If you want to get girls coding, get Windows OSes out of schools. They kill interest in computers before you have time to get interested in them.
Girls Who Code
81–90 of 397 posts
Re: Girls Who Code
#82I have to thank Valleywag for doing me the favor of helping me prune people who lack reading comprehension from twitter. I'm still kind of amazed how so many people un-ironically cited valleywag in their tweets. It's pretty obvious what pg was saying in this particular "smoking gun" quote: that figuring out a way to get more girls interested in programming at 13 is an incredibly important and hard problem. The willin…
But valleywag's point -- in the new, unfortunately Owen Thomas less incarnation -- is to find a quote from an engineer or executive associated with silicon valley that could be construed as sexist, or racist, or discriminatory to someone (and no worries if said quote must be taken wildly out of context) then pitch a fit about it. For a perfect example from [1], see [2]. So Nitashu happened upon Paul wondering about the low presence of women in the engineer pipeline and it was perfect. They are people who stole the fox news business model and pointed it at silicon valley.
Even when the complaints are legitimate, there's plenty to complain about in the valley, but characterizing us via the worst examples you can find is their stock in trade. A good 2014 resolution is to stop hoping Sam or Nitashu will turn into Owen and to ignore gawker.
[1] http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-de...
[2] http://valleywag.gawker.com/twitter-employees-dont-talk-abou...
Re: Girls Who Code
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. IBM was >30% women engineers when I interned there in 2004/2005. About half the interns were women and there was plenty of racial diversity as well. My boss was a woman, my mentor was a woman, and frankly it was the most diverse place I have ever worked.
Google is reportedly over 30% women, too. I wonder if it is just something about startups - higher risk, lower guaranteed reward, worse training programs, higher pressure. The startup world compares well to the original California gold rush - a risk for a small shot at a high reward - and that was mostly male, too. Also, keep in mind that it's a zero-sum game. If Google and IBM each hire 1,000 female engineers from t…
google may be 30% women overall but I would be shocked if that where true of engineering; Rachel of rachel by the bay definitely didn't have that experience
Re: Girls Who Code
#84When I hear about this being a cultural thing, an important aspect people leave out is that men aren't exactly encouraged to be coders either. Writing code has pretty much no social cred until you're out of school, and pretty much automatically gets you tagged as a nerd. No coder I know started coding because it was cool, they just sort of enjoyed it and accepted the social consequences. I'm just going to throw this…
> I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses. Perhaps because you mostly read tech news sites, and not nursing news sites. This stuff (in both tech and nursing) rarely reaches the mainstream news sources, so people not involved in the industry generally are unawar…
Psychology is still very male-dominated, at least in terms of employers, teachers, and researchers — i.e. people in power in the industry.
Re: Girls Who Code
#85If you want to get girls coding, get Windows OSes out of schools. They kill interest in computers before you have time to get interested in them.
What a weird comment. How would this be worse for girls than for boys?
Re: Girls Who Code
#86One of that impresses me, and kind of amuses me, is how PG will talk these issues out, even though the danger of being misquoted or misinterpreted is much higher than the chances of being appreciated, especially for someone in his position. The phrase "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers?" , as a standalone statement, is ripe for ripping apart. But I think in its context, it o…
> To argue that women can't make it as hackers is like arguing, post-Jackie Robinson, that blacks can't develop professional baseball skills.
You might want to reword that last part slightly, maybe? winces
I feel I should warn you that if you use that argument, you may in some cases get a "Bell Curve" inspired response to do with average ability or performance of the genders / races. To enter the merit argument is to risk being bogged down in it unnecessarily: Even if women were 10% as likely as men to be good programmers, one still should not and should not be allowed to discriminate programmers on the basis of gender. Instead they should have their actual ability assessed, without anyone taking probabilistic short-cuts in thinking. (In other words, equality of opportunity)
Re: Girls Who Code
#87When I hear about this being a cultural thing, an important aspect people leave out is that men aren't exactly encouraged to be coders either. Writing code has pretty much no social cred until you're out of school, and pretty much automatically gets you tagged as a nerd. No coder I know started coding because it was cool, they just sort of enjoyed it and accepted the social consequences. I'm just going to throw this…
Men do better than women at the Math SAT[1]. The male/female ratio is especially high in the higher Math percentiles, where you would expect your best engineers to come from. The polite way to explain this is some kind of "expectations effect", which is possible, but females do dominate at all other aspects of education. We cannot rule out simple innate ability, combined with higher male interest in abstract things.
[1] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...
Re: Girls Who Code
#88If you want to get girls coding, get Windows OSes out of schools. They kill interest in computers before you have time to get interested in them.
What a weird comment. How would this be worse for girls than for boys?
> What a weird comment. How would this be worse for girls than for boys?
I didn't say it was worse. I simply posted it because nobody else has mentioned it. Teaching computing these days is seen as a joke, much like learning to code.
Re: Girls Who Code
#89One thing that came out of the discussion in the last article on this topic, was the people who support this kind of affirmative action were very interested in hearing from HN posters who opposed it (especially men), so they could understand what our reasons were, and a respectful discussion could be had. In response to this request, here is my opinion on the matter.
In fact, I think there is truth to what both sides say. On the pro AA side, it is true that women probably feel unwelcome in the tech industry. Even when men don't do anything consciously to exclude women, programming culture revolves around certain attitudes and mindsets that are associated with young men in our culture. E.g. being interested in science fiction, being obsessive about one's work and hobbies, . None of these things are strictly related to programming, and an excessive focus on them makes it harder for women (and minorities) to enter the field. The fact that male programmers are attracted to the minority of female programmers doesn't help with this feeling of unwelcomeness, in fact it adds to the awkwardness (although I think that most of this is completely innocent and could not be called harassment, and actual harassment is rarer in our industry than others).
On the anti-AA side, I think that women, due to reverse-discrimination and old fashion chivalry, are objectively advantaged in every field. Furthermore, some things that would seem to advantage men like long hours, stressful work, and being judged on results, are not bad or discriminatory in themselves. But they will tend to favor men over women because our society provides greater incentives for men to obtain money and positions of power. When people talk about work life balance, what they really mean is that the industry should stop providing people with an opportunity to advance their career by putting in extra time and effort.
Thank you for hearing my opinions on the issue, and I hope more people who oppose AA will answer the call to explain their viewpoints.
Re: Girls Who Code
#90One fascinating aspect of this is how bad the post 1990 startup culture has been for women. There was something about those big, boring corporations of the 1970s and 1980s that actually gave female hackers more acceptance than what startups have offered. You can see female interest in programming change in the charts on these pages: http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-comput... Note that those graph…
FWIW, the startup I was at seemed to have a soft affirmative action for females. They would reject males that didn't do much outside of college work, but would be willing to consider females with the same resume because "it would be nice to have more female coders". Culture fit was about a modicum of friendliness. You could get rejected for culture fit by, say, looking away from your interviewer and mumbling to yours…
The thing about startups and bias is that if you have a multitiered informal hiring process, a little bit of biases can be invisible and can be multiplied over filtering stages.
The company may at one stage indeed "let's consider her" but unless the company's overall hiring is formally specified, unless your documenting and so keeping reasonably track of what you are doing, you may not know the way that biases are creeping your decisions.
Another thing about startups is they often involve a "join our company and our lifestyle" approach. That also means that you will windup with people like you.