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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#101

Post by tptacek »

Tycho wrote: post #100
danso wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I'll just post what Valleywag excerpted, with the assumption that if any context is left out, it is in favor of the Valleywag author, with interjections of how I interpreted PG's words: > I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. [...] OK, nothing bad here, assuming that the implication is that there aren't many female founders f…

How is being interested in something a privilege?

It isn't. The problem is, "interest" isn't the only concept he's talking about; he's actually referring to a tuple that includes interest, opportunity, and support.

Re: Girls Who Code

#102

Post by crassus »

joe_the_user wrote: post #90
crassus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cr…

"Prove that you're not a witch" is a very old tactic - and it's the opposite of the modern standard of guilt.

Re: Girls Who Code

#103

Post by yummyfajitas »

tptacek wrote: post #72
andrewljohnson wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Matasno's hiring process work? I don't think I've heard you comment on hiring except to say everyone does it wrong. In my company, we've hired everyone based on remote/part-time work, and paid tryouts. This seems to work well, but I don't feel like I can hire people who currently have full time jobs this way. I'm not sure how best to judge candidates who I can't observe working, besides a standard battery of…

I'll try to condense it as much as possible, and add the caveat that our process is imperfect: 1. Build outreach programs that are open-enrollment and broadly targeted (for instance, the crypto challenges aren't targeted at security industry events). 2. Explicitly overcommunicate the whole hiring process to candidates up front and sell the job, before attempting to screen. Actively try to correct for the adversarial…

This sounds like a vast improvement over most normal hiring processes. A question though - how do you avoid legal liability from (4) and (5) in the event that they cause a disparate impact (see Griggs vs Duke Power, etc)?

Re: Girls Who Code

#104

Post by danso »

ZoFreX wrote: post #86
danso wrote: post #7

One 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…

We don't even have to speculate whether x% of women can be as good as men. We know that for some time, women have been among the elite in computer science.

You argue that it's as simple as just doing merit-based analysis, which implies that because women are so scarce in the field, it's because they've failed these impartial merit based tests. I'm arguing that it's quite possible that these impartial merit based tests don't exist.

They don't even exist for men -- i.e. "it's not what you know but who you know".

Re: Girls Who Code

#105

Post by Sssnake »

Alex3917 wrote: post #18

Apparently the definition of sexism is now just not telling women what they want to hear. The vast majority of the criticism of pg's answer that I saw wasn't even claiming that he was wrong, but just calling him sexist because his answer wasn't masturbatory enough. C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840377

People lose their jobs for this kind of shit, it is ridiculous.

Re: Girls Who Code

#106

Post by pygy_ »

lkrubner wrote: post #11

One 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…

Raganwald's post:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130116103105/http://raganwald.p...

Re: Girls Who Code

#107

Post by tptacek »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #103
tptacek wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll try to condense it as much as possible, and add the caveat that our process is imperfect: 1. Build outreach programs that are open-enrollment and broadly targeted (for instance, the crypto challenges aren't targeted at security industry events). 2. Explicitly overcommunicate the whole hiring process to candidates up front and sell the job, before attempting to screen. Actively try to correct for the adversarial…

This sounds like a vast improvement over most normal hiring processes. A question though - how do you avoid legal liability from (4) and (5) in the event that they cause a disparate impact (see Griggs vs Duke Power, etc)?

I don't think about it at all, and for good reason: nothing that our process does could possibly be more risky than the crapshoot process other companies use. To wit: I know for a fact that my process isn't going to be dumb enough to ask a woman whether she's going to be able to manage her child care responsibilities and still be able to answer emergency work calls.

Re: Girls Who Code

#108

Post by ama729 »

newnewnew wrote: post #87
overgard wrote: post #70

When 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.…

> where you would expect your best engineers to come from.

I frequently see this assertion but I never see it sourced. Most programming use nothing more than simple math or just re-implementation of known algorithms (and we know how it turned out for Telegram to invent their own), why would you need hardcore math skills then?

If you said "above average", that would have been understandable, but then there isn't much data to support that point of view since as point out, the effect is especially important in the higher percentiles.

Re: Girls Who Code

#109

Post by defen »

tptacek wrote: post #107
yummyfajitas wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a vast improvement over most normal hiring processes. A question though - how do you avoid legal liability from (4) and (5) in the event that they cause a disparate impact (see Griggs vs Duke Power, etc)?

I don't think about it at all, and for good reason: nothing that our process does could possibly be more risky than the crapshoot process other companies use. To wit: I know for a fact that my process isn't going to be dumb enough to ask a woman whether she's going to be able to manage her child care responsibilities and still be able to answer emergency work calls.

The point of Griggs vs Duke Power is that a work sample test would probably need to be "reasonably related" to the job at issue, if it has a disparate impact on minorities (meaning minorities pass at a lower rate). I have no idea how one proves in court that a test is "reasonably related", because I'm not a lawyer :-)

Re: Girls Who Code

#110

Post by ama729 »

pnathan wrote: post #53

In tech, saying anything about gender is an opportunity to be lambasted vigorously. But I think I can contribute something. Having read what I could over the years on the academic side of "women in tech" (i.e., academic research studying the matter, rather than opinion pieces), the consensus seems to be that the early teens are the time where the decision is taken to move away (or not) from STEM fields. That is part…

If you have some links to the studies you have read, I would be really interested to read them.

Thank you

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