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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#121

Post by joe_the_user »

crassus wrote: post #102
joe_the_user wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "mismatch" in dialog about this stuff is perhaps telling.

One person says (essentially): "organization need to take systematic efforts to avoid bias in hiring".

The other person say (essentially): "you can't prove we're sexist, this is a witch hunt".

Re: Girls Who Code

#122

Post by judk »

crassus wrote: post #69
leahculver wrote: post #66

Earlier 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…

30% is probably including sales org, it is high for engineering. Anyway, consider the difference between 2-3 women of 12 people in an startup, vs 200 of 1000 in a big company, where women may cluster on some teams, or have "dotted line" relationships outside their official hierarchy.

Re: Girls Who Code

#123

Post by jfarmer »

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?

> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13.

I am by most standards a successful founder. I was not hacking on computers at age 13. Why not? My family could not afford a computer at age 13. I got my first computer at 15-16 by essentially fishing it out of a garbage can.

How long did it take me to write my first C program? About a year. Why? Because I was the only person in my (very, very small) hometown who had any affinity or interest in computers in general, let alone programming in particular.

That is why that statement "reeks of privilege."

Re: Girls Who Code

#124

Post by judk »

revelation wrote: post #80
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…

I think we need to be very clear that the programming jobs of that era are not todays programing jobs. It was 1980, general society wasn't very progressive, why would computer programming be the magic beacon of equality? And, of course, it wasn't, it was considered menial work fit for females.

I have heard that argument for jobs, but what about Bachelors Degree majors?

To me, the bigger difference is that there must be 10-100x more CS majors per year now than in 1985. CS was mostly applied math then, and math majors have long been extremely majority male.

Re: Girls Who Code

#125

Post by rokhayakebe »

ZoFreX wrote: post #78
rokhayakebe wrote: post #4

I am a man. These initiatives will simply not work. Imagine "Men Nurse." Many women SIMPLY do not code for the same reason many men do not code. Most of us were not exposed to the science as kids, hence step 1 is to make Programming mandatory. Note I say programming and not C.S.. I am an amateur programmer and I can say wit confidence that this is as fundamental as basic arithmetic. Full stop. I frankly wish they shu…

> Many women SIMPLY do not code for the same reason many men do not code. Well, yes, I suppose this is true. If you pick a random woman who cannot code, that is probably the reason. What about the women who have been driven out of coding simply because they happen to be female? It's something I have personally witnessed, both in the education system, and in commercial settings. There are real problems here, problems…

A women cannot be driven out of coding by anyone other than herself. This is not a social thing. This is not hard core research requiring millions to get started. Only a PC, Stack Overflow and an internet connection are required. Even now on HN I cannot tell who is a girl or guy by their username, let alone the gender of the person who wrote the code that populates the webpage I read.

Re: Girls Who Code

#126

Post by judk »

parennoob wrote: post #114
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…

Yep, and a series of uncomfortable truths about how things work against men (specially Asian men) who are trying to learn to code: 1. At school and such, no one tries to encourage you to code. People naturally think, "Oh, male and Asian, screw him , the world doesn't need another Asian dude coding. Let's try and teach Rails to that cute girl -- we need more of her kind." 2. People assume you are better at coding, mat…

Are you joking? The fashion world has massively outreached to men in recent couple of decades. Axe and chest shaving and all that other metrosexual stuff.

And the lack of male teachers is a persistent concern in the education world, especially with respect to the need to provide male role models for kids of single moms.

Re: Girls Who Code

#127

Post by eropple »

newnewnew wrote: post #118
ama729 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Startups try to keep a "high bar", only hiring people with sterling academic credentials or proven work in the field. So I would expect the gender ratio to be less equal at startups that draw from the far right-hand side of the graph, and more equal at big firms that are willing to hire from the middle.

> Startups try to keep a "high bar", only hiring people with sterling academic credentials or proven work in the field.

Your "high bar" is everyone else's "they're like us."

Re: Girls Who Code

#128

Post by judk »

city41 wrote: post #57
EliRivers wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is there not a male nurse initiative? Did you actually look? http://www.gatewayct.edu/Programs-Courses/Divisions-Departme... http://www.minoritynurse.com/article/man-enough-20-x-20-choo... http://aamn.org/choosenursing.shtml Likewise the male teachers of younger children.

You're correct. I did not look. And it does make sense that they would exist. Yeah, maybe my original comment was wrong. Maybe my view on this is wrong. I will admit seeing the male nurse initiatives does give me a different perspective on this.

This comment sets a good example.

Re: Girls Who Code

#129

Post by rokhayakebe »

ZoFreX wrote: post #78
rokhayakebe wrote: post #4

I am a man. These initiatives will simply not work. Imagine "Men Nurse." Many women SIMPLY do not code for the same reason many men do not code. Most of us were not exposed to the science as kids, hence step 1 is to make Programming mandatory. Note I say programming and not C.S.. I am an amateur programmer and I can say wit confidence that this is as fundamental as basic arithmetic. Full stop. I frankly wish they shu…

> Many women SIMPLY do not code for the same reason many men do not code. Well, yes, I suppose this is true. If you pick a random woman who cannot code, that is probably the reason. What about the women who have been driven out of coding simply because they happen to be female? It's something I have personally witnessed, both in the education system, and in commercial settings. There are real problems here, problems…

There are real problems here? What are these problems?

Re: Girls Who Code

#130

Post by Tycho »

jfarmer wrote: post #123
Tycho wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is being interested in something a privilege?

> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. I am by most standards a successful founder. I was not hacking on computers at age 13. Why not? My family could not afford a computer at age 13. I got my first computer at 15-16 by essentially fi…

There doesn't seem to be a gender component in the situation you described.
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