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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#141

Post by jfarmer »

Tycho wrote: post #130
jfarmer wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So? I was telling a story from my personal experience to try to demonstrate how that statement (in isolation) reeks of privilege. It does not reek of male privilege, which I'm admittedly less sensitive to than class privilege.

But imagine growing up surrounded by people telling you to "Stop with all that computer stuff. That's nerdy boy stuff. Boys won't like you if you're into that." Or parents who refuse to buy their daughter a computer for similar reasons. That is a story I've heard from plenty female engineers I know.

Does that count? I was trying to make my point more relatable. Sorry.

Re: Girls Who Code

#143

Post by VLM »

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…

I like your first paragraph. That said I dislike your second paragraph because of all the possible reasons to oppose discrimination, a pile of historical anecdotes is the least effective. You can run a morality argument, or philosophy, or some biochem neurology analysis, or ethics, or legality, or (modern, civilized) cultural incompatibility with discrimination, or even simple competitive economics argument like those who select inferior employees for irrational reasons will inevitably in the long run be crushed by more rationally managed companies. But anecdote anecdote anecdote isn't going to do it. I like where you're aiming, you're just not doin it right. That said at least you picked popular traditional anecdotes, although you could have picked more recent anecdotes like Radia Perlman or Limor Fried...

Re: Girls Who Code

#144

Post by stirno »

tptacek wrote: post #98
yetanotherphd wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Tulsa Codes would exist for logistical and practical reasons (it makes sense to organize people who already live in an area). Girls Code is associated (fairly or not) with an ideological movement to correct for oppression and privilege that exists in our society. People who disagree with this movement will of course post about it when they see these articles.

Yes. Exactly my point. The problem people have with "Girls Code" is that accepting it requires them to accept that women have been at some point treated unfairly.

I personally have no issue with "Black Girls Code" or any other groups like that -- mostly because any work done to educate more people (of any gender, race, sexuality, whatever) about what we do is a positive.

Moreover its important that people who decide to contribute in this way (teachers, mentors, etc) feel like they are helping a group they care deeply about and/or can identify with.

Having said that I do wish we had more events targeting all kinds of youth with the goal of changing the mentality of future developers/engineers. If they learn in diverse groups (including some level of age diversity, preferably) I feel they'd have a better shot at creating a 'new normal' for the future.

Re: Girls Who Code

#145

Post by ericd »

ama729 wrote: post #108
newnewnew wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Math and programming both require a facility in thinking abstractly, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a correlation between math ability and programming ability.

Re: Girls Who Code

#146

Post by ceol »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #125
ZoFreX wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> A women cannot be driven out of coding by anyone other than herself.

What a disgustingly ignorant thing to say. The sheer obliviousness of your privilege in this regard is staggering. It's ridiculous to expect someone to put up with harassment and vitriol and, when they finally give up and leave — which is completely normal and something any normal person, including yourself, would do — say that it was all on them.

You may not even realize it, but your comment actually excuses all of the sexism and misogyny in the industry. It's putting the onus, and the blame, on the victim. That's awful.

Re: Girls Who Code

#147

Post by loomio »

kn0thing wrote: post #3

What great timing. BTW, thanks to all of you who backed my crowdtilt to bring BlackGirlsCode to Brooklyn! https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/no-sleep-till-brooklyn-f...

I am so, so glad to see a much more high quality discussion (thanks in large part to lkrubner's insightful top comment) going on here today than the travesty that accompanied your post about Black Girls Code. The reactions that provoked made me feel sick. I guess the important think is your campaign is being supported and funded! But It's always a shock to see the dark side of this community revealed so starkly.

Re: Girls Who Code

#148

Post by RivieraKid »

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…

> I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male.

I think this is partly caused by the fact that men and women have a different natural tendency to enjoy nursing. (Honest question – is this belief politically incorrect?) If you completely filter out cultural effects, the tendency to incline to a specific profession will differ between genders, at least very slightly (that's just statistics). Of course, the very hard question is how big is this difference.

Re: Girls Who Code

#149

Post by 4bpp »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #60
gfodor wrote: post #17

I 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…

I agree, and it strikes me as ironic the massive tidal wave of hate that arises whenever anyone violates a What You Can't Say in our industry. I understand the reasons for it in general, and sometimes it's even deserved (eg confirmed cases of sexual harassment at conferences). But it seems to me to be directly counter productive to the stated goals. We want to be more accepting and open as an industry? How about havi…

Your closing question really seems like the wrong one to ask to me. The bottom line is that some people do learn to code and come here nevertheless. Why on earth do they want to, and why is it that their reasoning isn't equally applicable for the complementary set of women-(and-men) you speak of?

Re: Girls Who Code

#150

Post by parennoob »

judk wrote: post #126
parennoob wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I mean men working in fashion, not being marketed to. And Axe is not fashion, thank you very much.

> And the lack of male teachers is a persistent concern in the education world...

Show me the equivalent of "Rails Girls" or "Girls Who Code" for male teachers or fashion designers. For example, the list of sponsors on this page (http://www.girlswhocode.com/about-us/).

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