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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#151

Post by vezzy-fnord »

ceol wrote: post #146
rokhayakebe wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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're conflating coding with the culture behind it. And even the culture isn't uniform, it's divided into many different subcultures.

For all intents and purposes, there's nothing stopping a woman from learning how to program, contribute to open source and engage in community. A lot of people, male and female alike, operate under a pseudonym. Unless you're a celebrity, it's generally smarter for plenty of reasons, including risk management (something contemporary feminists don't seem to comprehend) and OPSEC.

Even if you do use your real name and explicitly denote your sex as female, you'll still survive. You certainly aren't immune from trolling. No one is. But frankly most cases of "harassment and vitriol" I've read about (on the Geek Feminism Wiki, for instance) tend to be mostly about offended sensibilities.

This isn't victim blaming. It's being realistic.

Re: Girls Who Code

#152

Post by parennoob »

ceol wrote: post #139
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…

> Yet no one's complaining Plenty of people are complaining. You just don't see it because you're surrounding yourself in this little bubble of tech and startups and coding. The least you could have done, if not a simple Google search, was scroll three inches down before you replied: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6981113 There are plenty of initiatives to get more men into nursing and teaching and fashion. Eve…

> There are plenty of initiatives to get more men into nursing and teaching and fashion.

Show me the equivalent of initiatives like "Rails Girls" or "Girls Who Code", or "Github's free private repos for women" for male teachers or nurses. A halfhearted list of platitudes from a Dean at ASU and an NYTimes article != actual effort. Look at the list of sponsors on this page. http://www.girlswhocode.com/about-us/ and show me something even remotely equivalent for nursing, or fashion.

> Even if there weren't, why does that matter? It has nothing to do with this industry's problems. We don't need every other industry to be fixing itself before we do.

I might turn that around and say, "Well, if other industries, specially female-dominated ones aren't rushing to be inclusive towards men, is there a rational reason why we should be making these extra efforts? Or is it to satisfy the whims of writers like Nitasha Tiku who wouldn't know tech if it danced naked in front of her wearing a tea-cosy labelled Tech?" The fact that female-dominated industries are often perfectly comfortable being female-dominated industries is an indicator that it might be counterproductive to ignore male coders in a sexist effort to recruit more female ones.

> That's not even touching on your victim-complex of an argument about men coding. You must be pretty deep in that bubble.

What bubble? All I'm saying is that, as a low-income Asian person who learned to code, I am not a particularly privileged or rich person. Yet I have had zero initiatives helping me, or encouraging me to code. I have seen several people in a similar position. On the other hand, plenty of girls with high-income parents are babysat and helped by initiatives like Rails Girls et al. This is reality. Not sure why you think it is a complex.

Re: Girls Who Code

#153

Post by hacker789 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #121
crassus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

Not quite.

One person says, "We deliberately handle women with kid gloves. A under-qualified woman has a better chance than an under-qualified man."

A feminist activist responds, "But you still hire more men! Therefore, it's almost a given that you're biased against women in other ways. Fix it."

The original person says, "Wow. We just can't win with you people."

Re: Girls Who Code

#154

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #138
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is much they can do. A similar review of Human Resources professionals, also courtesy LinkedIn, shows about 70% are women. In another report, in 2013, 41% of college seniors that elected majors in Physical Science were women. Yet, only 18% of those who chose computer science or engineering were women. It seems they'd be equally capable in chemistry and physics as in computer science and engineer.…

How does your "gender-based difference in interests" explain the last thirty years of (proportional) decline in women majoring in CS?

30 years is plenty of time for the interests of a demographic to shift.

Re: Girls Who Code

#155

Post by temphn »

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.

How many women and non-Asian minorities does Matasano end up hiring with that process?

Re: Girls Who Code

#156

Post by Tycho »

jfarmer wrote: post #141
Tycho wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

But if anything your own example seems to reaffirm pg's point. You fished a computer out of a garbage bin and therefore had some coding experience before university age. You found it on your own. PG observes that this is 'invariably' a quality of the most successful founders and therefore (presumably) one which he looks for in prospective founders.

Re: Girls Who Code

#157

Post by xrctl »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #136
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.…

Men do better than women at the Math SAT[1] I just want to add that this has to do with culture, and, again, what we were exposed to and influenced to have an interest in from childhood. In high school I can remember the top Science student were all women and they racked more awards than men.

hahah, you recall that the top science students you knew were women? How convincing!

I have analyzed the records of the World Cubing Association, and there is 1 woman in the top 100 ranked [1].

I have analyzed the ratings of the American Scrabble Association, and there are 6 women in the top 100 ranked [2].

It is well known that there is only 1 woman in the top 100 ranked chess players (FIDE).

I have analyzed the ratings of the European Go Federation, and there are 0 women in the top 100 ranked [3].

But no, I guess I must defer to your remembered impressions.

[1] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-speedcubing.html

[2] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-scrabble.html

[3] Forthcoming

Re: Girls Who Code

#158

Post by wlievens »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #119
draugadrotten wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> huge stigma against men who wanted to become nurses because it was a job "for women" and what kind of man would want to do that kind of thing. ...and that's exactly the kind of label that women slaps on tech jobs. "What kind of woman would want to {drive race cars,work 60 hour weeks coding,debug java threads,maintain virtual server farms}" And there you have it. It's clearly the oppressive white males' fault.

"and that's exactly the kind of label that women slaps on tech jobs" what kind of world are you living in because it's not one I've visited.

Actually it is what I remember from most girls in high school (late nineties): they want to work "with people instead of machines". It's a stigma that existed then in girls' minds and presumably still does, at least where I live.

I'm all for more women in tech, even if only to make the workforce more diverse. I'm also all for more minorities in tech, sure. Where I live, working in a tech job means 95% of youf colleagues will be white, male, middle class thirty-year olds.

But I have a gut feeling that at least in my environment, it's the fault of young women's mindset, not of "the system".

Re: Girls Who Code

#159

Post by vacri »

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…

Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses.... Why is that?

Because you're not reading the discussions in the nursing industry. It's a recognised problem there and they do want more men involved.

The technical world also has a much larger online presence, unsurprisingly.

Same goes for elementary school teachers.

Same goes for elementary school teachers.

Re: Girls Who Code

#160

Post by ZoFreX »

danso wrote: post #104
ZoFreX wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 test…

> 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.

Sorry, this isn't what I meant to imply at all. That was very much a "how things should be" rather than what things are like right now.

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