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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#161

Post by ZoFreX »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #112
ZoFreX wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this really YC's problem to solve? I think it's up to everyone to do their part. This problem, like all big problems, is made up of lots of little problems.

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.…

> I believe that the whole dust up is a matter of gender-based difference in interests. Nothing more, and not a real problem. Which is why YC is scratching their heads about how to solve it.

This argument doesn't entirely follow and in my opinion unfairly misrepresents pg's position. Pg hasn't said that there is no "real problem", what he said was that he didn't know what he could do to solve it.

Personally I have witnessed a lot of sexism and even discrimination, so I don't believe there is no real problem. Maybe women are less interested in computer science than men, but maybe a few of them drop out due to the pervasiveness of sexism in the field? Or maybe interest would be higher if it didn't have this reputation?

Re: Girls Who Code

#162

Post by reitzensteinm »

4bpp wrote: post #149
reitzensteinm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My post was only intended to critique a very specific toxic behavior, and the closing question an attempt to demonstrate its severity.

I agree that it's the wrong question to ask in order to attempt to solve the problem in general.

Re: Girls Who Code

#163

Post by Sssnake »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #99
crassus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Party line" is an interesting choice of words. There's definitely some unhealthy groupthink going on that's gaining in power. It's never been easier to have something said taken out of context and have your reputation dragged through the mud by people who are professional social justice warriors and not much else (I doubt Nitasha Tiku could program "hello world") Maybe it's due to the rise of twitter and the ease of…

Shanley Kane and her circle and sympathizers are spearheading this. Many of them show up in every HN thread about charged topics. I fully expect defense of them to show up in reply. It is part of my core being to be respectful to everyone, to listen to all sides, to feel empathy; however, when I am presented with a popular group in my industry that does none of those things, I am not sure how to react. What's depress…

>I know several women in the industry, from marketing wizard to expert programmer with publish credits, who have to tip toe when they go to a company because men are being trained that all women are like Shanley in the industry

And that is what pisses me off about this kind of nonsense. If it was just idiots being idiots I wouldn't care, but this shit actually affects people. My wife doesn't to go to conferences or involve herself in the programming world outside of directly doing her job any more because she feels like everyone is afraid to talk near her much less to her, for fear of losing their job over something they said.

Re: Girls Who Code

#164

Post by vacri »

draugadrotten wrote: post #113
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're not old enough, but I am and I remember a 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.

> 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.

It's clearly the oppressive white males' fault.

The general public have no idea what "debug java threads" or "maintain virtual server farms" means, and being a programmer isn't particularly associated with long work days. It's also quite a stretch to call driving a race car a 'tech job'.

I think you need to reconsider your perspective on the issue.

Re: Girls Who Code

#165

Post by quinnchr »

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.…

Men score better than women on standardized tests in math in some countries, while in other countries women score better (http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~kelly/gap_sept09.pdf).

It's almost as if the culture you are surrounded by somehow affects you. In fact the countries with more gender equality that encourage women in the sciences have higher test scores for women!

Re: Girls Who Code

#166

Post by klipt »

VLM wrote: post #133
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…

"As a share of all CS bachelor's degrees granted that year, females had slipped almost 10 points" This line of reasoning seems to assume that virtually all CS grads go into "post 1990 startup culture" companies. I suspect that nationwide, fresh grads going into startups is a rounding error. I'm not disagreeing with the conclusion, just claiming the facts in support of it are not a good fit. Something cultural that I…

> Maybe women are smart enough to avoid that particular form of stupidity and thus avoid the field, but men are too dumb, thus maleness ratio increases.

To quote Philip Greenspun:

> I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory.

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Re: Girls Who Code

#167

Post by zhemao »

HaloZero wrote: post #6

It sounds like Harvey Mudd's program improves female enrollment but it's just seems like a good idea in general The quick program for Harvey Mudd seems to be 1) Make the problems more practical in application (ie controlling a robot, modelling a disease) 2) Giving students choices in what problems they are interested in 3) Segmenting students according to skill set, thus putting people who have been programming in an…

I think it's also great because it encourages students majoring in other science and engineering fields to learn CS and see how it is applicable to their field of study. I also like how they try to make it fun. My intro CS classes were really dry and boring. I only pushed through them because I was set on being a computer engineering major and knew I would like the more advanced classes.

Re: Girls Who Code

#168

Post by hhw »

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…

Also to add to the Asian part (Chinese in particular in my case), CS is still too new to be a particularly esteemed profession in Chinese culture, and I don't think I'm alone in having parents and a large extended family that pressured me hard to pursue a conservative, high income, esteemed profession instead such as medicine, finance, accounting, or law. Having graduated right after the dotcom bubble crashed certainly didn't help either, and was pretty close to taking a first job in accounting, as my parents convinced me that tech was dead-end. I finally put my foot down after realizing I would have been miserable doing anything other than tech, and it took quite a lot of time and effort before my parents accepted my career choice. However, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that I would have ended up in tech sooner or later no matter what happened.

I'm not saying that having pushy Asian parents is the same as having to face gender discrimination, but simply that CS is not simply handed on a silver platter to all men either.

Re: Girls Who Code

#169

Post by tptacek »

Tycho wrote: post #156
jfarmer wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh for fuck's sake.

Re: Girls Who Code

#170

Post by hacker789 »

jfarmer wrote: post #117
crassus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I wonder if it is just something about startups - higher risk, lower guaranteed reward, worse training programs, higher pressure. This is explained equally well by inexperienced managers hiring people similar to themselves culturally, racially, and socioeconomically. Likewise, if I were a woman, I wouldn't want to work on a team with five dudes oblivious to their dude-dom.

Across all cultures (perhaps across all of history), women are more risk averse.

In fact, feminist activists didn't push to get more women into tech until tech was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor.

Only then did it become scandalous that young women were choosing different career paths (but interestingly, the fact that young women are earning more than young men and graduating from college in far greater rates than young men isn't scandalous).

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