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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#191

Post by reinhardt »

quinnchr wrote: post #165
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 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!

Sure, if "gender equality" is a euphemism for school grades being biased towards girls:

“If, as the data suggest, young girls display a more developed ‘attitude toward learning’ and teachers (consciously or subconsciously) reward these attitudes by giving girls higher marks than warranted by their test scores, the seeds of a gender gap in educational attainment may be sown at an early age, because teachers‘ grades strongly influence grade-level placement, high-school graduation and college admission prospects.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/why-girls-get-better-grade...

Re: Girls Who Code

#193

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

ZoFreX wrote: post #161
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.…

> 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 wi…

I am certain that a few have dropped out due to sexism and discrimination. And certain that a few others have tried and found that the social aspects of working in a team of programmers, even polite, respectful ones, is just not rewarding.

Can we hear from those who felt kept or pushed out, please? If it is a real problem, where are the marches and movements and leaders at the podium? I suppose they don't hang out on HN, but they should be high profile, given that the media seems to be really interested in this story.

Here's a recent, related article (October, 2013) with a few anecdotes. http://www.businessinsider.com/7-things-keeping-women-out-of...

There is one comment. From a guy.

Re: Girls Who Code

#194

Post by Anechoic »

krakensden wrote: post #175
Anechoic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is there not a male nurse initiative? Or male elementary teacher initiative[1]? There are! It's just not discussed on HN because this isn't a site focused on nursing and teaching, but copying from a prior post of mine, 45 seconds of Googling brought up http://www.malenursemagazine.com http://www.menteach.org/ and http://www.minoritynurse.com/article/recruiting-men-nursing-... .

malenursemagazine.com seems to be a spam/product placement blog menteach.org has a (C) of 2007, and a dead forum.

Some more up-to-date links:

http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2013/mar/23/advocates-say...

http://aamn.org

http://www.aacn.nche.edu/media-relations/fact-sheets/enhanci...

Re: Girls Who Code

#195

Post by RivieraKid »

gfodor wrote: post #37
tptacek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again: after establishing bona fides by saying "fuck Vallywag and everything they stand for", I feel like I need to say that Graham wasn't hugely distorted. He was asked whether YC discriminates against women. The obvious subtext of that question is that there's a large imbalance between men & women among YC founders. He could have said "no, we don't discriminate; I don't know why the imbalance among YC founders…

I'm not sure this is a fair assessment. The (admittedly likely butchered at this point) quote: > 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. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. In the very next sentence pg states that…

> "girls just don't like computers"

I believe* in something very similar – that girls have a lower natural inclination to computers and programming than boys have. Is that considered wrong or politically incorrect?

*believe = about 85% confidence

Re: Girls Who Code

#196

Post by Sssnake »

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…

>What a disgustingly ignorant thing to say

Was that intended as a warning for the rest of your post?

>It's ridiculous to expect someone to put up with harassment and vitriol

Of course it is. And since that does not happen any more frequently in tech than anywhere else, and does not happen any more frequently to women than to men, I have a hard time seeing the relevance.

>You may not even realize it, but your comment actually excuses all of the sexism and misogyny in the industry

You may not even realize it, but your comment actually makes women less likely to participate in tech. When people constantly make a huge fuss about imaginary misogyny, women start feeling like they are blamed by all the normal people, even though they had nothing to do with it and are actually normal people themselves.

Re: Girls Who Code

#197

Post by [deleted] »

ps4fanboy wrote: post #177
RivieraKid wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).…

To suggest that men are some how different to women is incredibly sexist, check your privilege.

[deleted]

Re: Girls Who Code

#198

Post by ceol »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #151
ceol wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, i…

> For all intents and purposes, there's nothing stopping a woman from learning how to program, contribute to open source and engage in community.

Except the community, which is generally hostile towards women. Sure, someone can learn how to program on their own without ever interacting with the programming community, but that means shutting them off from a huge and helpful resource.

> A lot of people, male and female alike, operate under a pseudonym.

"It's fine as long as you never say you're a woman!" Yeah, that's indicative of a friendly culture.

>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.

Aside from all your open source work never being attributable to yourself, sure. It's totally smarter. I'm sure no one ever contributes to open source projects with the intent of getting their name out. And your little aside to "contemporary feminists" (ironically in the same comment where you complain about generalizing cultures) just reveals your true intention in this discussion.

> ...tend to be mostly about offended sensibilities.

Ah, here we go. The "you're just too sensitive" argument. As though not wanting to be hurt or harassed or bothered is a bad thing. As though the culture of trolling and adolescent behavior that permeates the programming community should remain the status quo, and anyone who calls for change just doesn't have thick enough skin.

You sure do bring some unique and insightful contributions.

Re: Girls Who Code

#199

Post by RivieraKid »

dragonwriter wrote: post #185
ps4fanboy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To suggest that men are some how different to women is incredibly sexist, check your privilege.

Men are obviously biologically different than women in a large number of ways; the exact degree to which those biological differences affect behavior and attitudes is unclear, but we know that differences in, e.g., hormone levels within a gender have behavioral and attitude impacts, so its at least likely that there is some degree of such impact from that and other biological differences between genders. If you defin…

Well, men and women are different. As hopefullly everyone knows, they have different bodies, including the brain (there are obvious psychological and behavioral differences).

Re: Girls Who Code

#200

Post by dragonwriter »

zhemao wrote: post #171
Patrick_Devine wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Harvey Mudd's approach is fantastic. I love the idea of two separate tracks for getting people to code. It allows people to take an academic risk which they normally wouldn't be able to take for fear of destroying their GPA. I think this is a fundamental problem with STEM programs in general. Why have grades and tracks at all? The important thing is to learn the material, and not what grade you got on a test…

The problem with MOOCs is that they have a pretty low retention rate. Sure you can repeat the material until you know it, but how many people actually will? The benefit of having a physical class is that you can turn to the professor or TAs for help if you're having trouble. It's also more difficult to completely fall behind because there are milestones in place (tests, assignments, projects, etc.). This isn't to say…

> The problem with MOOCs is that they have a pretty low retention rate.

Actually, I think that's one of the strengths of MOOCs (or, at least, a symptom of its strengths.)

> The benefit of having a physical class is that you can turn to the professor or TAs for help if you're having trouble. It's also more difficult to completely fall behind because there are milestones in place (tests, assignments, projects, etc.).

The MOOCs I've been in EdX and Coursera all have had both milestones of the type described, and TAs to go to for help.

What they don't have is a large up-front cost to enter, so there's no reason for people not to try out classes when they aren't completely certain are the right fit -- and little reason, even if the fit is good, not to drop out of one iteration and come back and take the course again if other life events that do have a cost for not dealing with now erupt.

So, yeah, a higher rate of people starting MOOCs and not completing them compared to traditional courses is to be expected -- and that's a good thing.

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