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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#211

Post by jayhuang »

A place I worked at previously had a manager who managed 2 small teams. One that did analytics, and another that did media/communications, for a total of about 10 people. On my first week of work, we had a meeting and in the middle of some discussion, he literally said "girls are better than guys. If I could, I would hire only girls". No specific reason, just girls are better than guys (he had 3 daughters though, so I don't know if that was the reason). It still blows my mind to this day that he said that out loud.

At one point we had a female intern who was on a 8 month work term. 3 months into her workterm, the manager offered her a full-time position, not contingent on her graduation (she was in 3rd year and planned to return to complete school). Now I'm not anyone to judge, but I will say her performance wasn't particularly impressive, especially compared to other interns on the team, one of who (male) had already graduated, interned for a total of 20 months, and took on plenty of duties. 5 months into the workterm, she ended up wiping a ton of live data of a fairly important legacy application, effectively costing the company a few hundred k. A year later she's working there full-time as expected, but from what I understand, she didn't end up graduating anyways. The male intern worked on that team for 13ish months, then finally got full-time through a different team. All I will say is that this company is one of the tech giants.

I agree we need more females in the field, but like many other people have mentioned, lowering the hiring bar in an intentional effort to hire a female hacker isn't very helpful. The problem is we're not producing enough qualified women, and overcompensating to fix that is not a good long term solution. There are plenty of very talented female hackers, and we do need them, but we also need to fix the root of the problem, and not intentionally skewing hiring to meet level of acceptable gender diversity.

Women in the field also face other challenges, such as not being as vocal as males when it comes to promotions/raises, so it's common for them to have lower salaries than their male counterparts. There are lots of issues females face in this field, but let's look at fixing the root cause.

Re: Girls Who Code

#212

Post by dragonwriter »

crassus wrote: post #74
fiatmoney wrote: post #71

No one seems to talk about where these girls are being pulled from , as if labor shifts don't have two sides. What often seems to happen in initiatives like this is that all the sectors which decide they need higher female participation end up fighting over the same pool of "high-achieving" (high IQ, upper class, family connections) individuals. "We need to shift women from MBA programs into comp sci master's program…

Keep in mind, too, that female unemployment is lower than male unemployment. Your average female in the labor force has more options than your average male.

> Keep in mind, too, that female unemployment is lower than male unemployment. Your average female in the labor force has more options than your average male.

A society which views it as more acceptable for women to opt-out of the labor force may distort this: when employment becomes less scarce, women may be more likely to opt-out of the labor force -- since unemployment measures (actively looking for work) / (employed + actively looking for work), people dropping out of the active labor force when out of work shows up as lower unemployment, but it doesn't mean "more options" for those in the labor force.

Re: Girls Who Code

#213

Post by nitrogen »

belorn wrote: post #208
joe_the_user wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that happened, I could understand it. If you claim the thread above is summarized by that, you're hallucinating. I simply said that bias can be invisible and it useful to have formal methods for catching it. I don't see myself as a "feminist activist" by any means. I think the feminist activists who do sometimes uncritically toss around accusations of bias aren't really helping. But when I notice people reading my…

> but the argument seems involve the claim that some people have no need for formal methods to correct their biases. I beg to differ, everyone needs that Demanding that everyone has a formal method to correct biases only provable in statistics, really do go back to the "Prove that you're not a witch" argument a few comments ago. The exact same proof can be found against different color of skin, names and clothes. It…

Yet, a formal method should only really be needed once the bias is found to actually exist on a individual level. Everything else would be insane.

Wouldn't a better approach be incorporating formal, rational methods into everyone's individual thought processes from the beginning? In other words, I believe adopting the overt rationality advocated by the likes of http://lesswrong.com/ would almost automatically correct a lot of societal problems caused by bias.

Re: Girls Who Code

#214

Post by reinhardt »

Alex3917 wrote: post #18

Apparently the definition of sexism is now just not telling women what they want to hear. The vast majority of the criticism of pg's answer that I saw wasn't even claiming that he was wrong, but just calling him sexist because his answer wasn't masturbatory enough. C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840377

Pretty much. The definition of sexism also involves endless discussions about the almost last job category still ruled by the evil patriarchy - computer engineers - among the 15 projected to grow the most over the next decade [1]. For the record, the only other male dominated job category is janitors but I somehow doubt it faces similar outrage by the gender equality knight templars.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-...

Re: Girls Who Code

#215

Post by jmagoon »

hacker789 wrote: post #170
jfarmer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Do you have any evidence to back up your broad-brushed claims?

And who are these "feminist activist" strawmen(straw-women?) you have set up?

Re: Girls Who Code

#216

Post by davidf18 »

I am a male who started programming in my early teens on large computers at a major tech university along with other boys who were passionate about programming computers (and working on bicycles, in garages, etc.). We tried to get girls interested but they were not interested in programming computers, they had other interests which is alright. You do not need computer science course to start programming. What you need is a passion and what is very helpful is the assistance of someone who can help you with your questions.

75% of the graduates with PhDs in psychology are women and the fields of fashion and ballet/dance are dominated by women by you never hear calls for more males to enter these fields.

IMHO, computer programming, like medicine are fields that one should not enter unless they have a passion for the field.

Autism research Simon Baron-Cohen speaks of the differences between male and female brains. Boys are 8 times more likely to be autistic than girls. Autism (and the related Aspergers) and very good at systemitizing but bad at empathisizing. Females are more likely to be empathizers than males. Of course there is overlap and some women are better at sytemitizing than some men and some men are better at empathizing than some women, but that 8:1 difference in Autism in boys over girls probably is an indication of the imbalance of boys over girls who are passionate about programming computers.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizing...

These are three on-line tests from Baron-Cohen that help determine your EQ and SQ (empathizing quotient and systemitizing quotient).

http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/faces/eyestest.aspx

http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/empathyquotient/empathyquoti...

http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/systemizingquotient/systemiz...

Re: Girls Who Code

#217

Post by anildash »

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'm a white male and I am evil to them"

Name one person who has said this.

Re: Girls Who Code

#218

Post by esperluette »

xrctl wrote: post #157
rokhayakebe wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rat…

And this couldn't be in part because women have less free time across the board, about five hours less?[1]

Hard to get to tournament quality if you don't get as much time to practice.

[1]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/10/another-gend...

Re: Girls Who Code

#219

Post by yetanotherphd »

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…

I have a funny story. When I was about 14, I was told I was going to be in a newspaper story about students participating in mathematics competitions (national versions of the IMO). In the end, they cancelled the interview and did the story on two White guys of the same age who had placed much lower in the competitions. I guess its a consolation that nowadays both White and Asian males would make an equally bad story.

Re: Girls Who Code

#220

Post by codygman »

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... thought coding was cool.
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