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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#221

Post by glesica »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #77
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…

But IBM, and many of the big corporations in the USA, followed very liberal policies that promoted diversity in the work place. A meritocracy based on raw intelligence and skill (measured by standardized testing) is not exactly what people mean today when they discuss "promoting diversity". In fact, nowadays people typically criticize such practices as inhibiting diversity [1]. As for culture fit, it's a complicated…

  > A meritocracy based on raw intelligence and skill (measured by standardized testing) is not exactly what people mean today when they discuss "promoting diversity".
Well sure, but largely because the standardized tests are all biased against women and/or minorities. [1] Aside from that, what exactly is a "meritocracy"? What does that mean? You have to define it pretty carefully. HN is full of posts about making social connections to get what you want, so is it a sign of merit if someone has lots of social connections and can therefore get jobs/funding? I mean, is it common for startups to actually administer intelligence/IQ tests to their prospective hires before interviewing them? Be careful when making claims about "merit" because it can be defined in many different ways, and most of them are pretty unappealing once they are spelled out.

[1] https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=standardized%20t...

Re: Girls Who Code

#222

Post by hythloday »

RivieraKid wrote: post #195
gfodor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does the word "natural" mean there?

Re: Girls Who Code

#223

Post by sunir »

joe_the_user wrote: post #90
crassus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the startup I was at seemed to have a soft affirmative action for females. They would reject males that didn't do much outside of college work, but would be willing to consider females with the same resume because "it would be nice to have more female coders". Culture fit was about a modicum of friendliness. You could get rejected for culture fit by, say, looking away from your interviewer and mumbling to yours…

The thing about startups and bias is that if you have a multitiered informal hiring process, a little bit of biases can be invisible and can be multiplied over filtering stages. The company may at one stage indeed "let's consider her" but unless the company's overall hiring is formally specified, unless your documenting and so keeping reasonably track of what you are doing, you may not know the way that biases are cr…

Well, you can easily statistically measure the funnel of applicants to interviews to hired by gender and verify this claim. I doubt you will find the problem is multiplied hidden biases in the interviewing process.

Really there usually aren't enough applicants that are diverse on any dimension. Mostly because most applications are by direct referral of existing staff. That's legitimate. Eventually your company will grow big enough to hire a recruiter to look in new talent markets.

Re: Girls Who Code

#224

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Girls Who Code

#225

Post by hythloday »

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.

If you really believe that, would you be neutral on a law that forbade boys under 18 from using a computer? By your hypothesis the ones who are destined to be successful will circumvent it without penalty.

Re: Girls Who Code

#226

Post by yapcguy »

wissler wrote: post #63
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 always cringe when someone famous gets attacked by the political correctness Nazis -- usually the reaction by them is appeasement, which only makes the general cultural situation worse.

Nazi is the correct term, because political correctness is really just a tool, a fascist like device, to shut down discourse and debate.

Re: Girls Who Code

#227

Post by shunya »

Sssnake wrote: post #163
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I agree with your wife, also avoid tech conf and women tech meetups because I am afraid. Most of us are trying to be do our job well, improve how we code etc, build something useful perhaps BUT this back and forth makes it very difficult.

Re: Girls Who Code

#228

Post by Alex3917 »

reinhardt wrote: post #214
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/ma…

For what it's worth, that statistic isn't actually true. While computer engineers may be expected to be one of the fastest growing employment categories by percent, the number of computer engineers are relatively tiny. So in fact way more jobs are going to be added in careers that are projected to have only a couple percent growth. By absolute numbers, computer engineers aren't even in the top 30 careers for anticipated growth. C.f. page 18: http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/Underemploy...

Re: Girls Who Code

#229

Post by tonecluster »

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.

Who in their right mind would want to work on a team of highly-intelligent, socially-challenged, culturally-homogeneous young men whose experience to date is primarily steeped in the casual misogyny, homophobia, and racism of MMORPG chat-channels; dorm-room bike-shedding; and adolescent dude-bro jokes?

Re: Girls Who Code

#230

Post by PakG1 »

leahculver wrote: post #66
crassus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the startup I was at seemed to have a soft affirmative action for females. They would reject males that didn't do much outside of college work, but would be willing to consider females with the same resume because "it would be nice to have more female coders". Culture fit was about a modicum of friendliness. You could get rejected for culture fit by, say, looking away from your interviewer and mumbling to yours…

Nope. IBM was >30% women engineers when I interned there in 2004/2005. About half the interns were women and there was plenty of racial diversity as well. My boss was a woman, my mentor was a woman, and frankly it was the most diverse place I have ever worked.

I have to say that I dislike it when someone says Bigcorp was like this, that is what Bigcorp's culture is. Having worked in several bigcorps, they are huge, diverse, and it's impossible for one employee to say that their experience is reflective of the entire company. There are differences from department to department, from team to team, and for the multinational bigcorps, from continent to continent. A warehouse worker for Amazon cannot say that they had the same experience as a merchandising agent, and we can't even start to compare those experiences with that of an AWS devops engineer.

When someone says, "My experience at Bigcorp was like this!", we should always tone it down to read it as "My experience on the whatsit team in the whazzat department at Bigcorp was like this!"

Sorry, just had to get that out there.

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