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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#241

Post by newnewnew »

jmagoon wrote: post #215
hacker789 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

5 minutes of googling:

"MEN, WOMEN AND RISK AVERSION:EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE" - http://aysps.gsu.edu/isp/files/ISP_Ind_3.pdf

"Sex Differences in Everyday Risk-Taking Behavior in Humans" - http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/ep062942.pdf

Reality fits egalitarian beliefs quite poorly.

Re: Girls Who Code

#242

Post by 001sky »

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…

women are more risk averse

I think this is misleading. Men and women face different risks, and heterodox strategies are not indicative of very much. First, you need to be careful how you infer "risk taking" from "not taking the same bets", because the actual riks taken is a portfolio riks calculation which is blind. Second, you don't have any data to infer anyrthing about the quality of the risk taking they are in fact taking; that is in terms of actual/realize and even provability weighted expected returns. To give one crass example, a women could take a strategy of legal ownership of "high risk realized assets" through marriage. This is a "high-risk strategy", but it is also empirically true that many rich men are married.[1] Of course, the odds of success in this strategy are also not evenly distributed amongst women as a group, either. Another person could look at that and say that marriage to a rich person is a "risk avoidance" strategy...and again, this may or may not be true. Because wealth and genetic fitness need not correlate, and so your frame of reference on the purpose of strategy quickly turns into quite a bit more complex calculation.

[1] Marriage as a legal contract has a financial value; a derivative, with contingent claims on of the underlying (asset) value of couple's cumulative/aggregate incomes.

Re: Girls Who Code

#243

Post by jfarmer »

Tycho wrote: post #209
jfarmer wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm not going to play Calvinball with you. Sorry!

I guess it was a privilege arguing with you.

To be honest, I didn't realize we were arguing until it turned into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y&t=1m18s

Before that I thought I was just sharing a personal story with you to illustrate someone else's point.

Re: Girls Who Code

#244

Post by thearn4 »

ZoFreX wrote: post #94
Roboprog wrote: post #8

My daughter doesn't code, but she and another friend of hers do a lot of work to find, get and set up game emulators and related wares. Motivated to do light "sys admin" work, but not coding, I guess.

Does they play Megadrive games? If so I know a really cool nerdy trick: Sonic & Knuckles was a pretty awesome Sonic installment for the Megadrive that had a really weird cartridge. On top, it had a flip-open cartridge slot... You could plug in Sonic 2 or Sonic 3 to play through those previously existing games with the Knuckles character. Awesome! So how do you play the games like that on your emulator? Turns out it's…

Very cool - thanks for sharing!

Re: Girls Who Code

#245

Post by theorique »

hhw wrote: post #168
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…

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 certain…

That surprises me - my Electrical/Computer Engineering classes had a substantial proportion of Asian students (primarily Chinese).

My friends and classmates of Asian background seemed to have families who were delighted and supportive that they were studying something technical and 'practical'.

Re: Girls Who Code

#246

Post by glesica »

theorique wrote: post #236
glesica wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 soci…

Well sure, but largely because the standardized tests are all biased against women and/or minorities. IQ tests - which are pretty well normed across cultures if you use the right ones - tend to turn up the same patterns over and over. IQ tests (or their proxies) are useful ways of testing general cognitive fitness and ability and anticipating on-the-job performance and learning (see, e.g., http://www.udel.edu/educ/go…

So then why don't startups hire based on the results of IQ tests, isn't this a meritocracy? You actually made my overall point stronger, because you demonstrated that this community clearly doesn't define "merit" to be "raw intelligence". It is a much, much more nuanced concept and it includes, I suspect, a large number of characteristics that are heavily influenced by gender, culture, and class. When we say "merit" we do not simply mean "how smart are you?", if we did, then according to your evidence, more companies would use IQ tests for screening potential employees.

Re: Girls Who Code

#247

Post by theorique »

judk wrote: post #126
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…

Are you joking? The fashion world has massively outreached to men in recent couple of decades. Axe and chest shaving and all that other metrosexual stuff. And the lack of male teachers is a persistent concern in the education world, especially with respect to the need to provide male role models for kids of single moms.

The fashion world has massively outreached to men in recent couple of decades. Axe and chest shaving and all that other metrosexual stuff.

The fashion world sees men as a target market. Doesn't mean that they are doing outreach or trying to improve the pipeline of men in to the industry.

Re: Girls Who Code

#248

Post by newnewnew »

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!

Wow, I never knew that the male-female Math gap was so robust. Look at the tables in the last three pages you linked. Except for Israel, nearly every country has a male-biased Math score gap on standardized tests.

Re: Girls Who Code

#249

Post by codahale »

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…

Watching you clutch your pearls is fucking hilarious, so I've set up a weekly donation of a fair chunk of change to Shanley's Gittip account.

Keep up the good work.

Re: Girls Who Code

#250

Post by 0x20 »

parennoob wrote: post #150
judk wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you joking? The fashion world has massively outreached to men in recent couple of decades. Axe and chest shaving and all that other metrosexual stuff. And the lack of male teachers is a persistent concern in the education world, especially with respect to the need to provide male role models for kids of single moms.

> The fashion world has massively outreached to men in recent couple of decades. Axe and chest shaving and all that other metrosexual stuff. I mean men working in fashion, not being marketed to. And Axe is not fashion, thank you very much. > And the lack of male teachers is a persistent concern in the education world... Show me the equivalent of "Rails Girls" or "Girls Who Code" for male teachers or fashion designers…

As well as girlswhocode there are also many non-gender-specific organizations aimed at helping young people into computer science.

Instead of asking whether gender-specific orgs for young people exist in the fashion or teaching world, you should also be asking whether non-gender-specific orgs exist in those fields as well.

The possible lack of "Young Male Teachers" organizations doesn't make much of a point if there's also a lack of "Young Teachers" organizations.

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