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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#251

Post by philwelch »

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…

What disappoints me most is that I actually sympathize with feminism. I just wish they were less McCarthyist about it. Which is an apt analogy as I also sympathize with anti-communists.

Re: Girls Who Code

#252

Post by 0x20 »

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.…

http://www.lscp.net/persons/ramus/fr/GDP1/papers/spencer99.p...

“Characterizing the test as insensitive to gender differences was enough to totally eliminate women’s underperformance in this experiment. Yet when the same test was characterized as sensitive to gender differences, women significantly underperformed in relation to equally qualified men.”

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15298868.2012.68...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19487665

Re: Girls Who Code

#253

Post by mistermann »

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?

I think part of the reason these discussions never get anywhere is because of blatant dishonesty in discussions. You actually think there is no "feminist activist" movement?

Re: Girls Who Code

#254

Post by jlees »

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.

I got into programming by figuring out how to cheat at games when I was small; another common route is writing mods/addons (which I also did, later on). Don't knock the instincts even though it's not writing code!

Re: Girls Who Code

#255

Post by philangist »

codex wrote: post #172

In a far off land, bounceyball was the national sport. A funny cross between basketball and volleyball, it was hugely popular, and to be a professional player was considered the most prestigious occupation. A minor scandal erupted when was noted that there were few women in the co-ed national league, and a huge about of effort was made to recruit female players. Every family wanted the prestige, fame, and fortune tha…

I don't necessarily agree with this metaphor, but it was entertaining and a fresh approach to the girls in tech problem. I especially thought 'Male players wanted more females playing so it didn't feel like a damn sausagefest all the time, and to help with dating' was hilarious.

Anyway, my major problem with your assertion is that we know that the number of female bouncyballers has been going down significantly over the last few decades. It's not as if women have gotten significantly shorter, or men have gotten significantly taller in that time period, so the difference in participation rates can't be explained entirely with biology.

Re: Girls Who Code

#256

Post by anthonyb »

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…

Friendly reminder that "meritocracy" is intended as an anti pattern, in the same way that waterfall is.

Edit: here's a thoughtful piece on the term and its implications, from the original coiner of the term: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

Re: Girls Who Code

#257

Post by jfarmer »

theorique wrote: post #232
anildash wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm a white male and I am evil to them" Name one person who has said this.

No one says it literally. It's embedded in the implications. The industry is "too white, too male". White men don't understand the implications or the need for diversity. White men are dinosaurs, they need to adapt to the new world. There's a ton of dog-whistle racism and sexism against white men. Unfortunately, that's the 'acceptable' kind of racism and sexism, because many white men are in positions of power and au…

Louis CK has many smart and funny things to say on this topic (race, here, not gender for the most part):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4LkrQCyIz8
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=derzWWYf3-w
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF1NUposXVQ
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4f9zR5yzY
When the jester mocks the king it's funny. When the king mocks the jester it's just cruel.

Re: Girls Who Code

#258

Post by aphyr »

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 want to help other groups in this industry; however, there is no speaking to them.

I think I partially know how it feels to be gay, because I didn't choose my situation yet there is an extremely vocal group that wants me to believe I am doing something wrong.

I humbly submit that you have no idea how it feels to be gay, and that the best way to find out is to actually talk to us. aphyr@aphyr.com.

Re: Girls Who Code

#259

Post by jlees »

I'd like to call attention to this part of Fred's post which many of the sub-threads appear to have overlooked:

Instead of turning Paul's comments into a blogosphere shitstorm, maybe we would all be better off staring the issue in the face and thinking about how each of us could help make a difference on this issue

How would you help a 13-year-old -- of either gender? -- get interested in programming?

Raspberry Pi? PyGame? Lego FIRST robotics? How can some of these initiatives be spread more widely to those who maybe don't have supportive family or communities to encourage their nerdy, high-school-pariah interest in tech?

Re: Girls Who Code

#260

Post by skinnycow »

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…

Hey sprinkles, I could use some legal advice. Think you could advise?
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