141–150 of 176 posts
I don't care how many classes women take, men will still rule the technology world.
If it's any consolation there will always be charity positions for under-qualified women, like Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and that clueless simpleton at Yahoo!, who can't even get their email client to work.
If I offended any ladies here, let me apologize. Perhaps I can fund the next Spanx start-up.
CS10 TA here: I have been involved in the development of this course for almost 4 years and in that time I watched it grow from a small 80 student pilot course to a 220 student CS goliath. In my opinion the growth in popularity of this course is representative of an underwhelming high school CS education. For students without some previous experiences, CS61A as an introduction can be brutally discouraging. This fact…
> For students without some previous experiences, CS61A as an introduction can be brutally discouraging. CS61A hasn't been the intro course for inexperienced students for as long as I can remember: What about CS3? I came into CS having never touched or seen a piece of code, and I took CS3 because my understanding was that it was supposed to be the gentle introduction for complete neophytes. I found CS3 to be enormous…
Women are usually pretty awful programmers and engineers. Sorry, but the cats out of the bag.
I don't care how many classes women take, men will still rule the technology world.
If it's any consolation there will always be charity positions for under-qualified women, like Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and that clueless simpleton at Yahoo!, who can't even get their email client to work.
If I offended any ladies here, let me apologize. Perhaps I can fund the next Spanx start-up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. I bet your average person can't understand compiler theory or asymptotic growth of recursive functions. But I see your point. They are as emotionally advanced as computer types are intellectually advanced.
> They are as emotionally advanced as computer types are intellectually advanced. Some of them are pretty damned intellectually advanced as well.
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And teachers? That has to be the MOST important group where we should absolutely have equal representation. As a "traditionally female" occupation, K-12 teaching is woefully underpaid relative to, say, police or firemen. In the SF Bay Area, teaching is just not a middle-class profession at all.
Could I take your comment to mean that men are not teachers because of the low pay-scale? It's a valid point and certainly one we would all like addressed.
Someone made the point long before I did that while we are grateful that women have so many more professional possibilities, it does mean a loss of many of the best women for the traditionally-female professions of nursing, "librarian-ing" and above all teaching. Just as engineering and science and medicine lose STEM minds to Wall Street and app-design shops.
Where I live, cops make $150K. Teachers make a lot less.
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No one is saying that more women in CS courses will eliminate sexism everywhere. There is intrinsic value to having gender diversity in any field, and CS is one with a notable lack of it. This is a classic example of "moving the goalposts". By claiming that incremental progress doesn't matter (or is somehow detrimental[1]) because of sexism elsewhere, you inhibit progress everywhere. By relying on strawman arguments…
I'm not inhibiting any progress by pointing out the fallacy of "more jobs = less inequality". That, by the way, is a classic example of syllogistic reasoning. We need more women to get CS jobs to increase equality, and i'm suggesting we don't need to focus on just getting them CS jobs, so I must be advocating women should have less equality. But people claiming each other is giving strawman arguments is an infinite l…
That's not what I said, and your logic is also a poor example of syllogistic reasoning, which just refers to deducing a conclusion from two premises and is not fallacious by nature. I'm criticizing the part where you assume an indicator of progress (more women in CS courses) is unimportant or negative because of structural problems elsewhere. This is a defeatist attitude that's used over and over again to shut down social progress (we shouldn't help advance the careers of women in CS because there's sexism elsewhere!). Note that I am criticizing the logic of your post and not claiming that your singular comment has affected anyone anywhere.
...about gender diversity. Is it useful in general? Sure. Will it help you understand an algorithm's efficiency? Probably not.
So? That's not the issue at stake (although there is plenty of evidence that gender-diverse workplaces are more effective[1]).
There's a lot of different kinds of diversity we could be pushing for, like political, religious, economic, cultural, and racial diversity, but nobody's pushing for them.
People are absolutely pushing for those things as well[2,3]. I have not heard much about political or religious discrimination in the tech world. I would be curious to see any evidence on the extent of those problems.
I suspect it's less that tech workers are inherently more sensitive to the needs of women, and more likely that lonely male nerds want women to gawk at in the workplace. This could be why none of them are actually discussing the issues that cause inequality and seemingly just want to get them to work in nearby cubicles. But that might be a big leap.
That is a mightily limited assumption (which also seems to imply that none of the people fighting for gender diversity in tech companies are women!) that I strongly disagree with. Think about how the current situation came about -- male-dominated cultures emerged at tech companies because the employees were almost all men. A workforce with a more balanced gender ratio would help bring about a more welcoming and equal culture, but since the culture discourages women from joining in the first place, it's necessary to have proactive measures to improve the balance. There are other factors in play, but it's really not too much more complicated than that.
So pushing women into more tech jobs without working on the more important issues (inequality) just subjects them to more abuse, for example the misogynist kind.
This, to me, epitomizes what I find so very wrong with your attitude, which screams "keep women out for their own good, because we're too hopelessly misogynistic to create a good culture for them." Punishing women by keeping them out of tech companies isn't a recompense for misogyny, it is an expression of misogyny. Tech companies ought to actively change their cultures by recruiting and hiring more women, not give up and use their own sexism as an excuse for keeping women away.
[1] http://www.mckinsey.de/sites/mck_files/files/Women_Matter_1_...
[2] http://pando.com/2014/02/21/marc-roth-hacked-his-way-out-of-...
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At our school, by the time you reached 2nd year most everyone disappeared, male and female. Fall semester sophomore year was about 25% of fall semester freshmen.
As it turns out, making video games has little to do with playing them.
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> For students without some previous experiences, CS61A as an introduction can be brutally discouraging. CS61A hasn't been the intro course for inexperienced students for as long as I can remember: What about CS3? I came into CS having never touched or seen a piece of code, and I took CS3 because my understanding was that it was supposed to be the gentle introduction for complete neophytes. I found CS3 to be enormous…
We shouldn't be making things easier just to accommodate a bunch of women who pissed away their time studying foolish nonsense like women's studies, or socialist studies. Women are usually pretty awful programmers and engineers. Sorry, but the cats out of the bag. I don't care how many classes women take, men will still rule the technology world. If it's any consolation there will always be charity positions for unde…
My mother graduated from Berkeley as an EECS major. As a matter of fact, so did two of my aunts. They all earn a lot more than the male computer engineers in my family, and this is independent of their sex.
Every subject has its introductory classes, many of which people have taken in high school. There isn't an option for introductory CS in many high schools. It seems logical to have one, then, in college
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Yeah. I bet your average person can't understand compiler theory or asymptotic growth of recursive functions. But I see your point. They are as emotionally advanced as computer types are intellectually advanced.
> They are as emotionally advanced as computer types are intellectually advanced. Some of them are pretty damned intellectually advanced as well.
The point was that nurses have more emotional strength than most people.
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It can be that progression but the RNs I've come across were more like a restricted general practitioner, so I think they just went to school (takes longer) then went into practice. They can even write certain prescriptions, but it seems like they are under the supervision of actual doctors.
That sounds more like a nurse practitioner than an RN. It takes 4 or 5 years of school beyond that required to become an RN to become an NP.