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To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

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Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#111
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?

Animus9 is an obvious mens rights advocate. They are indistinguishable from trolls; the only difference being that they believe the stuff they say.

@poorelise - you seem unfamiliar with what DanBC means by "mens rights advocate" -- let me help you:

Men’s Rights Activists advocate for ‘human rights’ with rape and death threats - http://feministcurrent.com/7555/mens-rights-activistsadvocat...

The most persuasive MRA ever - http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/11/the-most-p...

White Hot Rage: the men's rights movement - http://prospect.org/article/white-hot-rage

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#112

I run a private education organization that teaches kids how to code at a physical facility, and we get a gender breakup of male and female students that is similar to that of the industry (around 80 - 20). Because of the overwhelming male presence, it is difficult to make a comfortable learning environment for the female students, who may often feel uncomfortable, at odds with, or ostracized by pseudo-masculine effo…

How about just being harsh on "psuedo-masculine efforts"? Just like if you had mostly white kids and they made the black kids "feel uncomfortable" by "awkward" kids, the answer is to meet the stupid jokes and what not with sincerity and make them realise how absurd the behaviour is. Just like in other co-ed classes if boys make whatever jokes, it gets slapped down. Separating things sounds like it'd just make the mal…

We don't segregate, we simply offer the all-girls class as an alternative. We still have girls in our regular class and they are very chill. I'm not saying we have an issue with boys acting out, I'm saying that when we get that occasional kid who makes things uncomfortable, some girls get visibly put off by it. I train all my instructors on how to deal with inappropriate comments and to let me know about them, so my decision to provide girls with a more comfortable environment is rooted in the observation that 100% of the inappropriate comments we've had to deal with come from a male student.

When any student, regardless of gender, is uncomfortable in a class, they will pay less attention and perform noticeably poorer.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#113
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard tons of people complain about that, though for other reasons - it would be really good for boys (and their social and academic performance) to have male rolemodels, the argument goes. Consider the reasons for non-attractiveness. In the case of nursing, it's bad pay as well, presumably. In the case of IT, the general unfriendliness is one reason, though there might be others. Shouldn't we just remove the remov…

Just curious why you think nursing is bad pay? Or what do you consider to be bad? Where I live (Vancouver, BC.) entry level (students) pay for nurses is $50K/year. Average earnings for nurses I believe is on the order of $70-90K/year though.

I think it is mainly because nursing isn't a 'career' kind of a job. You can make $50K an year, but 10 years down the lane, now what?

While your engineering friend is aiming to sell his start up for some millions of dollars, your job doesn't even have the scope to even attempt anything like that even if you wanted to.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never consider a female coder to be any different from a male one. I am merely giving anecdotal evidence that female students of the 11 - 17 age group learn significantly better when they are amongst their peers. My decision to make a few of our classes into girls-only ones was to allow the girls who felt uncomfortable in a male-dominated setting to still have an opportunity to learn in a setting they found c…

>I would never consider a female coder to be any different from a male one You literally segregated males from females in your coding class. That is considering them to be different. >female students of the 11 - 17 age group learn significantly better when they are amongst their peers. So male students aren't peers of female students? Really? I'm pretty sure you're not being purposefully malicious, but jeeze... Your…

You're obviously a man, but you seem to think yourself the arbiter of what is or is not sexist against women. Why is this?

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#115
post #101

It would be really nice to see more females in the industry, but I rally have to ask myself if those artificial promotions will help much. I never learned to program because of some courses or because the industry needed me, I started programming because I wanted to create things. There was just a natural interest in computers and how they work, that's what drove and often still drives me today. If females have the s…

How did you develop this 'natural' interest in programming? I am male, but had literally zero role models, and my school system never covered computers. I made it to age 25 without knowing what a programming language is. But when I found out I was bloody hooked on the idea!

Fair point, I might have been "spoiled" with growing up in a rather techy environment, my dad worked with PC ever since I can remember. I however think that the schooling system needs to start including computer science subjects and by that I don't just mean how to use Microsoft Word.

Then again the question is, why do females not get hooked on the idea, even when they don't grow up in such a techy environment. Is it really "our" fault or is even "our" job to trying to confince people how great programming is? We've a lot of events especially made for females where we try to excite them for computer science, but so far it didn't add much to the imbalance. So for me it seems (at least here in Switzerland) that we're doing everything possible to get women into programming, but if their interests are somewhere else, what else is there to do? Do we really need to play a blame game?

That's what I meant with "natural" interest. We can't force women to get "hooked" on the idea, they need to get there on their own.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#116
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious why you think nursing is bad pay? Or what do you consider to be bad? Where I live (Vancouver, BC.) entry level (students) pay for nurses is $50K/year. Average earnings for nurses I believe is on the order of $70-90K/year though.

I think it is mainly because nursing isn't a 'career' kind of a job. You can make $50K an year, but 10 years down the lane, now what? While your engineering friend is aiming to sell his start up for some millions of dollars, your job doesn't even have the scope to even attempt anything like that even if you wanted to.

Nursing has career path through specialist forms of nursing (intensive care, nurse-prescribers, etc) to management of teams, wards, hospitals, health trusts, etc.

That's what a normal career. Most people don't have the sell-the-company lottery as an option.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#117
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you develop this 'natural' interest in programming? I am male, but had literally zero role models, and my school system never covered computers. I made it to age 25 without knowing what a programming language is. But when I found out I was bloody hooked on the idea!

Fair point, I might have been "spoiled" with growing up in a rather techy environment, my dad worked with PC ever since I can remember. I however think that the schooling system needs to start including computer science subjects and by that I don't just mean how to use Microsoft Word. Then again the question is, why do females not get hooked on the idea, even when they don't grow up in such a techy environment. Is it…

It's probably not the fault of the "programming world", but rather gender roles in their entirety, where boys and girls are pushed toward certain interests and away from others.

Programming is often seen as "geeky" (lesser so today than in the past) and girls are encouraged to "not be geeky," to fit in with their peers. Boys are, I think, much less socially penalized.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#118
Here is my abridged comment:

1. It is important to like who you are and what you do. I am glad you are proud of being who you are,

2. But at the same time I don't like when people are calling out initiatives like "more women in tech". Look, getting a job is tough. It can be luck or qualification. I know someone is going to cite some research studies but at this point, let's just say yes we get it, a lot of assholes out there are discriminating women. But in reality, you can't stop them by hiring more women. You wish you could just get more women in manager level so that more women can be hired. That's not going to happen magically and hoping women managers hire more women is also acting discrimination. I am not comfortable with that kind of initiatives. It is as if I was a broker setting a goal for myself. That's just number game, there is nothing we gain from it other than growing the numbers.

3. All-girls class is just bad. For one it's like containing them, like putting them in a zoo and wait for them to do something amazing and then we pay a visit and cheer them for their accomplishment. Events meant for helping girls to find self-esteem is great but then again, too many is going to do damage because they soon will get attached to these "all-girls" environment. To actually work in the real world, one must accept the flaws and be ready to work with unfriendly people. What is even more frustrating is that we are dogfooding people with the crazy things CS and programming are doing. The ability to code is great, awesome. But coding is just a tool. Like every other tool out there, you can either make something awesome and powerful or something ugly and useless. Knowing how to code doesn't make you smarter or special. It's like knowing quantum physics suddenly makes you a wantable guy among your girlfriends? That's just bullshit (for some it's true but then that's just bullshit). And that's pretty much stereotyping.

What we need is to stop telling girls or any group of people to do XYZ because they are the minority or is having disadvantage. Making exceptions to them isn't going to help them. I am Asian (Chinese to be exact) and if 20 years later Asian MD dominates like 80%, do we start another initiative to bring up other ethnicity? If all the ice cream truck drivers are Asians, do we want more diversity? If we think (or because studies have shown...) that girls don't end up in tech because they are afraid or because they were told they weren't good enough, having all-girl class won't solve the problem when they enter the real world either.

Teach people about computer and web literacy, about science and engineering, about what people do in their daily jobs. Teach regardless of gender or race. We all deserve to know them and we don't need to have special non-profit organizations going after XYZ groups of people. Bring those things into core education.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#119
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?

Animus9 is an obvious mens rights advocate. They are indistinguishable from trolls; the only difference being that they believe the stuff they say.

Your label, not mine. I don't believe in the MRA movement or whatever you call it. I am opposed to off-topic gender politics articles (which are becoming more frequent here) as I believe they are divisionist and ruin the spirit of this forum. This is Hacker News NOT Gender Politics News.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#120
post #74
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you mean to run a "competitive company" you have to abuse your employees? I know a lot of companies that are the best in their business and never have to. It is just unfortunate for India that our so-called IT Industry is just marketing itself as cheap and easy-to-abuse labour.

>>you mean to run a "competitive company" you have to abuse your employees? Not at all, but to be a "competitive company" you have to be "competitive" which is essentially doing better than your competition. The issue is someone is always willing to put more effort than you/your company. This is where it all breaks down. This is exactly what makes our profession so much sought after. Because at some point you can mak…

I don't agree that abusing employees helps. Software development is a creative activity, and you've got to get enough rest to be creative.

Disclosure: European here.

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