Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great suggestion. I will pass along the feedback to the developer :)
A carrousel could work as well
carrousels are so passé
Women: Learn to Program This Summer
181–190 of 606 posts
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#182Some of the comments in this thread is a master class of how discrimination and gatekeeping work not just in our industry but in society as a whole.
How can we simultaneously be an industry built on free an open source software and yet try to put up walls around our industry when efforts are made to make it more accessible to others?
The barriers to programming are being lowered and this is an excellent thing. More diverse companies, different types of people to bounce ideas on, new perspectives. This is what our industry needs more than ever, and yet so many feel a threat veiled by concerns of affirmative action and 'reverse discrimination'.
We need to acknowledge the barriers that have existed in our industry but may be blind to you personally because you never had to deal with it. For one, access to a PC for a long time was restricted to those with low incomes. My mother saved her income tax refund for two years to buy our first PC, the one I learned to program on. The schools I attended didn't have a computer lab until my junior year of high school. It's a great thing that programming is being spread to those who did not have access before. If software is eating the world everyone had better become familiar.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#183Just leave the women alone, they are not interested and rightfully so. In the western world there are many other jobs which are much more fun for women and they are happy to do them, including high paying professional jobs like lawyers or doctors with much higher bars for entry, and yet, women manage to study and do those jobs just fine.
In countries where programming pays well and there are no other better options you can see much more women in the field, like India or Israel, somehow those women who in many times comes from much more traditional and conservative societies, manage to learn to code like any other men. I wonder how they do it without all the affirmative action while popping out 5 kids per family or even more like the orthodox women in Israel.
It seems like modern feminism destroys the capability of women to learn anything that is not liberal arts, someone needs to research how that happened and how it is all men's fault.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if the underlying reason is that women, as a whole, are less interested in Science/Engineering than men are?
Is this actually true? How do we verify this? (Certain portions of engineering have higher women participation rates than men- can we identify a biological cause for this disparity, or that many of the sciences have women on parity or overrepresentation?) I agree that this is a definite possibility but I struggle to identify a reason to explain the disparities of participation in subfields purely from a genetic point…
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge... and read the first couple of comments as well which is further back and forth between the two authors.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#185EDIT: To clarify that the money is going directly to private individuals, as per Austen. Incredible, thanks for putting your money where your values are @jl. As for the numerous comments in this post around reverse sexism / reverse discrimination: 1. This is a private individual giving personal capital to other private individuals, supporting a personal cause. It is hard to both claim principles of free market and ra…
> arbitrary euphemisms for gender / racial bias like 'bad culture fit'. You make it sound like there are people out there saying to themselves, "I know I should stop discriminating against under-represented minorities, but I just can't seem to stop myself" as if discriminating were addictive like smoking. If somebody used to discriminate and wants to stop, the solution is to stop discriminating, not discriminate in t…
Unconscious bias is a real thing. You can easily have a situation in which no one is intentionally discriminating and yet end up with decidedly non-equal outcomes.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think of it like this. Linear models in statistics break out the prediction for a given case in terms of main effects and interactions. All women get hit by the main effect of being a woman; it just so happens that some women are buoyed by other main effects like wealth, whiteness, etc. Now, it may turn out that you might want to evaluate an aggregate measure of disadvantage per person, so you can sort people by leve…
> doing less good than a perfect-information solution, will still almost certainly do more good than harm. This thread, and past threads on this subject turn into an absolute shit-show and cause tribalism/division. I feel like that is evidence enough that these policies are harmful. When you do/don't get a job there's uncertainty around the reason. Was it my experience/skill-set, or race/gender/sexual orientation/rel…
It doesn't show that they're harmful; it shows that they have a cost. The question is whether the benefit exceeds the cost, which depends on making some sort of quantifiable conversion rate between "acrimony and uncertainty" versus "more women getting coding jobs".
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#187I recently completed a very difficult job search where I unfortunately had to lean on my ethnicity (I’m Mexican) to pass through very overt screening against white men. I was shocked to hear from multiple companies, large and small, that they did not want men and white men in particular. Now we see a YC co-founder giving 40 women $9000 to learn to program. Where does it end? I was really sad that while I personally c…
I have sadly witnessed a lot of discrimination against white men recently as well. God forbid you happen to be a white man from a third-world country, you'll literally never get a single interview anywhere no matter how good you happen to be.
I thought Visa sponsorship was the issue for third-world countries,I and many of my friends (local code meetup) share the same story ; apply to 150+ companies and not a single response.
We are white from North-Africa.
I stopped applying abroad because these kind of "diversity" policies scare me because they're mostly ethnic based I believe it should be idea based otherwise you end up with a group that all think alike.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#188EDIT: To clarify that the money is going directly to private individuals, as per Austen. Incredible, thanks for putting your money where your values are @jl. As for the numerous comments in this post around reverse sexism / reverse discrimination: 1. This is a private individual giving personal capital to other private individuals, supporting a personal cause. It is hard to both claim principles of free market and ra…
>3. None of this is to say that you personally are not experiencing a challenging time or are not subject to bias in any way. None of this should diminish your personal challenges in the work environment. That should be addressed. This particular individual (@jl) and this particular company (Lambda School) are just not addressing that particular cause at this moment. And that should be ok.
I think you summed up perfectly what causes people to have knee-jerk reactions against correcting biases.
Just because one effort doesn't address all issues at once, doesn't mean its futile.
Progress isn't instantaneous. It takes many attempts over long periods of time to move the needle. I'm not sure why people feel the need to criticize any and all attempts at doing so.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this actually true? How do we verify this? (Certain portions of engineering have higher women participation rates than men- can we identify a biological cause for this disparity, or that many of the sciences have women on parity or overrepresentation?) I agree that this is a definite possibility but I struggle to identify a reason to explain the disparities of participation in subfields purely from a genetic point…
The basic answer is we don't know, hence why this is such a contentious issue. There are many known physical[1] and psychological[2] differences between the sexes[3]. Boys tend to play with inanimate objects while girls tend to play with dolls and role play. Women tend to be more social, while men are less so. Men with higher testosterone tend to be more aggressive overall[4]. Some think many of these differences are…
Intuitively, I don't understand why computer science engineering would have a lower ratio than engineering in general from a biological perspective. Or physics vs chemistry. Or structural engineering vs electrical. Which of the above fields have to do with playing with dolls vs playing with inanimate objects (are dolls not inanimate objects)? Which of the above fields is more aggressive in the academic pursuit? (I've never considered computer science, with a very low ratio compared to other STEM pursuits, to be more aggressive...)
That confusion is why I'm having a lot of difficulty personally buying that much of the differences can be attributed to biological differences in women and men. I feel like I'm missing some evidence where it is proven computer science is more aggressive than, say, structural engineering- and that's why there is a bigger representation of men in computer science.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#190Some of the comments in this thread is a master class of how discrimination and gatekeeping work not just in our industry but in society as a whole. How can we simultaneously be an industry built on free an open source software and yet try to put up walls around our industry when efforts are made to make it more accessible to others? The barriers to programming are being lowered and this is an excellent thing. More d…
> Some of the comments in this thread is a master class of how discrimination and gatekeeping work
All the top comments I see are supportive and encouraging. Maybe there were some negative removed comments, but overall this thread doesn't seem to demonstrate gatekeeping and discrimination.