Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology

Are you also feeling somehow ostracised because of your minority genetic dispositions or lifestyle? Then welcome more women into the field, because acceptance welcomes more acceptance. We rage about what happened to Turing, but I wonder how many of us in that day and age, if we were his peers, would have fought for him publicly. And yes, I put Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper on a pedestal. I put Ada's mother on a pedestal for pushing Ada into mathematics. Without a role model, every person of minority must make the fight to be the first, and why use that energy fighting to be the first when that energy is better spent innovating in the field.

I ask you all please, look to a future 20-30 years from now, when there is more of a balance, as it happened in the fields of medicine, law, architecture.. There was a time when being a woman professional was unimaginable and resisted. It took courage and fearlessness, and it happened. It can happen in our field too, just don't keep blocking it (unwittingly or no) with constant criticism, it's tiring.

I cannot wait until the day a post on HN about achieving a balance in our technical fields has zero comments wondering why this could possibly be a good thing.

Of course the selection of recipients is classist... so is $100k tuition. The whole point is to reduce the impact that class and socioeconomic background has on who can attend the institution.

The result is a more meritocratic application process, which I believe is a worthy goal in the context of universities.

> Grants based on gender attempting to correct an imbalance are not sexist.

You twisted my words. I said the selection of who gets the grant is sexist by nature. I admitted the motivation for doing so is to help reduce sexism via creating biases on the other end of the spectrum.

Kind of like in war when one country kills a thousand of the enemies because the enemy killed a thousand of their soldiers. It may seem like a fair reaction, but is it solving the root of them problem (for ex making sure another thousand won't die again)? Or is it creating a larger divide?

> I'm not sure why you think scholarships based on gender are sexist but scholarships based on socioeconomic background are fine.

It's simple.

The problem which socioeconomic applicants is that they can't afford to apply, regardless of their ability. A grant is a monetary award that was voluntarily donated to allow them to compete based on merit/ability with the wealthier applicants.

With gender and (pure) race-based scholarships the problem is usually ignorance or bias of the administration - the school ignores the ability or merit of the applicant simply because of their race or gender. Giving the applicant a monetary award for (potentially) being left behind due to the administrations ignorance isn't solving the root of the problem.

"Last September, three out of 96 employees in Engineering and Operations at Etsy were women, and none of them were managers"

How many of the 96 employees were black, and how many of the employees were black women? Should we be concerned if it was lower than the stats about women in general? If not, why?

You talk about "gender balance" as if somehow there's an argument there that is more valid than "race balance."

In terms of engaging specifically females into more tech subjects, i'll relate something i've seen here in DC. I work with Knowledge Commons DC which offers lots of free classes, some of which are tech related (Object Oriented Programming with Java, for example). That class was 75% women last time. Why? One reason might be that most of the volunteers/organizers are women, and their social circles reach out to even larger groups of women. As people seek out similar people it may make it easier for them to gravitate to subjects which might normally be perceived as male-dominated or otherwise not as open for women. Just a thought.

That said, I don't think talking about gender imbalance in software development takes away from discussing racial imbalance in software development.

And I do think underrepresentation is an issue on all sides. In my career so far, I think I've met a total of 5 black programmers. The fact that I can remember the exact number is a problem, because I definitely can't, and don't, keep track of the number of asian/latin/etc. programmers. But meeting somebody black in tech is so rare, it always stands out.

So yes, it is a concern. But they are all valid concerns. And talking about women doesn't take away from talking about blacks. All are valid issues.

And the whole point of Etsy's scholarship is to reduce the impact that gender has on who gets into the tech field.

> You twisted my words. I said the selection of who gets the grant is sexist by nature. I admitted the motivation for doing so is to help reduce sexism via creating biases on the other end of the spectrum.

It's not sexist the same way a scholarship for kids coming from households with low incomes isn't classist. Sure, if you want to stretch the definition, it's "classist" (or "sexist"), but truly it's not. It's there to correct already existing classism (or sexism) or to assist a specific group of people.

I didn't twist your words. You specifically said the scholarship is sexist. I said it is not.

> Kind of like in war when one country kills a thousand of the enemies because the enemy killed a thousand of their soldiers. It may seem like a fair reaction, but is it solving the root of them problem (for ex making sure another thousand won't die again)? Or is it creating a larger divide?

Your (rather poor) analogy would make more sense if the first country was constantly killing enemy soldiers for thousands of years, and then the second country tries to take a little bit of land back and the first country screams, "Look! Look what they're doing! This isn't fair! We should be treated equally!"

The only divide it's creating is in people who don't think women belong in those fields. We call those people "sexists" and I don't enjoy their company.

> The problem which socioeconomic applicants is that they can't afford to apply, regardless of their ability.

The same is true of women. Regardless of their ability, it is much more difficult for them to get into the field versus men.

> With gender and (pure) race-based scholarships the problem is usually ignorance or bias of the administration - they ignore the ability or merit of the applicant simply because of their race or gender. Giving the applicant a monetary award for (potentially) being a victim of the administrations ignorance isn't solving the root of the problem.

And, using your same logic, income-based scholarships ignore the ability or merit of the applicant simply because of their income level. They are all in place to bridge a gap. This attempts (rather well) to bridge the gender gap in the tech industry.

Here are a couple of comics that summarize the gist of my points: http://i.imgur.com/fMIRr.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xEiL4.jpg