Women: Learn to Program This Summer • Hacker News Board

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#241

Post by pbhjpbhj » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #132

commandlinefan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender. Is there any evidence that this is happening, though? I've never seen anybody, even anecdotally claim "I'm a woman (who is qualified) and I've been unable to find employment". Mostly what I see is people trying to work backwards and say, "if group X makes up Y% of the population and only Z% of programmers, that in itself must be evidence of discr…

I was once sitting on a plane wearing a shirt branded with a major tech company. The person next to me asked if I was a software engineer and I said yes. They excitedly started telling me about how they were doing all this work to groom their young son (age like 6) to go into tech. This person also had a similarly aged daughter and he was doing none of this for her. Perhaps the son really did love this stuff and perh…

That is interesting, I've only ever seen technology courses/opportunities targetting women/girls. Never anything like that for boys.

It doesn't matter to a boy in primary school what proportion of men there are in tech, they just want the opportunities others are getting. For some reason "other people wanted equality of opportunity in the past but didn't get it, so you can't have it now" is supposed to answer this.

Meanwhile noone seems to care that all the teachers, and all the elected governors, in the school are female; but if a lesson can't have only male scientists mentioned in it ... which seems massively inconsistent.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#242

Post by mywittyname » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

wolco wrote: post #27

mywittyname wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I honestly don’t see how any of this is legal It is illegal to discriminate for jobs on the basis of sex in the US (as per the Civil Rights Act of 1964). If you believe yourself to be the victim of discrimination, then submit a complaint the the EEOC [1] who will investigate. That being said, a large gap between the number men and women (or whites and blacks, etc) working at companies exist can be considered eviden…

I can accept either point but not both. It is illegal to discriminate based on sex. By not discriminating based on sex to fix a ratio/percent you could be found discriminating

Statistically speaking, an equal opportunity workforce should be comprised of some demographic makeup. If a company deviates dramatically from that target makeup, the implication is that hiring practices are unfair. Addressing the unfairness will cause the issue to naturally correct itself.

This is a sound strategy that's commonly applied to other areas of engineering. If a company produces bearings and their QA department measures bearing tolerances from a shipment sample to deviate wildly from what is expected, then the implication is their is an issue with the manufacturing process that needs to be addressed. They don't just toss a handful of under-tolerant bearing in the shipment to bring the median value inline.

In other words:

> By not discriminating based on sex to fix a ratio/percent

...Is where your misunderstanding is. This idea is not over-correction -- you do no need to discriminate to achieve a specific makeup. You explicitly need to NOT discriminate and the problem will be correct itself.

ELI5: If a company was found to have a workforce that was too short. An appropriate response is to notice the problem an conduct an investigation, which determines tall people were put off from applying because the doors were too short. They correct the doors and the average height of employees naturally correct.

A wrong approach is to explicitly weight taller people more favorable in interviews.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#243

Post by AnthonyMouse » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

ajiang wrote: post #161

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point was: If you're going to argue against this donation, saying that it fuels the trend of reverse racism / sexism that makes the free market more distorted, I would argue that this donation is very much a part of the free market. Private donations to private organizations for private causes. This is trying to eat your cake and still have it though. If you ask a staunch free market person whether we should hav…

That's a very intriguing point! Can you help me understand it better? Are you saying that it is currently against the law for @jl to donate to Lambda School to sponsor 40 men to attend for free? I don't think that is your point, but I'm having trouble interpreting it any other way.

I'm not going to pretend to know the specific details of every law in every jurisdiction regarding what organizational purpose or member threshold or funding source or the like is required before sex discrimination is unlawful, but I'm fairly confident there are a number of laws to that effect on the books.

Maybe none of them apply in this case. But given the complexity and somewhat arbitrary nature of the requirements, that seems more like happenstance than some reasoned choice to have this specific type of thing excluded as opposed to the others, and we probably ought to be more consistent one way or the other.

For example, if MIT (a private university) wanted to have a program like this, should it be allowed in this case but not in their case just because their institution does some unrelated publicly funded research or whatever the restriction is?

But then you're also opening them up to being an entirely or almost-entirely gender segregated school if they want to be. So which one is it?

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#244

Post by tomp » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:44 PM UTC

seancoleman wrote: post #28

My girlfriend, a nurse of 10+ years, just started learning to code on her own, built her first (basic) website ( https://www.nataliepeterson.dev ) and is applying to Lambda School already. I sent this to her this morning and she was elated. Programs like this really work.

Lovely website! One suggestion: it looks like the image is randomized on each click - the UX is that sometimes it doesn't work, because the randomly chosen image is (presumably) the same one - so probably the better choice would be to randomly chose a different image.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#245

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

jschwartzi wrote: post #201

commandlinefan wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's not exactly what OP means. What's actually going on is that we have certain expectations around candidates' behavior and the wording they use on their resumes and the way that they respond to technical interviews. These are behaviors that are ingrained for most white men but tend to be less ingrained for women and non-white men. So our hiring processes are subtly biased against anyone who isn't like us. The in…

[deleted]

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#246

Post by DBYCZ » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

Anyone who argues that there should be "More women in tech" needs to go visit a medical college. Completely filled with super smart women interested in science.

If STEM women found Coding as interesting as they did Medicine (which is arguably more competitive and prestigious), we wouldn't have any shortage of women writing code. There is nothing wrong with either way, just let people do what they like to do.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#247

Post by dang » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:47 PM UTC

grondilu wrote: post #238

the_af wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Her username here is Doreen, and I assume that's her name. Why should she have to hide it? If she has to hide her sex in order to get meaningful answers, that right there is a huge impediment us men in tech never have to experience.

Most people on internet pick a fairly random, gender-neutral pseudonym. Your username for instance is "the_af". Her picking "Doreen" as a username was her publicizing her gender. She can't do that and at the same time complain about being treated as a woman. It's not a "huge impediment". She'd just have to pick a gender-neutral pseudonym. Is it really such a big deal?

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments in this thread (and in any HN thread)? You're crossing into trolling at this point.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#248

Post by bazooka_penguin » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:47 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #34

ReturnToVoid wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've seen even more against Asian men (not that it makes discrimination again white men any more okay). After all, if we are going to strive for for equal representation - which seems to be the goal - Asian are going to have to go down from 30-40% of many large companies down to a fraction of that. Asians are 14% of California and 5.2% of the US population.

They were getting lynched up into the 1900s by whites and Hispanics, put in camps in the mid 1900s, and discriminated against up until just a few generations ago, and now they're expected to lay down and be trodden upon, or else. Very cool, very progressive.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#249

Post by elliekelly » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:50 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #185

commandlinefan wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

One of my favorite examples from the Boston Symphony Orchestra[1]:

> For the auditions, the musicians would be playing behind a screen, in an effort to remove all chance of bias and allow for a merit based selection only - a selection that would hopefully increase the number of women in the orchestra.

> To their surprise, their initial audition results still skewed male.

> Then they asked the musicians to take off their shoes. The reason? The sound of the women's heels as they entered the audition unknowingly influenced the adjudicators. Once the musicians removed their shoes, almost 50% of the women made it past the first audition.

[1] https://www.upworthy.com/this-orchestras-blind-audition-prov...

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#250

Post by dang » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:50 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #237

dang wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, because it destroys the intellectual curiosity that is the reason HN exists. If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Why are his comments "idealogical battle" and the mainstream comments just comments. Clarify that for me, thank you.

I'd be happy to, if you give me a reason to believe that this is a good faith question and not a hostile cross-examination. That game is no fun, and only leads to more hostile cross-examination—exponentially more, in fact, as each entry produces multiple replies. It is also a bad thing for HN, soaking up time that could otherwise go into making HN better.

(The short version, though, is that (a) turning this into a race war about white men is obviously off topic, and (b) when people comment like this, they're essentially copying pre-existing talking points, which is neither thoughtful nor conversation.)