Women: Learn to Program This Summer • Hacker News Board

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#271

Post by camelNotation » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:07 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #251

DBYCZ wrote: post #246

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.

What's the evidence that women aren't coding because they aren't "interested"? If you want to make that argument, don't you need to go and refute all the anecdotal evidence that women aren't entering tech careers because they don't feel welcome? I cite as evidence the fact that women in med schools have not, in fact, always been well represented and that the same kind of rhetoric about their "interests" was used to e…

It blows my mind that so many people are still unaware of the gender equality paradox. People constantly bring this up, constantly ask that same question, constantly get the same response. Women self-select into certain fields at higher rates than others, men do the exact same thing. Can we move on now? There is no problem to solve.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#272

Post by fzeroracer » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:08 PM UTC

Pyxl101 wrote: post #239

UncleMeat wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The research community does not have a better explanation for the disparity than social bias That's not really true. There is a lot of research showing that men and women have different interests and make different life choices, and that these choices impact career demographics. One of the most well-researched differences is that men tend to be more interested in "things", especially mechanical things, and women te…

How does this explain for example, the following two points I will assert:

1. Software Engineering has become more social over time. The idea of the loner software developer has sort of vanished as open offices become the norm and the collaborative nature of software engineering grows.

2. Women majors in computer science has dropped like a rock over the past few decades [1]

These two points seem to refute your explanations, considering software development at one time had a signiciant amount of developers that were women. If women were somehow biologically uninclined to be software engineers, the statistics don't seem to follow this train of thought.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#273

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:09 PM UTC

gridlockd wrote: post #127

dzink wrote: post #4

Spreading this as far and wide as I can. Coding is as critical as literacy for the next 20 years and there are too many programs and teachers that teach it poorly, alienating large segments of the population. Lambda is among the best. I hope they can scale past 40 students for this in the future.

> Coding is as critical as literacy for the next 20 years... I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-coders. You need sales, marketing, accounting, management, HR, legal - and even the IT guys often truck along fine with little to no coding skills. If you need code written to perform your task that usually just means the UI of your application isn't powerful en…

Jessica made a really good point, that female founders without any coding knowledge can't even assess whether a coder is any good before hiring him or her. Getting the fundamentals in an intense summer course will not only enable someone to develop a prototype on their own, but also assess who is a good potential hire and who is just good at bullshitting.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#274

Post by djsumdog » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:12 PM UTC

ericsoderstrom wrote: post #190

40acres wrote: post #182

Some 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.

Enabled flagged/dead in your options. I think it's pretty valuable to see the way moderators are shaping the conversation.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#275

Post by eq_sd_ » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:14 PM UTC

Pyxl101 wrote: post #239

UncleMeat wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The research community does not have a better explanation for the disparity than social bias That's not really true. There is a lot of research showing that men and women have different interests and make different life choices, and that these choices impact career demographics. One of the most well-researched differences is that men tend to be more interested in "things", especially mechanical things, and women te…

"inherent interests"?? Anecdotally...my two biggest passions are photography (artistic/visual creativity in general) and software development. Neither of these were innate. My grandma and my dad were the ones that exposed me to creativity and computers throughout my entire childhood, and then a boyfriend who sparked my interested in code.

If money and the like were of no concern I might consider pursuing photography over coding. However, just because I love that a little more, doesn't necessarily mean I'm not interested in code.

There are absolutely people who will pursue things they have little to no interest in, but there are also people who will pick one over another because one is just a little bit better for whatever reason. How about we don't discount that people can have multiple passions?

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#276

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:15 PM UTC

grondilu wrote: post #55

Isn't programming a skill that can be learned alone in a fairly straightforward manner? I mean, most programming languages have extensive documentation, tutorials and so on (at least FOSS dynamical languages like Python, Rust, Perl...). From my personal experience and what I can guess about hackers I've talked to for instance on IRC, that's how most guys learned it : the web is full of resources for whoever wants to…

"Isn't programming a skill that can be learned alone in a fairly straightforward manner?"

Isn't this true for content covered by the vast majority of all secondary and college courses?

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#277

Post by Pyxl101 » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:20 PM UTC

eq_sd_ wrote: post #275

Pyxl101 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The research community does not have a better explanation for the disparity than social bias That's not really true. There is a lot of research showing that men and women have different interests and make different life choices, and that these choices impact career demographics. One of the most well-researched differences is that men tend to be more interested in "things", especially mechanical things, and women te…

"inherent interests"?? Anecdotally...my two biggest passions are photography (artistic/visual creativity in general) and software development. Neither of these were innate. My grandma and my dad were the ones that exposed me to creativity and computers throughout my entire childhood, and then a boyfriend who sparked my interested in code. If money and the like were of no concern I might consider pursuing photography…

I edited my comment to replace "inherent interests" with "biological trends in interest differences".

I'm not trying to make a comment about individuals, only about trends that we might see in the population at large.

The topic further up was whether differences in job participation can be explained by reasons other than discrimination - the answer is that, yes, they can be explained by other factors such as biological trends in interest differences. One needs to control for these factors before drawing conclusions about discrimination.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#278

Post by DantesKite » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:20 PM UTC

In general, making it easier for more people to get into programming feels feels like a good thing to me. Programming is a game-changer in terms of its ability to amplify talents and interests. It's the longest lever I know of.

What stops people from getting into programming, however, is a bit more difficult to determine, but there does seem to be patterns. Less women and blacks compared to asians and whites.

Oddly enough, trying to figure out the causes of these differences intersects a broad range of fields from evolution to sexual discrimination to access to resources.

And because there's so much uncertainty, the explanation quickly turns into politics.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#279

Post by dang » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:20 PM UTC

allen37 wrote: post #259

A great message. I love HN for this very reason. Just today I noticed an article about an Army interrogator turned concientious objector. At the latter portion of my military career I too was an interrogator. I avoided posting because I realized the topic was too hot and likely to become political. It didn't hurt my feelings, I simply moved on with my day.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19465697 and marked it off-topic. Nothing wrong with your comment at all, it just shouldn't be at the top of this thread. Mine shouldn't either, but it's up there for different reasons unfortunately.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#280

Post by root_axis » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 8:21 PM UTC

mlevental wrote: post #235

dang wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that moderation comments are out-of-band for the site. But they're necessary, because the system can't right itself without them. If it helps at all, they're even more tedious to write than they are to read. Edit: mlevental points out that you were referring to the article, not my comment. I think there's plenty of intellectual curiosity in what Jessica wrote, especially in the blog post explaining why she…

the person you're responding to here is trying to point out that the article is disingenuous and so only can generate the same. I don't agree/disagree. just clarifying.

What about the article is disingenuous? It doesn't even seem to be making any arguments.