Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't call the act of attempting demographic balance in a field 'stubborn'. History often teaches us that differences between groups are contextual rather than intrinsic. When I say contextual I mean they are often for reasons that have to do with specific social forces at work during specific historical periods. For example, there was a time that software engineering was dominated by females. At the time, softw…
> a time that software engineering was dominated by female ref?
Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
31–40 of 114 posts
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't call the act of attempting demographic balance in a field 'stubborn'. History often teaches us that differences between groups are contextual rather than intrinsic. When I say contextual I mean they are often for reasons that have to do with specific social forces at work during specific historical periods. For example, there was a time that software engineering was dominated by females. At the time, softw…
> a time that software engineering was dominated by female ref?
I don't know how to post links, hopefully this works.
http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmin...
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/10/06/345...
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#33We already have a very accurate system of privilege in 'parental wealth'. It has always puzzled me why people refuse to use this instead of relying of race/sex ect . wtf. why is this downvoted?
Because "wealth" isn't the only sort of privilege that exists in society.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#34We already have a very accurate system of privilege in 'parental wealth'. It has always puzzled me why people refuse to use this instead of relying of race/sex ect . wtf. why is this downvoted?
My theory is that affirmative action gives colleges an excuse to bump up rich, "underprivileged" minorities over poor, "privileged" races so they don't have to give as much financial aid
That's certainly a valid suspicion, given the mercenary nature of university management these days, but is it actually borne by facts?
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#35> She expected the class to be full of guys who loved video games and grew up obsessing over how they were made. There were plenty of those guys but, to her surprise, she found the class fascinating.
So many of these articles seem incredibly sexist to me -- they all boil down to "women are too ignorant to realize that computers are fun".
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm having trouble reading that Quartz article as arguing that men and women have intrinsically different interests, and I think you acknowledge that by saying that there are social differences. It doesn't seem like they're arguing that there's anything in Star Trek posters that deters people with certain hormones, but that socially, Star Trek posters convey an association with a closed male culture. Thing is, this i…
> It'd be one thing if we discovered that male brains were inherently better at tech thinking (it would be an extraordinary hypothesis that would need correspondingly extraordinary evidence, but it's certainly possible that evidence could be found). Given that males and females have vastly different reproductive strategies, the extraordinary claim is that male and female minds don't display the same sexual dimorphism…
Oh no, I totally believe that the minds exhibit dimorphism. The claim I think is extraordinary is that the dimorphism is correlated with tech thinking, which, for starters, isn't a well-defined term. Is it raw programming ability? (If so, there are lots of reasons to believe that women are more suited to it than men, which were common folklore in the middle of last century when programming was low-status.) Is it project management? Business sense? Insight into emerging industries? The ability to learn new complex systems? The ability to work with other people effectively?
Once you have that, what's the argument that male brains are better at that particular type of thinking? The fact that more men happen to be employed to do this thinking isn't an argument; at best it's initial evidence that would inspire you to create a hypothesis, but it's not the end of the study by any means.
The interpretation that seems most likely to me, but which is unfortunately horribly politically incorrect, is that men are more likely to be territorial assholes about high-status positions in society, and we'll preserve our exclusivity when we have it. This manifests as us being better at $field for any $field because we don't allow women to have a chance to succeed. (We might allow enough of a chance to succeed so we can avoid accusations of sexism, which would risk our exclusivity, but we don't want to go so far that we concede the exclusivity on our own.) At least this hypothesis has the advantage of the known fact that having an aggressive personality is correlated with gender.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#37So How did they get to 55%. Are they just refusing to admit more than a certain number of men? Or is the a more organic shift through staffing and support changes?
That was stated in the article: Organic shift through curriculum redesign and change in teaching methods. Staffing probably also played a part, although that wasn't mentioned in the article beyond Klawe.
Note that students at Harvey Mudd are not admitted to any particular major or program, they are admitted to the college in general and don't declare a major until Sophomore year. An increase from 10% to 55% is at least partially a result of more female students taking interest in the subject, not a result of admissions. Matriculation of female students to the college as a whole also rose over the past decade, but that went from ~35% to ~50%, so it accounts for less than half of the change in CS.
(Disclosure: Harvey Mudd alumn, class of 2008)
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#38Won't happen unless they actually invent a vaccine that gives autism and use it on girls.
This is pretty far from the most relevant counterargument to that statement, but autism and Asperger's are routinely misdiagnosed / underdiagnosed in girls because the diagnostic criteria are based on boys' behavior, because society expects boys' behavior and girls' behavior to be different and picks up on non-conforming boys' behavior more easily, etc. See, for instance: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/au…
Thank you for mentioning this! I've heard the hypothesis that some Autistic Spectrum Disorders are misdiagnosed as Borderline in women. I don't know how credible that hypothesis is, or how well-substantiated, but it seems reasonable to me.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#39I have two concerns with the ideology espoused in this article; the first is that a majority female program is lauded as "diverse", whereas a majority male program, even by a similarly small margin, is considered problematic. I don't buy the idea that any given subset of students has to either exactly match or disfavor men compared to the general population. My second concern is with the stubborn insistence that we m…
I wouldn't call the act of attempting demographic balance in a field 'stubborn'. History often teaches us that differences between groups are contextual rather than intrinsic. When I say contextual I mean they are often for reasons that have to do with specific social forces at work during specific historical periods. For example, there was a time that software engineering was dominated by females. At the time, softw…
> dominance
That's not the right word. Interest is the right word. The % of females in tech resembles the % of females majoring in CS
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#40I have two concerns with the ideology espoused in this article; the first is that a majority female program is lauded as "diverse", whereas a majority male program, even by a similarly small margin, is considered problematic. I don't buy the idea that any given subset of students has to either exactly match or disfavor men compared to the general population. My second concern is with the stubborn insistence that we m…
Some people argue that more diverse teams will produce better results but I have yet to see evidence that this happens in Computer Science related tasks. In addition I remember being taught that you ultimately want teams to "jel" much more than some marginal productivity gain you might get from diversity. Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? Notice that I mean this in the limited scope of programming I k…
Isn't one of the central truisms these days in software is that "monocultures are bad"?