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Women: Learn to Program This Summer

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Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#301

Post by UncleMeat »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #241
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…

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. M…

LEGO Mindstorms is the example that comes to mind most immediately to me. In addition to the toy there was an entire league structure that fed into a high school level robotics competition. Starting from a toy that was marketed clearly at boys. How many kids were first exposed to programming through Mindstorms? What percentage of those kids do you think were boys?

I'd truly encourage you to go hang out with some real activists working on this stuff. We do care about teachers being majority female (though things get much more male as you get to higher education as well as administration roles like principals).

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#302

Post by peterwwillis »

So, this brings up some questions in my mind:

1) Who is it being offered to? Clearly, women in college. The majority of people in college are privileged (in this country, anyway) so you're offering free money to potentially privileged people. Is it possible to prioritize women who need the money over ones that could pay for it?

2) If I offered $9,000 in training for welding to someone in college, they might take that too. It's well known that the things people study in college and careers they prepare for often don't always result in what they do for the rest of their working life. Is it possible to prioritize individuals who demonstrate a consistent/continued interest in being in the industry, rather than random students looking for a free ride?

3) Where is this being marketed? To insiders who already are in a position to want to be in the industry and find a place there? Or underprivileged and minority communities that might need more of a hand to find out about such opportunities before they can work towards them?

Basically, I think it's a nice idea, but I think it can be tuned to optimize doing the most good with some minor tweaks.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#303

Post by ajross »

camelNotation wrote: post #271
ajross wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There is no problem to solve.

Which is exactly what people said about unrepresented demographics in career XXX, for literally every XXX of the past few centuries in which the representation has since normalized. The example above was medicine, but we can play it with any high-status career you want: law, government, corporate middle management, academics, finance... Back up a hundred years and there were effectively no women (or african americans, pick your demographic) in those careers. Now they're much closer to parity.

And in all those cases, small-c conservatives interested in preserving the status quo trotted out all sorts of arguments just like this. And they were wrong every time.

So tell me again how your cool bit of jargon makes this all go away like magic?

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#304

Post by crumpets »

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…

>This person also had a similarly aged daughter and he was doing none of this for her.

Cool, but that has nothing to do with industry bias. This same phenomenon is shown by enrollment rates at university in CS.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#305

Post by DoreenMichele »

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.

Jessica Livingston, an investor who happens to be female, isn't saying "There should be more women in tech." She's saying "If women want to found tech companies, they need to learn to code. Not coding is a barrier to successfully founding a tech company that trips up lots of women interested in founding a company of this sort." and putting her money where her mouth is and offering women an opportunity to learn to code.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#306

Post by UncleMeat »

tomp wrote: post #226
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…

> 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. Does this actually work though? My whole life, I've been weakly encouraged, mainly by my parents, to study economics and/or law, and discouraged (weakly by my parents, and strongly by society and bullies) from being a geek / programmer / mathematician... But in the end, I picked the latte…

At an individual level it probably fails more often than it succeeds. But a small effect across a broad population can lead to real distribution differences.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#307

Post by criddell »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #256
criddell wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should you only help some people if you are willing to help all people? It's a partial solution to a small part of a big problem.

So "only whites may apply for this scholarship" is fine then? Clearly not IMO, there needs to be a morally defensible reason for restricting the field by physical characteristics; sex and skin colour/race are not good reasons in general.

You don't think women are underrepresented in the software sector?

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#308

Post by ajross »

manfredo wrote: post #296
ajross wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that "tech" and not just "time"? Tech careers have only been spoken of as such for about a quarter century. Where were scandanavian female doctors as far as representation in the 1970s? I mean, you're still sort of sidestepping the issue, but you brought up the analogy: what is it about tech that is fundamentally more gender-selective than medicine?

I think you're missing the core point. It's not that industries are selective of gender. It's that people are selective of the industry they work in, and on average women select things other than tech. The agency is on the part of people. So the less restrictions there are on gender roles, the more agency people have to select fields based on their own preferences.

No no, I get your point. I'm saying there's a much more obvious hypothesis for why "people are selective of the industry they work in", and you need to refute that instead of circularly insisting on its truth as the basis for your argument.

Basically, you're saying "chicks don't like tech", and I'm saying "prove it". And you won't. And then you try to tell me that I'm missing the point because I failed to note that chicks don't like tech.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#309

Post by [deleted] »

ajross wrote: post #308
manfredo wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the core point. It's not that industries are selective of gender. It's that people are selective of the industry they work in, and on average women select things other than tech. The agency is on the part of people. So the less restrictions there are on gender roles, the more agency people have to select fields based on their own preferences.

No no, I get your point. I'm saying there's a much more obvious hypothesis for why "people are selective of the industry they work in", and you need to refute that instead of circularly insisting on its truth as the basis for your argument. Basically, you're saying "chicks don't like tech", and I'm saying "prove it". And you won't. And then you try to tell me that I'm missing the point because I failed to note that c…

[deleted]

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#310

Post by identity-haver »

commandlinefan wrote: post #29
rosterface wrote: post #3

I 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'm a white man, and sometimes I fear that the best thing I ever did for my son was give him Hispanic heritage through his mother.

My plan would be to send my kids to dual language programs. If you're a somewhat native Spanish speaker, you can claim to be Hispanic with a clear conscience. "Hispanic" is, legally speaking (for now), an "ethnicity", not a race, which means it is independent of blood (but apparently race is a "socio-political construct" according to the US Census). People are already doing this, plus the people with one Mexican grandparent or something.

This farcical system can't go on forever as is. Either racial preferences in hiring will be banned under the 14th amendment, or the US will adopt a Brazil-style racial preference system, where they will actually test your blood and have technicians measure the tone of your skin and the shape of your face in order to fit you into a category.

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