EDIT: To clarify that the money is going directly to private individuals, as per Austen. Incredible, thanks for putting your money where your values are @jl. As for the numerous comments in this post around reverse sexism / reverse discrimination: 1. This is a private individual giving personal capital to other private individuals, supporting a personal cause. It is hard to both claim principles of free market and ra…
To be clear, nobody is giving money to Lambda School. Jessica is giving people money directly to help them be able to participate. Lambda School is also making the course work available for free. Lambda School is not being paid by anyone, and no money is changing hands, other than Jessica literally giving money away.
Women: Learn to Program This Summer
371–380 of 606 posts
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 effective…
The alternative - shaming women who do not go into tech - is unpalatable to most.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
This, I feel, is a disingenuous summary of the concerns with explicitly discriminatory policies voiced in the comments here. The issue is not that people don't want to make coding more accessible. The issue most serm to be taking is that many places are pursuing diversity by deliberately making it less accessible for undesireable demographics. See my company's policies for one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/it…
If you are in a privileged position, and then that privilege is reduced, it can feel like a barrier is going up. It's not. When you rebalance scales, the side that was too high has to go down a little.
What about this situation makes you think that white and Asian men are privileged as compared to women?
The assumption that women are underprivileged in tech often does not hold up to scrutiny. Many studies have found significant bias in favor of women. When Google studies it's wages recently it found proportionally more men were underpaid.
Again in case you missed it, my company does explicitly deny employment opportunities to white and Asian men where they would have been hired were they women: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464944
Barriers are going up. Perhaps at the moment this is limited to certain places like San Francisco and silicon valley. But to say barriers aren't going up for white and Asian men is counterfactual.
And besides, I'm Cuban myself so I ostensibly belong to an "underprivileged" group (though I would be among the first to tell you that this is a BS generalization. I am not by any means underprivileged).
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "tech is behind medicine's adoption curve with resepect to gender inclusion" This is a testable hypothesis and wrong. Women's participation in CS is dropping, so it absolutely is not the same curve, just a little behind.
> > "tech is behind medicine's adoption curve with resepect to gender inclusion" > This is a testable hypothesis and wrong. Women's participation in CS is dropping, so it absolutely is not the same curve, just a little behind. Women's inclusion dropped in medicine between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries, and came up after that, IIRC, so it could well be the same curve just 100 years or so behind.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_medicine#History seems to say quite the opposite.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#375Earlier 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.
And so, while we might hypothesize that a "natural/biologically driven" allocation be uneven (and I'm willing to grant), we have no idea by how much. Perhaps it's really 95/5, or who knows, perhaps it's 60/40.
The argument that where we're at now is where we should be (and thus why we shouldn't try to eliminate various obstacles to entry) is really just a form of status quo bias. It's the same argument that's been used over the years to justify why women couldn't go to college, be lawyers, etc... etc...
[1] https://capx.co/what-jordan-peterson-gets-wrong-about-the-no...
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, the tech companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The media has been heavily pushing the narrative that women are underrepresented at these tech companies - and they are compared to the general population. But I've seen plenty of stories, even from reputable sources like the NYT, criticizing tech companies for only hiring 20-25% women while failing to mention that this is exactly in line with…
> But I've seen plenty of stories, even from reputable sources like the NYT, criticizing tech companies for only hiring 20-25% women while failing to mention that this is exactly in line with the percentages of tech workers that are women. If the industry is systematically unfavorable to women, hiring at the same percentage as the industry as a whole (which is what matching the “percentage of tech workers that are wo…
It's not. The CS graduation ratio is just as bad.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#377Earlier 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…
Anecdotal, but me and my dad tried so, so hard to get my sister into computers back in the 80s and 90s. Even just to use them, let alone program them. She had no interest. Absolutely zero.
She also had no interest in Legos, or Dungeons & Dragons, or video games, even though I tried to get her into them just so I could have another person to do these things with.
Ironically, she's now a successful project manager in her employer's IT department, managing software development projects.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#378Some 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…
You want "the other side" to acknowledge the barriers existed in our industry, and yet do not want to acknowledge that reverse discrimination directly hurt people. Being rejected for the identity you are born with hurt on a very personal and primal way.
Then we have cases like my own perspective. I have seen this kind of gender initiative for about 30 years now here in Sweden. Gender segregation in this industry has in the 30 last year gotten worse. I know for example a woman who took a "women only programming course" in the 90s, and she is now the single person left still in the programming profession out of every single person that graduated (she got a job before she graduated but that might be beyond the point). Study after study report the same where if a person belong to the minority gender in the work place, the risk that they will switch work place to one where they are majority is significant every single year. If I recall right it actually increase for each year, in particular after they graduate. Regardless if Men or women are the minority in the study, the result is similar.
The only effective measure I have seen to prevent this pattern is mentorship programs. I have not ready any in-depth explanation why they tend to work, through I strongly suspect it addresses some of the core issues behind gender segregation. An observation I made is that you can offer mentorship to both majority and minority segments of a group and the minority will more likely join and participate, which still focus the effort on the minority but does not exclude if any individuals in the majority have a similar need for the service. Obviously not everyone of that identify as belonging to the majority is identical and individuals have different needs.
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
A scholarship for a CS program seems a much more worthy cause, as everyone with an internet connection has access to learn everything needed to begin a career in tech.
It's funny how the same people who argue that there are real differences between men and women that are biological in origin which produce all of the differences in representation in tech can't imagine that there might be real, at least on-average, differences between men and women (whether of biological or socialization-rooted origin) that affect what learning methods and contexts they are most successful with and i…
Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer
#380I 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 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…
No it can't unless you show that there are an equal number of qualified candidates, which there aren't in tech. CS grad rates for women are much lower.