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Women: Learn to Program This Summer

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Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#381

Post by wsy »

Grustaf wrote: post #348
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…

Most people get interested in computers early on in life, when there is nothing at all stopping them. You can’t blame society that many more 12 year old boys than 12 year old girls are obsessed with computers. It is a fact that even at birth, girls are more interested in people where boys are more interested in things. This is even true for newborn chimpanzees. You can’t really blame society for this. Surely this is…

Society still has an immense effect on what children and teenagers prefer to do, via instilling role models. There is an amazing small experiment with primary school children. First, no girl in the class even has the idea she could become a pilot, because this is seen as a boy's/men's profession. Then a female pilots and a female car mechanic visit the kids, and explain what they are doing. Afterwards, half of the girls want to become pilot. Excerpts from this feature are available here (only in German): https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/no-more-boys-and-girls/beru...

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#382

Post by belorn »

CptFribble wrote: post #340
manfredo wrote: post #210

Earlier 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.

The word privilege do not function on individuals. A barrier is a barrier if it prevent a individual from fulfilling their potential.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#383

Post by leereeves »

CptFribble wrote: post #340
manfredo wrote: post #210

Earlier 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.

Lumping all white men together as if they are equally privileged is dishonest.

A poor white boy from Appalachia doesn't benefit from whatever "privilege" young white men in the Bay Area might tend to enjoy as a result of their parents' success.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#384

Post by chocolatebunny »

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…

What exactly are the barriers to programming for women?

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#385

Post by rhegart »

CptFribble wrote: post #340
manfredo wrote: post #210

Earlier 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.

Extremely naive and condescending take. You and people who think this way are on an elementary school mindset of “justice” and fighting against the man combined with a misplaced ego power trip.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#386

Post by kyle-rb »

dragonwriter wrote: post #290
manfredo wrote: post #281

Earlier 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…

I don't think the person you're replying to is criticizing the industry though. From what I can tell, they're saying it's not the industry's fault that it lacks women.

That's how I see it anyway: mainly based on the fact that women make up only around 20% of CS majors, I don't think the issue lies in the hiring practices of most tech companies.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#387

Post by manfredo »

spamizbad wrote: post #369
manfredo wrote: post #210

Earlier 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…

Is there any evidence of a "general attitude" that white and asian men are bad in technology? Because if they are, they must be incredible at what they do as they keep getting hired in droves. I think the view is they're overrepresented, but the "bad" part of that is the overrepresentation, not the race or gender. For example the American Association of Educators is trying to encourage more men to become elementary s…

Sure, but are they explicitly discriminating against women in hiring teachers in order to increase the percentage of male teachers? Because more and more that's what's going on in tech companies (with the genders reversed).

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#388

Post by wsy »

sqrt17 wrote: post #314
zzzeek wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Anyone who argues there should be "More women in medical school" needs to go visit a secretarial school. Completely filled with super smart women interested in typing and being secretaries." "If secretarial school women found being doctors as interesting as they did being Secretaries, we wouldn't have any shortage of women being doctors." same comment in 1950 when only 6% of doctors in the US were women (surprisingl…

The difference being, being a doctor is (in many parts of the world) both more challenging/competitive and better paid than programming. You explain with discrimination (which was real in the 50s according to most evidence we have) what is in parent's case better explained as a difference in motivation (making a five-figure salary by being responsible for humans is more attractive to the average US woman than being r…

> Let's start to tease them apart without merely stopping at the clichés.

Yes, please do so. "They are not interested in computers" is a huge cliché. So which non-cliché reasons do you see?

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#389

Post by dragonwriter »

kyle-rb wrote: post #386
dragonwriter wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't think the person you're replying to is criticizing the industry though. From what I can tell, they're saying it's not the industry's fault that it lacks women. That's how I see it anyway: mainly based on the fact that women make up only around 20% of CS majors, I don't think the issue lies in the hiring practices of most tech companies.

> I don't think the person you're replying to is criticizing the industry though.

No, but the people they are criticizing for criticizing firms hiring at industrt-average proprotions are also criticizing the industry, which is the issue.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#390

Post by toadwaffen »

elliekelly wrote: post #249
CydeWeys wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Then the whole bus clapped....
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