Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues • Hacker News Board

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#41

Post by _mhr_ » Wed, Jan 04, 2017, 7:33 PM UTC

SerLava wrote: post #22

lemmsjid wrote: post #18

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…

>For example, there was a time that software engineering was dominated by females. At the time, software development was considered a feminine task. But I think you are talking about a menial job that doesn't exist anymore. That skew comes from basically punch card data entry. I don't think software design was ever female dominated. Is that incorrect?

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Never female dominated (at least, in terms of degrees), but there was much less of a gap.

I couldn't find occupational statistics, only academic. I did find a lot of anecdotes about software being a stereotypically female activity, but I couldn't find actual data.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#42

Post by noobermin » Wed, Jan 04, 2017, 7:36 PM UTC

I recently talked to a friend (who, yes is female) who took a required programming course. She is an English major, but she found python fun and she's planning to take another course on it next year.

While everyone here is discussing SJ vs not SJ[0], I think this article is another data point in my belief that a liberal arts education, or one that requires a number of pre-requisites across fields, is so beneficial. Being well rounded and schools requiring general ed's across the spectrum helps people discover interest in things they never thought they would be interested in.

I am on my way to a Physics Ph.D., but next to my undergraduate QM courses, I am most thankful for my undergraduate's German classes, philosophy, and a history course about the US Presidents (this one required us to read primary sources, letters, unedited tape transcripts, tedious for someone who had other commitments like studying for the Physics GRE, but it was super enlightening). At the time, I railed against general ed requirements and I considered them as a waste of my time, but they do well to expose you to more of the world and round you out as an educated person.

[0]"not SJ" is the only term I could come up with.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#43

Post by maxxxxx » Wed, Jan 04, 2017, 7:38 PM UTC

RoboticFoot wrote: post #5

I 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 arbitrary constructed criteria"

I think that's the problem. It seems most of these criteria go along gender, race or sexual preferences lines. Nobody talks about shy people, disabled people, people with the wrong accent, fat people, older people, ugly people and so on. These groups get discriminated a lot against but nobody seems to care.

My company is rated as one of the most diverse companies in the but the diversity ends at race and gender.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#44

Post by dominotw » Wed, Jan 04, 2017, 7:41 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #33

dominotw wrote: post #25

We 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.

it is the primary one but it doesn't seem to be taken into consideration at all. why is that? Certainly a better indicator of privilege than sex.

eg: 'Only 3.8 percent of American families make more than $200,000 per year. But at Harvard University, 45.6 percent of incoming freshman come from families making $200,000 or more. A mere 4 percent of Harvard students come from a family in the bottom quintile of US incomes, and only 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles'[1].

1. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-...

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#45

Post by ng12 » Wed, Jan 04, 2017, 7:42 PM UTC

lmkg wrote: post #37

karmicthreat wrote: post #17

So 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 lea…

Can you elaborate on the change in teaching methods? I don't understand how CS101 could be gendered in a way that Math or Physics isn't.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#46

Post by jasonwatkinspdx » Wed, Jan 04, 2017, 7:42 PM UTC

spaceflunky wrote: post #13

RoboticFoot wrote: post #5

I 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 think that the term "diverse" has many definitions. For example, if a gender split at a tech company was 50/50, but everyone was white, would we still consider that company diverse? What is the right definition of "diversity" and which groups (gender vs race vs socio-economic vs ...) should we spend our time working on? You can see how identity politics become problematic very quickly.

You're overcomplicating things. In the ideal if we erased biases in education and staffing, we'd expect the various distributions we measure across tech companies to match a random sampling of the population at large. When we see large deviations from the population at large, it's a clear signal that something is going on.

This isn't that obscure, and we certainly don't need to engage in a false, hand wringing, semantic debate derailment along the lines of "but what IS diversity REALLY anyway?" Please. You know exactly what we're talking about here.

Your post is an exercise in identity politics as well. Welcome to same bowl the rest of us are in.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#47

Post by FT_intern » Wed, Jan 04, 2017, 7:42 PM UTC

LunaSea wrote: post #19

geofft wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the argument you're making is that, if society is treating one sex differently on the basis of sex, ending that different treatment also counts as treating them differently on the basis of sex, and leaving that different treatment in place does not. For instance, if men can vote and women can't, giving every woman a vote and not giving every man a second vote would be a sexist change. If so, yes, I am in fa…

No. You failed to prove that society is indeed making it more difficult for women to join computer science education and jobs.

That's my main gripe. Treating people differently based on gender is simply wrong. The default should always be to treat people the same.

If you are going to commit sexism with the purpose of "reversing the patriarchy", you first have to prove and quantify the effects of the "patriarchy". Only then can you justify using sexism. Otherwise, you are committing a definite wrong, sexism, to reverse the possibility of sexism, which is something that could possibly (but hasn't been proven) to be wrong.

I have the same viewpoint about affirmative action in general. The default, preferred state is an absence of racial/gender based discrimiation, aka affirmative action, unless an imbalance is properly proven. Affirmative action is something that not only needs to be justified once but also continually and repeatedly justified throughout time. Simply disproving arguments for affirmative action should be enough to stop it.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#48

Post by mjfl » Wed, Jan 04, 2017, 7:45 PM UTC

While they have the best intentions, these kinds of initiatives can backfire badly. 2 years ago, I was partnered on a project with a woman who did not how to code a single line of C++ in a senior-level computer science course. Whenever I would arrange for us to work together in lab, she would call in sick. This happened about 3 or 4 times. I told this to my professor, who was a HUGE social justice guy, and after investigating our version-controlled project he found that I had written 98% of the lines. I got an A on the project, she got a B, so she still passed, but the whole time I'm wondering: is this really helping her? Is it really going to help her in her long term career to push her through the classes without learning anything to push a statistic that the college can later brag about. Of the couple girls I know who graduated in my class, one works at Google, but none of the rest of them are working in a remotely computer science job. I think the proportion corresponds to the ratio of girls who would naturally take computer science (the one that works at google now and perhaps a few who just preferred other things) vs. the people that were pushed through (the rest).

This also causes problems for the whole school as well: I learned through a friend that a google recruiter was talking about how students from my school often have great resumes and then fall apart during technical interview questions. So I think it is plausible that these kinds of initiatives hurt EVERYONE from the school in question.

This is all anecdotes, but I'm convinced this is a real problem, causing REAL harm, all for the college to look better in social justice statistics. This is why I'm writing about it instead of just shrugging my shoulders.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#49

Post by awfgylbcxhrey » Wed, Jan 04, 2017, 7:45 PM UTC

PrimalDual wrote: post #10

RoboticFoot wrote: post #5

I 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…

Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier?

In my opinion, no. It's been my experience that a large portion of programmers are the type to easily lose track of the real goal (delivering a product that generates business value) in favor of relatively unimportant details.

To make this short and blunt: I've watched a pair of mega-nerds geek out for a week, over-engineering and prematurely optimizing an unimportant feature. I've also watched an adult have an absolute emotional meltdown over curly brace placement.

In my opinion, diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#50

Post by nommm-nommm » Wed, Jan 04, 2017, 7:46 PM UTC

RoboticFoot wrote: post #5

I 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…

>No one suggests that we should go and macho-fy teaching or nursing or literature so we can get more men in those majors.

Yes they do.

https://www.jacksonvilleu.com/resources/career/men-in-nursin...

>The American Assembly for Men in Nursing (AAMN) is encouraging men to enroll in nursing school, with a goal of increasing male enrollment in nursing programs to 20% by 2020.

>Recruiters for schools and hospitals are placing targeted ads in publications and on websites that see more male users.

>The Oregon Center for Nursing undertook a recruitment campaign in 2002 titled, “Are You Man Enough to Be a Nurse?” which has recently been the focus of new attention.