Women: Learn to Program This Summer • Hacker News Board

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#421

Post by UncleMeat » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 11:02 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #257

ajiang wrote: post #58

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…

As to #2, is it bias when the candidate pool is self-selecting? I mean, generally we're talking about an industry where a self-starter can learn, get their foot in the door and build a career. Every actual study I've seen actually indicates bias in favor of women. The fact that the candidate pool is so unbalanced to me seems to indicate an issue in education or no issue at all (self-selecting), not corporate hiring.

But not everybody is a self starter. We also have a ton of people who were nudged in this direction and men get those nudges far more often. I certainly didn't learn software totally independent of other structures. Both my parents were software engineers. I had toys (marketed at boys) that encouraged creativity with computers. I had teachers who encouraged me to work in software. Etc etc.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#422

Post by wsy » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

sqrt17 wrote: post #405

wsy wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> "They are not interested in computers" is a huge cliché. So which non-cliché reasons do you see? Motivation goes beyond "being interested" in something. If you ask why there aren't more men studying art history it would be rather silly to say that men are less interested in art history. Then again, if you said that men don't pursue art history because they (most often) wouldn't be able to sustain a family on an art…

It's also only anecdotically, but I think your art history example doesn't fly: https://art.stanford.edu/people/faculty

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#423

Post by manfredo » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 11:05 PM UTC

wsy wrote: post #411

manfredo wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do they explicitly deny women jobs for a position where they would have hired a man? As in do men get two chances to pass an interview when women get one? Do they have blanket policies to not hire women of certain backgrounds where they do hire men of those backgrounds?

I don't know that. But even what I described disadvantages female teachers, and rightfully so.

Well in my company we are using those policies. And besides just because it's happening to women in other industries does not make it any less immoral.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#424

Post by ajross » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 11:07 PM UTC

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #372

ajross wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gender equality paradox is the observation that offering men and women more freedom increases the degree to which they self-select. In other words, offering people more freedom of choice increases the under-representation. The alternative - shaming women who do not go into tech - is unpalatable to most.

The gender equality paradox is like a religion to you people. It's being vastly misapplied here, and the authors of that study (it was one study) would be horrified to see this rhetoric.

Go back and look at the scatter plot. It's a weak, but real correlation. The random deltas between nations are well above the significance of the gender signal. There's good science to be argued about there.

But it's being used here to justify an outrageous outlier. Women aren't just "less interested" in sofware at the scale we see in that study, they're outnumbered by literally a whole order of magnitude. Nothing from that study argues for this kind of effect, nothing at all.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#425

Post by UncleMeat » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

Grustaf wrote: post #351

krastanov wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not important to understand where these choices come from? Not because we have to enforce any particular distribution of genders, rather because it is useful to understand any differences that exist and whether they are truly personal choices.

Surely the reason is obvious, as it pervades all of society. Women are, generally speaking, more interested in people than men are, and men are more interested in things. Yes there is a big overlap, and yes there are plenty of exceptions, but the trend is very clear. And yes it is present from birth, so it can’t be just society.

> Surely the reason is obvious

Most human behavior is not obvious on close inspection. And when what seems "obvious" happens to align with traditional expectations of historically oppressed groups we should be very very skeptical of our personal gut feelings.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#426

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 11:12 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #20

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 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…

[deleted]

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#427

Post by 40acres » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 11:14 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #210

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…

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…

This is bad policy, but in my experience also an outlier. I'm actually quite surprised that a company would publish this policy, as opposed to simply executing it under the rug. I have to ask -- how large is your company? Is it public?

Secondly, I'd also disagree that about the general attitudes of folks pushing diversity initiatives. No one is trying to eliminate white and Asian men from the workforce. This is more about bringing people in, not excluding populations.

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#428

Post by Scea91 » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 11:15 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #242

wolco wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can accept either point but not both. It is illegal to discriminate based on sex. By not discriminating based on sex to fix a ratio/percent you could be found discriminating

Statistically speaking, an equal opportunity workforce should be comprised of some demographic makeup. If a company deviates dramatically from that target makeup, the implication is that hiring practices are unfair. Addressing the unfairness will cause the issue to naturally correct itself. This is a sound strategy that's commonly applied to other areas of engineering. If a company produces bearings and their QA depa…

What is the desired demographic makeup? Is it 50:50? Should it be across all professions?

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#429

Post by skookumchuck » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 11:16 PM UTC

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…

Barriers to programming are very, very low:

1. no degree is required, not even a high school diploma

2. a Windows laptop can be had for $100 at a pawn shop

3. an incredible amount of programming tutorials exist for free on the internet, including a complete CS degree course from MIT

4. a business license can be had by just filing a bit of paperwork with the state

5. operating a business on the internet means nobody needs to know what sex/religion/age/whatever you are

6. programming tools and SDKs are available for free

7. you can work from home

How much more can one ask for?

Re: Women: Learn to Program This Summer

#430

Post by UncleMeat » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 11:16 PM UTC

crumpets wrote: post #304

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…

>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.

All biases flow together. You are right that tech companies cannot stop this man from doing this. We must instead holistically approach these topics. But tech does play a role (via advertising and other media) in planting an image of what tech is like in people's minds, which can make them more or less likely to behave in this way.

The most important point here is that this stuff is everywhere and deep. When people say they've never seen any bias I encourage them to ask all their male peers if they used toys as children as an entry into tech. Then I ask if those toys were marketed at boys. Repeat for female peers. You find a lot of influence in this manner.