Live data from Hacker News

Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

latimes.com

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#51
post #27

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?

The acceptance rate for males is 9%. For females it is 21%.

This will likely be true in the short term. But experience with other professions shows that the phenomenon will likely be transient. For example, despite the fact that law school is gated by an entrance exam where men outperform women by about the same margin as they do on the SAT Math,[1] law schools have even gender ratios with similar admissions chances for each gender. That wasn't necessarily true back when law schools (and med schools) took affirmative measures to equalize gender ratios, but the very process of equalization removed barriers keeping women from considering the field.

Fundamentally, most sensible people do not want to create additional hassles in their lives by choosing to become a minority. If life in Bangladesh had been as great as life in the U.S.A., my parents certainly wouldn't have moved to a place where they looked different from everyone around them. When women consider going into male-dominated fields, that's essentially what they're signing up for. That dissuades a lot of candidates who would otherwise be promising.[2]

[1] While men and women perform similarly on average on both tests, there are significantly more men who score in the top 1% on each test (for whatever reason). In the numbers-driven world of law school or med school admissions, that factor is outweighed by the fact that women tend to have better GPAs and as a result have similar admissions composite scores.

[2] The same is of course true for men considering women-dominated fields. There are many men who would be phenomenal teachers, nurses, child-care workers, which are solid jobs with good pay, who very reasonably do not want to put up with the hassles and skepticism that would come with being a man in a women-dominated field.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#52
post #48

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 inve…

>This is all anecdotes

NHS did a study on female doctors who drop out of workplace at way higher rate than men and all the social/economic implication of it given the huge cost invested into medical education.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#53
post #48

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 inve…

same experience here. Now 10 years later. Not a single person (man or woman) who was not a cs geek before uni started is into hands-on development

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, seman…

My query is more along the lines of how to invest resources to correct large deviations from the population at large and which deviations are more important than others.

For example, HMC is attempting to address diversity, but only along gender lines. There is no attempt to address racial diversity in any means.

Further in very progressive companies like Google and Facebook, Hispanic and Blacks in leadership positions are less than 1%, compared to a US population of 17% and 12% nationwide (respectively).

In these companies, 24% of leadership roles are held by women. That means that with regards to women, they are hitting 48% of their target (if the target is to get a 50/50 gender split). Whereas, with regards to race, they are hitting 5% of their target with Hispanics and 8% with blacks (if the goal is to get close to the population sample at large). So why is that that most "diversity" program only focus on gender? I know that the two aren't mutual exclusive, but it's no secret that far more resources are spent on gender diversity than anything else.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#55

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?

Many colored women say mainstream feminism is primarily for white wealthly women, so it would be why the biggest issue of wealth inequality is dismissed in favor of gender.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#57
post #6
post #4

Won't happen unless they actually invent a vaccine that gives autism and use it on girls.

This is pretty far from the most relevant counterargument to that statement, but autism and Asperger's are routinely misdiagnosed / underdiagnosed in girls because the diagnostic criteria are based on boys' behavior, because society expects boys' behavior and girls' behavior to be different and picks up on non-conforming boys' behavior more easily, etc. See, for instance: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/au…

That article suggests autism in girls is not just different but less severe and more like normal boys development. There seems like something bigger here hidden in the data.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#58

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?

My theory is that affirmative action gives colleges an excuse to bump up rich, "underprivileged" minorities over poor, "privileged" races so they don't have to give as much financial aid

Absolutely, its not just financial aid but also how much donations you can pull from alumni and their families.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#59
post #53
post #48

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 inve…

same experience here. Now 10 years later. Not a single person (man or woman) who was not a cs geek before uni started is into hands-on development

This doesn't match my experience at all. Are you considering people who moved into lead or management positions from more hands-on engineering positions as not being "into hands-on development"?

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Gender and race are orthogonal to shortsightedness and nerdiness.

>diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check.

The term diversity by itself has no meaning. One needs to specify how groups of people are split up whenever using the word "diversity". Are we splitting the groups up by race, gender, economic class, technology experiences, etc.?

There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender.

Post reply on HN