Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Girls Who Code

avc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 397 posts

Re: Girls Who Code

#51

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

city41 wrote: post #20
tptacek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tons of male nurses. 'iamelgringo, a former top contributor here, is an ER nurse. Back of the envelope: There are ~24,000,000 people aged 18-24 in the US. Assume half are female: there are ~12,000,000 "girls who might code" in the US. Of these, 12.6% are African American. There are ~1,440,00 "black girls who might code" in the US. There are ~400,000 people who live in Tulsa. There have probably been several…

9.6% of all RNs are male [0] Why is there not a male nurse initiative? Or male elementary teacher initiative[1]? I have to admit, I am strongly against things like "Girls who code". If there truly are issues in our culture that prevent girls from looking into coding, then absolutely let's get rid of those as best we can. But a girl can look into and explore coding just as easily as a boy can. There's really nothing s…

Maybe you're not old enough, but I am and I remember a huge stigma against men who wanted to become nurses because it was a job "for women" and what kind of man would want to do that kind of thing.

Re: Girls Who Code

#52

Post by Anechoic »

city41 wrote: post #20
tptacek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tons of male nurses. 'iamelgringo, a former top contributor here, is an ER nurse. Back of the envelope: There are ~24,000,000 people aged 18-24 in the US. Assume half are female: there are ~12,000,000 "girls who might code" in the US. Of these, 12.6% are African American. There are ~1,440,00 "black girls who might code" in the US. There are ~400,000 people who live in Tulsa. There have probably been several…

9.6% of all RNs are male [0] Why is there not a male nurse initiative? Or male elementary teacher initiative[1]? I have to admit, I am strongly against things like "Girls who code". If there truly are issues in our culture that prevent girls from looking into coding, then absolutely let's get rid of those as best we can. But a girl can look into and explore coding just as easily as a boy can. There's really nothing s…

Why is there not a male nurse initiative? Or male elementary teacher initiative[1]?

There are! It's just not discussed on HN because this isn't a site focused on nursing and teaching, but copying from a prior post of mine, 45 seconds of Googling brought up http://www.malenursemagazine.com http://www.menteach.org/ and http://www.minoritynurse.com/article/recruiting-men-nursing-....

Re: Girls Who Code

#53

Post by pnathan »

In tech, saying anything about gender is an opportunity to be lambasted vigorously. But I think I can contribute something.

Having read what I could over the years on the academic side of "women in tech" (i.e., academic research studying the matter, rather than opinion pieces), the consensus seems to be that the early teens are the time where the decision is taken to move away (or not) from STEM fields. That is part of why the Girls Who Code initiative & others like it is such a big deal.

There are a lot of different factors and stereotypes playing into the decision to exit STEM tracks, but among them are - "unpleasant male geeks", "programmers work alone", "girls don't need to know math", "boys figure things out" and so forth. (Clearly these are a subset of examples, and also clearly not all of these are 100% influential for any particular person, place, time). So the stereotypical 13 y/o girl and her interest in STEM is actually the target of a lot of research and policy efforts.

There's also a self-reinforcing aspect to this: heavily gender-coded places aren't typically presenting a welcome to people of the other gender. I read a academic paper on this in the last several years, but can't recall the experiment in detail or the citation. The implication is that a workspace festooned with seriously masculine widgets often tells many women that, "hey, man cave here. not so welcome".

For the interested person, the academic experiments are usually well done and their results, while not always surprising, clearly quantify certain sexist aspects in the tech world.

Re: Girls Who Code

#54

Post by gfodor »

tptacek wrote: post #48
gfodor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is a fair assessment. The (admittedly likely butchered at this point) quote: > If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. In the very next sentence pg states that…

Once again: misogyny is a specific thing. It connotes an overt bias against women. That bias, while definitely present in our industry (and for some reason especially well-represented on HN) is rare. I would be shocked to find out that Paul Graham was a misogynist: it would not fit the rest of the picture that I have of him from what he writes. But the absence of bias against women is inadequate innoculation against…

It sounded to me like you took pg's quote to mean he felt was blind to the factor opportunity takes towards gaining affinity for a subject. If this were true (and his next sentence seems to invalidate this) it would mean he felt that women were less capable, inherently, of appreciating computers and programming. At the risk of splitting hairs, this would be a misogynistic viewpoint. This is the narrative these clowns want people to believe anyway, that someone like pg is a 1-dimensional cartoon villain who thinks "girls' brains can't code, what am I supposed to do about it?!"

Re: Girls Who Code

#55

Post by tptacek »

gfodor wrote: post #47
tptacek wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This speaks to how deranged mainstream software hiring practices are. To wit: take a bunch of practitioners more or less at random and arrange to have them serially interview candidates. Apply virtually no structure to the interviews themselves; most of those practitioners will be free to generate their own questions, and if any guidance is given at all, it will usually take the form of "assess the candidate's abilit…

Is it the case that you do not screen candidates based upon any other criteria than skills-based assessment in other fields? That assumes people are robots. I don't care what field you are talking about, people are always going to screen for "culture fit", since it can be defined to mean anything you want. It's "can I work with this person", "does this person seem trustworthy and honest", etc. The only difference is…

You can complete the sentence "people are always going to ________", especially as regards software hiring, with all sorts of crazy shit. Hiring is broadly and deeply fucked up. Very few organizations do it especially well. The median companies does it abysmally. But we don't notice, because we develop other systems to compensate for how bad we are at getting the right people in the door.

That's my point, why I bring up how bad hiring is. "Widespread best practice" in hiring does not imply effectiveness. Most companies are terrible at hiring. They just get away with it because other aspects of those companies are good enough to compensate.

Re: Girls Who Code

#57

Post by city41 »

EliRivers wrote: post #50
city41 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9.6% of all RNs are male [0] Why is there not a male nurse initiative? Or male elementary teacher initiative[1]? I have to admit, I am strongly against things like "Girls who code". If there truly are issues in our culture that prevent girls from looking into coding, then absolutely let's get rid of those as best we can. But a girl can look into and explore coding just as easily as a boy can. There's really nothing s…

Why is there not a male nurse initiative? Did you actually look? http://www.gatewayct.edu/Programs-Courses/Divisions-Departme... http://www.minoritynurse.com/article/man-enough-20-x-20-choo... http://aamn.org/choosenursing.shtml Likewise the male teachers of younger children.

You're correct. I did not look. And it does make sense that they would exist.

Yeah, maybe my original comment was wrong. Maybe my view on this is wrong. I will admit seeing the male nurse initiatives does give me a different perspective on this.

Re: Girls Who Code

#58

Post by [deleted] »

gfodor wrote: post #26
city41 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9.6% of all RNs are male [0] Why is there not a male nurse initiative? Or male elementary teacher initiative[1]? I have to admit, I am strongly against things like "Girls who code". If there truly are issues in our culture that prevent girls from looking into coding, then absolutely let's get rid of those as best we can. But a girl can look into and explore coding just as easily as a boy can. There's really nothing s…

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. The question you ask is a good one, though you are jumping to some conclusions. I think it may very well be that there should be a "male nurse initiative", or at least that the lack of one doesn't somehow dictate the ethics and obligations of our field.

[deleted]

Re: Girls Who Code

#59

Post by tptacek »

gfodor wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again: misogyny is a specific thing. It connotes an overt bias against women. That bias, while definitely present in our industry (and for some reason especially well-represented on HN) is rare. I would be shocked to find out that Paul Graham was a misogynist: it would not fit the rest of the picture that I have of him from what he writes. But the absence of bias against women is inadequate innoculation against…

It sounded to me like you took pg's quote to mean he felt was blind to the factor opportunity takes towards gaining affinity for a subject. If this were true (and his next sentence seems to invalidate this) it would mean he felt that women were less capable, inherently, of appreciating computers and programming. At the risk of splitting hairs, this would be a misogynistic viewpoint. This is the narrative these clowns…

It's easier at this point to just say what I do and don't actually think. I don't think Paul Graham believes women are intrinsically less capable than men. I do think he has a blind spot regarding privilege and specifically the way his reputational energy reinforces privilege, and another related blind spot about how that fortified privilege impedes the progress of women in our field.

Another way to put it would be, if Paul Graham acted personally as the hiring manager for every YC company, I wouldn't be too concerned. But he's not: his thoughts about capability and aptitude are filtered through the brains of hundreds of (mostly young, male) nerds.

Re: Girls Who Code

#60

Post by reitzensteinm »

gfodor wrote: post #17

I have to thank Valleywag for doing me the favor of helping me prune people who lack reading comprehension from twitter. I'm still kind of amazed how so many people un-ironically cited valleywag in their tweets. It's pretty obvious what pg was saying in this particular "smoking gun" quote: that figuring out a way to get more girls interested in programming at 13 is an incredibly important and hard problem. The willin…

I agree, and it strikes me as ironic the massive tidal wave of hate that arises whenever anyone violates a What You Can't Say in our industry. I understand the reasons for it in general, and sometimes it's even deserved (eg confirmed cases of sexual harassment at conferences).

But it seems to me to be directly counter productive to the stated goals. We want to be more accepting and open as an industry? How about having some fucking maturity!? How about calmly discussing ideas with people that mean well? Even if they're wrong?

Even Hacker News, once the bastion of calm, rational discussion, has devolved into a bar room brawl whenever gender issues are talked about. Hundreds of posts to a topic, many really fucking mean and almost all black and white strawman bullshit, within an hour before it's manually killed off by a moderator.

There are plenty of smart, competent women (and men) in college who have the pick of their field. My sister was one. They could easily learn to code (or already do) and come here. But if we act like children at a drop of a hat, why on earth would they want to?

Post reply on HN