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Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

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Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#71

Post by randyrand »

_mhr_ wrote: post #23
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…

They're not pleased with a majority female program. They're pleased with a half-male / half-female program. They don't want it to be lopsided in either direction because they believe programming as a skill is orthogonal to sex. I think making computer science assignments and quizzes fun and less intimidating is a very different idea from the extreme of macho nursing. Your article shows that teachers were making girls…

> programming as a skill is orthogonal to sex

I can believe that. But I would never argue it's orthogonal to interest. I would be fighting a losing battle if I argued men and women have exactly the same interests. IMO a 50/50 split is not going to happen naturally, and it won't be self sustaining. As we've already seen, the way to get closer to 50/50 is to peer pressure women into it. Whoopdee doo. Progress!

The biggest bias women in tech face IMO is impostor syndrome.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#72

Post by sjc_native1980s »

FT_intern wrote: post #60
awfgylbcxhrey wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 styl…

There's a happy gray area between less c/overt bias/discrimination and promoting people whom aren't qualified/interested to ameliorate guilt of the former.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#73

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

spaceflunky wrote: post #54
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 position…

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

This particular article is about gender imbalance, but I'm sure HMC has policies and controls that address race as well. I'd be curious about the numbers. I visited there 2 decades ago and it was definitely a very white student population.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#74

Post by pomoma_grad »

mjfl wrote: 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…

I went to Pomona College, which is next to Harvey Mudd, with cross-enrollment and some shared CS classes.

I think the experience you are describing is not applicable here, because Pomona and Harvey Mudd are both highly selective schools. Nobody who can't code is graduating with a CS major. Mudd in particular is pretty hardcore. When I worked with other students in CS classes at Mudd, I was always impressed by their intelligence and work ethic, that goes for any gender.

My graduating class of CS majors had more women than men, and both men and women are developers at top companies, getting PhD's from top programs, etc.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#75

Post by dang »

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…

Sorry, but we've been through this tedious flamewar so many times that it's plain off topic on HN. This site exists to gratify intellectual curiosity—the polar opposite of drumming on dead horses. Those of you with a passion for nursing diversity need to find some other place to further the cause.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13241873

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#76

Post by mkeeter »

ng12 wrote: post #45
lmkg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Mudd alumni, class of 2011)

One big thing is splitting the intro CS course into different sections based in previous experience. Folks with a ton of experience end up one section, and those who are new to the subject in another.

The two sections cover the same material, but with different lecture styles, and people don't end up discouraged because their labmates cruise through exercises that they find challenging.

This isn't explicitly gendered, but pre-college exposure to CS and programming could well be correlated with gender...

The course website is here, and shows the Gold / Black sections: https://www.cs.hmc.edu/twiki/bin/view/CS5

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#77

Post by nsxwolf »

_mhr_ wrote: post #23
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…

They're not pleased with a majority female program. They're pleased with a half-male / half-female program. They don't want it to be lopsided in either direction because they believe programming as a skill is orthogonal to sex. I think making computer science assignments and quizzes fun and less intimidating is a very different idea from the extreme of macho nursing. Your article shows that teachers were making girls…

What principle insists that 50/50 is the correct ratio? How can anyone know that?

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#78

Post by toomanybeersies »

Torgo wrote: post #69
spaceflunky wrote: post #13

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.

Depending on the profession, "diversity" means black people or women. If you are diverse but don't have many women, you aren't actually diverse for the purposes of media hectoring. If you are diverse but you don't have enough black people, you aren't actually diverse for the purposes of media hectoring. Which sports field in the graph below is the most representative of US demographics? Which one would be recognized…

That FC article skims past, but doesn't quite touch on a very important point that's very central to the article:

> Silicon Valley companies are going after the same small pool of nonwhite, nonmale candidates

There's a limited pool of female software engineers and of non-white-or-asian software engineers. Universities are only graduating so many women, somewhere around the rate that Pinterest is hiring (~20%), if you hire more than this, you're just making sure that other companies can only have less than 20% women.

The change needs to start at the bottom, there need to be more women doing software engineering at university. You can't just hire all of the existing pool of female software engineers, or black software engineers, and then call yourself diverse, and shame on all the companies that now have only 5% female engineers.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#79

Post by ng12 »

virmundi wrote: post #66
ng12 wrote: post #35

> She expected the class to be full of guys who loved video games and grew up obsessing over how they were made. There were plenty of those guys but, to her surprise, she found the class fascinating. So many of these articles seem incredibly sexist to me -- they all boil down to "women are too ignorant to realize that computers are fun".

What if that's where we're at right now? Ignorance is correctible. It's not bad if corrected (they could be part of the lucky 10,000 [1]). Perhaps woman are under a false perspective that the material is boring. With time, and experience, this might change. 1 - https://xkcd.com/1053/

Hypothetically, if you really believe the majority of women eschew computer science out of ignorance, why do you believe we should correct it? Here's how I think about it: if I invited a male acquaintance to go to a ballroom dancing class and his response was "no way, dancing is for pansies" -- should my reaction be to try to make the lessons a more comfortable environment for him? Absolutely not. If anyone were to avoid learning to program because they believed the field is full of sweaty nerds frankly I'm of the opinion that it's their loss.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#80

Post by FT_intern »

Torgo wrote: post #69
spaceflunky wrote: post #13

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.

Depending on the profession, "diversity" means black people or women. If you are diverse but don't have many women, you aren't actually diverse for the purposes of media hectoring. If you are diverse but you don't have enough black people, you aren't actually diverse for the purposes of media hectoring. Which sports field in the graph below is the most representative of US demographics? Which one would be recognized…

Let's deep dive into diversity further. Why do we want diversity? Because apparently, we want people with different perspectives and experiences.

Now with "diversity", we have to specify how we split up the population into groups. We can use gender, race, country of origin, income, etc.

The media and general "diversity officers" use race and gender. However, this type of group division is not efficient for the goal of different perspectives and experiences. Female Americans have very similar experiences and perspectives compared to male Americans, as do black Americans and white Americans.

Differences in country of origin provide much higher differences in perspectives and experiences. A black American would have a more similar viewpoint with a white American than a black African immigrant. Dividing the groups by country of origin is MUCH more effective at satisfying the goal.

When viewed through the lense of country of origin, the tech field is very diverse in comparison to every other field out there. The field has a high immigrant %, and even the Americans are generally first generation Americans with immigrant parents, providing an extra boost in diversity.

Ironically, using country of origin to divide up groups shows that tech is much more diverse than fields like journalism/HR/etc. that vehemently advocate for diversity in tech.

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