How not to attract women to coding: Make tech pink • Hacker News Board

Re: How not to attract women to coding: Make tech pink

#71

Post by informatimago » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 12:40 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #2

> Last month, Google announced its plan to spend $50 million over the next three years encouraging young women to give coding a try. The website for the project features articles about inspiring women, like Erica Kochi, who leads UNICEF's Innovation Unit. The first item on a page of coding projects for girls to try is a 3-D-printed bracelet. > "It's insulting, not only because it's highly gendered, but also because i…

The whole discussion of women+tech is insulting!

Guys weren't baby fed tech! They just grab it and have fun with it.

Girls can grab it all the same: it's just knowledge. Computers and books are as available to girls as to boys.

I don't say in the 70's when computer access was limited, perhaps boys could jostle to gain access to the computer console better than girls; but the reality is that at that time, girls would just shun and mock boys interested in computers: geeks and nerds never have been "popular". I'm not sure it has much changed for a long time, until they realized that big money could be made by some in computers.

And even now, it only goes as far as how much money is made in computing.

If you look at: http://www.statisticbrain.com/startup-failure-by-industry/

You see that computing startups are the ones that are less likely to be still operating after 4 years (at 37%). Therefore I'm not surprised that girls are not interested in computing!

If you want more girls in computing, then make it more profitable and more reliable. Eliminate the risk!

Re: How not to attract women to coding: Make tech pink

#72

Post by qbrass » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 4:40 AM UTC

judk wrote: post #57

watwut wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that is not how it is used in everyday English. That word is not used too often of when it is, it does not refer to musical talent.

Snickers uses "diva" in its ads. The meaning there is "woman-like, and therefore unpleasant way for a man to behave." As long as women are disrespected culture-wide, any female-gendered term will seem degrading from a male point of view.

The ones with Aretha Franklin and Liza Minnelli in them.

Re: How not to attract women to coding: Make tech pink

#73

Post by mercer » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 2:20 PM UTC

_bfhp wrote: post #3

tzs wrote: post #2

> Last month, Google announced its plan to spend $50 million over the next three years encouraging young women to give coding a try. The website for the project features articles about inspiring women, like Erica Kochi, who leads UNICEF's Innovation Unit. The first item on a page of coding projects for girls to try is a 3-D-printed bracelet. > "It's insulting, not only because it's highly gendered, but also because i…

Where do you think female interest in jewelry comes from? Are you implying that interest in jewelry is inborn in women? You are begging the question. The professor is concerned with general culture's image of women, which is perpetuated when female programmers are shown to be printing pink jewelry and perpetually enraptured by childish flowery borders. The existence of individual women who enjoy jewelry for the aesth…

I find that an important question to ask when it comes to these discussions is whether the goal is to be pragmatic toward reaching a specific goal or to be 'correct'. Another important question is asking yourself to what extent one can achieve both, as that would be preferable.

I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this, so I could be very wrong. However, I'm inclined to think that if the goal is to get more (young) women to work in tech, making things more 'girly' might not be a bad idea. Ideally this would not be necessary, and I don't consider the approach 'correct', but as one of the possible approaches it might be the most pragmatic. And there could be plenty of initiatives in parallel that take a more correct or ideological approach.

This reminds me a bit of a workshop I heard about from a friend. It was a whiskey and wool event where participants would do whiskey tasting (with a Scottish-looking man guiding them), but also learn how to knit. The goal was specifically to get guys to try knitting, and it was very effective.

These kinds of things can be fine, in my opinion, as long as they're not the only options.

Then again, I'm not a woman, so I don't know if perhaps it's more offensive than it seems to me.