9 ms·

Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

60 points by nomadlogic 10y ago

kartD 10y ago
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6531251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6531251
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
catman56 10y ago
Won't happen unless they actually invent a vaccine that gives autism and use it on girls.
- geofft 10y ago
  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/autism-it-s-different-in-girls/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s-diffe... https://spectrumnews.org/opinion/male-slant-to-research-may-skew-autisms-reported-sex-ratio/ https://spectrumnews.org/opinion/male-slant-to-research-may-...
  - nooron 10y ago
    Thank you for mentioning this! I've heard the hypothesis that some Autistic Spectrum Disorders are misdiagnosed as Borderline in women. I don't know how credible that hypothesis is, or how well-substantiated, but it seems reasonable to me.
  - rokosbasilisk 10y ago
    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.
RoboticFoot 10y ago
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 must force the demographics of different institutions to adhere to some arbitrary constructed criteria. Whether we like it or not, there are social differences between men and women that cause them to have different interests. Here's a recent article that speaks to this point (although taking the opposite stance as me): http://qz.com/823162/a-new-study-shows-how-star-trek-jokes-and-geek-culture-make-women-feel-unwelcome-in-computer-science/ http://qz.com/823162/a-new-study-shows-how-star-trek-jokes-a... The article I linked basically advocates some sort of planned social manipulation to make CS culture more appealing to women. That doesn't sit right with me at all. No one suggests that we should go and macho-fy teaching or nursing or literature so we can get more men in those majors. I think it would be very destructive to do something like that. The reality is that different fields have characteristics that tend to match (or not match) with the unique social characteristics of different groups. I think it's fine if you don't like those unique characteristics (maybe you think everyone should have the exact same culture), but don't try to force the world to adhere to your vision by lowering educational standards or trying to manipulate the academic culture of whatever group you're targeting.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  There's plenty of discussion of cultural barriers to males becoming nurses... https://www.google.com/search?q=nursing+school+culture+males https://www.google.com/search?q=nursing+school+culture+males I guess there is no one suggesting ways to "macho-fy" it, but more sensible discussions are occurring.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- geofft 10y ago
  I'm having trouble reading that Quartz article as arguing that men and women have intrinsically different interests, and I think you acknowledge that by saying that there are social differences. It doesn't seem like they're arguing that there's anything in Star Trek posters that deters people with certain hormones, but that socially, Star Trek posters convey an association with a closed male culture. Thing is, this is already social manipulation on arbitrarily-constructed criteria. It'd be one thing if we discovered that male brains were inherently better at tech thinking (it would be an extraordinary hypothesis that would need correspondingly extraordinary evidence, but it's certainly possible that evidence could be found). But we're arguing that these purely artificial constructs of geeky men bonding over Star Trek are worth upholding. And for what advantage? Keeping qualified people out of an industry that badly needs them? It seems to me like it's entirely legitimate to plan social manipulation to disrupt existing social manipulation that gets in our way.
LunaSea 10y ago
So you're suggesting sexism as a solution.
- geofft 10y ago
  I suppose the argument you're making is that, if society is treating one sex differently on the basis of sex, ending that different treatment also counts as treating them differently on the basis of sex, and leaving that different treatment in place does not. For instance, if men can vote and women can't, giving every woman a vote and not giving every man a second vote would be a sexist change. If so, yes, I am in favor of that sort of sexism.
  - LunaSea 10y ago
    No. You failed to prove that society is indeed making it more difficult for women to join computer science education and jobs.
    - FT_intern 10y ago
      That's my main gripe. Treating people differently based on gender is simply wrong. The default should always be to treat people the same. If you are going to commit sexism with the purpose of "reversing the patriarchy", you first have to prove and quantify the effects of the "patriarchy". Only then can you justify using sexism. Otherwise, you are committing a definite wrong, sexism, to reverse the possibility of sexism, which is something that could possibly (but hasn't been proven) to be wrong. I have the same viewpoint about affirmative action in general. The default, preferred state is an absence of racial/gender based discrimiation, aka affirmative action, unless an imbalance is properly proven. Affirmative action is something that not only needs to be justified once but also continually and repeatedly justified throughout time. Simply disproving arguments for affirmative action should be enough to stop it.
      - geofft 10y ago
        But that's a losing strategy, in a game-theoretic sense, if your goal is to end sexism/discrimination/bias. It is fine if your goal is upholding a moral code where you personally actively committing an act of discrimination is unacceptable, but even unintentionally; you personally passively upholding discrimination is fine; and other people actively committing discrimination and you failing to stop them is not a thing you're super morally culpable for. That's certainly not my moral code, and I think even among the crowds that believe in intrinsically evil actions regardless of context (e.g., Catholic moral theology), they wouldn't agree that passively upholding evil or failing to stop others from doing active evil is fine (e.g., "I have greatly sinned ... in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do"). If we're making a deontological argument, we should nail down what we think about passive wrong or allowing a wrong to continue, and if we're making a consequentialist argument, we're not worried about intrinsic wrongs along the way to a right. It's a losing strategy because everyone who actively supports sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination have plausible reasons why their discrimination is justifiable. Even the white-nationalist types these days hesitate to say that the white race is superior; they just say they want protections for the white race in white countries (whatever those are). And most of the discrimination in today's society doesn't come from people who are nowhere near as overt as white nationalists. The colleges say, "Oh, we're just trusting these test scores." The standardized test companies say, "Oh, we're just trusting past performance at college." And if anyone had previously introduced bias into the system, they've now successfully laundered the bias; there's a feedback system that keeps whatever biases were present when it was created, and you can quite genuinely say, "Oh, I'm just following this system, which on paper should be a perfectly objective system" and there's no proof that you're actively and intentionally discriminating. But you're upholding discrimination, all the same. If you want to see this sort of bias-laundering in practice, my favorite recent example is the voting laws in North Carolina that were recently struck down by their Supreme Court: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-north-carolina-voter-id-law-20160902-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-n... Every restriction, on the face of it, was defensible. Voter ID in the abstract is a good idea. Eliminating certain parts of early voting seems fine. But the courts looked at the emails behind this law, where legislators asked which particular voting mechanisms were used by specific demographic groups, and eliminated those mechanisms "with almost surgical precision". You couldn't prove from the text of the law that there was any intention at bias, which was the entire point; it wasn't supposed to look like a discriminatory law. We don't have the benefit of seeing those discussions most of the time. So waiting until we have a proof of a wrong to fix that wrong is a losing strategy, one that is easily exploited by people who want to discriminate, and one that people who want to discriminate have demonstrated their willingness to exploit.
RodericDay 10y ago
Every diversity-related topic makes me wish that HN discussions weren't branched/fanned out. The problem isn't politics. The problem is that the exact same argument replicates itself and occurs about a dozen times in different leaves, and it becomes extremely tedious to pore through it multiple times. Maybe branching comment forums are a good idea for certain topics, but topics that require an in-depth back-and-forth like this one, are much better served by a single chronological pipeline.
karmicthreat 10y ago
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?
- bwanab 10y ago
  The acceptance rate for males is 9%. For females it is 21%.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    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.
- lmkg 10y ago
  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 least partially a result of more female students taking interest in the subject, not a result of admissions. Matriculation of female students to the college as a whole also rose over the past decade, but that went from ~35% to ~50%, so it accounts for less than half of the change in CS. (Disclosure: Harvey Mudd alumn, class of 2008)
dominotw 10y ago
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?
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  Because America has a belief system of a flat society vs a class hierarchy. Both wealth hierarchies and social class hierarchies exist, but that goes against the narrative.
- FT_intern 10y ago
  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
  - Apocryphon 10y ago
    That's certainly a valid suspicion, given the mercenary nature of university management these days, but is it actually borne by facts?
    - existencebox 10y ago
      This question nerd sniped me quite hard, and I'm unfortunately having trouble answering it. I figured a first step would be to look at aid as a portion of cost of attendance over time, tracked against affirmative action endeavors. The problem I'm having is finding consistent measures of both aid and COA, let alone over time. If anyone knows a data source that proffers this I'd be quite curious.
    - dominotw 10y ago
      http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-college-admissions-2013102945841711416.html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-... From the article I posted above has some details but not the precise metrics you requested. I'd be interested in those too.
ng12 10y ago
> 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".
- virmundi 10y ago
  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/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
  - ng12 10y ago
    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.
    - virmundi 10y ago
      The article was a little hand-wavey on the details about comfort. But to you hypothetical. Say that instead you tell him (assuming a straight guy), that it's great way to meet women and, oddly enough, get exercise. That might convince him to attend at least one. After auditing, he might like it. The field has an old rep. Some of it's earned. It's changing now. People are operating from old information. Correcting this information, by means of targeting marketing, might be a good thing. Now I do see benefit for keeping the view around if it means less workers and therefore a higher wage for me, :).
noobermin 10y ago
I recently talked to a friend (who, yes is female) who took a required programming course. She is an English major, but she found python fun and she's planning to take another course on it next year. While everyone here is discussing SJ vs not SJ[0], I think this article is another data point in my belief that a liberal arts education, or one that requires a number of pre-requisites across fields, is so beneficial. Being well rounded and schools requiring general ed's across the spectrum helps people discover interest in things they never thought they would be interested in. I am on my way to a Physics Ph.D., but next to my undergraduate QM courses, I am most thankful for my undergraduate's German classes, philosophy, and a history course about the US Presidents (this one required us to read primary sources, letters, unedited tape transcripts, tedious for someone who had other commitments like studying for the Physics GRE, but it was super enlightening). At the time, I railed against general ed requirements and I considered them as a waste of my time, but they do well to expose you to more of the world and round you out as an educated person. [0]"not SJ" is the only term I could come up with.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  I'm glad this article mentions improving the compulsory classes, in my experience the compulsory classes were the worst because people couldn't not take them if they sucked. I'm still bitter about the bullshit requirements my uni thrust on me. The patronizing "we know better than you" schtick gets old real fast.
mjfl 10y ago
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 investigating our version-controlled project he found that I had written 98% of the lines. I got an A on the project, she got a B, so she still passed, but the whole time I'm wondering: is this really helping her? Is it really going to help her in her long term career to push her through the classes without learning anything to push a statistic that the college can later brag about. Of the couple girls I know who graduated in my class, one works at Google, but none of the rest of them are working in a remotely computer science job. I think the proportion corresponds to the ratio of girls who would naturally take computer science (the one that works at google now and perhaps a few who just preferred other things) vs. the people that were pushed through (the rest). This also causes problems for the whole school as well: I learned through a friend that a google recruiter was talking about how students from my school often have great resumes and then fall apart during technical interview questions. So I think it is plausible that these kinds of initiatives hurt EVERYONE from the school in question. This is all anecdotes, but I'm convinced this is a real problem, causing REAL harm, all for the college to look better in social justice statistics. This is why I'm writing about it instead of just shrugging my shoulders.
- dominotw 10y ago
  >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.
  - chriskanan 10y ago
    I don't think that's the same thing as what the parent post is suggesting. Based on my wife's opinion (a female physician), female physicians seem to be dropping out or working only part time for child rearing purposes. It does have huge healthcare implications though, since females are now making up a large number of physicians and there are only a very small number of slots at medical schools.
garysieling 10y ago
For the people who are interested in this topic, Google has a training video that talks through some interesting psychology research that ties to hiring / performance reviews - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjFTHTgEVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjFTHTgEVU I haven't been able to locate many similar good talks, so if anyone can point me to speakers / talks I'd appreciate it.
BigChiefSmokem 10y ago
I wouldn't want my daughter working in technology for the same reasons I wouldn't want her to be a professional boxer or a coal miner. I'm a pretty tough guy, I've hunted and fished out of necessity and have had to deal with the hard consequences of a childhood lived in poverty and despair. Drug addiction, jail, recovery, I've had my fair share of time in life's gutter. Scumbags like Trump don't phase me, as I understand it's just on par when dealing with the phony tough. But with all the thick skin even I have been blown away at the ruthlessness and lack of empathy our industry mandates in a person for them to achieve the upper echelons, much like other male-dominated industries and endeavors. If there are women out there ready, passionate, ambitious, and intellectually up to the task of really ushering in the future then all the power and over 9000 blessings to them. But if they or anyone else expect me to treat them any differently than my all-male, all-star engineering and design teams then they'd be sadly disappointed. The truth is I'd hire a paraplegic transgender janitor with no high school education if they were able to somehow prove to me they could run with the all-stars or at the very least support us in our cause. Race or gender is really never a factor for a true leader looking to build an all-star team. My advice to my daughter, if it was true in her heart, would be never to join them - but to instead run over them like an old greasy tank. Don't even need a degree in Computer Science to do that.
- braveo 10y ago
  oh horsecrap, stop with the theatrics. You've been a drug addict who's gone to jail and had a hard time, but even you've never seen anything as horrible as white class workers presumably looking down on other white class workers? Is there anyone who actually buys that?
  - drspacemonkey 10y ago
    As soon as I got to the "over 9000", I knew it was 4chan nonsense. I stopped going to reddit to get away from that crap.
zackmorris 10y ago
Wow so many negative comments on this thread. I hope that any stereotypically white/male whatever technology professionals reading this remember back to the scorn and ridicule that many of us faced in our formative years due to our interest in technology. Many women, minorities, etc have had similar interests to yours but had few or no peers who shared them. You may have overcome hurdles but now imagine doing it alone or worse never knowing that it was even a possibility for you. Programs like this are designed to make up for the numerous biases in our culture that stand in the way of equality. I think it speaks to the fragility of your egos that you find the idea of giving someone else an opportunity threatening. Especially when it costs you essentially nothing to be supportive. I think one of the very worst sins is to rise to a position of power and use it against others who haven't had the advantages you've enjoyed. This is one of the thousand reasons I am deeply troubled by our near term political futures. A feeling which is more exacerbated every day by level of vitriol projected by people with the "I've got mine" mentality. Yes I've struggled, but I work to make things better so that others can avoid going what I went through. It sure beats maintaining a status quo that makes us pay our dues in futility.
- rokosbasilisk 10y ago
  It sure feels like you are arguing a strawman here. From reading the comments, its seems alot of people want to help but have legitimate, well reasoned and valid concerns.
  - zackmorris 10y ago
    You make a good point. I guess what I'm arguing is that the forces against equality are so large that it would take a great deal to shift things into balance in anything short of decades. I feel that taking an opposing or even neutral stance against active measures is a vote of support for inequality. If anyone is going to take a stand, I would think it would be people who have experienced being ostracized. But reading some of these comments has been an eye opener because they use seeds of truth to support what is unavoidably a position of ignorance. That trend is appearing all over the media right now and it's a very dark think IMHO. I admit that it may be the effect of controversy generating conversation that pushes the comments to the top but it makes me uncomfortable that even Hacker News isn't immune to such things.

60 points by nomadlogic 10y ago

kartD 10y ago

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6531251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6531251

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

catman56 10y ago

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

geofft 10y ago
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/autism-it-s-different-in-girls/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s-diffe... https://spectrumnews.org/opinion/male-slant-to-research-may-skew-autisms-reported-sex-ratio/ https://spectrumnews.org/opinion/male-slant-to-research-may-...
- nooron 10y ago
  Thank you for mentioning this! I've heard the hypothesis that some Autistic Spectrum Disorders are misdiagnosed as Borderline in women. I don't know how credible that hypothesis is, or how well-substantiated, but it seems reasonable to me.
- rokosbasilisk 10y ago
  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.

RoboticFoot 10y ago

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 must force the demographics of different institutions to adhere to some arbitrary constructed criteria. Whether we like it or not, there are social differences between men and women that cause them to have different interests. Here's a recent article that speaks to this point (although taking the opposite stance as me): http://qz.com/823162/a-new-study-shows-how-star-trek-jokes-and-geek-culture-make-women-feel-unwelcome-in-computer-science/ http://qz.com/823162/a-new-study-shows-how-star-trek-jokes-a... The article I linked basically advocates some sort of planned social manipulation to make CS culture more appealing to women. That doesn't sit right with me at all. No one suggests that we should go and macho-fy teaching or nursing or literature so we can get more men in those majors. I think it would be very destructive to do something like that. The reality is that different fields have characteristics that tend to match (or not match) with the unique social characteristics of different groups. I think it's fine if you don't like those unique characteristics (maybe you think everyone should have the exact same culture), but don't try to force the world to adhere to your vision by lowering educational standards or trying to manipulate the academic culture of whatever group you're targeting.

maxerickson 10y ago
There's plenty of discussion of cultural barriers to males becoming nurses... https://www.google.com/search?q=nursing+school+culture+males https://www.google.com/search?q=nursing+school+culture+males I guess there is no one suggesting ways to "macho-fy" it, but more sensible discussions are occurring.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
geofft 10y ago
I'm having trouble reading that Quartz article as arguing that men and women have intrinsically different interests, and I think you acknowledge that by saying that there are social differences. It doesn't seem like they're arguing that there's anything in Star Trek posters that deters people with certain hormones, but that socially, Star Trek posters convey an association with a closed male culture. Thing is, this is already social manipulation on arbitrarily-constructed criteria. It'd be one thing if we discovered that male brains were inherently better at tech thinking (it would be an extraordinary hypothesis that would need correspondingly extraordinary evidence, but it's certainly possible that evidence could be found). But we're arguing that these purely artificial constructs of geeky men bonding over Star Trek are worth upholding. And for what advantage? Keeping qualified people out of an industry that badly needs them? It seems to me like it's entirely legitimate to plan social manipulation to disrupt existing social manipulation that gets in our way.

LunaSea 10y ago

So you're suggesting sexism as a solution.

geofft 10y ago
I suppose the argument you're making is that, if society is treating one sex differently on the basis of sex, ending that different treatment also counts as treating them differently on the basis of sex, and leaving that different treatment in place does not. For instance, if men can vote and women can't, giving every woman a vote and not giving every man a second vote would be a sexist change. If so, yes, I am in favor of that sort of sexism.
- LunaSea 10y ago
  No. You failed to prove that society is indeed making it more difficult for women to join computer science education and jobs.
  - FT_intern 10y ago
    That's my main gripe. Treating people differently based on gender is simply wrong. The default should always be to treat people the same. If you are going to commit sexism with the purpose of "reversing the patriarchy", you first have to prove and quantify the effects of the "patriarchy". Only then can you justify using sexism. Otherwise, you are committing a definite wrong, sexism, to reverse the possibility of sexism, which is something that could possibly (but hasn't been proven) to be wrong. I have the same viewpoint about affirmative action in general. The default, preferred state is an absence of racial/gender based discrimiation, aka affirmative action, unless an imbalance is properly proven. Affirmative action is something that not only needs to be justified once but also continually and repeatedly justified throughout time. Simply disproving arguments for affirmative action should be enough to stop it.
    - geofft 10y ago
      But that's a losing strategy, in a game-theoretic sense, if your goal is to end sexism/discrimination/bias. It is fine if your goal is upholding a moral code where you personally actively committing an act of discrimination is unacceptable, but even unintentionally; you personally passively upholding discrimination is fine; and other people actively committing discrimination and you failing to stop them is not a thing you're super morally culpable for. That's certainly not my moral code, and I think even among the crowds that believe in intrinsically evil actions regardless of context (e.g., Catholic moral theology), they wouldn't agree that passively upholding evil or failing to stop others from doing active evil is fine (e.g., "I have greatly sinned ... in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do"). If we're making a deontological argument, we should nail down what we think about passive wrong or allowing a wrong to continue, and if we're making a consequentialist argument, we're not worried about intrinsic wrongs along the way to a right. It's a losing strategy because everyone who actively supports sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination have plausible reasons why their discrimination is justifiable. Even the white-nationalist types these days hesitate to say that the white race is superior; they just say they want protections for the white race in white countries (whatever those are). And most of the discrimination in today's society doesn't come from people who are nowhere near as overt as white nationalists. The colleges say, "Oh, we're just trusting these test scores." The standardized test companies say, "Oh, we're just trusting past performance at college." And if anyone had previously introduced bias into the system, they've now successfully laundered the bias; there's a feedback system that keeps whatever biases were present when it was created, and you can quite genuinely say, "Oh, I'm just following this system, which on paper should be a perfectly objective system" and there's no proof that you're actively and intentionally discriminating. But you're upholding discrimination, all the same. If you want to see this sort of bias-laundering in practice, my favorite recent example is the voting laws in North Carolina that were recently struck down by their Supreme Court: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-north-carolina-voter-id-law-20160902-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-n... Every restriction, on the face of it, was defensible. Voter ID in the abstract is a good idea. Eliminating certain parts of early voting seems fine. But the courts looked at the emails behind this law, where legislators asked which particular voting mechanisms were used by specific demographic groups, and eliminated those mechanisms "with almost surgical precision". You couldn't prove from the text of the law that there was any intention at bias, which was the entire point; it wasn't supposed to look like a discriminatory law. We don't have the benefit of seeing those discussions most of the time. So waiting until we have a proof of a wrong to fix that wrong is a losing strategy, one that is easily exploited by people who want to discriminate, and one that people who want to discriminate have demonstrated their willingness to exploit.

RodericDay 10y ago

Every diversity-related topic makes me wish that HN discussions weren't branched/fanned out. The problem isn't politics. The problem is that the exact same argument replicates itself and occurs about a dozen times in different leaves, and it becomes extremely tedious to pore through it multiple times. Maybe branching comment forums are a good idea for certain topics, but topics that require an in-depth back-and-forth like this one, are much better served by a single chronological pipeline.

karmicthreat 10y ago

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?

bwanab 10y ago
The acceptance rate for males is 9%. For females it is 21%.
- rayiner 10y ago
  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.
lmkg 10y ago
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 least partially a result of more female students taking interest in the subject, not a result of admissions. Matriculation of female students to the college as a whole also rose over the past decade, but that went from ~35% to ~50%, so it accounts for less than half of the change in CS. (Disclosure: Harvey Mudd alumn, class of 2008)

dominotw 10y ago

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?

hkmurakami 10y ago
Because America has a belief system of a flat society vs a class hierarchy. Both wealth hierarchies and social class hierarchies exist, but that goes against the narrative.
FT_intern 10y ago
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
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  That's certainly a valid suspicion, given the mercenary nature of university management these days, but is it actually borne by facts?
  - existencebox 10y ago
    This question nerd sniped me quite hard, and I'm unfortunately having trouble answering it. I figured a first step would be to look at aid as a portion of cost of attendance over time, tracked against affirmative action endeavors. The problem I'm having is finding consistent measures of both aid and COA, let alone over time. If anyone knows a data source that proffers this I'd be quite curious.
  - dominotw 10y ago
    http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-college-admissions-2013102945841711416.html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-... From the article I posted above has some details but not the precise metrics you requested. I'd be interested in those too.

ng12 10y ago

> 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".

virmundi 10y ago
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/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- ng12 10y ago
  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.
  - virmundi 10y ago
    The article was a little hand-wavey on the details about comfort. But to you hypothetical. Say that instead you tell him (assuming a straight guy), that it's great way to meet women and, oddly enough, get exercise. That might convince him to attend at least one. After auditing, he might like it. The field has an old rep. Some of it's earned. It's changing now. People are operating from old information. Correcting this information, by means of targeting marketing, might be a good thing. Now I do see benefit for keeping the view around if it means less workers and therefore a higher wage for me, :).

noobermin 10y ago

I recently talked to a friend (who, yes is female) who took a required programming course. She is an English major, but she found python fun and she's planning to take another course on it next year. While everyone here is discussing SJ vs not SJ[0], I think this article is another data point in my belief that a liberal arts education, or one that requires a number of pre-requisites across fields, is so beneficial. Being well rounded and schools requiring general ed's across the spectrum helps people discover interest in things they never thought they would be interested in. I am on my way to a Physics Ph.D., but next to my undergraduate QM courses, I am most thankful for my undergraduate's German classes, philosophy, and a history course about the US Presidents (this one required us to read primary sources, letters, unedited tape transcripts, tedious for someone who had other commitments like studying for the Physics GRE, but it was super enlightening). At the time, I railed against general ed requirements and I considered them as a waste of my time, but they do well to expose you to more of the world and round you out as an educated person. [0]"not SJ" is the only term I could come up with.

Eridrus 10y ago
I'm glad this article mentions improving the compulsory classes, in my experience the compulsory classes were the worst because people couldn't not take them if they sucked. I'm still bitter about the bullshit requirements my uni thrust on me. The patronizing "we know better than you" schtick gets old real fast.

mjfl 10y ago

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 investigating our version-controlled project he found that I had written 98% of the lines. I got an A on the project, she got a B, so she still passed, but the whole time I'm wondering: is this really helping her? Is it really going to help her in her long term career to push her through the classes without learning anything to push a statistic that the college can later brag about. Of the couple girls I know who graduated in my class, one works at Google, but none of the rest of them are working in a remotely computer science job. I think the proportion corresponds to the ratio of girls who would naturally take computer science (the one that works at google now and perhaps a few who just preferred other things) vs. the people that were pushed through (the rest). This also causes problems for the whole school as well: I learned through a friend that a google recruiter was talking about how students from my school often have great resumes and then fall apart during technical interview questions. So I think it is plausible that these kinds of initiatives hurt EVERYONE from the school in question. This is all anecdotes, but I'm convinced this is a real problem, causing REAL harm, all for the college to look better in social justice statistics. This is why I'm writing about it instead of just shrugging my shoulders.

dominotw 10y ago
>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.
- chriskanan 10y ago
  I don't think that's the same thing as what the parent post is suggesting. Based on my wife's opinion (a female physician), female physicians seem to be dropping out or working only part time for child rearing purposes. It does have huge healthcare implications though, since females are now making up a large number of physicians and there are only a very small number of slots at medical schools.

garysieling 10y ago

For the people who are interested in this topic, Google has a training video that talks through some interesting psychology research that ties to hiring / performance reviews - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjFTHTgEVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjFTHTgEVU I haven't been able to locate many similar good talks, so if anyone can point me to speakers / talks I'd appreciate it.

BigChiefSmokem 10y ago

I wouldn't want my daughter working in technology for the same reasons I wouldn't want her to be a professional boxer or a coal miner. I'm a pretty tough guy, I've hunted and fished out of necessity and have had to deal with the hard consequences of a childhood lived in poverty and despair. Drug addiction, jail, recovery, I've had my fair share of time in life's gutter. Scumbags like Trump don't phase me, as I understand it's just on par when dealing with the phony tough. But with all the thick skin even I have been blown away at the ruthlessness and lack of empathy our industry mandates in a person for them to achieve the upper echelons, much like other male-dominated industries and endeavors. If there are women out there ready, passionate, ambitious, and intellectually up to the task of really ushering in the future then all the power and over 9000 blessings to them. But if they or anyone else expect me to treat them any differently than my all-male, all-star engineering and design teams then they'd be sadly disappointed. The truth is I'd hire a paraplegic transgender janitor with no high school education if they were able to somehow prove to me they could run with the all-stars or at the very least support us in our cause. Race or gender is really never a factor for a true leader looking to build an all-star team. My advice to my daughter, if it was true in her heart, would be never to join them - but to instead run over them like an old greasy tank. Don't even need a degree in Computer Science to do that.

braveo 10y ago
oh horsecrap, stop with the theatrics. You've been a drug addict who's gone to jail and had a hard time, but even you've never seen anything as horrible as white class workers presumably looking down on other white class workers? Is there anyone who actually buys that?
- drspacemonkey 10y ago
  As soon as I got to the "over 9000", I knew it was 4chan nonsense. I stopped going to reddit to get away from that crap.

zackmorris 10y ago

Wow so many negative comments on this thread. I hope that any stereotypically white/male whatever technology professionals reading this remember back to the scorn and ridicule that many of us faced in our formative years due to our interest in technology. Many women, minorities, etc have had similar interests to yours but had few or no peers who shared them. You may have overcome hurdles but now imagine doing it alone or worse never knowing that it was even a possibility for you. Programs like this are designed to make up for the numerous biases in our culture that stand in the way of equality. I think it speaks to the fragility of your egos that you find the idea of giving someone else an opportunity threatening. Especially when it costs you essentially nothing to be supportive. I think one of the very worst sins is to rise to a position of power and use it against others who haven't had the advantages you've enjoyed. This is one of the thousand reasons I am deeply troubled by our near term political futures. A feeling which is more exacerbated every day by level of vitriol projected by people with the "I've got mine" mentality. Yes I've struggled, but I work to make things better so that others can avoid going what I went through. It sure beats maintaining a status quo that makes us pay our dues in futility.

rokosbasilisk 10y ago
It sure feels like you are arguing a strawman here. From reading the comments, its seems alot of people want to help but have legitimate, well reasoned and valid concerns.
- zackmorris 10y ago
  You make a good point. I guess what I'm arguing is that the forces against equality are so large that it would take a great deal to shift things into balance in anything short of decades. I feel that taking an opposing or even neutral stance against active measures is a vote of support for inequality. If anyone is going to take a stand, I would think it would be people who have experienced being ostracized. But reading some of these comments has been an eye opener because they use seeds of truth to support what is unavoidably a position of ignorance. That trend is appearing all over the media right now and it's a very dark think IMHO. I admit that it may be the effect of controversy generating conversation that pushes the comments to the top but it makes me uncomfortable that even Hacker News isn't immune to such things.