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Except in the cases where it does work astoundingly well to solve issues that would have been labeled cultural before they were improved, like raising literacy

Except in the cases where it does work astoundingly well to solve issues that would have been labeled cultural before they were improved, like raising literacy rates across all races (achieved by massively increasing investment in education). See https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/#historical-perspective https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/#historical-perspective for some idea how well that worked. A similar situation is AIDS prevention via safe sex education. If a cultural problem has lack of exposure and education at its root, then it is very easy to throw money at that part of the problem and just fix it. Right now girls and underrepresented minorities are woefully underexposed to coding, and via education we can right that wrong directly even if we can't figure out how to fix the underlying cultural issues (which definitely exist, and have made white and Asian boys much more likely to have early exposure to CS). I'll note that students tend to rate CS as their favorite academic subject (it's slightly below art and theater) when they are forced to take it, so "force" in this context is mostly just about getting them to take the first step. They love it once they start, so whether or not it will solve the gender imbalance problem, it's such a critical skill for the future economy that it seems irresponsible not to spend money on it and prepare people to participate in that economy, doubly so when students enjoy it so much. That's not to say at all that the cultural components should be ignored, they're just so much deeper and more difficult to fix than this particular side effect, which is amenable to solution-by-education (which necessarily means throwing money around, since training teachers takes money).

Mz 9y ago
This is a very sincere question: Where in your link does it show that literacy rose due to throwing money at the problem? I am failing to find that assertion on the page you linke and that isn't my understanding at all of growing global trends in literacy, which are rooted in much more complex trends away from subsistence cultures and agriculturally based incomes. Furthermore, reading is a skill that is vastly different from the problem where talented educated women with ambitions cannot get their foot in the door because most men see them exclusively as sex objects. This is not solved at all by teaching women to code. Plenty of women code. They still face horrible problems due to sexism.
- ewjordan 9y ago
  > And the rate of growth really climbed after the middle of the 20th century, when the expansion of basic education became a global priority. You can read more about the expansion of education systems around the world in our entry on Financing Education. (links to https://ourworldindata.org/financing-education#historical-perspective https://ourworldindata.org/financing-education#historical-pe...) I don't know if that is proof of the statement or anything, but I don't think it's a particularly controversial claim to say that universal education impacts literacy. As for the challenges women face as they try to enter industry, those are well established and real, for sure. They need to be fought viciously, and we are correct to spend a lot of time and money on those problems. I'd never deny that, it's extremely important to do that work and fight that fight, as this entire article and discussion proves. But pre-industry, only 18% of CS majors are women, so the educational system has to be fixed as well, that's way too big of an early gap to hope it will magically close once the industry gets it's shit together. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2016-10-20/study-computer-science-gender-gap-widens-despite-increase-in-jobs%3Fcontext%3Damp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/a... has a good rundown of where the most valuable opportunities are (middle school is a big one) and how they should be addressed - it's not just about access, it's also about making sure that it's provided in a way that engages and targets young girls specifically, and making sure that more women are teaching these classes. Schools are a valuable point of leverage where you can affect preconceived notions about gender roles and career opportunities, and any effective program needs to break down those barriers. That requires a lot of curriculum design (the easy part) and retraining (the hard). While you're right that plenty of women code, men outnumber them by 4:1 before they even face the challenges of industry. We need to throw everything we can at that, from every angle, and at every step in the pipeline, until we're much closer to 50/50. Educational interventions are straightforward and proven to work with fairly low cost at the early stages, so I can't imagine why we'd want to rule them out as being part of the solution. They're also massively helpful when addressing the racial imbalances, which are arguably even more vulnerable to asymmetric early exposure than the gender imbalance is (though that's a much bigger subject worthy of its own discussion).
  - Mz 9y ago

Mz 9y ago

This is a very sincere question: Where in your link does it show that literacy rose due to throwing money at the problem? I am failing to find that assertion on the page you linke and that isn't my understanding at all of growing global trends in literacy, which are rooted in much more complex trends away from subsistence cultures and agriculturally based incomes. Furthermore, reading is a skill that is vastly different from the problem where talented educated women with ambitions cannot get their foot in the door because most men see them exclusively as sex objects. This is not solved at all by teaching women to code. Plenty of women code. They still face horrible problems due to sexism.

ewjordan 9y ago
> And the rate of growth really climbed after the middle of the 20th century, when the expansion of basic education became a global priority. You can read more about the expansion of education systems around the world in our entry on Financing Education. (links to https://ourworldindata.org/financing-education#historical-perspective https://ourworldindata.org/financing-education#historical-pe...) I don't know if that is proof of the statement or anything, but I don't think it's a particularly controversial claim to say that universal education impacts literacy. As for the challenges women face as they try to enter industry, those are well established and real, for sure. They need to be fought viciously, and we are correct to spend a lot of time and money on those problems. I'd never deny that, it's extremely important to do that work and fight that fight, as this entire article and discussion proves. But pre-industry, only 18% of CS majors are women, so the educational system has to be fixed as well, that's way too big of an early gap to hope it will magically close once the industry gets it's shit together. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2016-10-20/study-computer-science-gender-gap-widens-despite-increase-in-jobs%3Fcontext%3Damp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/a... has a good rundown of where the most valuable opportunities are (middle school is a big one) and how they should be addressed - it's not just about access, it's also about making sure that it's provided in a way that engages and targets young girls specifically, and making sure that more women are teaching these classes. Schools are a valuable point of leverage where you can affect preconceived notions about gender roles and career opportunities, and any effective program needs to break down those barriers. That requires a lot of curriculum design (the easy part) and retraining (the hard). While you're right that plenty of women code, men outnumber them by 4:1 before they even face the challenges of industry. We need to throw everything we can at that, from every angle, and at every step in the pipeline, until we're much closer to 50/50. Educational interventions are straightforward and proven to work with fairly low cost at the early stages, so I can't imagine why we'd want to rule them out as being part of the solution. They're also massively helpful when addressing the racial imbalances, which are arguably even more vulnerable to asymmetric early exposure than the gender imbalance is (though that's a much bigger subject worthy of its own discussion).
- Mz 9y ago