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The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint

by psyc 9y ago

The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint at the ways women do learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I just not reading closely enough? Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough. So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?

21 9y ago
Yes, you weren't paying attention :) She mentioned it a few times - girls like colaborative learning, not lone-wolf learning, and she also put a link in - https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/ https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/
- walshemj 9y ago
  Does this also apply to other branches of engineering, medicine and lawyers.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    There are some degrees/fields that involve more group projects and classes that are more discussion-based than pure lecture. I almost certainly did less work purely by myself for my MBA than my engineering degrees. But pretty much any degree that isn't hands-on/apprenticeship based is going to involve a lot of individual reading/studying/cranking through problems/etc.
l3k 9y ago
I think it was the collaborative learning rather than isolated learning and debugging she talked about. I agree that it also wasn't very clear to me so I could be wrong.
rbatty 9y ago
She does say: that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure although I suppose you have to imagine what a tech classroom/work environment would look like if it supported folks with such learning preferences since she doesn't fully spell that out. *editted formatting
- grzm 9y ago
  Please don't use code blocks (indentation) to quote text. it causes side-scrolling in browsers, making it difficult to read on desktop machines and nigh impossible on mobile devices. A common method of quoting text on HN is prefixing the line with a ">". I personally like also wrapping it in asterisks to italicize the quote.
  - revmoo 9y ago
    Hey HN can I offer some CSS to fix that
- lucidguppy 9y ago
  Pair programming and github projects seem like it would help. And also line them up for real-world working conditions.
- ivanhoe 9y ago
  Somehow most of the female programmers that I know well enough are not at all like this, so lets please not turn this into one-size-fits-all model and force it on every woman out there.
  - lscotte 9y ago
    I completely agree. I've worked with many good and bad programmers, both men and women, and it was usually only junior programmers and the bad ones that could not do their work without being 'collaborative' with others. Gender, like race, etc has nothing to do with it.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  The code formatting is confusing on mobile. Didn't know I could scroll through it. Like I just said for another comment, that quote doesn't seem to be true just for women or even possibly for women more than men. The few female programmers I've worked with weren't like that. There's guys who will be like that. I always thought ways of learning best were more on the people and environment (and how it affects the person) than gender by a long shot. I don't see why males wouldn't suffer just as much as women in the issues marked in her quote.
zvrba 9y ago
She "hints" at this in a couple of sentences: > Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports (in spite of being a textbook nerd, it turned out I was good enough at rowing for a few colleges to recruit me), or to spend time buried in random books. and > that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure I notice an inconsistency here: if women are "prone to perfectionism", why were "hours of debugging" a problem? ... Re fear of failure: computers are brutal. It either works or it doesn't, esp. when you're restricted to "artificial" problems as is often the case in university courses. It forces you to think in a strict and disciplined way (re. the above quote about "debugging for hours"). Yes, it can make you feel stupid because the negative feedback is immediate, and there's a lot of it, especially in the beginning. Even for me, as a professional developer with ~20 yrs of experience, working with computers consists of mostly noticing just negative feedback. "The code works" is a non-event for 90% of the time. Of course it works, I engineered it to work. The 10% of cases when it is an event is in cases when I've used something new according to documentation and it actually worked! Yay! However, "the code doesn't work" is an event in 100% of the cases. It requires analysis, drilling, fixing, maybe even leads to a bigger refactoring because a more fundamental issue was discovered, etc. IMHO, and gender aside, if the person can't endure a constant stream of negative feedback, they should probably choose another field of work.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  I'm not sure either quote applies necessarily to females specifically. At best seems to just be how this particular person is.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Well that's how courses work you have to know how to add 2+2 before going onto Calculus you cant expect to jump straight in to say a key role writing a Map reduce system for a major telcos billing system.
dudul 9y ago
What surprised me the most is that my understanding was that schools are actually designed to favor the way girls learn. Seating still for hours, listening to somebody, remembering the whole thing to be able to spit it out the next day is not how little boys should be taught things. And I don't even think it's great for girls, but they seem better equipped to deal with it.
ImSkeptical 9y ago
It's odd, because girls outperform boys in school in every subject, in every grade, and have for decades. Schools already conform very well to girl-centric learning - perhaps because the majority of school teachers are women. Arguments like this always start from the assumption that inequality is a result of failed education. It's like the people making these arguments have never met a boy or a girl. Boys and girls behave differently, think differently, and value different things. Of course, we should strive to make environments inclusive as possible, and everyone should be free to pursue their (legal) ambitions, but why do we have to assume that any gender imbalance is a result of bias? Women become pediatricians more than other types of doctor. Is that because pediatricians are less sexist than other subtypes of medicine, or because women are naturally more interested in taking care of children?

by psyc 9y ago

21 9y ago

Yes, you weren't paying attention :) She mentioned it a few times - girls like colaborative learning, not lone-wolf learning, and she also put a link in - https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/ https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/

walshemj 9y ago
Does this also apply to other branches of engineering, medicine and lawyers.
- ghaff 9y ago
  There are some degrees/fields that involve more group projects and classes that are more discussion-based than pure lecture. I almost certainly did less work purely by myself for my MBA than my engineering degrees. But pretty much any degree that isn't hands-on/apprenticeship based is going to involve a lot of individual reading/studying/cranking through problems/etc.

l3k 9y ago

I think it was the collaborative learning rather than isolated learning and debugging she talked about. I agree that it also wasn't very clear to me so I could be wrong.

rbatty 9y ago

She does say: that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure although I suppose you have to imagine what a tech classroom/work environment would look like if it supported folks with such learning preferences since she doesn't fully spell that out. *editted formatting

grzm 9y ago
Please don't use code blocks (indentation) to quote text. it causes side-scrolling in browsers, making it difficult to read on desktop machines and nigh impossible on mobile devices. A common method of quoting text on HN is prefixing the line with a ">". I personally like also wrapping it in asterisks to italicize the quote.
- revmoo 9y ago
  Hey HN can I offer some CSS to fix that
lucidguppy 9y ago
Pair programming and github projects seem like it would help. And also line them up for real-world working conditions.
ivanhoe 9y ago
Somehow most of the female programmers that I know well enough are not at all like this, so lets please not turn this into one-size-fits-all model and force it on every woman out there.
- lscotte 9y ago
  I completely agree. I've worked with many good and bad programmers, both men and women, and it was usually only junior programmers and the bad ones that could not do their work without being 'collaborative' with others. Gender, like race, etc has nothing to do with it.
skinnymuch 9y ago
The code formatting is confusing on mobile. Didn't know I could scroll through it. Like I just said for another comment, that quote doesn't seem to be true just for women or even possibly for women more than men. The few female programmers I've worked with weren't like that. There's guys who will be like that. I always thought ways of learning best were more on the people and environment (and how it affects the person) than gender by a long shot. I don't see why males wouldn't suffer just as much as women in the issues marked in her quote.

zvrba 9y ago

She "hints" at this in a couple of sentences: > Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports (in spite of being a textbook nerd, it turned out I was good enough at rowing for a few colleges to recruit me), or to spend time buried in random books. and > that girls and women prefer collaborative rather than solo work, that they are more engaged in “things” if they can see the “people” aspect to it, and that they are prone to perfectionism and a fear of failure I notice an inconsistency here: if women are "prone to perfectionism", why were "hours of debugging" a problem? ... Re fear of failure: computers are brutal. It either works or it doesn't, esp. when you're restricted to "artificial" problems as is often the case in university courses. It forces you to think in a strict and disciplined way (re. the above quote about "debugging for hours"). Yes, it can make you feel stupid because the negative feedback is immediate, and there's a lot of it, especially in the beginning. Even for me, as a professional developer with ~20 yrs of experience, working with computers consists of mostly noticing just negative feedback. "The code works" is a non-event for 90% of the time. Of course it works, I engineered it to work. The 10% of cases when it is an event is in cases when I've used something new according to documentation and it actually worked! Yay! However, "the code doesn't work" is an event in 100% of the cases. It requires analysis, drilling, fixing, maybe even leads to a bigger refactoring because a more fundamental issue was discovered, etc. IMHO, and gender aside, if the person can't endure a constant stream of negative feedback, they should probably choose another field of work.

skinnymuch 9y ago
I'm not sure either quote applies necessarily to females specifically. At best seems to just be how this particular person is.
walshemj 9y ago
Well that's how courses work you have to know how to add 2+2 before going onto Calculus you cant expect to jump straight in to say a key role writing a Map reduce system for a major telcos billing system.

dudul 9y ago

What surprised me the most is that my understanding was that schools are actually designed to favor the way girls learn. Seating still for hours, listening to somebody, remembering the whole thing to be able to spit it out the next day is not how little boys should be taught things. And I don't even think it's great for girls, but they seem better equipped to deal with it.

ImSkeptical 9y ago

It's odd, because girls outperform boys in school in every subject, in every grade, and have for decades. Schools already conform very well to girl-centric learning - perhaps because the majority of school teachers are women. Arguments like this always start from the assumption that inequality is a result of failed education. It's like the people making these arguments have never met a boy or a girl. Boys and girls behave differently, think differently, and value different things. Of course, we should strive to make environments inclusive as possible, and everyone should be free to pursue their (legal) ambitions, but why do we have to assume that any gender imbalance is a result of bias? Women become pediatricians more than other types of doctor. Is that because pediatricians are less sexist than other subtypes of medicine, or because women are naturally more interested in taking care of children?