3 ms·
If those assumptions about the underrepresentation of women in the field hold, then it's much easier to identify women for whom computer science would be a good
by natrius 16y ago
If those assumptions about the underrepresentation of women in the field hold, then it's much easier to identify women for whom computer science would be a good fit but haven't chosen it than it is to identify similar men. Paying the costs for any qualified college student to attend JSConf would be less effective than paying the costs for qualified women.
Can you suggest gender-blind criteria that would be successful? Discriminating less while achieving the same goal is an unalloyed good.
- cabalamat 16y ago> Can you suggest gender-blind criteria that would be successful? Well, the original formulation was "potential to succeed at computer science". So we need to measure potential (P) and success (S). Then the people we are interested in satisfy (P and not S). S could be defined as being a professor of computer science (or related discipline), or as earning more than a certain amount in a computing-related field. P could be determined by getting someone to submit a computing-based project they've worked on; the submission might consist of a tarball containing documentation and source code, which would obviously have to be assessed according to subjective criteria (to avoid untoward discrimination at this stage, the submissions might be anonymised so reviewers wouldn't know the name of the submitter. Or P could be determined by some objectively-assessible criteria, for example asking people to write a program whose performance would be measured objectively (e.g. the Google AI Challenge -- http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/contest/index.php http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/contest/index.php ) But however you determine S and P, the set of people you're interested in falls naturally from that.