43 ms·

Girls Who Code

226 points by yurisagalov 13y ago

PureApeshit 13y ago
go girls! :D
- ps4fanboy 13y ago
  Girl Power <3 <3
kn0thing 13y ago
What great timing. BTW, thanks to all of you who backed my crowdtilt to bring BlackGirlsCode to Brooklyn! https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/no-sleep-till-brooklyn-for-black-girls-code-ny https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/no-sleep-till-brooklyn-f...
- muglug 13y ago
  Awesome. Thanks for letting me know about this campaign! Best wishes, Brooklyn person.
- loomio 13y ago
  I am so, so glad to see a much more high quality discussion (thanks in large part to lkrubner's insightful top comment) going on here today than the travesty that accompanied your post about Black Girls Code. The reactions that provoked made me feel sick. I guess the important think is your campaign is being supported and funded! But It's always a shock to see the dark side of this community revealed so starkly.
rokhayakebe 13y ago
I am a man. These initiatives will simply not work. Imagine "Men Nurse." Many women SIMPLY do not code for the same reason many men do not code. Most of us were not exposed to the science as kids, hence step 1 is to make Programming mandatory. Note I say programming and not C.S.. I am an amateur programmer and I can say wit confidence that this is as fundamental as basic arithmetic. Full stop. I frankly wish they shut down "Girls Who Code" entirely and all the likes. Instead we can put our efforts into teaching everyone to code: "We Code." Because once someone does something as simple as print (2+2)-(3-2) or print $first_name + $last_name or (my favorite) <html><h1>The Website of Me</h1><p>My name is Joanna. This is my first web page.<img src='..'></p></html>, once they do this, there is simply no going back for them.
- tptacek 13y ago
  There are tons of male nurses. 'iamelgringo, a former top contributor here, is an ER nurse. Back of the envelope: There are ~24,000,000 people aged 18-24 in the US. Assume half are female: there are ~12,000,000 "girls who might code" in the US. Of these, 12.6% are African American. There are ~1,440,00 "black girls who might code" in the US. There are ~400,000 people who live in Tulsa. There have probably been several "Tulsa Codes!" events in the past couple years, but either way just stipulate that it could happen. A "Tulsa Codes!" event addresses just 400,000 people. For logistical and practical reasons, that event locks out an overwhelmingly huge number of potential beneficiaries. But nobody has a problem with "Tulsa Codes!". Threads aren't full of people ranting about "third wave feminism" when they do.
  - city41 13y ago
    9.6% of all RNs are male [0] Why is there not a male nurse initiative? Or male elementary teacher initiative[1]? I have to admit, I am strongly against things like "Girls who code". If there truly are issues in our culture that prevent girls from looking into coding, then absolutely let's get rid of those as best we can. But a girl can look into and explore coding just as easily as a boy can. There's really nothing stopping them. I have a few male nurse friends too. Nothing stopped them either, they simply found nursing interesting and pursued it. There might simply be fewer female coders because they tend to not be interested in this profession, same as male nurses. [0] -- http://www.minoritynurse.com/minority-nursing-statistics http://www.minoritynurse.com/minority-nursing-statistics [1] -- http://www.menteach.org/resources/data_about_men_teachers http://www.menteach.org/resources/data_about_men_teachers
    - smtddr 13y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6530237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6530237
    - gfodor 13y ago
      I don't know why you're getting downvoted. The question you ask is a good one, though you are jumping to some conclusions. I think it may very well be that there should be a "male nurse initiative", or at least that the lack of one doesn't somehow dictate the ethics and obligations of our field.
deleted 13y ago
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HaloZero 13y ago
It sounds like Harvey Mudd's program improves female enrollment but it's just seems like a good idea in general The quick program for Harvey Mudd seems to be 1) Make the problems more practical in application (ie controlling a robot, modelling a disease) 2) Giving students choices in what problems they are interested in 3) Segmenting students according to skill set, thus putting people who have been programming in another course that will match their pace better and allowing students who are more new to have their own pace.
- deleted 13y ago
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- Patrick_Devine 13y ago
  I think Harvey Mudd's approach is fantastic. I love the idea of two separate tracks for getting people to code. It allows people to take an academic risk which they normally wouldn't be able to take for fear of destroying their GPA. I think this is a fundamental problem with STEM programs in general. Why have grades and tracks at all? The important thing is to learn the material, and not what grade you got on a test at some arbitrary point in time. This is what is so brilliant about MOOCs like Khan Academy. No grades, and you can repeat the material until you know it.
  - zhemao 13y ago
    The problem with MOOCs is that they have a pretty low retention rate. Sure you can repeat the material until you know it, but how many people actually will? The benefit of having a physical class is that you can turn to the professor or TAs for help if you're having trouble. It's also more difficult to completely fall behind because there are milestones in place (tests, assignments, projects, etc.). This isn't to say that MOOCs don't have their place, but they are not a replacement for the traditional classroom model.
    - Patrick_Devine 13y ago
      Yes, that's definitely a problem, particularly the way most classes on services like Udacity are done. You can't just videotape the lectures and translate the homework/quizzes into a MOOC and expect that it's going to be compelling. Khan Academy definitely gets this right where other MOOCs really fail. The quizzes are actually quite engaging and the 'gamified' point giving, despite being incredibly cheesy, really seems to work. I agree that there is no replacement for TAs and the professor, and I think that's where a lot of confusion about MOOCs stems from. This is where 'flip' teaching comes about. Instead of wasting time doing daily lesson planning and grading papers, the TAs and the professor spend their time helping students out who are having trouble. The students can watch/re-watch pre-recorded lectures and then take quizzes during class time which can be graded by the computer.
danso 13y ago
One of that impresses me, and kind of amuses me, is how PG will talk these issues out, even though the danger of being misquoted or misinterpreted is much higher than the chances of being appreciated, especially for someone in his position. The phrase "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers?", as a standalone statement, is ripe for ripping apart. But I think in its context, it only expresses his frustration at the problem, which is much, much better than the apathy expressed by others. It's a problem with much more societal and institutional inertia behind it than just VC men looking down on female entrepreneurs, or even tech companies being discriminatory. He's absolutely right to say that the focus should be on early education, and if anyone knows the best way (on a timetable that would satisfy current observers) to implement that, then they should speak up. In terms of current harmful perceptions that can be stamped out in the short-term...I think the belief that females aren't genetically cut out to be programmers is one. The "world's first computer programmer" was a woman and COBOL, of course, was invented by Grace Hopper. These women were pioneers in early computing at a time when women were still struggling to be recognized as equal citizens. To argue that women can't make it as hackers is like arguing, post-Jackie Robinson, that blacks can't develop professional baseball skills. The lack of women computer scientists and programmers today more likely point to institutional/cultural problems rather than genetic ones.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Once again: after establishing bona fides by saying "fuck Vallywag and everything they stand for", I feel like I need to say that Graham wasn't hugely distorted. He was asked whether YC discriminates against women. The obvious subtext of that question is that there's a large imbalance between men & women among YC founders. He could have said "no, we don't discriminate; I don't know why the imbalance among YC founders exist or exactly how to correct it, but here are some reasons I don't think our process is what creates it". He does not say that. Instead, he composes a small essay about the roots of gender imbalance in the industry off the top of his head, and that impromptu essay manages to reinforce a lot of young- white- male privilege. "If women were going to be good coders", he seems to a reasonable reader to be saying, "they would have found coding on their own". But that's not true: it conflates affinity and aptitude with opportunity and support. It also conflates "living and breathing technology" with "ability to masterfully execute a role"; the correlation between living the life and ability to execute is dubious at best. It does not help that Paul Graham has said other things in the past that also reinforce privilege. "Privilege" is a dirty word on HN (I guess it makes me some kind of "nth wave feminist" to use it), but it isn't an indictment. Nobody is saying privilege needs to be rooted out and eliminated. How could you ever do that, anyways? The point is not to brand young white dudes with the word, but simply to recognize that it exists, and be wary about attitudes that reinforce it and allow it to feed on itself. That's the concern I have with the interview The Information published.
Roboprog 13y ago
My daughter doesn't code, but she and another friend of hers do a lot of work to find, get and set up game emulators and related wares. Motivated to do light "sys admin" work, but not coding, I guess.
- ZoFreX 13y ago
  Does they play Megadrive games? If so I know a really cool nerdy trick: Sonic & Knuckles was a pretty awesome Sonic installment for the Megadrive that had a really weird cartridge. On top, it had a flip-open cartridge slot... You could plug in Sonic 2 or Sonic 3 to play through those previously existing games with the Knuckles character. Awesome! So how do you play the games like that on your emulator? Turns out it's really simple: > cat snk.bin sonic3.bin > sonic3nk.bin Or on Windows, as I first learnt it (I had no idea what the command actually did back then, it was magic to me): > copy /b snk.bin + sonic3.bin sonic3nk.bin Suddenly I have a brand new game to play! How it works: When you plug another cartridge into the top of Sonic & Knuckles the console sees both games combined as a contiguous block of memory, which is equivalent to concatenating together the binary dumps of the cartridges. More details about this are available on this slightly horrific but very thorough webpage: http://www.emulationzone.org/projects/s&k/thesis.htm http://www.emulationzone.org/projects/s&k/thesis.htm
  - thearn4 13y ago
    Very cool - thanks for sharing!
- ceol 13y ago
  Nurture that. It's how a lot of developers get started: by tinkering and tooling.
- jlees 13y ago
  I got into programming by figuring out how to cheat at games when I was small; another common route is writing mods/addons (which I also did, later on). Don't knock the instincts even though it's not writing code!
sbt 13y ago
I hope PG doesn't get too frightened by the press from this and stops being his usual honest plainspoken self. We need more people like him trying to portray an accurate map of the territory, rather than being afraid of how quotes may be spun by cheap journalists.
- philwelch 13y ago
  If he takes his own advice[1], he'd be hard pressed to say anything at all. When people furiously accuse you of misogyny for not repeating the party line, there's no good faith discussion possible. [1] http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html
  - crassus 13y ago
    "Party line" is an interesting choice of words. There's definitely some unhealthy groupthink going on that's gaining in power. It's never been easier to have something said taken out of context and have your reputation dragged through the mud by people who are professional social justice warriors and not much else (I doubt Nitasha Tiku could program "hello world") Maybe it's due to the rise of twitter and the ease of taking things out of context. It seems to fuel tabloid "journalists" like Sam Biddle who sit around on twitter all day, looking for tweets that he can read X-ism into. The sad thing is that if Paul Graham were an employee of a tech company, he'd probably be fired by now[1]. The room for thought and discussion is much smaller than it used to be, even though we have more tools for self-expression than ever before. Moldbug saw this happening and he decided that "America is a Communist Country". I think that's a bit strong, but I agree that at least the progressive half of the country is converging on a narrow, extreme Social Justice ideology. First they came for the dongle jokers, and I did not speak, because I was not a dongle joker... [1] http://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-badgered-pressured-and-purged/ http://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-badg...
    - yetanotherphd 13y ago
      Indeed, and its ironic that the same people who seek to expose anyone who says something un-PC, are so quick to accuse anyone who criticizes their movement of harassment.
athesyn 13y ago
> There is a lot of systemic bias in the system against young women taking this kind of direction with their studies and their career. I understand there is cultural bias, but systemic? There are more women attending and graduating college than men, they're more economically prosperous in their early twenties as well.[1] [1]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/27/young-women-earning-more-men http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/27/young-w...
- tptacek 13y ago
  Yes, because they are very well represented in the traditional professions: law, accounting, and medicine. They are not well represented in computer software. That's what we're talking about. Go to a crypto conference sometime. If, like me, you hail from computer software and not from academic cryptography and mathematics, you will probably be surprised at how much better women are represented there than in software. The technology of cryptography is more demanding than computer software, but very similar in spirit. What is it about the field of computer software development that keeps so many women out? I suspect some of it has to do with the way we take observations about what successful developers have looked like in the past --- young white dudes --- and create fast paths for those people. People who "fit the mold" have an easier time making progress in our field. People who don't fit the mold have to contend with more interrogation, more doubt, and slower progress. It's true of other minorities (relative to software development demographics) as well, particularly older people.
  - Sssnake 13y ago
    >They are not well represented in computer software Are they "well represented" in any skilled trade? Why is this one specific skilled trade such a unique cause for concern and inventing crazy reasons to blame the people in the trade?
    - jdunck 13y ago
      Because software is eating the world. Because entrepreneurship creates jobs. Because software is the new means of production. Because people different than you have problems which are different than yours. Because dog-fooding is a great way to make something people want. Lots more reasons, but chew on those.
lkrubner 13y ago
One fascinating aspect of this is how bad the post 1990 startup culture has been for women. There was something about those big, boring corporations of the 1970s and 1980s that actually gave female hackers more acceptance than what startups have offered. You can see female interest in programming change in the charts on these pages: http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-computer-science-visual-trendline http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-comput... Note that those graphs show raw numbers, not a percentage of the population -- if you adjust for the growing population, female graduation rates in computer science peak in the 1980s. As it says in the text: "As a share of all CS bachelor's degrees granted that year, females had slipped almost 10 points, from 37% in 1984/1985 to 27% in 2003." A family anecdote: my mom was working on her Phd in urban planning back in the 1970s and her advisor said to her "You know, in the future, many of these issues of traffic and resource allocation will be resolved through computer simulations, so you should learn to program." My mom thought that was a good idea so she took some classes and learned basic programming. She does not recall feeling like an outsider in those classes: the computer field was still new and felt wide open. Nowadays a lot of startups talk about the need for "culture fit". This tends to limit the diversity of the gender and race and class of who is hired. For contrast, consider people like Evelyn Boyd Granville, and her acceptance at IBM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Boyd_Granville http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Boyd_Granville Here on Hacker News we also discussed the story that Raganwald posted, about another black woman at IBM, though that article is now offline: http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story If IBM applied a filter of "culture fit" then these women would not have been hired. But IBM, and many of the big corporations in the USA, followed very liberal policies that promoted diversity in the work place. There were some startups from the 1950s and 1960s that broke new ground in terms of diversity. Ray Kroc built up a small startup called McDonalds and in a quiet way he made feminist history in his treatment of June Martino. She was initially hired as the bookkeeper, but she was later entrusted with vast responsibilities and finally, in 1965, when McDonalds went public, she was given shares in the company, exactly like any other cofounder of a startup. This was apparently the first time in history that a woman was treated as a real cofounder and given stock. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Martino http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Martino If you look at the numbers, it seems clear that the emergence of the tech-based startup scene, in the 1990s, changed things for women. The startups have not emphasized hiring diversity. The startups tend to emphasize culture fit, and they were doing so even before that phrase came into existence. Why this should be, I am not sure. There have been startups in the past that have emphasized diversity in hiring, so I am not clear why the current generation of startups cannot do so. But what is clear is that it is not a priority for them. The big and boring corporations of the past did a better job of creating spaces for women in tech. Edit to add: to avoid being overly innocent, we should note how much the talk of "culture" is sometimes a smokescreen to hide power dynamics. Shanley Kane said "In Silicon Valley, and the tech industry in general, a lot of people were giving these talks about what their culture was and it was really superficial and focused on the privileged aspects of the company like free food and massages." Here on Hacker News we have already discussed the post "Google's 'free food' is not free" but it is worth remembering how much the talk about "culture" is just a negotiating tactic. http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/
gfodor 13y ago
I have to thank Valleywag for doing me the favor of helping me prune people who lack reading comprehension from twitter. I'm still kind of amazed how so many people un-ironically cited valleywag in their tweets. It's pretty obvious what pg was saying in this particular "smoking gun" quote: that figuring out a way to get more girls interested in programming at 13 is an incredibly important and hard problem. The willingness for people to quickly swallow and parrot a 1-dimensional narrative of "Paul Graham, sexist pig" based upon a few quotes taken out of context in a highly edited, 3rd hand rage-blog by fucking Vallywag is the type of behavior I expect from political spinmeister hacks trotted out on the 24 hour news channels, not from smart people who I respect.
- owenwil 13y ago
  Right, but when he had a chance to comment again to defend his statements, he instead went after the angle of saving himself rather than addressing the issue at the core. He could have talked about the work he's doing to help girls learn to code. He could have talked about others' work to help girls learn code. He could have talked about how he is not biased towards men. Instead, he just attacked journalists in general and didn't bother to address the root problem. It's all about saving oneself.
  - gfodor 13y ago
    Where did this happen? This article is a blog by Fred Wilson.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    The root problem is that when he tried talking about the root problem, his words were taken out of context and used against him. There's no way to win with character assassins and tabloids, and calling them out as people who don't discuss issues in good faith is the best you can do.
- reitzensteinm 13y ago
  I agree, and it strikes me as ironic the massive tidal wave of hate that arises whenever anyone violates a What You Can't Say in our industry. I understand the reasons for it in general, and sometimes it's even deserved (eg confirmed cases of sexual harassment at conferences). But it seems to me to be directly counter productive to the stated goals. We want to be more accepting and open as an industry? How about having some fucking maturity!? How about calmly discussing ideas with people that mean well? Even if they're wrong? Even Hacker News, once the bastion of calm, rational discussion, has devolved into a bar room brawl whenever gender issues are talked about. Hundreds of posts to a topic, many really fucking mean and almost all black and white strawman bullshit, within an hour before it's manually killed off by a moderator. There are plenty of smart, competent women (and men) in college who have the pick of their field. My sister was one. They could easily learn to code (or already do) and come here. But if we act like children at a drop of a hat, why on earth would they want to?
Alex3917 13y ago
Apparently the definition of sexism is now just not telling women what they want to hear. The vast majority of the criticism of pg's answer that I saw wasn't even claiming that he was wrong, but just calling him sexist because his answer wasn't masturbatory enough. C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840377
- Sssnake 13y ago
  People lose their jobs for this kind of shit, it is ridiculous.
- reinhardt 13y ago
  Pretty much. The definition of sexism also involves endless discussions about the almost last job category still ruled by the evil patriarchy - computer engineers - among the 15 projected to grow the most over the next decade [1]. For the record, the only other male dominated job category is janitors but I somehow doubt it faces similar outrage by the gender equality knight templars. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-...
  - Alex3917 13y ago
    For what it's worth, that statistic isn't actually true. While computer engineers may be expected to be one of the fastest growing employment categories by percent, the number of computer engineers are relatively tiny. So in fact way more jobs are going to be added in careers that are projected to have only a couple percent growth. By absolute numbers, computer engineers aren't even in the top 30 careers for anticipated growth. C.f. page 18: http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/Underemployed%20Report%202.pdf http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/Underemploy...
  - velis_vel 13y ago
    > For the record, the only other male dominated job category is janitors but I somehow doubt it faces similar outrage by the gender equality knight templars. I'm really curious where you got this information because it doesn't agree with anything else I've read. Among other things, about 75% of US doctors are male[1]. [1] http://www.hschange.com/CONTENT/1078/ http://www.hschange.com/CONTENT/1078/
newnewnew 13y ago
I don't think we've come anywhere close to rejecting the hypothesis of some kind of innate personality and ability differences between male and female. Men are higher represented in diseases like autism, which involve lower social functioning/higher affinity for the abstract. Men score higher on Math SAT[1], despite the school system being tilted more and more in favor of female. More women than men graduate from college and women have flooded into traditionally male majors in the sciences. There are plenty of female biologists and doctors. But they have not penetrated the most mathy majors, like engineering or Math itself. Maybe men and women aren't interchangeable cogs, and some combination of difference in interest and average ability will always mean that the way to get females into your tech company is by having a big non-software department. [1] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-huge-gender-math-gap-persists-with-a-33-point-advantage-for-high-school-boys/ http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...
11thEarlOfMar 13y ago
This is interesting: Of the 100 top academic authors in computer science today, per Microsoft, 96 are male: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=2&topDomainID=2&subDomainID=0 http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=2... The owner of this site appears to be a woman. Again, 20 males: http://www.bestcomputersciencedegrees.com/author/2admin/ http://www.bestcomputersciencedegrees.com/author/2admin/ And there is a preponderance of white males in the annals of computer history: http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm Even among software professionals, there is divergence in the types of roles women take vs. men. Search LinkedIn (3rd & everyone else) for SQA, and you get about 25% women. Search "Full Stack" and you get about 10% women. Is this really YC's problem to solve?
- ZoFreX 13y ago
  > Is this really YC's problem to solve? I think it's up to everyone to do their part. This problem, like all big problems, is made up of lots of little problems.
  - 11thEarlOfMar 13y ago
    I don't think there is much they can do. A similar review of Human Resources professionals, also courtesy LinkedIn, shows about 70% are women. In another report, in 2013, 41% of college seniors that elected majors in Physical Science were women. Yet, only 18% of those who chose computer science or engineering were women. It seems they'd be equally capable in chemistry and physics as in computer science and engineer. But their major choices indicate it is not about ability and something else is going on: http://www.directemployers.org/2012/08/16/the-college-class-of-2013-current-demographics/ http://www.directemployers.org/2012/08/16/the-college-class-... I believe that the whole dust up is a matter of gender-based difference in interests. Nothing more, and not a real problem. Which is why YC is scratching their heads about how to solve it.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
      How does your "gender-based difference in interests" explain the last thirty years of (proportional) decline in women majoring in CS?
dadagaaa 13y ago
What company has Fred Wilson ever started?
pnathan 13y ago
In tech, saying anything about gender is an opportunity to be lambasted vigorously. But I think I can contribute something. Having read what I could over the years on the academic side of "women in tech" (i.e., academic research studying the matter, rather than opinion pieces), the consensus seems to be that the early teens are the time where the decision is taken to move away (or not) from STEM fields. That is part of why the Girls Who Code initiative & others like it is such a big deal. There are a lot of different factors and stereotypes playing into the decision to exit STEM tracks, but among them are - "unpleasant male geeks", "programmers work alone", "girls don't need to know math", "boys figure things out" and so forth. (Clearly these are a subset of examples, and also clearly not all of these are 100% influential for any particular person, place, time). So the stereotypical 13 y/o girl and her interest in STEM is actually the target of a lot of research and policy efforts. There's also a self-reinforcing aspect to this: heavily gender-coded places aren't typically presenting a welcome to people of the other gender. I read a academic paper on this in the last several years, but can't recall the experiment in detail or the citation. The implication is that a workspace festooned with seriously masculine widgets often tells many women that, "hey, man cave here. not so welcome". For the interested person, the academic experiments are usually well done and their results, while not always surprising, clearly quantify certain sexist aspects in the tech world.
- ama729 13y ago
  If you have some links to the studies you have read, I would be really interested to read them. Thank you
  - pnathan 13y ago
    I apologize, I do not. I read widely and generally do not maintain an annotated bibliography of what I read. Perhaps I should.
    - girvo 13y ago
      I try to, surprisingly it's quite useful even outside of this small use-case. Evernote or OneNotes clipping functionality is perfect for it. Give it a try, even if only for a few weeks, it's super useful IMO!
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overgard 13y ago
When I hear about this being a cultural thing, an important aspect people leave out is that men aren't exactly encouraged to be coders either. Writing code has pretty much no social cred until you're out of school, and pretty much automatically gets you tagged as a nerd. No coder I know started coding because it was cool, they just sort of enjoyed it and accepted the social consequences. I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses. Same goes for elementary school teachers. Why is that? Just because there's a gender imbalance doesn't necessarily mean anyone is keeping anyone out. And if a few insensitive comments can keep you from doing what you want to do in life, maybe that's something you have to deal with -- there's always going to be haters no matter what you want to do.
- azakai 13y ago
  > I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses. Perhaps because you mostly read tech news sites, and not nursing news sites. This stuff (in both tech and nursing) rarely reaches the mainstream news sources, so people not involved in the industry generally are unaware of it. Definitely it is well known that there is a shortage of men in nursing as well as in clinical psychology for example, and many in those industries think their industries would be better off with more men, and make efforts to change things. Some random links: https://asunews.asu.edu/20121130_meninnursing https://asunews.asu.edu/20121130_meninnursing http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html?p... I have a background in psychology, so I know less about the nursing situation, but in psychology it's definitely a topic that comes up. Which is not surprising, the gender disparity is very large: When I was an undergrad, I was in a small minority, somewhere in 10-20%, and it can be an odd feeling.
  - ceol 13y ago
    Psychology is still very male-dominated, at least in terms of employers, teachers, and researchers — i.e. people in power in the industry.
fiatmoney 13y ago
No one seems to talk about where these girls are being pulled from, as if labor shifts don't have two sides. What often seems to happen in initiatives like this is that all the sectors which decide they need higher female participation end up fighting over the same pool of "high-achieving" (high IQ, upper class, family connections) individuals. "We need to shift women from MBA programs into comp sci master's programs" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
- crassus 13y ago
  Keep in mind, too, that female unemployment is lower than male unemployment. Your average female in the labor force has more options than your average male.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
    "eh" The rates looked to be tracking pretty closely until the housing bubble burst: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/womens-unemployment-surpasses-mens/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/womens-unemploy...
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Keep in mind, too, that female unemployment is lower than male unemployment. Your average female in the labor force has more options than your average male. A society which views it as more acceptable for women to opt-out of the labor force may distort this: when employment becomes less scarce, women may be more likely to opt-out of the labor force -- since unemployment measures (actively looking for work) / (employed + actively looking for work), people dropping out of the active labor force when out of work shows up as lower unemployment, but it doesn't mean "more options" for those in the labor force.
    - erichocean 13y ago
      when employment becomes less scarce, women may be more likely to opt-out of the labor force We've been in that situation for 5 years in the US. What you're describing did not happen—declines in labor participation among men still exceed women by a significant amount. One explanation I've heard is that since women earn less, but do "the same" work, it's cheaper to keep them on vs. men. I have no idea if that's correct or not, or if it is, explains the difference.
NAFV_P 13y ago
If you want to get girls coding, get Windows OSes out of schools. They kill interest in computers before you have time to get interested in them.
- hesselink 13y ago
  What a weird comment. How would this be worse for girls than for boys?
  - NAFV_P 13y ago
    > What a weird comment. How would this be worse for girls than for boys? I didn't say it was worse. I simply posted it because nobody else has mentioned it. Teaching computing these days is seen as a joke, much like learning to code.
yetanotherphd 13y ago
One thing that came out of the discussion in the last article on this topic, was the people who support this kind of affirmative action were very interested in hearing from HN posters who opposed it (especially men), so they could understand what our reasons were, and a respectful discussion could be had. In response to this request, here is my opinion on the matter. In fact, I think there is truth to what both sides say. On the pro AA side, it is true that women probably feel unwelcome in the tech industry. Even when men don't do anything consciously to exclude women, programming culture revolves around certain attitudes and mindsets that are associated with young men in our culture. E.g. being interested in science fiction, being obsessive about one's work and hobbies, . None of these things are strictly related to programming, and an excessive focus on them makes it harder for women (and minorities) to enter the field. The fact that male programmers are attracted to the minority of female programmers doesn't help with this feeling of unwelcomeness, in fact it adds to the awkwardness (although I think that most of this is completely innocent and could not be called harassment, and actual harassment is rarer in our industry than others). On the anti-AA side, I think that women, due to reverse-discrimination and old fashion chivalry, are objectively advantaged in every field. Furthermore, some things that would seem to advantage men like long hours, stressful work, and being judged on results, are not bad or discriminatory in themselves. But they will tend to favor men over women because our society provides greater incentives for men to obtain money and positions of power. When people talk about work life balance, what they really mean is that the industry should stop providing people with an opportunity to advance their career by putting in extra time and effort. Thank you for hearing my opinions on the issue, and I hope more people who oppose AA will answer the call to explain their viewpoints.
icecreampain 13y ago
Another article about feminist affirmate action, giving women free rides for shit they don't care about. Affirmative action is discrimination that takes away from qualified folk and gives to people who are incompetent. Why people see AA as acceptable is beyond me. And why do feminists only want access to clean, easy, well-paying jobs? Why do I never hear them wanting AA for mining jobs? Or picking up trash? Or bricklaying? It's always coding, engineering, company boards, politics, cops (but always waiting for male backup), etc. Fuck feminism. What this shit is doing is making people like me, who have been coding since before elementary school, extremely bitter. Not for my own sake, for I already have a good IT-job, but for the sake of those quiet kids. The quiet kids who aren't social enough to build large networks of friends who'll help them get IT-jobs. The quiet kids that spend all of their time in front of the computer, learning shit on their own instead of learning what they're taught. The quiet kids that need tons of luck to get a hold of jobs that they're competent for but overlooked from because some dude who is friendly and outgoing makes a far better impression during the interview - no matter their competency level. I was one of the quiet kids. When I was young there was no sexual discrimination because coding was still nerdy and shitty and not very highly regarded, but now it's different. Now it IS cool to code, and I can't fucking stand to see incompetent, uninterested people getting hired / promoted before those who have higher technical competency. That's discrimination no matter how you look at it. If girls were equally competent as guys then discrimination would not be necessary because it would be immediately obvious that everybody is competing on the same level, right right right?
alixaxel 13y ago
And..? I would be much more interested if the title was "Cats Who Code".
codex 13y ago
In a far off land, bounceyball was the national sport. A funny cross between basketball and volleyball, it was hugely popular, and to be a professional player was considered the most prestigious occupation. A minor scandal erupted when was noted that there were few women in the co-ed national league, and a huge about of effort was made to recruit female players. Every family wanted the prestige, fame, and fortune that came with having a daughter in the league. Male players wanted more females playing so it didn't feel like a damn sausagefest all the time, and to help with dating (for some odd reason, most male bounceyball players were surprisingly unattractive). Eventually it was suggested that the problem lay upstream, so major efforts were made to recruit teenage girls for the middle and high school leagues, which were also coed. However, for some reason this attempt also failed. Finally, an anonymous poster on the Internet noted that, as a broad generalization, taller bounceyball players were more suited to the game, scoring more points. Perhaps a gender difference in height was to blame, discouraging female players and hurting them in the draft. The poster tracked down these differences in height to a disparity in average male and female birth weights, and suggested that perhaps a cocktail of experimental prenatal hormones (primarily testosterone), continued until age 15, would do the trick. The anonymous poster was promptly downvoted and the discussion turned to topics of sexism, discrimination, and cultural bias in the bounceyball leagues. Various horror stories were recounted by female bounceyball players and a new round of self-flagellation began among those in the industry.
- philangist 13y ago
  I don't necessarily agree with this metaphor, but it was entertaining and a fresh approach to the girls in tech problem. I especially thought 'Male players wanted more females playing so it didn't feel like a damn sausagefest all the time, and to help with dating' was hilarious. Anyway, my major problem with your assertion is that we know that the number of female bouncyballers has been going down significantly over the last few decades. It's not as if women have gotten significantly shorter, or men have gotten significantly taller in that time period, so the difference in participation rates can't be explained entirely with biology.
  - yetanotherphd 13y ago
robomartin 13y ago
> Paul asks "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers?" (My comment, repeated from the other similar thread that got go superseded by this one) The problem of getting anyone, young or adult, interested in a subject --any subject-- isn't one with a simple solution. Technical subjects have the added difficulty that they require you to use your brain in non-trivial ways. Given equal exposure to the subject matter, I fail to see how a male or female subject would react differently to the idea of learning that subject. This, of course, assuming that both the male and female subjects got to that moment in time with a similar educational and perhaps even cultural frame of reference. If a mother only ever bought a little girl frilly pink and shiny things, well, it is probably unlikely that as a teenage girl or an adult woman she would even remotely show interest in learning more technical subjects. She will probably be a dancer and go into the arts or some other less "brainy" occupation. That's not to say that there aren't exceptions to this, but they are probably few and far between. The same is true of boys. If they are brought-up in front of a playstation, shooting at things, playing sports, and well outside of more academically focused areas he will probably grow up to be a jock and then move on to careers that do well when you use half your brain. Hell, he might even go into sales! Things are vastly different if you feed your kids a constant diet of what they should be learning in order to operate at a different level when they are older. My teenage son finished MIT's CS 6.00.1x course just a few weeks ago. That did not happen magically. That was a lot of work. For me and for him! And that also required a lot of work to get to the point where he could even be shoved into that end of the pool. My little girl is too young to think about formal learning of these kinds of subject, but this year she got introduced to Lego robotics and is starting to like it. Yet, the situation is exactly the same: It requires a ton of time and dedication on my part --as the designated nerd at home-- to keep her exposed to such subjects and make it fun. I have to get silly while teaching something useful. I have to figure out ways to make robotics fun, silly, exciting and something she wants to do. We don't buy lots of silly frilly things for her. That said, I have to tell you, it is hard to fight both genetics and exposure to such things through her peers. I guess my message is that parents needs to be very engaged and active in bringing up a child into the sciences and technology. It will not happen by osmosis. And, I really don't think gender makes a huge difference. It might change the approach, but I don't think it is the primary determinant of success or failure. One way I've explained this in the past to friends who marvel at what my kids are doing is that this is like a Formula 1 car drafting a car in front of them. You need to drive well and use a lot of effort to get close enough to be within the zone where drafting happens. Up until that point you are using a lot more energy to chase the car in front of you. Once you get into the drafting zone you need less power to maintain the same speed. Yet, you still need that foot solidly planted on the accelerator. With kids you have to push, push, push. I have navigated through really frustrating moments when I've gotten angry because I couldn't understand why he (my oldest son) didn't just grab that book I bought for him and launched himself into software development nirvana. Of course, I always reflected upon these things and never externalized them --not much of a motivator to yell and scream at your kid about learning something-- and realized that (a) he is still young and (b) we are not in the "draft zone" yet. It'll take a lot more effort --and this is different from kid to kid-- to get him into the "draft zone". Once we reach that zone it will require a lot less energy on my part and, if interested, he will ultimately need virtually no support from me. This is where I look at some of the things being said about STEM education and can't help but think we are just throwing money into a big bonfire. You can't force people into learning anything. A lot of my kid's friends are, well, jocks or exhibit no interest in anything at all. They are navigating through school with no guidance or encouragement in any direction whatsoever. You can't just throw money at that and expect things to change. For most kids it requires far more work than can be done during the time they are at school. Yes, of course, there are a few kids in every sample group that need almost zero work. These kids get hooked on a subject like programming and just go, go , go. Most kids are not like that. Just like most successful businesses did not get launched with a long coding session over a weekend while eating popcorn. Going back to my little girl, she is not seriously exposed to Lego robotics. In fact, our living room table is an official FLL table with the official field mat and everything. Yes, we are serious about this. I'd rather have a learning environment in my living room than a fancy dinning room table. As far as why there aren't more women in tech today. I don't have the answer for that. I only know that when I was a teenager girls mostly did different stuff. Not because they were being forced away from tech, they simply showed no interest in what we were doing. My guess is that it all came from home. So, as our culture changes so will that aspect of things. Evolution?
jayhuang 13y ago
A place I worked at previously had a manager who managed 2 small teams. One that did analytics, and another that did media/communications, for a total of about 10 people. On my first week of work, we had a meeting and in the middle of some discussion, he literally said "girls are better than guys. If I could, I would hire only girls". No specific reason, just girls are better than guys (he had 3 daughters though, so I don't know if that was the reason). It still blows my mind to this day that he said that out loud. At one point we had a female intern who was on a 8 month work term. 3 months into her workterm, the manager offered her a full-time position, not contingent on her graduation (she was in 3rd year and planned to return to complete school). Now I'm not anyone to judge, but I will say her performance wasn't particularly impressive, especially compared to other interns on the team, one of who (male) had already graduated, interned for a total of 20 months, and took on plenty of duties. 5 months into the workterm, she ended up wiping a ton of live data of a fairly important legacy application, effectively costing the company a few hundred k. A year later she's working there full-time as expected, but from what I understand, she didn't end up graduating anyways. The male intern worked on that team for 13ish months, then finally got full-time through a different team. All I will say is that this company is one of the tech giants. I agree we need more females in the field, but like many other people have mentioned, lowering the hiring bar in an intentional effort to hire a female hacker isn't very helpful. The problem is we're not producing enough qualified women, and overcompensating to fix that is not a good long term solution. There are plenty of very talented female hackers, and we do need them, but we also need to fix the root of the problem, and not intentionally skewing hiring to meet level of acceptable gender diversity. Women in the field also face other challenges, such as not being as vocal as males when it comes to promotions/raises, so it's common for them to have lower salaries than their male counterparts. There are lots of issues females face in this field, but let's look at fixing the root cause.
davidf18 13y ago
I am a male who started programming in my early teens on large computers at a major tech university along with other boys who were passionate about programming computers (and working on bicycles, in garages, etc.). We tried to get girls interested but they were not interested in programming computers, they had other interests which is alright. You do not need computer science course to start programming. What you need is a passion and what is very helpful is the assistance of someone who can help you with your questions. 75% of the graduates with PhDs in psychology are women and the fields of fashion and ballet/dance are dominated by women by you never hear calls for more males to enter these fields. IMHO, computer programming, like medicine are fields that one should not enter unless they have a passion for the field. Autism research Simon Baron-Cohen speaks of the differences between male and female brains. Boys are 8 times more likely to be autistic than girls. Autism (and the related Aspergers) and very good at systemitizing but bad at empathisizing. Females are more likely to be empathizers than males. Of course there is overlap and some women are better at sytemitizing than some men and some men are better at empathizing than some women, but that 8:1 difference in Autism in boys over girls probably is an indication of the imbalance of boys over girls who are passionate about programming computers. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizing_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizing... These are three on-line tests from Baron-Cohen that help determine your EQ and SQ (empathizing quotient and systemitizing quotient). http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/faces/eyestest.aspx http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/faces/eyestest.aspx http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/empathyquotient/empathyquotient.aspx http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/empathyquotient/empathyquoti... http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/systemizingquotient/systemizingquotient.aspx http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/systemizingquotient/systemiz...
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  is the eye test baiting me?! INSERT INTO EyesTest VALUES('al', 'Male', 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 2, 1, 0, 3, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 2, 0, 3, 2, 2, 3, 0, 1, 1, 0, 3, 2, 3, 2, 22, '207.216.200.118', '2013-12-30 17:22:41') I bet you they've long since lost their database.
jlees 13y ago
I'd like to call attention to this part of Fred's post which many of the sub-threads appear to have overlooked: Instead of turning Paul's comments into a blogosphere shitstorm, maybe we would all be better off staring the issue in the face and thinking about how each of us could help make a difference on this issue How would you help a 13-year-old -- of either gender? -- get interested in programming? Raspberry Pi? PyGame? Lego FIRST robotics? How can some of these initiatives be spread more widely to those who maybe don't have supportive family or communities to encourage their nerdy, high-school-pariah interest in tech?
midas007 13y ago
Mandatory plug for: Free Ruby on Rails workshops [sf] for women and their friends http://sfrubyworkshops.com/ http://sfrubyworkshops.com/ It's run by the same folks that run the SF Ruby meetup (the huge one)... they're neat, chill folks.
coldtea 13y ago
>There was something about those big, boring corporations of the 1970s and 1980s that actually gave female hackers more acceptance than what startups have offered. Yes: a 9-5 job mentality and a lack of emphasis on nerdy type hackers doing their thing.
lauradhamilton 13y ago
I don't understand all this excitement about the magical age of 13. Personally, I've never stopped learning--whether it's analytics, business, software development, or machine learning. I don't think it's any harder for me to learn stuff now at 28 than it was when I was 13. If anything, it's easier, because I have a much wider baseline of knowledge that I can use to reference things. For example, I learned set theory in high school => I can apply that to relational databases today. I do know some people, both men and women, that sort of stopped learning new stuff in their twenties, and now they're pretty much stuck. They can't keep up with technology changes (e.g., how does the router work) and they don't have a good baseline for learning new stuff. Nor the will.

Girls Who Code

226 points by yurisagalov 13y ago

PureApeshit 13y ago

go girls! :D

ps4fanboy 13y ago
Girl Power <3 <3

kn0thing 13y ago

What great timing. BTW, thanks to all of you who backed my crowdtilt to bring BlackGirlsCode to Brooklyn! https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/no-sleep-till-brooklyn-for-black-girls-code-ny https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/no-sleep-till-brooklyn-f...

muglug 13y ago
Awesome. Thanks for letting me know about this campaign! Best wishes, Brooklyn person.
loomio 13y ago
I am so, so glad to see a much more high quality discussion (thanks in large part to lkrubner's insightful top comment) going on here today than the travesty that accompanied your post about Black Girls Code. The reactions that provoked made me feel sick. I guess the important think is your campaign is being supported and funded! But It's always a shock to see the dark side of this community revealed so starkly.

rokhayakebe 13y ago

I am a man. These initiatives will simply not work. Imagine "Men Nurse." Many women SIMPLY do not code for the same reason many men do not code. Most of us were not exposed to the science as kids, hence step 1 is to make Programming mandatory. Note I say programming and not C.S.. I am an amateur programmer and I can say wit confidence that this is as fundamental as basic arithmetic. Full stop. I frankly wish they shut down "Girls Who Code" entirely and all the likes. Instead we can put our efforts into teaching everyone to code: "We Code." Because once someone does something as simple as print (2+2)-(3-2) or print $first_name + $last_name or (my favorite) <html><h1>The Website of Me</h1><p>My name is Joanna. This is my first web page.<img src='..'></p></html>, once they do this, there is simply no going back for them.

tptacek 13y ago
There are tons of male nurses. 'iamelgringo, a former top contributor here, is an ER nurse. Back of the envelope: There are ~24,000,000 people aged 18-24 in the US. Assume half are female: there are ~12,000,000 "girls who might code" in the US. Of these, 12.6% are African American. There are ~1,440,00 "black girls who might code" in the US. There are ~400,000 people who live in Tulsa. There have probably been several "Tulsa Codes!" events in the past couple years, but either way just stipulate that it could happen. A "Tulsa Codes!" event addresses just 400,000 people. For logistical and practical reasons, that event locks out an overwhelmingly huge number of potential beneficiaries. But nobody has a problem with "Tulsa Codes!". Threads aren't full of people ranting about "third wave feminism" when they do.
- city41 13y ago
  9.6% of all RNs are male [0] Why is there not a male nurse initiative? Or male elementary teacher initiative[1]? I have to admit, I am strongly against things like "Girls who code". If there truly are issues in our culture that prevent girls from looking into coding, then absolutely let's get rid of those as best we can. But a girl can look into and explore coding just as easily as a boy can. There's really nothing stopping them. I have a few male nurse friends too. Nothing stopped them either, they simply found nursing interesting and pursued it. There might simply be fewer female coders because they tend to not be interested in this profession, same as male nurses. [0] -- http://www.minoritynurse.com/minority-nursing-statistics http://www.minoritynurse.com/minority-nursing-statistics [1] -- http://www.menteach.org/resources/data_about_men_teachers http://www.menteach.org/resources/data_about_men_teachers
  - smtddr 13y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6530237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6530237
  - gfodor 13y ago
    I don't know why you're getting downvoted. The question you ask is a good one, though you are jumping to some conclusions. I think it may very well be that there should be a "male nurse initiative", or at least that the lack of one doesn't somehow dictate the ethics and obligations of our field.

deleted 13y ago

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HaloZero 13y ago

It sounds like Harvey Mudd's program improves female enrollment but it's just seems like a good idea in general The quick program for Harvey Mudd seems to be 1) Make the problems more practical in application (ie controlling a robot, modelling a disease) 2) Giving students choices in what problems they are interested in 3) Segmenting students according to skill set, thus putting people who have been programming in another course that will match their pace better and allowing students who are more new to have their own pace.

deleted 13y ago
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Patrick_Devine 13y ago
I think Harvey Mudd's approach is fantastic. I love the idea of two separate tracks for getting people to code. It allows people to take an academic risk which they normally wouldn't be able to take for fear of destroying their GPA. I think this is a fundamental problem with STEM programs in general. Why have grades and tracks at all? The important thing is to learn the material, and not what grade you got on a test at some arbitrary point in time. This is what is so brilliant about MOOCs like Khan Academy. No grades, and you can repeat the material until you know it.
- zhemao 13y ago
  The problem with MOOCs is that they have a pretty low retention rate. Sure you can repeat the material until you know it, but how many people actually will? The benefit of having a physical class is that you can turn to the professor or TAs for help if you're having trouble. It's also more difficult to completely fall behind because there are milestones in place (tests, assignments, projects, etc.). This isn't to say that MOOCs don't have their place, but they are not a replacement for the traditional classroom model.
  - Patrick_Devine 13y ago
    Yes, that's definitely a problem, particularly the way most classes on services like Udacity are done. You can't just videotape the lectures and translate the homework/quizzes into a MOOC and expect that it's going to be compelling. Khan Academy definitely gets this right where other MOOCs really fail. The quizzes are actually quite engaging and the 'gamified' point giving, despite being incredibly cheesy, really seems to work. I agree that there is no replacement for TAs and the professor, and I think that's where a lot of confusion about MOOCs stems from. This is where 'flip' teaching comes about. Instead of wasting time doing daily lesson planning and grading papers, the TAs and the professor spend their time helping students out who are having trouble. The students can watch/re-watch pre-recorded lectures and then take quizzes during class time which can be graded by the computer.

danso 13y ago

One of that impresses me, and kind of amuses me, is how PG will talk these issues out, even though the danger of being misquoted or misinterpreted is much higher than the chances of being appreciated, especially for someone in his position. The phrase "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers?", as a standalone statement, is ripe for ripping apart. But I think in its context, it only expresses his frustration at the problem, which is much, much better than the apathy expressed by others. It's a problem with much more societal and institutional inertia behind it than just VC men looking down on female entrepreneurs, or even tech companies being discriminatory. He's absolutely right to say that the focus should be on early education, and if anyone knows the best way (on a timetable that would satisfy current observers) to implement that, then they should speak up. In terms of current harmful perceptions that can be stamped out in the short-term...I think the belief that females aren't genetically cut out to be programmers is one. The "world's first computer programmer" was a woman and COBOL, of course, was invented by Grace Hopper. These women were pioneers in early computing at a time when women were still struggling to be recognized as equal citizens. To argue that women can't make it as hackers is like arguing, post-Jackie Robinson, that blacks can't develop professional baseball skills. The lack of women computer scientists and programmers today more likely point to institutional/cultural problems rather than genetic ones.

tptacek 13y ago
Once again: after establishing bona fides by saying "fuck Vallywag and everything they stand for", I feel like I need to say that Graham wasn't hugely distorted. He was asked whether YC discriminates against women. The obvious subtext of that question is that there's a large imbalance between men & women among YC founders. He could have said "no, we don't discriminate; I don't know why the imbalance among YC founders exist or exactly how to correct it, but here are some reasons I don't think our process is what creates it". He does not say that. Instead, he composes a small essay about the roots of gender imbalance in the industry off the top of his head, and that impromptu essay manages to reinforce a lot of young- white- male privilege. "If women were going to be good coders", he seems to a reasonable reader to be saying, "they would have found coding on their own". But that's not true: it conflates affinity and aptitude with opportunity and support. It also conflates "living and breathing technology" with "ability to masterfully execute a role"; the correlation between living the life and ability to execute is dubious at best. It does not help that Paul Graham has said other things in the past that also reinforce privilege. "Privilege" is a dirty word on HN (I guess it makes me some kind of "nth wave feminist" to use it), but it isn't an indictment. Nobody is saying privilege needs to be rooted out and eliminated. How could you ever do that, anyways? The point is not to brand young white dudes with the word, but simply to recognize that it exists, and be wary about attitudes that reinforce it and allow it to feed on itself. That's the concern I have with the interview The Information published.

Roboprog 13y ago

My daughter doesn't code, but she and another friend of hers do a lot of work to find, get and set up game emulators and related wares. Motivated to do light "sys admin" work, but not coding, I guess.

ZoFreX 13y ago
Does they play Megadrive games? If so I know a really cool nerdy trick: Sonic & Knuckles was a pretty awesome Sonic installment for the Megadrive that had a really weird cartridge. On top, it had a flip-open cartridge slot... You could plug in Sonic 2 or Sonic 3 to play through those previously existing games with the Knuckles character. Awesome! So how do you play the games like that on your emulator? Turns out it's really simple: > cat snk.bin sonic3.bin > sonic3nk.bin Or on Windows, as I first learnt it (I had no idea what the command actually did back then, it was magic to me): > copy /b snk.bin + sonic3.bin sonic3nk.bin Suddenly I have a brand new game to play! How it works: When you plug another cartridge into the top of Sonic & Knuckles the console sees both games combined as a contiguous block of memory, which is equivalent to concatenating together the binary dumps of the cartridges. More details about this are available on this slightly horrific but very thorough webpage: http://www.emulationzone.org/projects/s&k/thesis.htm http://www.emulationzone.org/projects/s&k/thesis.htm
- thearn4 13y ago
  Very cool - thanks for sharing!
ceol 13y ago
Nurture that. It's how a lot of developers get started: by tinkering and tooling.
jlees 13y ago
I got into programming by figuring out how to cheat at games when I was small; another common route is writing mods/addons (which I also did, later on). Don't knock the instincts even though it's not writing code!

sbt 13y ago

I hope PG doesn't get too frightened by the press from this and stops being his usual honest plainspoken self. We need more people like him trying to portray an accurate map of the territory, rather than being afraid of how quotes may be spun by cheap journalists.

philwelch 13y ago
If he takes his own advice[1], he'd be hard pressed to say anything at all. When people furiously accuse you of misogyny for not repeating the party line, there's no good faith discussion possible. [1] http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html
- crassus 13y ago
  "Party line" is an interesting choice of words. There's definitely some unhealthy groupthink going on that's gaining in power. It's never been easier to have something said taken out of context and have your reputation dragged through the mud by people who are professional social justice warriors and not much else (I doubt Nitasha Tiku could program "hello world") Maybe it's due to the rise of twitter and the ease of taking things out of context. It seems to fuel tabloid "journalists" like Sam Biddle who sit around on twitter all day, looking for tweets that he can read X-ism into. The sad thing is that if Paul Graham were an employee of a tech company, he'd probably be fired by now[1]. The room for thought and discussion is much smaller than it used to be, even though we have more tools for self-expression than ever before. Moldbug saw this happening and he decided that "America is a Communist Country". I think that's a bit strong, but I agree that at least the progressive half of the country is converging on a narrow, extreme Social Justice ideology. First they came for the dongle jokers, and I did not speak, because I was not a dongle joker... [1] http://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-badgered-pressured-and-purged/ http://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-badg...
  - yetanotherphd 13y ago
    Indeed, and its ironic that the same people who seek to expose anyone who says something un-PC, are so quick to accuse anyone who criticizes their movement of harassment.

athesyn 13y ago

> There is a lot of systemic bias in the system against young women taking this kind of direction with their studies and their career. I understand there is cultural bias, but systemic? There are more women attending and graduating college than men, they're more economically prosperous in their early twenties as well.[1] [1]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/27/young-women-earning-more-men http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/27/young-w...

tptacek 13y ago
Yes, because they are very well represented in the traditional professions: law, accounting, and medicine. They are not well represented in computer software. That's what we're talking about. Go to a crypto conference sometime. If, like me, you hail from computer software and not from academic cryptography and mathematics, you will probably be surprised at how much better women are represented there than in software. The technology of cryptography is more demanding than computer software, but very similar in spirit. What is it about the field of computer software development that keeps so many women out? I suspect some of it has to do with the way we take observations about what successful developers have looked like in the past --- young white dudes --- and create fast paths for those people. People who "fit the mold" have an easier time making progress in our field. People who don't fit the mold have to contend with more interrogation, more doubt, and slower progress. It's true of other minorities (relative to software development demographics) as well, particularly older people.
- Sssnake 13y ago
  >They are not well represented in computer software Are they "well represented" in any skilled trade? Why is this one specific skilled trade such a unique cause for concern and inventing crazy reasons to blame the people in the trade?
  - jdunck 13y ago
    Because software is eating the world. Because entrepreneurship creates jobs. Because software is the new means of production. Because people different than you have problems which are different than yours. Because dog-fooding is a great way to make something people want. Lots more reasons, but chew on those.

lkrubner 13y ago

One fascinating aspect of this is how bad the post 1990 startup culture has been for women. There was something about those big, boring corporations of the 1970s and 1980s that actually gave female hackers more acceptance than what startups have offered. You can see female interest in programming change in the charts on these pages: http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-computer-science-visual-trendline http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-comput... Note that those graphs show raw numbers, not a percentage of the population -- if you adjust for the growing population, female graduation rates in computer science peak in the 1980s. As it says in the text: "As a share of all CS bachelor's degrees granted that year, females had slipped almost 10 points, from 37% in 1984/1985 to 27% in 2003." A family anecdote: my mom was working on her Phd in urban planning back in the 1970s and her advisor said to her "You know, in the future, many of these issues of traffic and resource allocation will be resolved through computer simulations, so you should learn to program." My mom thought that was a good idea so she took some classes and learned basic programming. She does not recall feeling like an outsider in those classes: the computer field was still new and felt wide open. Nowadays a lot of startups talk about the need for "culture fit". This tends to limit the diversity of the gender and race and class of who is hired. For contrast, consider people like Evelyn Boyd Granville, and her acceptance at IBM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Boyd_Granville http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Boyd_Granville Here on Hacker News we also discussed the story that Raganwald posted, about another black woman at IBM, though that article is now offline: http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story If IBM applied a filter of "culture fit" then these women would not have been hired. But IBM, and many of the big corporations in the USA, followed very liberal policies that promoted diversity in the work place. There were some startups from the 1950s and 1960s that broke new ground in terms of diversity. Ray Kroc built up a small startup called McDonalds and in a quiet way he made feminist history in his treatment of June Martino. She was initially hired as the bookkeeper, but she was later entrusted with vast responsibilities and finally, in 1965, when McDonalds went public, she was given shares in the company, exactly like any other cofounder of a startup. This was apparently the first time in history that a woman was treated as a real cofounder and given stock. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Martino http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Martino If you look at the numbers, it seems clear that the emergence of the tech-based startup scene, in the 1990s, changed things for women. The startups have not emphasized hiring diversity. The startups tend to emphasize culture fit, and they were doing so even before that phrase came into existence. Why this should be, I am not sure. There have been startups in the past that have emphasized diversity in hiring, so I am not clear why the current generation of startups cannot do so. But what is clear is that it is not a priority for them. The big and boring corporations of the past did a better job of creating spaces for women in tech. Edit to add: to avoid being overly innocent, we should note how much the talk of "culture" is sometimes a smokescreen to hide power dynamics. Shanley Kane said "In Silicon Valley, and the tech industry in general, a lot of people were giving these talks about what their culture was and it was really superficial and focused on the privileged aspects of the company like free food and massages." Here on Hacker News we have already discussed the post "Google's 'free food' is not free" but it is worth remembering how much the talk about "culture" is just a negotiating tactic. http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/

gfodor 13y ago

I have to thank Valleywag for doing me the favor of helping me prune people who lack reading comprehension from twitter. I'm still kind of amazed how so many people un-ironically cited valleywag in their tweets. It's pretty obvious what pg was saying in this particular "smoking gun" quote: that figuring out a way to get more girls interested in programming at 13 is an incredibly important and hard problem. The willingness for people to quickly swallow and parrot a 1-dimensional narrative of "Paul Graham, sexist pig" based upon a few quotes taken out of context in a highly edited, 3rd hand rage-blog by fucking Vallywag is the type of behavior I expect from political spinmeister hacks trotted out on the 24 hour news channels, not from smart people who I respect.

owenwil 13y ago
Right, but when he had a chance to comment again to defend his statements, he instead went after the angle of saving himself rather than addressing the issue at the core. He could have talked about the work he's doing to help girls learn to code. He could have talked about others' work to help girls learn code. He could have talked about how he is not biased towards men. Instead, he just attacked journalists in general and didn't bother to address the root problem. It's all about saving oneself.
- gfodor 13y ago
  Where did this happen? This article is a blog by Fred Wilson.
- philwelch 13y ago
  The root problem is that when he tried talking about the root problem, his words were taken out of context and used against him. There's no way to win with character assassins and tabloids, and calling them out as people who don't discuss issues in good faith is the best you can do.
reitzensteinm 13y ago
I agree, and it strikes me as ironic the massive tidal wave of hate that arises whenever anyone violates a What You Can't Say in our industry. I understand the reasons for it in general, and sometimes it's even deserved (eg confirmed cases of sexual harassment at conferences). But it seems to me to be directly counter productive to the stated goals. We want to be more accepting and open as an industry? How about having some fucking maturity!? How about calmly discussing ideas with people that mean well? Even if they're wrong? Even Hacker News, once the bastion of calm, rational discussion, has devolved into a bar room brawl whenever gender issues are talked about. Hundreds of posts to a topic, many really fucking mean and almost all black and white strawman bullshit, within an hour before it's manually killed off by a moderator. There are plenty of smart, competent women (and men) in college who have the pick of their field. My sister was one. They could easily learn to code (or already do) and come here. But if we act like children at a drop of a hat, why on earth would they want to?

Alex3917 13y ago

Apparently the definition of sexism is now just not telling women what they want to hear. The vast majority of the criticism of pg's answer that I saw wasn't even claiming that he was wrong, but just calling him sexist because his answer wasn't masturbatory enough. C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840377

Sssnake 13y ago
People lose their jobs for this kind of shit, it is ridiculous.
reinhardt 13y ago
Pretty much. The definition of sexism also involves endless discussions about the almost last job category still ruled by the evil patriarchy - computer engineers - among the 15 projected to grow the most over the next decade [1]. For the record, the only other male dominated job category is janitors but I somehow doubt it faces similar outrage by the gender equality knight templars. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-...
- Alex3917 13y ago
  For what it's worth, that statistic isn't actually true. While computer engineers may be expected to be one of the fastest growing employment categories by percent, the number of computer engineers are relatively tiny. So in fact way more jobs are going to be added in careers that are projected to have only a couple percent growth. By absolute numbers, computer engineers aren't even in the top 30 careers for anticipated growth. C.f. page 18: http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/Underemployed%20Report%202.pdf http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/Underemploy...
- velis_vel 13y ago
  > For the record, the only other male dominated job category is janitors but I somehow doubt it faces similar outrage by the gender equality knight templars. I'm really curious where you got this information because it doesn't agree with anything else I've read. Among other things, about 75% of US doctors are male[1]. [1] http://www.hschange.com/CONTENT/1078/ http://www.hschange.com/CONTENT/1078/

newnewnew 13y ago

I don't think we've come anywhere close to rejecting the hypothesis of some kind of innate personality and ability differences between male and female. Men are higher represented in diseases like autism, which involve lower social functioning/higher affinity for the abstract. Men score higher on Math SAT[1], despite the school system being tilted more and more in favor of female. More women than men graduate from college and women have flooded into traditionally male majors in the sciences. There are plenty of female biologists and doctors. But they have not penetrated the most mathy majors, like engineering or Math itself. Maybe men and women aren't interchangeable cogs, and some combination of difference in interest and average ability will always mean that the way to get females into your tech company is by having a big non-software department. [1] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-huge-gender-math-gap-persists-with-a-33-point-advantage-for-high-school-boys/ http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...

11thEarlOfMar 13y ago

This is interesting: Of the 100 top academic authors in computer science today, per Microsoft, 96 are male: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=2&topDomainID=2&subDomainID=0 http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=2... The owner of this site appears to be a woman. Again, 20 males: http://www.bestcomputersciencedegrees.com/author/2admin/ http://www.bestcomputersciencedegrees.com/author/2admin/ And there is a preponderance of white males in the annals of computer history: http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm Even among software professionals, there is divergence in the types of roles women take vs. men. Search LinkedIn (3rd & everyone else) for SQA, and you get about 25% women. Search "Full Stack" and you get about 10% women. Is this really YC's problem to solve?

ZoFreX 13y ago
> Is this really YC's problem to solve? I think it's up to everyone to do their part. This problem, like all big problems, is made up of lots of little problems.
- 11thEarlOfMar 13y ago
  I don't think there is much they can do. A similar review of Human Resources professionals, also courtesy LinkedIn, shows about 70% are women. In another report, in 2013, 41% of college seniors that elected majors in Physical Science were women. Yet, only 18% of those who chose computer science or engineering were women. It seems they'd be equally capable in chemistry and physics as in computer science and engineer. But their major choices indicate it is not about ability and something else is going on: http://www.directemployers.org/2012/08/16/the-college-class-of-2013-current-demographics/ http://www.directemployers.org/2012/08/16/the-college-class-... I believe that the whole dust up is a matter of gender-based difference in interests. Nothing more, and not a real problem. Which is why YC is scratching their heads about how to solve it.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
    How does your "gender-based difference in interests" explain the last thirty years of (proportional) decline in women majoring in CS?

dadagaaa 13y ago

What company has Fred Wilson ever started?

pnathan 13y ago

In tech, saying anything about gender is an opportunity to be lambasted vigorously. But I think I can contribute something. Having read what I could over the years on the academic side of "women in tech" (i.e., academic research studying the matter, rather than opinion pieces), the consensus seems to be that the early teens are the time where the decision is taken to move away (or not) from STEM fields. That is part of why the Girls Who Code initiative & others like it is such a big deal. There are a lot of different factors and stereotypes playing into the decision to exit STEM tracks, but among them are - "unpleasant male geeks", "programmers work alone", "girls don't need to know math", "boys figure things out" and so forth. (Clearly these are a subset of examples, and also clearly not all of these are 100% influential for any particular person, place, time). So the stereotypical 13 y/o girl and her interest in STEM is actually the target of a lot of research and policy efforts. There's also a self-reinforcing aspect to this: heavily gender-coded places aren't typically presenting a welcome to people of the other gender. I read a academic paper on this in the last several years, but can't recall the experiment in detail or the citation. The implication is that a workspace festooned with seriously masculine widgets often tells many women that, "hey, man cave here. not so welcome". For the interested person, the academic experiments are usually well done and their results, while not always surprising, clearly quantify certain sexist aspects in the tech world.

ama729 13y ago
If you have some links to the studies you have read, I would be really interested to read them. Thank you
- pnathan 13y ago
  I apologize, I do not. I read widely and generally do not maintain an annotated bibliography of what I read. Perhaps I should.
  - girvo 13y ago
    I try to, surprisingly it's quite useful even outside of this small use-case. Evernote or OneNotes clipping functionality is perfect for it. Give it a try, even if only for a few weeks, it's super useful IMO!

deleted 13y ago

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overgard 13y ago

When I hear about this being a cultural thing, an important aspect people leave out is that men aren't exactly encouraged to be coders either. Writing code has pretty much no social cred until you're out of school, and pretty much automatically gets you tagged as a nerd. No coder I know started coding because it was cool, they just sort of enjoyed it and accepted the social consequences. I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses. Same goes for elementary school teachers. Why is that? Just because there's a gender imbalance doesn't necessarily mean anyone is keeping anyone out. And if a few insensitive comments can keep you from doing what you want to do in life, maybe that's something you have to deal with -- there's always going to be haters no matter what you want to do.

azakai 13y ago
> I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses. Perhaps because you mostly read tech news sites, and not nursing news sites. This stuff (in both tech and nursing) rarely reaches the mainstream news sources, so people not involved in the industry generally are unaware of it. Definitely it is well known that there is a shortage of men in nursing as well as in clinical psychology for example, and many in those industries think their industries would be better off with more men, and make efforts to change things. Some random links: https://asunews.asu.edu/20121130_meninnursing https://asunews.asu.edu/20121130_meninnursing http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html?p... I have a background in psychology, so I know less about the nursing situation, but in psychology it's definitely a topic that comes up. Which is not surprising, the gender disparity is very large: When I was an undergrad, I was in a small minority, somewhere in 10-20%, and it can be an odd feeling.
- ceol 13y ago
  Psychology is still very male-dominated, at least in terms of employers, teachers, and researchers — i.e. people in power in the industry.

fiatmoney 13y ago

No one seems to talk about where these girls are being pulled from, as if labor shifts don't have two sides. What often seems to happen in initiatives like this is that all the sectors which decide they need higher female participation end up fighting over the same pool of "high-achieving" (high IQ, upper class, family connections) individuals. "We need to shift women from MBA programs into comp sci master's programs" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

crassus 13y ago
Keep in mind, too, that female unemployment is lower than male unemployment. Your average female in the labor force has more options than your average male.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
  "eh" The rates looked to be tracking pretty closely until the housing bubble burst: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/womens-unemployment-surpasses-mens/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/womens-unemploy...
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Keep in mind, too, that female unemployment is lower than male unemployment. Your average female in the labor force has more options than your average male. A society which views it as more acceptable for women to opt-out of the labor force may distort this: when employment becomes less scarce, women may be more likely to opt-out of the labor force -- since unemployment measures (actively looking for work) / (employed + actively looking for work), people dropping out of the active labor force when out of work shows up as lower unemployment, but it doesn't mean "more options" for those in the labor force.
  - erichocean 13y ago
    when employment becomes less scarce, women may be more likely to opt-out of the labor force We've been in that situation for 5 years in the US. What you're describing did not happen—declines in labor participation among men still exceed women by a significant amount. One explanation I've heard is that since women earn less, but do "the same" work, it's cheaper to keep them on vs. men. I have no idea if that's correct or not, or if it is, explains the difference.

NAFV_P 13y ago

If you want to get girls coding, get Windows OSes out of schools. They kill interest in computers before you have time to get interested in them.

hesselink 13y ago
What a weird comment. How would this be worse for girls than for boys?
- NAFV_P 13y ago
  > What a weird comment. How would this be worse for girls than for boys? I didn't say it was worse. I simply posted it because nobody else has mentioned it. Teaching computing these days is seen as a joke, much like learning to code.

yetanotherphd 13y ago

One thing that came out of the discussion in the last article on this topic, was the people who support this kind of affirmative action were very interested in hearing from HN posters who opposed it (especially men), so they could understand what our reasons were, and a respectful discussion could be had. In response to this request, here is my opinion on the matter. In fact, I think there is truth to what both sides say. On the pro AA side, it is true that women probably feel unwelcome in the tech industry. Even when men don't do anything consciously to exclude women, programming culture revolves around certain attitudes and mindsets that are associated with young men in our culture. E.g. being interested in science fiction, being obsessive about one's work and hobbies, . None of these things are strictly related to programming, and an excessive focus on them makes it harder for women (and minorities) to enter the field. The fact that male programmers are attracted to the minority of female programmers doesn't help with this feeling of unwelcomeness, in fact it adds to the awkwardness (although I think that most of this is completely innocent and could not be called harassment, and actual harassment is rarer in our industry than others). On the anti-AA side, I think that women, due to reverse-discrimination and old fashion chivalry, are objectively advantaged in every field. Furthermore, some things that would seem to advantage men like long hours, stressful work, and being judged on results, are not bad or discriminatory in themselves. But they will tend to favor men over women because our society provides greater incentives for men to obtain money and positions of power. When people talk about work life balance, what they really mean is that the industry should stop providing people with an opportunity to advance their career by putting in extra time and effort. Thank you for hearing my opinions on the issue, and I hope more people who oppose AA will answer the call to explain their viewpoints.

icecreampain 13y ago

Another article about feminist affirmate action, giving women free rides for shit they don't care about. Affirmative action is discrimination that takes away from qualified folk and gives to people who are incompetent. Why people see AA as acceptable is beyond me. And why do feminists only want access to clean, easy, well-paying jobs? Why do I never hear them wanting AA for mining jobs? Or picking up trash? Or bricklaying? It's always coding, engineering, company boards, politics, cops (but always waiting for male backup), etc. Fuck feminism. What this shit is doing is making people like me, who have been coding since before elementary school, extremely bitter. Not for my own sake, for I already have a good IT-job, but for the sake of those quiet kids. The quiet kids who aren't social enough to build large networks of friends who'll help them get IT-jobs. The quiet kids that spend all of their time in front of the computer, learning shit on their own instead of learning what they're taught. The quiet kids that need tons of luck to get a hold of jobs that they're competent for but overlooked from because some dude who is friendly and outgoing makes a far better impression during the interview - no matter their competency level. I was one of the quiet kids. When I was young there was no sexual discrimination because coding was still nerdy and shitty and not very highly regarded, but now it's different. Now it IS cool to code, and I can't fucking stand to see incompetent, uninterested people getting hired / promoted before those who have higher technical competency. That's discrimination no matter how you look at it. If girls were equally competent as guys then discrimination would not be necessary because it would be immediately obvious that everybody is competing on the same level, right right right?

alixaxel 13y ago

And..? I would be much more interested if the title was "Cats Who Code".

codex 13y ago

In a far off land, bounceyball was the national sport. A funny cross between basketball and volleyball, it was hugely popular, and to be a professional player was considered the most prestigious occupation. A minor scandal erupted when was noted that there were few women in the co-ed national league, and a huge about of effort was made to recruit female players. Every family wanted the prestige, fame, and fortune that came with having a daughter in the league. Male players wanted more females playing so it didn't feel like a damn sausagefest all the time, and to help with dating (for some odd reason, most male bounceyball players were surprisingly unattractive). Eventually it was suggested that the problem lay upstream, so major efforts were made to recruit teenage girls for the middle and high school leagues, which were also coed. However, for some reason this attempt also failed. Finally, an anonymous poster on the Internet noted that, as a broad generalization, taller bounceyball players were more suited to the game, scoring more points. Perhaps a gender difference in height was to blame, discouraging female players and hurting them in the draft. The poster tracked down these differences in height to a disparity in average male and female birth weights, and suggested that perhaps a cocktail of experimental prenatal hormones (primarily testosterone), continued until age 15, would do the trick. The anonymous poster was promptly downvoted and the discussion turned to topics of sexism, discrimination, and cultural bias in the bounceyball leagues. Various horror stories were recounted by female bounceyball players and a new round of self-flagellation began among those in the industry.

philangist 13y ago
I don't necessarily agree with this metaphor, but it was entertaining and a fresh approach to the girls in tech problem. I especially thought 'Male players wanted more females playing so it didn't feel like a damn sausagefest all the time, and to help with dating' was hilarious. Anyway, my major problem with your assertion is that we know that the number of female bouncyballers has been going down significantly over the last few decades. It's not as if women have gotten significantly shorter, or men have gotten significantly taller in that time period, so the difference in participation rates can't be explained entirely with biology.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago

robomartin 13y ago

> Paul asks "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers?" (My comment, repeated from the other similar thread that got go superseded by this one) The problem of getting anyone, young or adult, interested in a subject --any subject-- isn't one with a simple solution. Technical subjects have the added difficulty that they require you to use your brain in non-trivial ways. Given equal exposure to the subject matter, I fail to see how a male or female subject would react differently to the idea of learning that subject. This, of course, assuming that both the male and female subjects got to that moment in time with a similar educational and perhaps even cultural frame of reference. If a mother only ever bought a little girl frilly pink and shiny things, well, it is probably unlikely that as a teenage girl or an adult woman she would even remotely show interest in learning more technical subjects. She will probably be a dancer and go into the arts or some other less "brainy" occupation. That's not to say that there aren't exceptions to this, but they are probably few and far between. The same is true of boys. If they are brought-up in front of a playstation, shooting at things, playing sports, and well outside of more academically focused areas he will probably grow up to be a jock and then move on to careers that do well when you use half your brain. Hell, he might even go into sales! Things are vastly different if you feed your kids a constant diet of what they should be learning in order to operate at a different level when they are older. My teenage son finished MIT's CS 6.00.1x course just a few weeks ago. That did not happen magically. That was a lot of work. For me and for him! And that also required a lot of work to get to the point where he could even be shoved into that end of the pool. My little girl is too young to think about formal learning of these kinds of subject, but this year she got introduced to Lego robotics and is starting to like it. Yet, the situation is exactly the same: It requires a ton of time and dedication on my part --as the designated nerd at home-- to keep her exposed to such subjects and make it fun. I have to get silly while teaching something useful. I have to figure out ways to make robotics fun, silly, exciting and something she wants to do. We don't buy lots of silly frilly things for her. That said, I have to tell you, it is hard to fight both genetics and exposure to such things through her peers. I guess my message is that parents needs to be very engaged and active in bringing up a child into the sciences and technology. It will not happen by osmosis. And, I really don't think gender makes a huge difference. It might change the approach, but I don't think it is the primary determinant of success or failure. One way I've explained this in the past to friends who marvel at what my kids are doing is that this is like a Formula 1 car drafting a car in front of them. You need to drive well and use a lot of effort to get close enough to be within the zone where drafting happens. Up until that point you are using a lot more energy to chase the car in front of you. Once you get into the drafting zone you need less power to maintain the same speed. Yet, you still need that foot solidly planted on the accelerator. With kids you have to push, push, push. I have navigated through really frustrating moments when I've gotten angry because I couldn't understand why he (my oldest son) didn't just grab that book I bought for him and launched himself into software development nirvana. Of course, I always reflected upon these things and never externalized them --not much of a motivator to yell and scream at your kid about learning something-- and realized that (a) he is still young and (b) we are not in the "draft zone" yet. It'll take a lot more effort --and this is different from kid to kid-- to get him into the "draft zone". Once we reach that zone it will require a lot less energy on my part and, if interested, he will ultimately need virtually no support from me. This is where I look at some of the things being said about STEM education and can't help but think we are just throwing money into a big bonfire. You can't force people into learning anything. A lot of my kid's friends are, well, jocks or exhibit no interest in anything at all. They are navigating through school with no guidance or encouragement in any direction whatsoever. You can't just throw money at that and expect things to change. For most kids it requires far more work than can be done during the time they are at school. Yes, of course, there are a few kids in every sample group that need almost zero work. These kids get hooked on a subject like programming and just go, go , go. Most kids are not like that. Just like most successful businesses did not get launched with a long coding session over a weekend while eating popcorn. Going back to my little girl, she is not seriously exposed to Lego robotics. In fact, our living room table is an official FLL table with the official field mat and everything. Yes, we are serious about this. I'd rather have a learning environment in my living room than a fancy dinning room table. As far as why there aren't more women in tech today. I don't have the answer for that. I only know that when I was a teenager girls mostly did different stuff. Not because they were being forced away from tech, they simply showed no interest in what we were doing. My guess is that it all came from home. So, as our culture changes so will that aspect of things. Evolution?

jayhuang 13y ago

A place I worked at previously had a manager who managed 2 small teams. One that did analytics, and another that did media/communications, for a total of about 10 people. On my first week of work, we had a meeting and in the middle of some discussion, he literally said "girls are better than guys. If I could, I would hire only girls". No specific reason, just girls are better than guys (he had 3 daughters though, so I don't know if that was the reason). It still blows my mind to this day that he said that out loud. At one point we had a female intern who was on a 8 month work term. 3 months into her workterm, the manager offered her a full-time position, not contingent on her graduation (she was in 3rd year and planned to return to complete school). Now I'm not anyone to judge, but I will say her performance wasn't particularly impressive, especially compared to other interns on the team, one of who (male) had already graduated, interned for a total of 20 months, and took on plenty of duties. 5 months into the workterm, she ended up wiping a ton of live data of a fairly important legacy application, effectively costing the company a few hundred k. A year later she's working there full-time as expected, but from what I understand, she didn't end up graduating anyways. The male intern worked on that team for 13ish months, then finally got full-time through a different team. All I will say is that this company is one of the tech giants. I agree we need more females in the field, but like many other people have mentioned, lowering the hiring bar in an intentional effort to hire a female hacker isn't very helpful. The problem is we're not producing enough qualified women, and overcompensating to fix that is not a good long term solution. There are plenty of very talented female hackers, and we do need them, but we also need to fix the root of the problem, and not intentionally skewing hiring to meet level of acceptable gender diversity. Women in the field also face other challenges, such as not being as vocal as males when it comes to promotions/raises, so it's common for them to have lower salaries than their male counterparts. There are lots of issues females face in this field, but let's look at fixing the root cause.

davidf18 13y ago

I am a male who started programming in my early teens on large computers at a major tech university along with other boys who were passionate about programming computers (and working on bicycles, in garages, etc.). We tried to get girls interested but they were not interested in programming computers, they had other interests which is alright. You do not need computer science course to start programming. What you need is a passion and what is very helpful is the assistance of someone who can help you with your questions. 75% of the graduates with PhDs in psychology are women and the fields of fashion and ballet/dance are dominated by women by you never hear calls for more males to enter these fields. IMHO, computer programming, like medicine are fields that one should not enter unless they have a passion for the field. Autism research Simon Baron-Cohen speaks of the differences between male and female brains. Boys are 8 times more likely to be autistic than girls. Autism (and the related Aspergers) and very good at systemitizing but bad at empathisizing. Females are more likely to be empathizers than males. Of course there is overlap and some women are better at sytemitizing than some men and some men are better at empathizing than some women, but that 8:1 difference in Autism in boys over girls probably is an indication of the imbalance of boys over girls who are passionate about programming computers. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizing_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizing... These are three on-line tests from Baron-Cohen that help determine your EQ and SQ (empathizing quotient and systemitizing quotient). http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/faces/eyestest.aspx http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/faces/eyestest.aspx http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/empathyquotient/empathyquotient.aspx http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/empathyquotient/empathyquoti... http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/systemizingquotient/systemizingquotient.aspx http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/systemizingquotient/systemiz...

GhotiFish 13y ago
is the eye test baiting me?! INSERT INTO EyesTest VALUES('al', 'Male', 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 2, 1, 0, 3, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 2, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 2, 0, 3, 2, 2, 3, 0, 1, 1, 0, 3, 2, 3, 2, 22, '207.216.200.118', '2013-12-30 17:22:41') I bet you they've long since lost their database.

jlees 13y ago

I'd like to call attention to this part of Fred's post which many of the sub-threads appear to have overlooked: Instead of turning Paul's comments into a blogosphere shitstorm, maybe we would all be better off staring the issue in the face and thinking about how each of us could help make a difference on this issue How would you help a 13-year-old -- of either gender? -- get interested in programming? Raspberry Pi? PyGame? Lego FIRST robotics? How can some of these initiatives be spread more widely to those who maybe don't have supportive family or communities to encourage their nerdy, high-school-pariah interest in tech?

midas007 13y ago

Mandatory plug for: Free Ruby on Rails workshops [sf] for women and their friends http://sfrubyworkshops.com/ http://sfrubyworkshops.com/ It's run by the same folks that run the SF Ruby meetup (the huge one)... they're neat, chill folks.

coldtea 13y ago

>There was something about those big, boring corporations of the 1970s and 1980s that actually gave female hackers more acceptance than what startups have offered. Yes: a 9-5 job mentality and a lack of emphasis on nerdy type hackers doing their thing.

lauradhamilton 13y ago

I don't understand all this excitement about the magical age of 13. Personally, I've never stopped learning--whether it's analytics, business, software development, or machine learning. I don't think it's any harder for me to learn stuff now at 28 than it was when I was 13. If anything, it's easier, because I have a much wider baseline of knowledge that I can use to reference things. For example, I learned set theory in high school => I can apply that to relational databases today. I do know some people, both men and women, that sort of stopped learning new stuff in their twenties, and now they're pretty much stuck. They can't keep up with technology changes (e.g., how does the router work) and they don't have a good baseline for learning new stuff. Nor the will.