5 ms·

No, it's not Google's job, but Google is in a good position to fix upstream. One of the things you repeatedly hear from girls/young women considering CS is tha

by groby_b 12y ago

No, it's not Google's job, but Google is in a good position to fix upstream. One of the things you repeatedly hear from girls/young women considering CS is that there are no role models. Sending female engineers to university events is a small step, but it can have huge impact. In a nutshell, it's playing the long game :)

cbhl 12y ago
I'm not sure I would want to take this to its logical conclusion. Imagine if it was mandated that every female engineer had to participate in university events. Now the job responsibilities are different between the genders, and you've made the problem worse on a different axis (equality of job responsibilities). Think about all the articles and blog posts written by female engineers who attend conferences and are insulted that they are perceived to be non-technical, or just a recruiter, and how such an initiative would make that worse.
- eropple 12y ago
  Do you seriously think they don't have a surfeit of volunteers? C'mon.
  - paulwolf 12y ago
    Probably not. It's usually difficult to get an engineer to waste an entire day or two visiting a university for recruiting.
    - ithkuil 12y ago
      You'd be surprised.
    - jtheory 12y ago
      Hey, next Friday is Google's "make the world a better place" day... would you be interested in coming with me and (name) to give mini-talks at a few schools? -- I guess you'd have a tougher time if you actually call it "wasting an entire day" when you pitch the idea.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Don't mandate it then? There are other ways of convincing people besides bossing them around.
crazypyro 12y ago
Are role models in CS (and even other industries) really what drives people to pursue the career? Just looking at my own experience, its hard to pinpoint a "role model". I'm curious why there is always such a huge focus on role models (is it a grandfathered idea from the past?) and not on the herd of other problems, such as access to tools, ease of self-learning and targeted tutorials at under-represented demographics. I'd imagine tutorials that are targeted at doing things that tend to be more popular with certain demographics would be more useful than a few famous minority or women C.S. majors, but I could be wrong. It seems dated to me, but maybe there is some strong research that correlates to the role model idea. I'm just not seeing it.
- swampangel 12y ago
  No research here, just opinions: "Representation" might be a better word than "role model". Simply, it helps to see someone who is superficially similar to you in a job/role that you aspire to. You can imagine that person overcame many of the same obstacles that you face. People point to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg to show that you don't need a comp sci degree to be a coder and an innovator. These examples are used to encourage people to continue in the field, not as models to pattern your behaviour after. On the other hand, if you look at a sample of people in an industry and you don't identify with any of them, you might imagine that people like you (a) don't enjoy the work experience or (b) face some serious obstacle to success.
  - wutbrodo 12y ago
    > Simply, it helps to see someone who is superficially similar to you in a job/role that you aspire to. This is the part that's kind of weird to me. Wouldn't this only be true of people with too much emphasis on superficial characteristics? I grant that there are many people like this, but we usually get a lot more info about people than just gender, race, etc. If a potential CS student reads about Zuckerberg and Page and Gates and just thinks "White Male" instead of "person who loves tinkering and breaking things down and creating, just like me" etc etc, isn't that an issue with their predilection for stereotyping? It's like someone staying out of jazz (or the NBA) because they look at its history and think "it's all black people, there's no place for me there" instead of "it's all creative and brilliant musicians (or talented athletes), I would love to be a part of that". I get that this might be a problem that's not easily solvable so we should explore other avenues as well, but it's bizarre to me that we seem to be embracing that sort of reduction of human beings into a single physical characteristic, instead of identifying it as a big part of the problem.
ArkyBeagle 12y ago
I am not so sure. I have two daughters. Both love computers, but will never go that way. Both are fearless about traditionally male pursuits; hunting (bow and speargun), fishing, mechanic-ing, surfing, dog training, ranching stuff.... one brought home A SHARK she'd speared. It was delicious. One's a master of one of the big stats packages (SPSS? I forget) and the like ( was in a bio PhD program; got out with a Masters before she crippled her career prospects ). Yawn. It just does nothing for them. My extremely biased sample says "girls just aren't as likely to want to code." Trust me, I tried. Nope. Perhaps reverse psychology would have worked....

by groby_b 12y ago

cbhl 12y ago

I'm not sure I would want to take this to its logical conclusion. Imagine if it was mandated that every female engineer had to participate in university events. Now the job responsibilities are different between the genders, and you've made the problem worse on a different axis (equality of job responsibilities). Think about all the articles and blog posts written by female engineers who attend conferences and are insulted that they are perceived to be non-technical, or just a recruiter, and how such an initiative would make that worse.

eropple 12y ago
Do you seriously think they don't have a surfeit of volunteers? C'mon.
- paulwolf 12y ago
  Probably not. It's usually difficult to get an engineer to waste an entire day or two visiting a university for recruiting.
  - ithkuil 12y ago
    You'd be surprised.
  - jtheory 12y ago
    Hey, next Friday is Google's "make the world a better place" day... would you be interested in coming with me and (name) to give mini-talks at a few schools? -- I guess you'd have a tougher time if you actually call it "wasting an entire day" when you pitch the idea.
icebraining 12y ago
Don't mandate it then? There are other ways of convincing people besides bossing them around.

crazypyro 12y ago

Are role models in CS (and even other industries) really what drives people to pursue the career? Just looking at my own experience, its hard to pinpoint a "role model". I'm curious why there is always such a huge focus on role models (is it a grandfathered idea from the past?) and not on the herd of other problems, such as access to tools, ease of self-learning and targeted tutorials at under-represented demographics. I'd imagine tutorials that are targeted at doing things that tend to be more popular with certain demographics would be more useful than a few famous minority or women C.S. majors, but I could be wrong. It seems dated to me, but maybe there is some strong research that correlates to the role model idea. I'm just not seeing it.

swampangel 12y ago
No research here, just opinions: "Representation" might be a better word than "role model". Simply, it helps to see someone who is superficially similar to you in a job/role that you aspire to. You can imagine that person overcame many of the same obstacles that you face. People point to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg to show that you don't need a comp sci degree to be a coder and an innovator. These examples are used to encourage people to continue in the field, not as models to pattern your behaviour after. On the other hand, if you look at a sample of people in an industry and you don't identify with any of them, you might imagine that people like you (a) don't enjoy the work experience or (b) face some serious obstacle to success.
- wutbrodo 12y ago
  > Simply, it helps to see someone who is superficially similar to you in a job/role that you aspire to. This is the part that's kind of weird to me. Wouldn't this only be true of people with too much emphasis on superficial characteristics? I grant that there are many people like this, but we usually get a lot more info about people than just gender, race, etc. If a potential CS student reads about Zuckerberg and Page and Gates and just thinks "White Male" instead of "person who loves tinkering and breaking things down and creating, just like me" etc etc, isn't that an issue with their predilection for stereotyping? It's like someone staying out of jazz (or the NBA) because they look at its history and think "it's all black people, there's no place for me there" instead of "it's all creative and brilliant musicians (or talented athletes), I would love to be a part of that". I get that this might be a problem that's not easily solvable so we should explore other avenues as well, but it's bizarre to me that we seem to be embracing that sort of reduction of human beings into a single physical characteristic, instead of identifying it as a big part of the problem.

ArkyBeagle 12y ago

I am not so sure. I have two daughters. Both love computers, but will never go that way. Both are fearless about traditionally male pursuits; hunting (bow and speargun), fishing, mechanic-ing, surfing, dog training, ranching stuff.... one brought home A SHARK she'd speared. It was delicious. One's a master of one of the big stats packages (SPSS? I forget) and the like ( was in a bio PhD program; got out with a Masters before she crippled her career prospects ). Yawn. It just does nothing for them. My extremely biased sample says "girls just aren't as likely to want to code." Trust me, I tried. Nope. Perhaps reverse psychology would have worked....