6 ms·

Google Invests $50M in “Made With Code” Program to Get Girls Excited About CS

59 points by mikeevans 12y ago

auganov 12y ago
They seem so blindly focused on that one metric of girls majoring/working in CS. So much that they have no shame about exploiting sexist stereotypes in their message, strategy, branding even all the way down to web design. I'd love to improve that metric as much as anyone. But it would be so so so much better to do it by working on the fundamentals rather than by manipulating people into CS using the very warfare that keeps them out.
- EduardoBautista 12y ago
  It's all about the PR to be able to say you support women coders.
- GuiA 12y ago
  I've seen cynical commenters on HN/proggit/etc. write that the reason why companies like Google are so intent on getting more female programmers, and more programmers in general, is that it'd allow for engineer wages to go down over the next decade or two due to the basic laws of supply/demand. Not sure I fully buy into it- but it's not a crazy argument either, especially given the recent accusations of collusion to keep salaries low between major tech players.
  - psychometry 12y ago
    Google has such a huge reserve of cash that it can afford philanthropic projects purely for the principle of the thing (and I suppose the good PR). A cynical interpretation isn't really warranted, in my opinion.
  - mFixman 12y ago
    Why is having more programmers overall, even if it will mean lower wages, a bad thing? You could say the same things about any course about programming that doesn't specifically target 50% of the population.
  - jophde 12y ago
    I don't see the programmer market ever getting flooded. I think it's sort of like writing. Pretty much everyone is taught how to write but not a lot of people can do it well let alone well enough to get paid for it.
    - jmromer 12y ago
      "Sort of like writing"?? That's pretty funny. Are you under the impression that there's a writer shortage, or that most people who "write for a living" can easily sustain a middle class lifestyle?
    - ok_craig 12y ago
      Writing and programming are basically just thinking, manifested as words or code. Most people either don't enjoy thinking, or are bad at it. I think this has and will be true for a very long time.
      - vdaniuk 12y ago
        >Most people either don't enjoy thinking, or are bad at it. Elaborate on the definitions and prove that with a scientific study. The arrogance here is outrageous.
        jophde 12y ago
        It's not arrogance. It's knowing the difference in skill it takes to work on an app compared for to working on a platform or the difference between cranking out stories for the Huffington Post and writing an editorial for the New York Times. It simply takes an enormous amount of time to reach the master level of a craft. I don't think the drive to reach that level can taught. A person just needs to be obsessed. Most people don't like computers enough to stare at one at least 8 hours a day for 10 years and read programming books on the side. Likewise, most people don't want to spend all day writing. I think the percentage of people who do will remain constant. I see the salary of high end programmers only going up.
crazypyro 12y ago
Previous discussion:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921360
pflanze 12y ago
I wanted to compare the amount of investment with the GSoC[1] program. The GSoC home page[2] says it supported over 7,500 students; since each student/mentor pair(?) receives $5500, that makes about $41m, with overhead probably about the same amount as the "Made With Code" program, although GSoC ran 3 times longer with that amount than is planned for this new program. Either Google thinks this topic is somewhat more important, or could benefit more from the money, or the effort can be concentrated into fewer years, or Google has a bit more money now than it had when it started GSoC. Or anything else (I haven't even read what they are planning to do exactly.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_summer_of_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_summer_of_code [2] https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/?csw=1 https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/?csw=1
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
My main problem with this has always been that it's treating the symptom, rather than the root cause. The idea is that if you throw enough money, you can magically cause radical paradigm shifts in how the professional interests of the genders and sexes. This might be so, in the short term. You'll likely have a nice boost in numbers, which I'm sure will look really good. But you should really be striving for long-lasting and meaningful change. You want girls to actually be passionate about programming as a craft, and not just create more disposable cogs who can churn out high-level instructions. I'm sure a lot of employers would salivate at the latter prospect, but it's not something we should be encouraging. Even the incessant use of the word "code" and the mystical cult of personality that is being erected around this abstract concept is cause for concern. I don't think having more women coders is enough, we need more women hackers to get something more meaningful. And when you start looking for that, you'll quickly find that the issue goes deeper than something flashy campaigns and cash can just swiftly solve. It's societal. Once you pin down the causes, you shouldn't just hurry to turn the tides, either. You should analyze the cost and benefit of doing so.
- nfoz 12y ago
  I expect a short-term boost in the number of girls in CS will lead to a long-term boost. But I guess that's the sort of thing a sociologist might study?
  - jmromer 12y ago
    Perhaps. I think it'd be beneficial to have more women in CS, but there are ways to go about effecting that kind of positive social change that also corrupt or blunt social feedback mechanisms in such a way that vulnerable people will be led to pursue ends which aren't in the cards for them, or which are suboptimal for them. Effectively, such schemes transfer wealth to the vulnerable from the even more vulnerable. That should give people pause, I think.
cowbell 12y ago
Why is there such a clamor to get girls to code? I never hear anyone say "We need more female lumberjacks|roofers|trash collectors|pilots" despite those being male dominated professions as well.
- ceras 12y ago
  Coding is much safer, comfortable, low-stress, well-paying, flexible (esp. for mothers), and employable than those jobs.
  - wyager 12y ago
    >Coding is much safer, comfortable, low-stress, well-paying, flexible (esp. for mothers), and employable than those jobs. So we're back to the good ol' days of "women shouldn't do hard labor"?
    - vdaniuk 12y ago
      What a red herring. We're in a good future days of "nearly no one should do hard labor".
      - wyager 12y ago
        >What a red herring. I don't think that means what you think it means. Regardless, it seems strange to me that people are pushing for advertising coding to women in the name of gender equality, but then they seem not to care about the number of women in fields that aren't perceived so highly. I think it really throws their motivations into question.
        vdaniuk 12y ago
        Perhaps, strawman would be a better characteristic of your post as you were trying to distort the argument of other party. And no, it doesn't seem strange to me that people are pushing women to learn coding. Coding skills provide great income, stability, mobility and independence. So yeah, thanks Google and others, who are trying to get more women in coding and increase their quality of life.
krstck 12y ago
Pretty tired of hearing women who aren't programmers or in tech telling other women that they need to program.
- KRuchan 12y ago
  This. I am a woman in engineering and share your sentiment. Can't describe how annoyed I have been to find non-engineer/non-programmer women beat the drums about getting more girls to code or more women into STEM while the actual deserving technical women toil away silently.
  - krstck 12y ago
    Yep. As a fellow woman in tech, I know that we have issues that need to be addressed. But what do Chelsea Clinton and Mindy Kaling have to do with this? Are they going to start programming professionally?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- magicalist 12y ago
  There are many women involved in Girls Who Code who are programmers. If you go to the site, www.madewithcode.com, the women highlighted are engineers. Moreover, no one here is telling anyone that they need to code.
  - eng_monkey 12y ago
    Are they programmers or engineers then?
  - KRuchan 12y ago
    The public face for Girls Who Code is Reshma Saujani (law / politics background). As krstck pointed out, the public faces here are Mindy Kaling, Chelsea Clinton. While there are engineers involved behind the curtains in each of these programs, I don't like the fact that the ones who stand to gain the most (publicity, credibility, funding, access to resources and powerful contacts) are people who don't have anything to do with tech themselves except flying around the country giving talks about how everyone should code (Reshma Saujani, I am looking at you). I am being bitter here, but I would hope to live in a world where real engineers are the women in the limelight for the kids to look up to.
throwaway0x78 12y ago
This move makes me very reluctant to work at google. Would my future career be limited, because women are favored in promotions and internal recruitment? I mean this show what google's values are, and which methods they think are acceptable. It would feel much safer and future proof to work for a more meritocratic competitor.
- cgranade 12y ago
  "This move makes me very reluctant to work at google." If removing barriers to getting good people interested in what you supposedly love makes you "reluctant," I think that says far more about you than about Google. "Would my future career be limited, because women are favored in promotions and internal recruitment?" No, but you might not be as favored over women as you are now. Men in CS, we're playing the game on easy mode (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...).
  - aianus 12y ago
    From my anecdotal experience women are favored over men for hiring at megacorps. I think men are still treated better at work and favored for promotions though. Quick edit/evidence: 17% of Google technical workers are female where only 11% of CS majors at my school were women.
  - throwaway0x78 12y ago
    Proof by analogy? Not a single piece of evidence? Really?
    - cgranade 12y ago
      No, not proof by analogy, but explanation by analogy. As Scalzi says in his follow-up, providing proof of endemic sexism is about as necessary by now as providing evidence that gravity exists when tripping over one's shoelaces. The evidence by now is clear enough that to demand evidence in every discussion is a distraction tactic, and not actually useful. Finding evidence is, because of the sheer breadth and extent of the problem, as difficult as using your favorite search engine to look up income stats, harassment at the workplace, unfair hiring practices, etc., such that demanding evidence is pretty much asking someone else to do your work for them. (I should note that Scalzi did link to another post with more facts, over at http://www.jimchines.com/2012/05/facts-are-cool/ http://www.jimchines.com/2012/05/facts-are-cool/, if you still demand that someone else go search for things online for you.)
sk2code 12y ago
Instead of teaching someone to code the better approach would be to give basic STEM education. What would a coding class do if the basics of Maths and Science are not clear.
clockworkelf 12y ago
So if more women choose CS careers and consequently delay child-bearing until later in life, doesn't this actually encourage our society to have less healthy children statistically and further burdening our health care system?
utopkara 12y ago
Disgusting title! An exhibit to why the program is needed. It is not for getting girls excited, it is for getting idiots like the reporter (Jordan Crook) understand that coding is not a men's thing.
TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
I don't understand the focus on making women want to code. Maybe women just like different career choices then men. Does it really make sense to spend $50M on marketing to convince women to code?
- oh_sigh 12y ago
  Google seems to think so. IIRC, 20% of their software engineering staff are women. This is probably because 20% of the software engineers in America are women. If google could help push that number up to near parity, then they will have hundreds of thousands of new potential applicants to help create skynet 2.0.
  - aianus 12y ago
    Not unless the class sizes get that much larger at the top schools. In reality they'd just be displacing the weaker male students at admission time. Edit: Downvoted for a tautology? This site is going the way of reddit.
brandonmenc 12y ago
My girlfriend, who is an iOS and OS X programmer, described this as "highly offensive." The program-some-jewelry-without-typing did not go over well with her.
tree_of_item 12y ago
They actually neutered the Blockly environment here. Try not following the instructions at https://www.madewithcode.com/project/bracelet https://www.madewithcode.com/project/bracelet You can't! It tells you to use a diameter of "18"; if you try to make it "6", the environment will forcefully change it. Is this even programming? You can't do anything here but click the buttons it tells you to. Half the fun of programming is doing oddball things your environment and its designers didn't expect. Some people call this "hacking", but it doesn't look like Google expects girls to want to hack. Yeah, maybe "it's just a tutorial", but since when do tutorials acutally stop you from going off the rails and experimenting?
chondos 12y ago
Good PR stunt (posturing) for Google. I call it that because the execs actually know that unless it changes genetics it won't generally be making girls "Exited" (at least not in the long term) about CS. Any marketing campaign can temporarily make believers and stir up happy emotion to "sell" things, but of all the women I have known in CS (this is over 100 including those in high school/college computer classes and throughout my career) I can think of only a couple whom I would consider exited/passionate about it. Around 1%. And this is really the 1% of the 1% (or less) of women who actually ended up in CS. You would think that people would realize that women just aren't into CS like men are. Their brains are different and they just don't generally like it. They naturally think it's uninteresting and boring. It is not generally because of sexism in my experience either. I am not denying that it exists, but I have seen very little. All the women I have worked with have been treated very professionally. I don't think that it is a stigma for a women to be in CS either. I think that other women and men generally regard a women in it pretty highly. I am all for welcoming women into CS and giving them a fair shake, but in my personal experience the desire is just not there. I don't know how you can manufacture passion. There are industries that are dominated by women workers and those dominated by men. Why do we try to change what people like to do?

59 points by mikeevans 12y ago

They seem so blindly focused on that one metric of girls majoring/working in CS. So much that they have no shame about exploiting sexist stereotypes in their message, strategy, branding even all the way down to web design. I'd love to improve that metric as much as anyone. But it would be so so so much better to do it by working on the fundamentals rather than by manipulating people into CS using the very warfare that keeps them out.

EduardoBautista 12y ago
It's all about the PR to be able to say you support women coders.
GuiA 12y ago
I've seen cynical commenters on HN/proggit/etc. write that the reason why companies like Google are so intent on getting more female programmers, and more programmers in general, is that it'd allow for engineer wages to go down over the next decade or two due to the basic laws of supply/demand. Not sure I fully buy into it- but it's not a crazy argument either, especially given the recent accusations of collusion to keep salaries low between major tech players.
- psychometry 12y ago
  Google has such a huge reserve of cash that it can afford philanthropic projects purely for the principle of the thing (and I suppose the good PR). A cynical interpretation isn't really warranted, in my opinion.
- mFixman 12y ago
  Why is having more programmers overall, even if it will mean lower wages, a bad thing? You could say the same things about any course about programming that doesn't specifically target 50% of the population.
- jophde 12y ago
  I don't see the programmer market ever getting flooded. I think it's sort of like writing. Pretty much everyone is taught how to write but not a lot of people can do it well let alone well enough to get paid for it.
  - jmromer 12y ago
    "Sort of like writing"?? That's pretty funny. Are you under the impression that there's a writer shortage, or that most people who "write for a living" can easily sustain a middle class lifestyle?
  - ok_craig 12y ago
    Writing and programming are basically just thinking, manifested as words or code. Most people either don't enjoy thinking, or are bad at it. I think this has and will be true for a very long time.
    - vdaniuk 12y ago
      >Most people either don't enjoy thinking, or are bad at it. Elaborate on the definitions and prove that with a scientific study. The arrogance here is outrageous.
      - jophde 12y ago
        It's not arrogance. It's knowing the difference in skill it takes to work on an app compared for to working on a platform or the difference between cranking out stories for the Huffington Post and writing an editorial for the New York Times. It simply takes an enormous amount of time to reach the master level of a craft. I don't think the drive to reach that level can taught. A person just needs to be obsessed. Most people don't like computers enough to stare at one at least 8 hours a day for 10 years and read programming books on the side. Likewise, most people don't want to spend all day writing. I think the percentage of people who do will remain constant. I see the salary of high end programmers only going up.

crazypyro 12y ago

Previous discussion:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921360

pflanze 12y ago

I wanted to compare the amount of investment with the GSoC[1] program. The GSoC home page[2] says it supported over 7,500 students; since each student/mentor pair(?) receives $5500, that makes about $41m, with overhead probably about the same amount as the "Made With Code" program, although GSoC ran 3 times longer with that amount than is planned for this new program. Either Google thinks this topic is somewhat more important, or could benefit more from the money, or the effort can be concentrated into fewer years, or Google has a bit more money now than it had when it started GSoC. Or anything else (I haven't even read what they are planning to do exactly.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_summer_of_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_summer_of_code [2] https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/?csw=1 https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/?csw=1

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

My main problem with this has always been that it's treating the symptom, rather than the root cause. The idea is that if you throw enough money, you can magically cause radical paradigm shifts in how the professional interests of the genders and sexes. This might be so, in the short term. You'll likely have a nice boost in numbers, which I'm sure will look really good. But you should really be striving for long-lasting and meaningful change. You want girls to actually be passionate about programming as a craft, and not just create more disposable cogs who can churn out high-level instructions. I'm sure a lot of employers would salivate at the latter prospect, but it's not something we should be encouraging. Even the incessant use of the word "code" and the mystical cult of personality that is being erected around this abstract concept is cause for concern. I don't think having more women coders is enough, we need more women hackers to get something more meaningful. And when you start looking for that, you'll quickly find that the issue goes deeper than something flashy campaigns and cash can just swiftly solve. It's societal. Once you pin down the causes, you shouldn't just hurry to turn the tides, either. You should analyze the cost and benefit of doing so.

nfoz 12y ago
I expect a short-term boost in the number of girls in CS will lead to a long-term boost. But I guess that's the sort of thing a sociologist might study?
- jmromer 12y ago
  Perhaps. I think it'd be beneficial to have more women in CS, but there are ways to go about effecting that kind of positive social change that also corrupt or blunt social feedback mechanisms in such a way that vulnerable people will be led to pursue ends which aren't in the cards for them, or which are suboptimal for them. Effectively, such schemes transfer wealth to the vulnerable from the even more vulnerable. That should give people pause, I think.

cowbell 12y ago

Why is there such a clamor to get girls to code? I never hear anyone say "We need more female lumberjacks|roofers|trash collectors|pilots" despite those being male dominated professions as well.

ceras 12y ago
Coding is much safer, comfortable, low-stress, well-paying, flexible (esp. for mothers), and employable than those jobs.
- wyager 12y ago
  >Coding is much safer, comfortable, low-stress, well-paying, flexible (esp. for mothers), and employable than those jobs. So we're back to the good ol' days of "women shouldn't do hard labor"?
  - vdaniuk 12y ago
    What a red herring. We're in a good future days of "nearly no one should do hard labor".
    - wyager 12y ago
      >What a red herring. I don't think that means what you think it means. Regardless, it seems strange to me that people are pushing for advertising coding to women in the name of gender equality, but then they seem not to care about the number of women in fields that aren't perceived so highly. I think it really throws their motivations into question.
      - vdaniuk 12y ago
        Perhaps, strawman would be a better characteristic of your post as you were trying to distort the argument of other party. And no, it doesn't seem strange to me that people are pushing women to learn coding. Coding skills provide great income, stability, mobility and independence. So yeah, thanks Google and others, who are trying to get more women in coding and increase their quality of life.

krstck 12y ago

Pretty tired of hearing women who aren't programmers or in tech telling other women that they need to program.

KRuchan 12y ago
This. I am a woman in engineering and share your sentiment. Can't describe how annoyed I have been to find non-engineer/non-programmer women beat the drums about getting more girls to code or more women into STEM while the actual deserving technical women toil away silently.
- krstck 12y ago
  Yep. As a fellow woman in tech, I know that we have issues that need to be addressed. But what do Chelsea Clinton and Mindy Kaling have to do with this? Are they going to start programming professionally?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
magicalist 12y ago
There are many women involved in Girls Who Code who are programmers. If you go to the site, www.madewithcode.com, the women highlighted are engineers. Moreover, no one here is telling anyone that they need to code.
- eng_monkey 12y ago
  Are they programmers or engineers then?
- KRuchan 12y ago
  The public face for Girls Who Code is Reshma Saujani (law / politics background). As krstck pointed out, the public faces here are Mindy Kaling, Chelsea Clinton. While there are engineers involved behind the curtains in each of these programs, I don't like the fact that the ones who stand to gain the most (publicity, credibility, funding, access to resources and powerful contacts) are people who don't have anything to do with tech themselves except flying around the country giving talks about how everyone should code (Reshma Saujani, I am looking at you). I am being bitter here, but I would hope to live in a world where real engineers are the women in the limelight for the kids to look up to.

throwaway0x78 12y ago

This move makes me very reluctant to work at google. Would my future career be limited, because women are favored in promotions and internal recruitment? I mean this show what google's values are, and which methods they think are acceptable. It would feel much safer and future proof to work for a more meritocratic competitor.

cgranade 12y ago
"This move makes me very reluctant to work at google." If removing barriers to getting good people interested in what you supposedly love makes you "reluctant," I think that says far more about you than about Google. "Would my future career be limited, because women are favored in promotions and internal recruitment?" No, but you might not be as favored over women as you are now. Men in CS, we're playing the game on easy mode (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...).
- aianus 12y ago
  From my anecdotal experience women are favored over men for hiring at megacorps. I think men are still treated better at work and favored for promotions though. Quick edit/evidence: 17% of Google technical workers are female where only 11% of CS majors at my school were women.
- throwaway0x78 12y ago
  Proof by analogy? Not a single piece of evidence? Really?
  - cgranade 12y ago
    No, not proof by analogy, but explanation by analogy. As Scalzi says in his follow-up, providing proof of endemic sexism is about as necessary by now as providing evidence that gravity exists when tripping over one's shoelaces. The evidence by now is clear enough that to demand evidence in every discussion is a distraction tactic, and not actually useful. Finding evidence is, because of the sheer breadth and extent of the problem, as difficult as using your favorite search engine to look up income stats, harassment at the workplace, unfair hiring practices, etc., such that demanding evidence is pretty much asking someone else to do your work for them. (I should note that Scalzi did link to another post with more facts, over at http://www.jimchines.com/2012/05/facts-are-cool/ http://www.jimchines.com/2012/05/facts-are-cool/, if you still demand that someone else go search for things online for you.)

sk2code 12y ago

Instead of teaching someone to code the better approach would be to give basic STEM education. What would a coding class do if the basics of Maths and Science are not clear.

clockworkelf 12y ago

So if more women choose CS careers and consequently delay child-bearing until later in life, doesn't this actually encourage our society to have less healthy children statistically and further burdening our health care system?

utopkara 12y ago

Disgusting title! An exhibit to why the program is needed. It is not for getting girls excited, it is for getting idiots like the reporter (Jordan Crook) understand that coding is not a men's thing.

TheMagicHorsey 12y ago

I don't understand the focus on making women want to code. Maybe women just like different career choices then men. Does it really make sense to spend $50M on marketing to convince women to code?

oh_sigh 12y ago
Google seems to think so. IIRC, 20% of their software engineering staff are women. This is probably because 20% of the software engineers in America are women. If google could help push that number up to near parity, then they will have hundreds of thousands of new potential applicants to help create skynet 2.0.
- aianus 12y ago
  Not unless the class sizes get that much larger at the top schools. In reality they'd just be displacing the weaker male students at admission time. Edit: Downvoted for a tautology? This site is going the way of reddit.

brandonmenc 12y ago

My girlfriend, who is an iOS and OS X programmer, described this as "highly offensive." The program-some-jewelry-without-typing did not go over well with her.

tree_of_item 12y ago

They actually neutered the Blockly environment here. Try not following the instructions at https://www.madewithcode.com/project/bracelet https://www.madewithcode.com/project/bracelet You can't! It tells you to use a diameter of "18"; if you try to make it "6", the environment will forcefully change it. Is this even programming? You can't do anything here but click the buttons it tells you to. Half the fun of programming is doing oddball things your environment and its designers didn't expect. Some people call this "hacking", but it doesn't look like Google expects girls to want to hack. Yeah, maybe "it's just a tutorial", but since when do tutorials acutally stop you from going off the rails and experimenting?

chondos 12y ago

Good PR stunt (posturing) for Google. I call it that because the execs actually know that unless it changes genetics it won't generally be making girls "Exited" (at least not in the long term) about CS. Any marketing campaign can temporarily make believers and stir up happy emotion to "sell" things, but of all the women I have known in CS (this is over 100 including those in high school/college computer classes and throughout my career) I can think of only a couple whom I would consider exited/passionate about it. Around 1%. And this is really the 1% of the 1% (or less) of women who actually ended up in CS. You would think that people would realize that women just aren't into CS like men are. Their brains are different and they just don't generally like it. They naturally think it's uninteresting and boring. It is not generally because of sexism in my experience either. I am not denying that it exists, but I have seen very little. All the women I have worked with have been treated very professionally. I don't think that it is a stigma for a women to be in CS either. I think that other women and men generally regard a women in it pretty highly. I am all for welcoming women into CS and giving them a fair shake, but in my personal experience the desire is just not there. I don't know how you can manufacture passion. There are industries that are dominated by women workers and those dominated by men. Why do we try to change what people like to do?