While they have the best intentions, these kinds of initiatives can backfire badly. 2 years ago, I was partnered on a project with a woman who did not how to code a single line of C++ in a senior-level computer science course. Whenever I would arrange for us to work together in lab, she would call in sick. This happened about 3 or 4 times. I told this to my professor, who was a HUGE social justice guy, and after investigating our version-controlled project he found that I had written 98% of the lines. I got an A on the project, she got a B, so she still passed, but the whole time I'm wondering: is this really helping her? Is it really going to help her in her long term career to push her through the classes without learning anything to push a statistic that the college can later brag about. Of the couple girls I know who graduated in my class, one works at Google, but none of the rest of them are working in a remotely computer science job. I think the proportion corresponds to the ratio of girls who would naturally take computer science (the one that works at google now and perhaps a few who just preferred other things) vs. the people that were pushed through (the rest).
This also causes problems for the whole school as well: I learned through a friend that a google recruiter was talking about how students from my school often have great resumes and then fall apart during technical interview questions. So I think it is plausible that these kinds of initiatives hurt EVERYONE from the school in question.
This is all anecdotes, but I'm convinced this is a real problem, causing REAL harm, all for the college to look better in social justice statistics. This is why I'm writing about it instead of just shrugging my shoulders.
I went to Pomona College, which is next to Harvey Mudd, with cross-enrollment and some shared CS classes.
I think the experience you are describing is not applicable here, because Pomona and Harvey Mudd are both highly selective schools. Nobody who can't code is graduating with a CS major. Mudd in particular is pretty hardcore. When I worked with other students in CS classes at Mudd, I was always impressed by their intelligence and work ethic, that goes for any gender.
My graduating class of CS majors had more women than men, and both men and women are developers at top companies, getting PhD's from top programs, etc.
This doesn't match my experience at all. Are you considering people who moved into lead or management positions from more hands-on engineering positions as not being "into hands-on development"?
I had the same thing happen to me in an advanced OS course, but my partner was a guy doing a Master's degree, clearly we're not going to blame it on his gender.
I am emphatically not blaming it on her gender rather a school policy that pushes unprepared students through a system to satisfy a vision of what things should be like. If you read the former you need to go back and read my post more carefully.
NHS did a study on female doctors who drop out of workplace at way higher rate than men and all the social/economic implication of it given the huge cost invested into medical education.
I don't think that's the same thing as what the parent post is suggesting. Based on my wife's opinion (a female physician), female physicians seem to be dropping out or working only part time for child rearing purposes. It does have huge healthcare implications though, since females are now making up a large number of physicians and there are only a very small number of slots at medical schools.
I recently talked to a friend (who, yes is female) who took a required programming course. She is an English major, but she found python fun and she's planning to take another course on it next year.
While everyone here is discussing SJ vs not SJ[0], I think this article is another data point in my belief that a liberal arts education, or one that requires a number of pre-requisites across fields, is so beneficial. Being well rounded and schools requiring general ed's across the spectrum helps people discover interest in things they never thought they would be interested in.
I am on my way to a Physics Ph.D., but next to my undergraduate QM courses, I am most thankful for my undergraduate's German classes, philosophy, and a history course about the US Presidents (this one required us to read primary sources, letters, unedited tape transcripts, tedious for someone who had other commitments like studying for the Physics GRE, but it was super enlightening). At the time, I railed against general ed requirements and I considered them as a waste of my time, but they do well to expose you to more of the world and round you out as an educated person.
[0]"not SJ" is the only term I could come up with.
I'm glad this article mentions improving the compulsory classes, in my experience the compulsory classes were the worst because people couldn't not take them if they sucked.
I'm still bitter about the bullshit requirements my uni thrust on me. The patronizing "we know better than you" schtick gets old real fast.
So How did they get to 55%. Are they just refusing to admit more than a certain number of men? Or is the a more organic shift through staffing and support changes?
That was stated in the article: Organic shift through curriculum redesign and change in teaching methods. Staffing probably also played a part, although that wasn't mentioned in the article beyond Klawe.
Note that students at Harvey Mudd are not admitted to any particular major or program, they are admitted to the college in general and don't declare a major until Sophomore year. An increase from 10% to 55% is at least partially a result of more female students taking interest in the subject, not a result of admissions. Matriculation of female students to the college as a whole also rose over the past decade, but that went from ~35% to ~50%, so it accounts for less than half of the change in CS.
One big thing is splitting the intro CS course into different sections based in previous experience. Folks with a ton of experience end up one section, and those who are new to the subject in another.
The two sections cover the same material, but with different lecture styles, and people don't end up discouraged because their labmates cruise through exercises that they find challenging.
This isn't explicitly gendered, but pre-college exposure to CS and programming could well be correlated with gender...
This will likely be true in the short term. But experience with other professions shows that the phenomenon will likely be transient. For example, despite the fact that law school is gated by an entrance exam where men outperform women by about the same margin as they do on the SAT Math,[1] law schools have even gender ratios with similar admissions chances for each gender. That wasn't necessarily true back when law schools (and med schools) took affirmative measures to equalize gender ratios, but the very process of equalization removed barriers keeping women from considering the field.
Fundamentally, most sensible people do not want to create additional hassles in their lives by choosing to become a minority. If life in Bangladesh had been as great as life in the U.S.A., my parents certainly wouldn't have moved to a place where they looked different from everyone around them. When women consider going into male-dominated fields, that's essentially what they're signing up for. That dissuades a lot of candidates who would otherwise be promising.[2]
[1] While men and women perform similarly on average on both tests, there are significantly more men who score in the top 1% on each test (for whatever reason). In the numbers-driven world of law school or med school admissions, that factor is outweighed by the fact that women tend to have better GPAs and as a result have similar admissions composite scores.
[2] The same is of course true for men considering women-dominated fields. There are many men who would be phenomenal teachers, nurses, child-care workers, which are solid jobs with good pay, who very reasonably do not want to put up with the hassles and skepticism that would come with being a man in a women-dominated field.
I wouldn't want my daughter working in technology for the same reasons I wouldn't want her to be a professional boxer or a coal miner. I'm a pretty tough guy, I've hunted and fished out of necessity and have had to deal with the hard consequences of a childhood lived in poverty and despair. Drug addiction, jail, recovery, I've had my fair share of time in life's gutter. Scumbags like Trump don't phase me, as I understand it's just on par when dealing with the phony tough.
But with all the thick skin even I have been blown away at the ruthlessness and lack of empathy our industry mandates in a person for them to achieve the upper echelons, much like other male-dominated industries and endeavors.
If there are women out there ready, passionate, ambitious, and intellectually up to the task of really ushering in the future then all the power and over 9000 blessings to them. But if they or anyone else expect me to treat them any differently than my all-male, all-star engineering and design teams then they'd be sadly disappointed. The truth is I'd hire a paraplegic transgender janitor with no high school education if they were able to somehow prove to me they could run with the all-stars or at the very least support us in our cause. Race or gender is really never a factor for a true leader looking to build an all-star team.
My advice to my daughter, if it was true in her heart, would be never to join them - but to instead run over them like an old greasy tank. Don't even need a degree in Computer Science to do that.
You've been a drug addict who's gone to jail and had a hard time, but even you've never seen anything as horrible as white class workers presumably looking down on other white class workers?
I hope that any stereotypically white/male whatever technology professionals reading this remember back to the scorn and ridicule that many of us faced in our formative years due to our interest in technology. Many women, minorities, etc have had similar interests to yours but had few or no peers who shared them. You may have overcome hurdles but now imagine doing it alone or worse never knowing that it was even a possibility for you.
Programs like this are designed to make up for the numerous biases in our culture that stand in the way of equality. I think it speaks to the fragility of your egos that you find the idea of giving someone else an opportunity threatening. Especially when it costs you essentially nothing to be supportive.
I think one of the very worst sins is to rise to a position of power and use it against others who haven't had the advantages you've enjoyed. This is one of the thousand reasons I am deeply troubled by our near term political futures. A feeling which is more exacerbated every day by level of vitriol projected by people with the "I've got mine" mentality. Yes I've struggled, but I work to make things better so that others can avoid going what I went through. It sure beats maintaining a status quo that makes us pay our dues in futility.
I guess what I'm arguing is that the forces against equality are so large that it would take a great deal to shift things into balance in anything short of decades. I feel that taking an opposing or even neutral stance against active measures is a vote of support for inequality.
If anyone is going to take a stand, I would think it would be people who have experienced being ostracized. But reading some of these comments has been an eye opener because they use seeds of truth to support what is unavoidably a position of ignorance.
That trend is appearing all over the media right now and it's a very dark think IMHO.
I admit that it may be the effect of controversy generating conversation that pushes the comments to the top but it makes me uncomfortable that even Hacker News isn't immune to such things.
For the people who are interested in this topic, Google has a training video that talks through some interesting psychology research that ties to hiring / performance reviews -
> She expected the class to be full of guys who loved video games and grew up obsessing over how they were made. There were plenty of those guys but, to her surprise, she found the class fascinating.
So many of these articles seem incredibly sexist to me -- they all boil down to "women are too ignorant to realize that computers are fun".
What if that's where we're at right now? Ignorance is correctible. It's not bad if corrected (they could be part of the lucky 10,000 [1]). Perhaps woman are under a false perspective that the material is boring. With time, and experience, this might change.
Hypothetically, if you really believe the majority of women eschew computer science out of ignorance, why do you believe we should correct it? Here's how I think about it: if I invited a male acquaintance to go to a ballroom dancing class and his response was "no way, dancing is for pansies" -- should my reaction be to try to make the lessons a more comfortable environment for him? Absolutely not. If anyone were to avoid learning to program because they believed the field is full of sweaty nerds frankly I'm of the opinion that it's their loss.
The article was a little hand-wavey on the details about comfort. But to you hypothetical. Say that instead you tell him (assuming a straight guy), that it's great way to meet women and, oddly enough, get exercise. That might convince him to attend at least one. After auditing, he might like it.
The field has an old rep. Some of it's earned. It's changing now. People are operating from old information. Correcting this information, by means of targeting marketing, might be a good thing.
Now I do see benefit for keeping the view around if it means less workers and therefore a higher wage for me, :).
Every diversity-related topic makes me wish that HN discussions weren't branched/fanned out.
The problem isn't politics. The problem is that the exact same argument replicates itself and occurs about a dozen times in different leaves, and it becomes extremely tedious to pore through it multiple times.
Maybe branching comment forums are a good idea for certain topics, but topics that require an in-depth back-and-forth like this one, are much better served by a single chronological pipeline.
Even in a wretched flamewar like this one, this drive-by ideological potshot stands out as the kind of comment we don't want on Hacker News. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all, from now on.
I suppose the argument you're making is that, if society is treating one sex differently on the basis of sex, ending that different treatment also counts as treating them differently on the basis of sex, and leaving that different treatment in place does not. For instance, if men can vote and women can't, giving every woman a vote and not giving every man a second vote would be a sexist change.
That's my main gripe. Treating people differently based on gender is simply wrong. The default should always be to treat people the same.
If you are going to commit sexism with the purpose of "reversing the patriarchy", you first have to prove and quantify the effects of the "patriarchy". Only then can you justify using sexism. Otherwise, you are committing a definite wrong, sexism, to reverse the possibility of sexism, which is something that could possibly (but hasn't been proven) to be wrong.
I have the same viewpoint about affirmative action in general. The default, preferred state is an absence of racial/gender based discrimiation, aka affirmative action, unless an imbalance is properly proven. Affirmative action is something that not only needs to be justified once but also continually and repeatedly justified throughout time. Simply disproving arguments for affirmative action should be enough to stop it.
But that's a losing strategy, in a game-theoretic sense, if your goal is to end sexism/discrimination/bias.
It is fine if your goal is upholding a moral code where you personally actively committing an act of discrimination is unacceptable, but even unintentionally; you personally passively upholding discrimination is fine; and other people actively committing discrimination and you failing to stop them is not a thing you're super morally culpable for. That's certainly not my moral code, and I think even among the crowds that believe in intrinsically evil actions regardless of context (e.g., Catholic moral theology), they wouldn't agree that passively upholding evil or failing to stop others from doing active evil is fine (e.g., "I have greatly sinned ... in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do"). If we're making a deontological argument, we should nail down what we think about passive wrong or allowing a wrong to continue, and if we're making a consequentialist argument, we're not worried about intrinsic wrongs along the way to a right.
It's a losing strategy because everyone who actively supports sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination have plausible reasons why their discrimination is justifiable. Even the white-nationalist types these days hesitate to say that the white race is superior; they just say they want protections for the white race in white countries (whatever those are). And most of the discrimination in today's society doesn't come from people who are nowhere near as overt as white nationalists. The colleges say, "Oh, we're just trusting these test scores." The standardized test companies say, "Oh, we're just trusting past performance at college." And if anyone had previously introduced bias into the system, they've now successfully laundered the bias; there's a feedback system that keeps whatever biases were present when it was created, and you can quite genuinely say, "Oh, I'm just following this system, which on paper should be a perfectly objective system" and there's no proof that you're actively and intentionally discriminating. But you're upholding discrimination, all the same.
If you want to see this sort of bias-laundering in practice, my favorite recent example is the voting laws in North Carolina that were recently struck down by their Supreme Court:
Every restriction, on the face of it, was defensible. Voter ID in the abstract is a good idea. Eliminating certain parts of early voting seems fine. But the courts looked at the emails behind this law, where legislators asked which particular voting mechanisms were used by specific demographic groups, and eliminated those mechanisms "with almost surgical precision". You couldn't prove from the text of the law that there was any intention at bias, which was the entire point; it wasn't supposed to look like a discriminatory law.
We don't have the benefit of seeing those discussions most of the time. So waiting until we have a proof of a wrong to fix that wrong is a losing strategy, one that is easily exploited by people who want to discriminate, and one that people who want to discriminate have demonstrated their willingness to exploit.
Sorry, but we've been through this tedious flamewar so many times that it's plain off topic on HN. This site exists to gratify intellectual curiosity—the polar opposite of drumming on dead horses. Those of you with a passion for nursing diversity need to find some other place to further the cause.
It's really saddening to see that the idea that humans are not a blank slate[1] is considered a "tedious flamewar topic" while articles such the one that started this thread this are not.
Not everything is a product of society and there's a mountain of science to support the fact. It's increasingly politically untenable (at least in the anglosphere) to acknowledge any biological differences between demographic groups, but that's weak reason for shutting down discussion.
The issue here is mostly not ideological [1]. It's about discussions that have been had a thousand times, never lead anywhere new—and therefore are never interesting—and always turn bilious. It's impossible to pull these weeds with full consensus but I'm pretty sure most readers of HN are bored by angry tape loops.
At some point, moderation has to be opinionated or we end up with the brown you get when all the finger paints are smeared together. Except in this case it's brown battery acid, because it's so nasty.
HN can't be for everyone. The reader who wants that type of argument should probably find some other websites.
[1] I'm giving you a "mostly" because yes, everything is ideological—I did go to grad school.
I'm no fan of angry tape loops and prefer a civil, moderated area. It's just powerful actors enforcing their politics, which seems to be getting more popular in every camp these days, is also highly undesirable. If I found that worthwhile that, I'd just stick to Chinese media.
They're not pleased with a majority female program. They're pleased with a half-male / half-female program. They don't want it to be lopsided in either direction because they believe programming as a skill is orthogonal to sex.
I think making computer science assignments and quizzes fun and less intimidating is a very different idea from the extreme of macho nursing.
Your article shows that teachers were making girls feel unwelcome because they didn't understand the cultural in-jokes. There's a big difference between cultural predisposition and predisposition towards a skill. I find it really hard to believe that programming and problem-solving is something men are just generally better at compared to women. If we measure problem-solving ability by IQ, then women are just as capable as men, though it looks like there are more males than females on each side of the spectrum of extraordinarily good at problem-solving and extraordinarily bad. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intellige...
I can believe that. But I would never argue it's orthogonal to interest. I would be fighting a losing battle if I argued men and women have exactly the same interests. IMO a 50/50 split is not going to happen naturally, and it won't be self sustaining. As we've already seen, the way to get closer to 50/50 is to peer pressure women into it. Whoopdee doo. Progress!
The biggest bias women in tech face IMO is impostor syndrome.
> Your article shows that teachers were making girls feel unwelcome because they didn't understand the cultural in-jokes.
I wonder if anywhere has tried running a female-only CS path (e.g. at a private non-coed institution) long enough to generate its own identity/culture, and then what would happen if you "transplanted" some of those teachers and students into a mixed-gender situation.
Could that "prime the pump", providing a cultural anchor point for more females in the mixed-gender place?
I wouldn't call the act of attempting demographic balance in a field 'stubborn'. History often teaches us that differences between groups are contextual rather than intrinsic. When I say contextual I mean they are often for reasons that have to do with specific social forces at work during specific historical periods.
For example, there was a time that software engineering was dominated by females. At the time, software development was considered a feminine task. Should we have concluded, at the time, that females were more inclined toward software development?
Any time a particular group dominates a particular field, we should question ourselves as to why. Because history shows that the reason is usually some form of erroneous preconception. Of course that won't always be true, but it is often true and should be questioned until it is obviously not true.
The benefit of continually questioning particular groups' dominance is obvious: once a particular narrowly conceived field is opened up to more people, the talent pool behind that field will grow.
Never female dominated (at least, in terms of degrees), but there was much less of a gap.
I couldn't find occupational statistics, only academic. I did find a lot of anecdotes about software being a stereotypically female activity, but I couldn't find actual data.
Some people argue that more diverse teams will produce better results but I have yet to see evidence that this happens in Computer Science related tasks.
In addition I remember being taught that you ultimately want teams to "jel" much more than some marginal productivity gain you might get from diversity. Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? Notice that I mean this in the limited scope of programming I know there is evidence to the contrary at the management level.
In my opinion, no. It's been my experience that a large portion of programmers are the type to easily lose track of the real goal (delivering a product that generates business value) in favor of relatively unimportant details.
To make this short and blunt: I've watched a pair of mega-nerds geek out for a week, over-engineering and prematurely optimizing an unimportant feature. I've also watched an adult have an absolute emotional meltdown over curly brace placement.
In my opinion, diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check.
Gender and race are orthogonal to shortsightedness and nerdiness.
>diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check.
The term diversity by itself has no meaning. One needs to specify how groups of people are split up whenever using the word "diversity". Are we splitting the groups up by race, gender, economic class, technology experiences, etc.?
There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender.
There's a happy gray area between less c/overt bias/discrimination and promoting people whom aren't qualified/interested to ameliorate guilt of the former.
I'm not particularly interested in gender and race, I'm interested in culture. Gender and race happen to be pretty easy metrics to break up monoculture on a typical programming team.
The term diversity by itself has no meaning.
Yes it does.
There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender.
Homogeneous in what sense? It seems likely to me that things like sense of humor and work ethic would be lot more important than maleness when crafting your measure of homogeneity there.
If I tried to apply that logically, it is probably an argument for diversity in the field overall rather than intra-team. There should be more all-women software teams/companies, half-half, etc rather than a domination of all or mostly male teams.
>The American Assembly for Men in Nursing (AAMN) is encouraging men to enroll in nursing school, with a goal of increasing male enrollment in nursing programs to 20% by 2020.
>Recruiters for schools and hospitals are placing targeted ads in publications and on websites that see more male users.
>The Oregon Center for Nursing undertook a recruitment campaign in 2002 titled, “Are You Man Enough to Be a Nurse?” which has recently been the focus of new attention.
I think that's the problem. It seems most of these criteria go along gender, race or sexual preferences lines. Nobody talks about shy people, disabled people, people with the wrong accent, fat people, older people, ugly people and so on. These groups get discriminated a lot against but nobody seems to care.
My company is rated as one of the most diverse companies in the but the diversity ends at race and gender.
I think that the term "diverse" has many definitions. For example, if a gender split at a tech company was 50/50, but everyone was white, would we still consider that company diverse? What is the right definition of "diversity" and which groups (gender vs race vs socio-economic vs ...) should we spend our time working on? You can see how identity politics become problematic very quickly.
Depending on the profession, "diversity" means black people or women. If you are diverse but don't have many women, you aren't actually diverse for the purposes of media hectoring. If you are diverse but you don't have enough black people, you aren't actually diverse for the purposes of media hectoring.
Which sports field in the graph below is the most representative of US demographics? Which one would be recognized for achievements in diversity?
because "diversity" means black people, not "representative of America's diversity."
In tech, if your ethnic demographics match the population, you are not diverse. To be diverse you need to hire less white people. Pinterest was not diverse because women were only 27% of tech hires. Ethnically the hires are 60% Asian, white males 35%, but the conclusion was too many white males.
Let's deep dive into diversity further. Why do we want diversity? Because apparently, we want people with different perspectives and experiences.
Now with "diversity", we have to specify how we split up the population into groups. We can use gender, race, country of origin, income, etc.
The media and general "diversity officers" use race and gender. However, this type of group division is not efficient for the goal of different perspectives and experiences. Female Americans have very similar experiences and perspectives compared to male Americans, as do black Americans and white Americans.
Differences in country of origin provide much higher differences in perspectives and experiences. A black American would have a more similar viewpoint with a white American than a black African immigrant. Dividing the groups by country of origin is MUCH more effective at satisfying the goal.
When viewed through the lense of country of origin, the tech field is very diverse in comparison to every other field out there. The field has a high immigrant %, and even the Americans are generally first generation Americans with immigrant parents, providing an extra boost in diversity.
Ironically, using country of origin to divide up groups shows that tech is much more diverse than fields like journalism/HR/etc. that vehemently advocate for diversity in tech.
If we're going whole hog we also have to include the various drug users and people of differing ages. What if that 18 year old prostitute druggie has a perspective that isn't covered in our scrum standups!
> Let's deep dive into diversity further. Why do we want diversity? Because apparently, we want people with different perspectives and experiences.
I don't think that's all of it. People have been pitching that as a politically-correct argument for diversity, since "There are actual racists and actual sexists among us and they have successfully biased the industry" is too offensive to say out loud. But diversity of perspective isn't the fundamental reason.
Absent a solid scientific reason to believe that one gender, one race, one country of origin, one level of income, etc. is truly better at the job than another (as opposed to better thanks to circumstance and existing systems of oppression), a non-diverse candidate pool is an arbitrary subset of a diverse candidate pool. This is both unprofitable for the industry, because you're skipping qualified candidates for no good reason, and unjust to the candidates whom you're skipping.
So, if these candidates truly are qualified and there's no scientific reason why they're statistically worse at the job, why are they being underrepresented? Because we have racists and sexists among us and they're in power.
Which is why it makes sense to look at race and sex and so forth more than other axes like viewpoint or country of origin: first, race and sex are particularly arbitrary, and second, that's what we know people have particularly discriminated on. There is discrimination on other axes, and it's absolutely also worth looking at, but it's a bit less egregious.
>Absent a solid scientific reason to believe that one gender, one race, one country of origin, one level of income, etc. is truly better at the job than another (as opposed to better thanks to circumstance and existing systems of oppression), a non-diverse candidate pool is an arbitrary subset of a diverse candidate pool. This is both unprofitable for the industry, because you're skipping qualified candidates for no good reason, and unjust to the candidates whom you're skipping.
There are objectively less qualified under represented minorities and females in the tech industry. Just check CS major demographics, stackoverflow demographics, etc. It's an undisputed fact.
If you want to cry foul on why they are less qualified, citing unequal representation is not adequate proof of sexism or racism.
Sexism, racism and discrimination are useless concepts unless properly and concisely defined before discussion because everyone's definition is different. It is very annoying to have people classify everything as "racism" or "sexism" to lazily avoid the need to justify arguments.
> There are objectively less qualified under represented minorities and females in the tech industry. Just check CS major demographics, stackoverflow demographics, etc. It's an undisputed fact.
I'm not sure I understand this sentence. It is an undisputed fact that the proportions of sex, race, etc. in tech are not reflective of the population at large, yes. But I'm not sure how this means that certain groups are less qualified.
> citing unequal representation is not adequate proof of sexism or racism
Sure. But it is the simplest hypothesis; other hypotheses have a higher burden of proof. Serious, straightforward racism and sexism are within living memory; FORTRAN, for instance, is older than Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement. There's good reason to believe sexism and racism could cause the discrepancy we see.
There is less good reason to believe an inherent biological bias; citing unequal representation is also not an adequate proof of biological differences.
>I'm not sure I understand this sentence. It is an undisputed fact that the proportions of sex, race, etc. in tech are not reflective of the population at large, yes. But I'm not sure how this means that certain groups are less qualified.
The question you were answering was "On average, do some races/genders make better tech workers than others?". the answer is, yes some races/genders are more qualified to work in tech than other races/genders because on average, they are more likely to spend the time to become qualified (see college and CS major demographics) and to gain CS knowledge. That is why the tech field skews toward a gender or race over others. Because some races/genders are literally more qualified for tech work than others.
No company is "skipping qualified candidates" because female and underrepresented minorities have not spent the time to become qualified to work in the tech field. They are, on average, literally less qualified to work in the tech field, given their current, average CS and programming knowledge.
>There is less good reason to believe an inherent biological bias; citing unequal representation is also not an adequate proof of biological differences.
Denying that sexism/discrimination against minorities is the cause of unequal representation is not the same as saying that the cause is biological differences. Some easy explanations for unequal representation could be society's pressure on men to make money, Asian/White parents' pressure on kids to do well, etc.
Unequal representation is not enough to prove racism/sexism against females and URMs.
> yes some races/genders are more qualified than other races/genders because on average, they are more likely to spend the time to become qualified (see college and CS major demographics). That is why the tech field skews toward a gender or race over others. Because some races/genders are literally more qualified for tech work than others.
OK, sure.
But this article is about fixing the demographics at the college level: figuring out why it is that some races/genders are more likely to become CS majors, and un-skewing that - so that the number of qualified people graduating with a CS degree is no longer biased on some unrelated demographic attribute. Is it not?
That FC article skims past, but doesn't quite touch on a very important point that's very central to the article:
> Silicon Valley companies are going after the same small pool of nonwhite, nonmale candidates
There's a limited pool of female software engineers and of non-white-or-asian software engineers. Universities are only graduating so many women, somewhere around the rate that Pinterest is hiring (~20%), if you hire more than this, you're just making sure that other companies can only have less than 20% women.
The change needs to start at the bottom, there need to be more women doing software engineering at university. You can't just hire all of the existing pool of female software engineers, or black software engineers, and then call yourself diverse, and shame on all the companies that now have only 5% female engineers.
You're overcomplicating things. In the ideal if we erased biases in education and staffing, we'd expect the various distributions we measure across tech companies to match a random sampling of the population at large. When we see large deviations from the population at large, it's a clear signal that something is going on.
This isn't that obscure, and we certainly don't need to engage in a false, hand wringing, semantic debate derailment along the lines of "but what IS diversity REALLY anyway?" Please. You know exactly what we're talking about here.
Your post is an exercise in identity politics as well. Welcome to same bowl the rest of us are in.
My query is more along the lines of how to invest resources to correct large deviations from the population at large and which deviations are more important than others.
For example, HMC is attempting to address diversity, but only along gender lines. There is no attempt to address racial diversity in any means.
Further in very progressive companies like Google and Facebook, Hispanic and Blacks in leadership positions are less than 1%, compared to a US population of 17% and 12% nationwide (respectively).
In these companies, 24% of leadership roles are held by women. That means that with regards to women, they are hitting 48% of their target (if the target is to get a 50/50 gender split). Whereas, with regards to race, they are hitting 5% of their target with Hispanics and 8% with blacks (if the goal is to get close to the population sample at large). So why is that that most "diversity" program only focus on gender? I know that the two aren't mutual exclusive, but it's no secret that far more resources are spent on gender diversity than anything else.
> For example, HMC is attempting to address diversity, but only along gender lines. There is no attempt to address racial diversity in any means.
This particular article is about gender imbalance, but I'm sure HMC has policies and controls that address race as well. I'd be curious about the numbers. I visited there 2 decades ago and it was definitely a very white student population.
>In the ideal if we erased biases in education and staffing, we'd expect the various distributions we measure across tech companies to match a random sampling of the population at large
Has anyone actually proven that, or is that just an assumption?
When it comes to a single tech company, just by the reason of statistics, I can understand how it's hard to worry about diversity because you're basically taking a small N sampling of the distribution. When you're talking about all tech companies as a whole it makes more sense...and similarly, all colleges, or even individual colleges, who tend to enroll a larger sample of the population.
Of course, when we're talking about Google or Facebook, we at big N territory, so if you don't expect biases, the make up should reflect the general population.
I'm having trouble reading that Quartz article as arguing that men and women have intrinsically different interests, and I think you acknowledge that by saying that there are social differences. It doesn't seem like they're arguing that there's anything in Star Trek posters that deters people with certain hormones, but that socially, Star Trek posters convey an association with a closed male culture.
Thing is, this is already social manipulation on arbitrarily-constructed criteria. It'd be one thing if we discovered that male brains were inherently better at tech thinking (it would be an extraordinary hypothesis that would need correspondingly extraordinary evidence, but it's certainly possible that evidence could be found). But we're arguing that these purely artificial constructs of geeky men bonding over Star Trek are worth upholding. And for what advantage? Keeping qualified people out of an industry that badly needs them?
It seems to me like it's entirely legitimate to plan social manipulation to disrupt existing social manipulation that gets in our way.
Nobody's arguing that geeks shouldn't be geeks. What they're arguing is that collections of geeks shouldn't be allowed to organize their workplaces to only accept geeks, or to prefer geek culture over other cultures.
And, in fact, no true geek has any trouble understanding why this is important. There are so many branches of geekdom that there is (or was) an elaborate geek code that broadcast ones affiliations. There are Star Trek geeks, and there are vampire LARP geeks. The Star Trek geeks are generally not OK with the idea of a clique of vampire LARP geeks refusing to hire anyone who doesn't look like they enjoy Bauhaus.
It's a common trope --- not among geeks, but among chauvinists of varying stripes --- that efforts to reduce discrimination are really thinly veiled attempts to persecute geeks. Don't fall for that. These really are the droids you're looking for.
> It'd be one thing if we discovered that male brains were inherently better at tech thinking (it would be an extraordinary hypothesis that would need correspondingly extraordinary evidence, but it's certainly possible that evidence could be found).
Given that males and females have vastly different reproductive strategies, the extraordinary claim is that male and female minds don't display the same sexual dimorphism as male and female bodies.
Oh no, I totally believe that the minds exhibit dimorphism. The claim I think is extraordinary is that the dimorphism is correlated with tech thinking, which, for starters, isn't a well-defined term. Is it raw programming ability? (If so, there are lots of reasons to believe that women are more suited to it than men, which were common folklore in the middle of last century when programming was low-status.) Is it project management? Business sense? Insight into emerging industries? The ability to learn new complex systems? The ability to work with other people effectively?
Once you have that, what's the argument that male brains are better at that particular type of thinking? The fact that more men happen to be employed to do this thinking isn't an argument; at best it's initial evidence that would inspire you to create a hypothesis, but it's not the end of the study by any means.
The interpretation that seems most likely to me, but which is unfortunately horribly politically incorrect, is that men are more likely to be territorial assholes about high-status positions in society, and we'll preserve our exclusivity when we have it. This manifests as us being better at $field for any $field because we don't allow women to have a chance to succeed. (We might allow enough of a chance to succeed so we can avoid accusations of sexism, which would risk our exclusivity, but we don't want to go so far that we concede the exclusivity on our own.) At least this hypothesis has the advantage of the known fact that having an aggressive personality is correlated with gender.
This is a hunch on my part, but I think the place to look for dimorphism isn't so much in raw ability as it is in motivation and willingness to take risk.
This is a non-PC opinion to match yours (which I largely agree with), but I think the desire to learn how to program is highly related to the desire to tinker and build, something which my life experience has shown to be much more prevalent in males than females (wood working, model building, car tinkering, etc. being largely male hobbies)
In addition to that, until recently, programming was a pretty high risk career choice. I think most people would not have predicted the sheer quantity of upper middle class careers that now exist in technology. I know when I was in college the received wisdom was that you became a doctor or a lawyer if you wanted a low-risk path to an upper middle class lifestyle. And I think those two professions are much more evenly balanced between males and females as a result.
I'm not sure I buy the tinkering argument. There are types of tinkering that are stereotypically male, but also types that are stereotypically female: see "old wives' remedies," cooking, sewing / knitting, etc.
I buy the risk argument in theory; anecdotally, friends who are women in tech seem to worry a bit more than friends who are men in tech about long-term career stability. But tech has been low-risk for the last few decades. Even when I was very young I remember being aware that Bill Gates was the richest man in the world, and he did programming, and programming was a thing I could learn. And the number of women in tech has been dropping since approximately the time Bill Gates became the richest man in the world.
I think the risk argument could apply well to high-risk tech career decisions, though, of which there are still quite a few like founding startups. But becoming a rank-and-file software engineer at a big corporation has been a low-risk high-reward career choice for a good while.
See, for instance, this graph of the proportion of CS graduates by gender (from ComputerWorld):
> But tech has been low-risk for the last few decades.
We only know that because we have the benefit of hindsight. But for somebody growing up in the 80s, 90s, and 00s outside of Silicon Valley, I don't think that it would have been seen as low risk when they were deciding what career to pursue.
Think about it. The reason software engineering has been a great profession for the last 3 decades is because an unprecedented number of software engineering jobs have been created in that time span. But most of those jobs didn't exist 3 decades ago (or even just one decade ago).
Somebody who can hack it as a software engineer can probably also hack it as a doctor or a lawyer. Choosing software engineering over law or medicine was definitely taking a risk. You probably had to relocate for a job, whereas jobs in law and medicine exist in most of the country. People were making good money as software engineers, but you couldn't be sure that would continue (I mean, there was the crash in 2000).
Again, not in hindsight. In hindsight, it was a reasonable choice, especially since you avoid huge additional schooling costs. But if you were making that decision 10 or 20 years ago, it was definitely taking a risk vs. the established career paths that law or medicine offer.
For every male I know that has strong opinions about IPAs and Overwatch, I know two women that spend their weekends working on things we call "maker projects" when dudes do them, but other things when women do them because women have been doing them forever. Have you ever paid serious attention to a real sewing project? It's a lot more like software construction than most of the things dudes do in their spare time.
> Have you ever paid serious attention to a real sewing project? It's a lot more like software construction than most of the things dudes do in their spare time.
Yes, my wife sews and knits. Hence my position that it's not really about raw ability.
I think the entry route to programming has historically had a lot in common with how somebody starts tinkering with machines (cars, appliances, farm equipment, timepieces, etc), despite the fact that programming is about manipulating abstract concepts and tinkering is about manipulating physical machines.
When telling their origin stories, many programmers will start by recounting the first physical computer they owned and how programming was a result of learning how to manipulate that machine. To me, it sounds an awful lot like how car guys talk about their first cars.
Is anyone not going to bring up Star fucking Trek is that beautiful fantastical future where women and men are equal in almost every respect, and humans all band together as a single race? Star Trek is a globalist/liberal's wet dream. Even TOS which had Captain Pike mumbling about "women on the bridge" was diverse for the 60's not just in representation of women but minorities, and clearly TNG was everything most of the SJ crowd would hope for.
We already have a very accurate system of privilege in 'parental wealth'. It has always puzzled me why people refuse to use this instead of relying of race/sex ect .
My theory is that affirmative action gives colleges an excuse to bump up rich, "underprivileged" minorities over poor, "privileged" races so they don't have to give as much financial aid
This question nerd sniped me quite hard, and I'm unfortunately having trouble answering it. I figured a first step would be to look at aid as a portion of cost of attendance over time, tracked against affirmative action endeavors. The problem I'm having is finding consistent measures of both aid and COA, let alone over time. If anyone knows a data source that proffers this I'd be quite curious.
Many colored women say mainstream feminism is primarily for white wealthly women, so it would be why the biggest issue of wealth inequality is dismissed in favor of gender.
it is the primary one but it doesn't seem to be taken into consideration at all. why is that? Certainly a better indicator of privilege than sex.
eg: 'Only 3.8 percent of American families make more than $200,000 per year. But at Harvard University, 45.6 percent of incoming freshman come from families making $200,000 or more. A mere 4 percent of Harvard students come from a family in the bottom quintile of US incomes, and only 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles'[1].
This is pretty far from the most relevant counterargument to that statement, but autism and Asperger's are routinely misdiagnosed / underdiagnosed in girls because the diagnostic criteria are based on boys' behavior, because society expects boys' behavior and girls' behavior to be different and picks up on non-conforming boys' behavior more easily, etc. See, for instance:
That article suggests autism in girls is not just different but less severe and more like normal boys development.
There seems like something bigger here hidden in the data.
Thank you for mentioning this! I've heard the hypothesis that some Autistic Spectrum Disorders are misdiagnosed as Borderline in women. I don't know how credible that hypothesis is, or how well-substantiated, but it seems reasonable to me.
This also causes problems for the whole school as well: I learned through a friend that a google recruiter was talking about how students from my school often have great resumes and then fall apart during technical interview questions. So I think it is plausible that these kinds of initiatives hurt EVERYONE from the school in question.
This is all anecdotes, but I'm convinced this is a real problem, causing REAL harm, all for the college to look better in social justice statistics. This is why I'm writing about it instead of just shrugging my shoulders.