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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
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.
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:
[+] [-] mjfl|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pomoma_grad|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hkon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eridrus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominotw|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noobermin|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Eridrus|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] karmicthreat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmkg|9 years ago|reply
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.
(Disclosure: Harvey Mudd alumn, class of 2008)
[+] [-] bwanab|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kartD|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182080
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6531251
[+] [-] BigChiefSmokem|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] braveo|9 years ago|reply
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?
Is there anyone who actually buys that?
[+] [-] zackmorris|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rokosbasilisk|9 years ago|reply
From reading the comments, its seems alot of people want to help but have legitimate, well reasoned and valid concerns.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] garysieling|9 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjFTHTgEVU
I haven't been able to locate many similar good talks, so if anyone can point me to speakers / talks I'd appreciate it.
[+] [-] ng12|9 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] virmundi|9 years ago|reply
1 - https://xkcd.com/1053/
[+] [-] RodericDay|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] LunaSea|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13320899 and marked it off-topic.
[+] [-] geofft|9 years ago|reply
If so, yes, I am in favor of that sort of sexism.
[+] [-] RoboticFoot|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13241873
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] _mhr_|9 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] lemmsjid|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PrimalDual|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nommm-nommm|9 years ago|reply
Yes they do.
https://www.jacksonvilleu.com/resources/career/men-in-nursin...
>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.
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=nursing+school+culture+males
I guess there is no one suggesting ways to "macho-fy" it, but more sensible discussions are occurring.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spaceflunky|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] geofft|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dominotw|9 years ago|reply
wtf. why is this downvoted?
[+] [-] hkmurakami|9 years ago|reply
Both wealth hierarchies and social class hierarchies exist, but that goes against the narrative.
[+] [-] FT_intern|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rokosbasilisk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] catman56|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] geofft|9 years ago|reply
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s-diffe...
https://spectrumnews.org/opinion/male-slant-to-research-may-...