[cuttooth]

I'm fine with a program like HS existing if people want to join it, but I'll have no respect for them until they treat both genders equally in terms of the tuition assistance.

Note that I'm all for women joining the program, but I'd presume people with the time to commit to the program are a) not working, and b) don't have much money, so it's completely unfair to exclude men to receive assistance just because they happen to be of the majority who are interested the field.

[antics]

To be clear, there is no "tuition" and therefore no "tuition assistance". The living stipends are provided by external companies, like etsy, and they are provided as an outreach effort.

Now. On a purely practical note, HS is a business, and the core objective is to deliver excellent batch dynamics. The responsibility is to attendees and attendees only -- how are they delivering an experience that makes the time (and, indirectly, money) commitment of the students worth it? The issue of "fairness" does not enter the conversation because this is not a charity. Or, more straightforwardly, their responsibility is not to people who did not get in.

Now, ok, you might argue that you are not convinced that having a roughly-equal gender ratio is beneficial to the batch as a whole, but I am in the current batch and I'm telling you it makes a huge difference. If you don't believe me, let's chat over email or skype.

[xinn]

Do you think a lower standard is required of female applicants in the application process than of male applicants?

[nicholasjbs]

To clarify, we don't have any "tuition assistance," since we don't charge anyone tuition. Hacker School is entirely free for everyone.

(We do have a limited number grants for living expenses, which other companies pay for, that are currently only available for women.)

[bgilroy26]

The money is an extra, it's added on. It's not as though they thought about paying for everybody and then took it away for men, that would be silly.

[ankitml]

The tuition assistance is precisely for this reason that majority interested are men. The assistance is supposed to increase the interest among women.