Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
latimes.com
latimes.com
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 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.
Thats why alot of companies prefers ivy leagues, mit, other top schools etc.
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.
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 still bitter about the bullshit requirements my uni thrust on me. The patronizing "we know better than you" schtick gets old real fast.
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)
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...
The course website is here, and shows the Gold / Black sections: https://www.cs.hmc.edu/twiki/bin/view/CS5
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.
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?
Is there anyone who actually buys that?
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.
From reading the comments, its seems alot of people want to help but have legitimate, well reasoned and valid concerns.
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.
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.
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".
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, :).
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.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13320899 and marked it off-topic.
If so, yes, I am in favor of that sort of sexism.
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.
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:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-n...
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.
wtf. why is this downvoted?
Both wealth hierarchies and social class hierarchies exist, but that goes against the narrative.
From the article I posted above has some details but not the precise metrics you requested. I'd be interested in those too.
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].
1. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-...