Why in the age of a _World_ Wide Web and "post-discrimination" are large companies such as Google deliberately targeting specific groups? What will be in the girls-only code program that might be inappropriate for boys?
Large companies are judged by the diversity of their employees. They want to hire more women. In order to hire more women, there needs to be more qualified women applying for jobs. In order for there to be more qualified women applying for jobs, there needs to be more qualified women. In order for there to be more qualified women we need to be teaching more girls how to program.
> What will be in the girls-only code program that might be inappropriate for boys?
It's more about what won't be in those classes, specifically: inappropriate boys.
One school of thought about why there are less girls in computer science classes is that the environment/culture? of the currently self-selected students can sometimes (seem) abrasive and uninviting.
Maybe that is just a stereotype, but offering classes specifically for underrepresented demographics is at least a method to test that theory.
And here is the problem - diversity has become a goal rather than a natural consequence of everyone having equal chances.
It's not the lack of diversity that those companies should focus on - much more important is an elimination of any kind of discrimination based on gender/race/religion etc.
In a world where boys and girls are given the same opportunities at (even) younger ages, you wouldn't need something like this.
As it stands right now, it is intimidating for a girl to sign up for her first computer science class knowing that it will be full of boys that have been encouraged to do computer sciencey things from an earlier age. There is the perception that the girl will come in at a disadvantage.
Allowing a them to sign up for a class with the perception that they all have equal footing/previous knowledge could give them the confidence they need to join the classes with boys that are perceived to have more experience.
When the time comes that girls are signing up for computer science classes at the same rate as boys, then classes like this would no longer be necessary.
That being said, public schools cannot create X-only classes. There is no discrimination in which students can signup for my computer science classes and I have unfortunately low female enrollment.
YMMW but IIRC my experience has been a bit different :-/
Edit: added IIRC
So you tolerate that a complete sex shall be punished for former sins. Clearly not my sense of justice.
> In a world where boys and girls are given the same opportunities at (even) younger ages, you wouldn't need something like this.
Everybody can use the internet to learn coding. But at least to me it seems that mostly boys (with few exceptions) seem to love doing this - in particular from young age on.
This is not a zero-sum game. Creating a new opportunity for girls does not remove an existing opportunity for a boy.
> But at least to me it seems that mostly boys (with few exceptions) seem to love doing this - in particular from young age on
Maybe you should try talking to more girls and asking them what they are interested in.
> This is not a zero-sum game. Creating a new opportunity for girls does not remove an existing opportunity for a boy.
Not when quotas are involved. In Germany, where I live, every few years serious attempts to introduce women quota for companies are attempted to pass as a law (which typically are only prevented in the last moment because of massive protests of business associations).
Since Januar 2016 gender quotas for the supervisory council of the 106 largest market-listed companies were introduced. For restaffing in the supervisory council there is a quota of 30% for both gender (or the position has to be left vacant).
Wikipedia link:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frauenquote&oldid...
Here a Reuters article about the topic:
> http://web.archive.org/web/20160619090749/http://de.reuters....
Here an "official" article by the Federal Minestry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth ["Federal Minestry for everybody except men" ;-) ]:
> https://www.bmfsfj.de/bmfsfj/themen/gleichstellung/frauen-un...
Head count is orthogonal to gender make up of the company
You are not inoculated from the past sins of gender discrimination. So simply because you did not discriminate does not mean you did not benefit from past discrimination. While this fact should not be used to hold you accountable, it should be used to pursue policies that offset that advantage.
A company offering a program for girls is not punishing boys. It's giving girls a boost that was given to boys of previous generations.
Simply giving equal opportunity after decades (longer, really) of inequality is not truly equal. As an analogy, imagine if a government gave extremely preferential treatment to one company over another for an extended period of time (lower taxes, looser regulation, etc.) and all of the sudden started treating the two companies the same. Would you expect them to have an equal chance of success? Surely the accumulated benefits of the one company would still provide a significant advantage that would have to be remedied before the companies have an equal chance of success.
Edit: I realize I assumed you are male, which your comment does not state. Mea culpa. Read this comment as directed at any male who opposes policies that promote gender equality in STEM education.
That hasn't been proven or quantified. If you're going to use sexism to fix perceived sexism, you should quantify and prove the original sexism first.
And here is the problem - people think diversity is a goal per se, while it is actually a competitive advantage.
A competitive advantage would be gained through diversity of thought. Making gender, skin color or any other superficial characteristic into a numbers game in order to look diverse is in no way a competitive advantage.
Well, not really. I mean, not at all. I appreciate you took your time to tell me I'm wrong, but you might want to support it with something more solid. Diversity of thought is not just what happens when you get two people together. If those people have a very similar upbringing, chances are they think in a similar way. They might reach different conclusions and one of them might reach the right one, but they might be missing points of view that could increase their accuracy when making decisions.
Your upbringing shapes how you think, what you fear, what you wish. Of course even inside the same communities very similar people might have completely different trains of thought, but what you call "superficial characteristics" as gender or skin colour it is (unfortunately) not superficial in many places. Many men can't even imagine the things a woman has to endure at the workplace, or your skin colour when you're a minority.
Even things like being a native speaker of a foreign tongue shapes how you think. The culture of your hometown, province, region, country defines you, too.
If you've lived a different life because of your gender, ethnicity, passport, disability, country of birth or even family wealth chances are you can bring quite different points of view than people with different gender, ethnicity, passport, disability, country of birth or even family wealth.
There are studies that show correlation between higher diversity and better performance (Forbes, McKinsey).
P.S.: I suspect you're the one that downvoted me (just above 500 karma, only reply to my comment). I appreciate you followed up with a comment, but downvotes are not "I disagree" signals. Please learn to be a bit more tolerant with people that does not think like you, instead of trying to shut their voice down.
Well that's just discriminating against nerds
This is exactly the problem. You've assumed that 'nerds' -- people who are skilled and passionate about tech things -- are male. It's that kind of assumption which enforces a massive mental barrier for women to be able to consider themselves legitimately passionate and skilled about tech, and also for men to recognise them as such too.
Until the association of nerds with masculinity is broken up, boys and men will dominate tech at the expense of others. And until that that point, programs like Google's which foster different ('minoritean') associations with being passionate and skilled with tech will be needed.
I don't even.
exactly. I dont agree with you that women have "never been" discriminated against, but I do agree that vocational fields are not homogeneously populated (and that is not the result of discrimination).
* I dont see very many women police officers
* (this was mentioned on HN last week) not very many oil-rig workers are women
* I dont see many heterosexual men working as hair dressers or bridal shop/wedding planners/fashion designers/makeup artists ("this is clearly a glass door organized by the Gay Male Establishment to prevent heterosexual men from breaking into this field. Such abuse of privilege" /s).
* I don't see many women working as bouncers at night clubs
* I don't see many women working as commercial pilots.
But you know, for all the "I don't see"'s , when I do see one that defies the norm, I dont think much of it. They're people just like anyone else, free to pursue whatever they want. But it's not automatically discrimination when groups of people gravitate to certain fields.
As the one judging the ones doing the judging, it's fun to imagine that the judgement is what motivates the corporation's actions. I don't think that's actually what happens though.
The motivation I've actually seen corporations act upon, is that diversity in employees has direct benefits to the company's bottom line. For example, googling "facebook diversity" gets me this paragraph:
>"Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. In order to achieve that mission, we need an employee base that reflects a broad range of experiences, backgrounds, races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, abilities and many other characteristics."
You can assume that they're all lying to virtue signal if you want, it's impossible to stop anyone from assuming such things. But if you're proposing an alternative to their stated motivations, you should probably explain why that motivation isn't actually true.
Unfortunately, a lot of tech companies these days consider "positive discrimination" as a good thing.
The above are my assumptions and may be wrong.
As for your girls-only code program comment, I have taught kids to create things using visual scripting tools. There is a difference in what the girls want to make and what the boys want to make. This was my first hand experience and is a limited insight into a small world.
Because the gender ratio in STEM fields skews heavily towards men.
>What will be in the girls-only code program that might be inappropriate for boys?
I can't imagine there would be anything that was 'inappropriate', though there may be some boys less excited about making a dress light up. Google is using existing gender roles to introduce girls to code and get them excited about STEM, something that may be far more difficult once they grow older.
Girls are free to study what they want. If they don't want to study STEM fields - their problem, which I don't feel having to care for.
How do you define discrimination? I think there isn't a clear line, and we have to use our evolving best judgment depending on the context.
How else can we attempt to more quickly resolve unfortunate and unfair dynamics the past has brought us?
Lastly, I think it's a mistake to assume all discrimination is zero sum. We will all reap benefits from previously disadvantaged groups receiving more opportunity.
Using any other criterion than ability for e.g. staffing jobs/university places/... In this sense every forced quota on gender/skin color/race/... is discrimination. Women only programs are, too (as "men only", "white only" or "black only").
EDIT:
> How do you feel about Spanish language programming courses?
Living in Germany I openly don't understand what you want to imply with this question.
If your complaint is mainly about quotas, I don't have as much to say about those. My intuition is that strict quotas are overly heavy handed and also treating the symptom not the cause. I would guess that programs that seek to help certain groups closer to the source (e.g. in the education and training phase) are more effective.
A clear line has been drawn in the form of protected classes. Primary language spoken and income are not protected classes. Gender is.
Of course, but when the disparity is so large we should at least question why that is. Are girls biologically less inclined to find any appeal in STEM, or is it due to upbringing? This course appears to be following the latter, and either challenging any social bias that may dissuade girls, or balancing out any extra persuasion of boys
you're using gender stereotypes ("girls like dresses", and implied its corollary, "boys like machines") in an argument against gender exclusion.
It's not easy to break down cultural barriers, and doing so in one fell swoop is near impossible. Employing these stereotypes in order to bring an end to them is not necessarily a bad thing
In regards to targeting young women, they're making an effort to redress the obvious gender imbalances and male dominance of the tech world. Why is that a problem?
It could be that they are just virtue signaling and trying to appease the easily offended bloggers and tech "journalists"