Women: Learn to Program This Summer

Edit: mlevental points out that you were referring to the article, not my comment. I think there's plenty of intellectual curiosity in what Jessica wrote, especially in the blog post explaining why she did it. In fact, I'd say it's obvious. That commenters don't always respond to curiosity with curiosity of their own is a separate issue.

Certainly it's also a promotional post in the sense of wanting to call attention to the program, but that sort of mix is common on HN, and it's where it is on the front page because users upvoted it.

The interview process is all about being biased against certain candidates. But what often happens is that the biases we hold when interviewing and working with candidates don't matter to the job but happen to exclude people who would otherwise do quite well.

It's not like interviewers are all twirling their waxed mustaches and snickering about how many women they've excluded. But what they do is listen to how someone describes a problem or how they behave during a whiteboard interview and interpret that negatively simply because it's different from what they were expecting. And so they don't hire the person because they're a "bad culture fit." Some women have been trained by our culture to use less assertive terms to avoid showing dominance in a discussion. And they tend to wait for you to finish before they talk.

Or suppose that the people at the company tend to wear a certain gamut of colors because they're all white and blue-ish and grey-ish colors tend to look better on white guys. So when someone shows up with a redder shirt that person might be taken as "too flamboyant" when in reality they're just picking a good neutral color for their skin tone. It just happens to be a significantly different tone from the rest of the office.

It could even be as subtle as discomfort with inexact or flowery speech. I had a lead who would get very uncomfortable when I would talk in metaphor and use metaphors and different words to describe things in terms that he wasn't used to. He would try to get me to tone it down. But everyone else on the team was perfectly okay with it so I kept doing it. That's another form of useless bias, because I was understood and could do my job but probably wouldn't have been as hire-able if I had talked like that during my interview.

My point and OP's point is that discrimination is frequently not overt. We have to look past these superficial differences and really think about whether someone can do the job. And we also need to be exposed to more candidates who are not like this. So a program like this stuffs the pipeline and gets us more exposure, and it's now up to us to challenge our existing biases and try a more diverse array of people out.

So this is helping those who are already privileged, while the actual underprivileged are ignored once again.

Good luck to the author :)

It's https and 100 speed score on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=.... I'm guessing this is on something like Netlify, as it's fast and there is HN hug of death.

For example the American Association of Educators is trying to encourage more men to become elementary school teachers, where women are drastically overrepresented (It makes tech look like a utopian melting pot). By doing so, they're not saying women are bad, but they are saying the profession would benefit significantly from more male participation, particularly when addressing concerns specific to young boys who are more likely to struggle in school.

Secondly, I'd also disagree that about the general attitudes of folks pushing diversity initiatives. No one is trying to eliminate white and Asian men from the workforce. This is more about bringing people in, not excluding populations.

From the discussion/debate I’ve had in the past, I perceive a strong overlap between people who would aggressively dismiss these women’s opinions, and also people who say we should “just listen to women”.

I have no agenda to push women into tech specifically, but coincidentally most of the people I have mentored and brought into tech have been women. This is likely because I’m in tech, and I’ve always spent more time with women. It puts me in an awkward position when I encourage a woman to attend an event like Rails Girls (which I had heard is an excellent experience for women), and then that woman comes back and says she hated it, and that very few of the women there actually wanted to do any programming, and that most of them just wanted to talk about gender politics.

In any case, I’m glad you weren’t deterred.

It's also worth mentioning why the term "underrepresented minority" or "underrepresented group" is need in the first place. Considering how sexist and racist people claim tech is Asians seem to be doing perfectly fine which is exactly why the term URM is needed in the first place.

It’s not apparently obvious what ethnicity I am based on looks. I had already been told there was a focus on diversity at the company I ended up getting an offer at and they “really want to build a diverse team from the ground up”. The conversation had been dragging for months and I resisted bringing up my background out of principle. I saw the hiring manager tweeting about a Latinx conference (I hate that term) and bit the bullet and told them I’m Latinx. I had an offer by the end of the week. This was after months of similar discussions with other companies where I stuck to my ideal of being hired for what I’ve accomplished and the skills I can prove I have. Ultimately I was running out of money and got desperate. I still feel terrible and angry but I have to put food on the table.

Stats like this are so useless. Obviously if males make up 95% of the pool they're more likely to have founded some of the unicorns, therefore skewing the average. If one of the 5% of females founded a unicorn I bet they'd have a greater share of VC dollars.

And yet, the OP is openly and blatant 'men need not apply'. How is that ever OK?

It is illegal to discriminate based on sex.

By not discriminating based on sex to fix a ratio/percent you could be found discriminating

No it can't unless you show that there are an equal number of qualified candidates, which there aren't in tech. CS grad rates for women are much lower.

These rhyme with soviet era policies circa 1950-1960 in Eastern Europe. At universities, there was an admission exam for 'healthy origin' people for the majority of the spots, and then another exam where everybody, including those failing the first time, could compete for the scraps. We all know how that turned out economically speaking.

Seeing the same policies in XXI century USA is surreal.

I must be really awful if I can't get hired as a Mexican, eh?

You are ultimately selecting the factors which could affect the outcome of that opportunity.

How is that not discrimination? How do you pick and choose what you consider diverse?

When you select the factors you're ultimately not an equal opportunity employer anymore in my opinion.

Next time I apply somewhere I am going to check Cajun or other since we have 'ethnic status'. I am certain we Cajuns aren't well represented in tech.

I've already resigned myself that I must tell him to always check those minority boxes and he may want to consider only using his mother's surname on his resume, instead of the traditional dual surname he legally has (Example: Lopez, instead of Smith Lopez).

This farcical system can't go on forever as is. Either racial preferences in hiring will be banned under the 14th amendment, or the US will adopt a Brazil-style racial preference system, where they will actually test your blood and have technicians measure the tone of your skin and the shape of your face in order to fit you into a category.

Because, you know, most companies look up the profile of candidates on LinkedIn, social media etc. Unless you actually consider yourself transgender, you would quickly be caught and removed just as quickly.

also seems like a hard-to-believe hypothesis.

See https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... for an outline of the 'interest' hypothesis - essentially, women are stronger than men in both verbal and math/science domains, but prefer the former, so will pick subjects that more closely align with their interests when society lets them do so. In countries with worse egalitarianism and social security, they'll gravitate towards subjects that bring them more economic freedom.

Who feels welcome in tech? It's an elitest culture filled with strong personalities that fancies itself a meritocracy.

Edit, here's an article explaining this since judging by subsequent comments I may have done a poor job: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

> What is this “object vs. people” distinction?

> It’s pretty relevant. Meta-analyses have shown a very large (d = 1.18) difference in healthy men and women (ie without CAH) in this domain. It’s traditionally summarized as “men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people”. I would flesh out “things” to include both physical objects like machines as well as complex abstract systems; I’d also add in another finding from those same studies that men are more risk-taking and like danger. And I would flesh out “people” to include communities, talking, helping, children, and animals.

> So this theory predicts that men will be more likely to choose jobs with objects, machines, systems, and danger; women will be more likely to choose jobs with people, talking, helping, children, and animals.

In there, there's a link to a study, though that link appears to be dead right now. Here's the study's abstract and a different link https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004....

> How big are gender differences in personality and interests, and how stable are these differences across cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I summarize data from two meta‐analyses and three cross‐cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men).

> In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people‐oriented and less thing‐oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender‐egalitarian societies than in gender‐inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.

Anyway, while it's not an open and shut case, it's very hard to explain why these preferences are stronger in more egalitarian/less sexist societies, rather than weaker, using conventional social progressive thinking. If the idea behind these preferences and decisions is "well, that's because of societal sexism", why are the least sexist societies doing the worst there, and the most sexist societies the best?

I'm socially progressive on most issues, but I find much of the arguments and reasoning from other social progressives for this topic to be fairly disingenuous. They often strongly give the impression of having decided that basically all strong gender preferences must be because of some kind of oppression or stereotyping, any scientific inquiry that indicates otherwise is morally unacceptable, facts be damned.

This is a testable hypothesis and wrong. Women's participation in CS is dropping, so it absolutely is not the same curve, just a little behind.

Every study that actually bothered to ask that question?

1.

For example, there was an ACM study that asked both men and women (most studies do not). To their surprise, they found that women reported greater levels of support from their management than the men did. One of the few things they asked in terms of attitudes where there was a statistically significant difference between men and women was, drumroll, "interest in technology".

And that's for people actually in the profession!

https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2008/2/5453-women-and-men-in-...

2. Then there was the study that looked at why women leave engineering. #1 reason? "Didn't like the work/not interested in engineering". #2 reason was starting a family, #3 was didn't like the environment.

https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tid...

(Note: look at the actual numbers, not the headlines, because the headlines are very, very selective and do not reflect the actual numbers)

3. There was a study about high school students taking (or not taking) CS in Israel. They looked at all the factors that are usually trotted out, support, role-models, etc. No difference. The one point that showed a difference: "interest in CS", with the boys taking the class at 100% and the girls at 43%. For kids not taking the class the level of interest was gender-neutrally low. Interestingly, this was reported as "no statistical difference", which is...odd.

(Semanticscholar actually has the table in question, it's table 7 in the gallery)

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Computer-science-issue...

4. The ROSE project showed that non-interest in science and engineering starts at a very early age. It also shows that interest dropping generally in countries with higher HDI, not just for girls, though for girls it drops even more quickly.

So it's not just the Gender Equality Paradox already mentioned quite a bit here, but also a more general Development vs. interest in STEM issue.

https://roseproject.no/network/countries/norway/eng/nor-Sjob...

And of course there are the more general studies that show that a difference between people vs. things (empathising vs. systematising) is one of the largest and most robust gender differences that has been found (in the same category as the difference in aggression).

It is a fact that even at birth, girls are more interested in people where boys are more interested in things. This is even true for newborn chimpanzees. You can’t really blame society for this.

Surely this is a more plausible explanation why there are more women in medicine than in programming?

But that is not the case. In 1984, 37% graduates of computer science were women but in 2017 only 12% were women [0]. How can it be that with so much more focus on diversity and inclusion today so many women are choosing a non-computing career than in 1984? The tech industry does seem to be on a fundamentally different path to medicine and law in this regard.

A second point is that writing computer code seems to have a strong appeal to people close to the autism spectrum - people who love to close the door to their private office, put on their headphones and write code for 6 hours without any interaction with another human being. And men tend to be greatly overrepresented on the autism spectrum.

[0] https://www.thebusinesswomanmedia.com/stats-women-tech-worse...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...

---

We synthesized evidence from interest inventories over four decades and found large sex differences in vocational interests, with men preferring working with things and women preferring working with people.

---

Engineering can be said to be involved with "things" and "med schools" with people?

Informally we could perhaps translate that to "Just because men like to sit in a cubicle all day and invert binary trees (a small pun on Google's hiring practices https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en) that everyone else, namely women, should enjoy doing same". I mean, they might and many do, but it is not an obvious thing like it is often presented and it should be discussed. Of course, we can then ask where do those interests come from and some will say because of how people are socialized and others will say because of hormones and other biological differences.

Ha. Anecdotal evidence? I thought we had better than that (especially when talking about stuff such as other people's subtle, unconscious biases, as judged by someone who has had a job application accepted or rejected..)

There are fewer women doing coding despite no barriers to entry, more opportunities (like this one) and preferential selection (thanks to people like you).

Just look around you for the evidence. Men spend their free time on hobbies, building things, playing with machines. Women call men boys for doing this. They do not want to do it. They do not understand why men do it.

And so, to further the goal of equal opportunity, one must balance an already unbalanced set of scales. Not to do so is merely to accept its bias as the status quo.

There are philosophical cases to be made that the wrong must be righted asap, or that this approach is an instance of two wrongs not making a right.

For me, assuming good intentions, I choose other things to be upset about than people being selectively nice or helpful to others who are dealing with a problem.

I can understand the concern that leaning too hard in to this kind of thing can get out of hand, so as with everything, probably best to do our research and decide case by case.

Was the widespread social justice outrage lost in translation? Where are the public calls to revoke the psychologists' licenses and shut down the website where they give advice?

All I see is one article that doesn't mention any significant public response at all. While it's nice that someone is speaking against it, it's not nearly enough, and only confirms my point that abusing men is still generally tolerated.

Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? They include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

Also, please stop posting flamebait, especially ideological flamebait, to HN. It fuels flamewars, which destroy what we want to preserve here: thoughtful conversation and intellectual curiosity. Assuming those are things you also want, you're welcome to post here in that spirit.

> I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-coders

It would be absurd if coding skill were only useful to people whose job title and central role is “coder” (just as viewing literacy as central would be absurd if measured by the number of people employed as “writers”.)

https://tim.blog/2019/03/21/learn-to-code/

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_litteris_colendis

(This is nowhere near the worst guideline violation in this thread, but it's such a precise one.)

EDIT: Here's one paper that talks about how "widely shared cultural beliefs about gender" affect early decisions people make wrt to their careers https://sociology.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9501/f/pu...

"The results of this study show that males assess their own mathematical competence higher than their otherwise equal female counterparts"

"self-assessments of task competence were found to influence career-relevant decisions, even when controlling for commonly accepted measures of ability. For males and females, the higher they rate their mathematical competence, the greater the odds that they will continue on the path leading to careers in the quantitative professions. However, since males tend to overestimate their mathematical competence relative to females, males are also more likely to pursue activities leading down a path toward a career in science, math, and engineering."

I can anecdotally confirm that I've witnessed women in software engineering be discouraged from learning software engineering at the undergraduate level, often from TAs/Professors.

I can also point to other reported anecdotes, such as the big Riot Games article, several blogs/tweets confirming the article, the Uber NYT article, etc.

The literal quote 'unable to find employment' does not coincide with the quoted portion 'discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied'. Employment is one of the last opportunities that can be denied or discouraged towards women- we have a wealth of educational, internship, volunteering, etc. opportunities that can serve to winnow the pipeline of appropriate female candidates before discussing employment.

Note: I'm not arguing that this is universal to all women in the engineering field, merely providing some response to "I have never even heard of this phenomenon anecdotally".

Perhaps the son really did love this stuff and perhaps the daughter was given the opportunity to do other things. Perhaps this was a one-off coincidence. But my experience is littered with this stuff. It happened even to me. I've got two parents who were both software engineers and I was given toys as a child that were designed to develop technical skills and my sister wasn't.

The research community does not have a better explanation for the disparity than social bias.

There's nothing in this release saying they want to offer this to disadvantaged women, they simply want to offer it to women.

And the same could be said for other fields. Step in to a construction site/auto dealership/mechanic shop/sports field and tell me how many women you see. Are all those fields dominated by sexist men as well?

And for men, how many are nurses/teachers/social workers/counselors/human resources vs women? Are all those fields dominated by sexist women?

Could it be that women enjoy jobs with more human interaction and men are more content to sit in front of a computer screen?

If your contention is correct, the absence of male teachers for impressionable young children must be a massively damaging thing? Much worse than a preponderance of one sex or another of students in a lecture theatre?

Clearly not IMO, there needs to be a morally defensible reason for restricting the field by physical characteristics; sex and skin colour/race are not good reasons in general.

This thread, and past threads on this subject turn into an absolute shit-show and cause tribalism/division. I feel like that is evidence enough that these policies are harmful.

When you do/don't get a job there's uncertainty around the reason. Was it my experience/skill-set, or race/gender/sexual orientation/religion? It feels like we're trying to fix discrimination by forcing everyone to feel like they might be experiencing it.

"Even if we're not actively discriminating against women now, bias still remains in this male-dominated industry."

This rhetoric is just to confuse people. Any non-active discrimination removes the burden on those who are not facing the bias. Period. Getting equality by stepping over other's heads and pushing them down? Sorry, that is not equality. That is oppression. These non-active biases are something women have every right and power to overcome by themselves. They should not be served in platter. They should burden themselves to do so.

"Therefore, it's necessary to do something in order to bring women back in, and we all have to do our part - in some cases this could mean men making way for women."

Its funny how we write "we all have to do our part" only to not see women sacrifice anything in the end. The word "all" is clever way to escape this sexism against men. Also the word "small" downplays the sacrifices of men in the due process and assumes patronizing attitude in deciding the pains behind such sacrifices don't matter for men. If in order to support your livelihood, I have to kill my hunger, my opportunities, my chances, my support to family then you are part of the problem, not me.

"...it's about doing what we can to correct our historic mistakes."

Past is past. History remains and can never be corrected. It is the present that we should correct and see to it that there is no further active discrimination.

I do think women should stop blaming others and put their efforts to the point of testing their limits instead of insulting men but I am slandered with 'victim blaming'. Ha!

These people cannot make the whole world believe their perpetual victimization just so they can steal free affirmative action. Either prove your mettle and talent to get your money or get out.

Studies have shown that women move away from STEM, both in studies and career as countries are more gender egalitarian. Countries with less egalitarian societies have more women in STEM[0].

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/countries-with-l...

That's an interesting example. Sure, I was initiated to the Unix command line at the University, but it was just that : an initiation. I got hooked quickly though so I was driven to learn the rest all by myself (or rather, with the help of the linux community online). I'm sure it's more or less the same for most linux nerds. I may have bought one or two books about linux though, but buying a book about a subject you're passionate about is something normal.

You're right that once you want to get into the important technical details, free documentation on the web may be insufficient and you may need to invest in proper textbooks. I still think my point stands, though.

A good instructor will also guide you to good learning materials. There's lots of terrible books out there, but I found good books through my classes. Though, it's probably easier to find learning materials today than when I began.

I don't understand why women in general need special help or guidance.

Not always true, sometimes you have to help lift boxes (100lb) carrying hardware with your software preinstalled / ready to be shipped because you work in a small office and paying someone off to do the same task 1 day randomly throughout the different quarters of the year is not worth the hassle.

The problem is that people learning programming for the first time, who don't have a passion for it, can find themselves in a class with those who do. I have witnessed, first hand, people who were beginners getting left in the dust by their classmates on a group project and ultimately dropping out of CS/SE entirely.

Gender is not important here. As a matter of fact, I wanted to edit my post and talk about people in general, but I did not bother. This article was about women.

My point is that I have the feeling that programming is something most people learn more or less for free with the documentation available online and with the help of online programming communities. The lack of intrinsic motivation is how I explain someone (woman or man) may need financial support and a IRL teacher.

That is just hard to understand. If your gender is an issue, why even make it public in the first place? I mean, ever heard of the saying "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

I don't care one whit about what gender an engineer or technician is, nor do I even know all the time online -- sometimes I find out years later, sometimes I never find out, but I've never cared.

If you want to learn to code, join one of the free Udacity courses, or MIT or Harvard's free EdX courses, and learn, and write your projects. Nobody's going to stop you. Information is free. And you got a whole stack of useful responses to the post you just linked.

Posted by a user with a female name & received substantial feedback.

> small comment here and there by someone knowledgeable can save you hours and hours

Sometimes it can. But if you're just a beginner, you don't need the expert advice you're talking about. Hours and hours of what? If you're already programming even at very entry level, you can get very similar advice on stackoverflow.

> If it were, I think I would already be a coder with several published projects.

I don't think you lack expert advice. I think you lack interest.

I remember since pre-teen, I was obsessed about computers, first videogames, then computers in general. I've spent hundreds of hours tinkering with them, trying to make them do what I wanted them to. I wasn't motivated by money, it was fun.

Vast majority of exceptionally good programmers I know can tell similar stories about themselves. There're a few women among them, too.

When you have interest that strong, you spend hundreds of hours of your time, unpaid, doing what you like. Especially when you're a teen with no kids. That's what helps with learning programming. Also reading good books. Expert advice only becomes relevant much later, and by that time, if you pick jobs well, you'll be surrounded with smart people willing to answer your questions.

If you don't have that kind of interest in computers, you won't become exceptionally good. You probably can still learn the trade and make a living off it, but will require substantial time and efforts. I think that's the target audience of that summer school.

The author went on to mention that learning in the span of a summer would help pick a good team member or even build a prototpe him/herself.

We know from both studies and personal experience, that tech interviews just don't work all that well. This is tech interviews done by professional programmers and managers. We don't know how to pick people who are good vs talk like they're good!

This is not anecdotal - it is well known via studies, done by top psychologists.

Given that - how would a summer coding bootcamp help pick a co-founder? It's certainly better than nothing. It is also not clear how much one would benefit from 3 months versus taking one of the many excellent online courses and working at your own pace, such as Harvard's CS50, freely available on youtube.

Regarding building your own prototype after 3 months of programming - I just want to throw my hands up in the air of this wishful thinking that 3 months is anywhere close to enough time. You will need someone who's tech savvy, and then you're right back to the same difficulties.

Lambda School's traffic is down 20% today as compared to yesterday, so if this was a marketing stunt it was a very inefficient and expensive one.