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> This is especially important in CS especially when boys are encouraged from a young age to do "techy" and "geeky" things in ways that girls usually aren't.

Just be aware that this is not everyones experience.

Many places boys are held back and girls are pushed forward.

And then afterwards boys gets told they are somehow "privileged" and would never be were they are if it wasn't for "male privilege".

Obviously this goes both ways, but there is at least some focus on it when it hurts girls.

If you try to mention the problems young innocent boys have, be prepared to get laughed out.

(I'm halfway expecting that even on HN too.)

This seems entirely created out of thin air.

I think that was neither nice nor fair from you.

This is experience.

If you had a cushy life, good for you. But don't tell others their experiences aren't real.

Ok, I'll bite. Citation? Any evidence of any kind to offer?

See, that post just read like negative chatter. "Folks are always doing wrong stuff." Meaningless to offer without anything concrete.

This is a pseudonymous account and I am not willing to change that.

I will try without giving anything away, but you will need to help me here:

- Do you really think some people here haven't grown up with feminist teachers who took it way too far?

- How many times have you heard anything about "Girls who code" vs "Boys who code"?

- If you are actually interested and ready to see something ugly, just go back and try to read some "mens day" discussion on Twitter or I think even on HN too.

I've tried to be active in those days in a positive way. Last year I gave up. Any mention of today being mens day on company chat is immediately laughed off with something along the lines of "and so is 363 other days".

Meanwhile men die younger, have higher incarceration rates, more suicides, and gets less education.

And also the few times there is discussion it is often redirected to "how men are suffering from toxic masculinity" which is probably true but only a small problem.

What places?

Most public schools in my state.

Meanwhile my sister's first programming course at university involved making a game using an existing bespoke framework. It mostly involved adding graphics and a few methods & some properties to objects (which already had physics etc. implemented) in an otherwise more or less done project base. I don't know about retaining or intimidation but I feel like it was way too much "just fill in the gaps, look you have a character on the screen now" and that they really failed to teach the basics of programming and I got the vibe that students finished the course not really having any clue how the whole thing works at all. The next course was object oriented programming at the deep end.

I feel like she's still struggling with the basics and doesn't have much self confidence at all. And she's not dumb.

> Meanwhile my sister's first programming course at university involved making a game using an existing bespoke framework.

I had exactly the same exercise on my first day on uni, we had to take some robot maze pathfinder game and adjust the algorithm a bit.

As someone who had been writing code for over a decade at that point (but who was unfamiliar with Java), I still remember it was intimidating.

I cannot imagine how it must have felt for people without prior coding experience.

Warwick? :)

In hindsight, the quality of teaching actual coding at my uni was pretty poor. But coding in general is pretty hard to teach well in that setting.

This comment covered several hot topics.

1. Girls in STEM: society needs to quit telling people "math is hard, tee hee" and quit shopping in the Pink Aisle at the toy store and reinforcing that culture. Buy your kids Lego and Raspberry Pi circuit kits and see what happens.

2. CS is part coding, part science of algorithms, and part software engineering. We have to quit intertwingling all terms into the catchall "CS" bucket because sometimes "how to run excel" gets thrown in there too. Maybe best to drop the term altogether and use more descriptive names for each study.

> 1. Girls in STEM: society needs to quit telling people "math is hard, tee hee" and quit shopping in the Pink Aisle at the toy store and reinforcing that culture. Buy your kids Lego and Raspberry Pi circuit kits and see what happens.

Girls in STEM =/= Girls becoming professional programmers.

There are plenty of girls in STEM fields such as medicine, biology, geology, physics, Math, civil engineering...

The fact that not a lot of them want to be forced to sit before a computer 10 hours a day for the rest of their lives certainly isn't an issue if you asks me...

> Girls in STEM: society needs to quit telling people "math is hard, tee hee"

To me, the very existence of "Girls in STEM" groups is sending a weird message to girls (and I’m apparently not the only one to think that). Something along the lines of “sure you can do STEM, you’re just not good enough to do it the regular way so we created a group just for you”.

Honestly that’s the message a lot of diversity initiatives end up sending.

True to some degree, but I think it does help girls get involved in areas where boys are dominant. In high school the comments from boys towards girls interested in such pursuits can deter them. Having a space free of that, at least until they've developed the motivation to continue, is important.

As a high school CS teacher, I've seen how boys can be towards girls interested in coding.

All of this swings both ways, of course, and men are deterred from positions like elementary school teacher, nursing, and secretary roles. Gender being attached to jobs is just dumb in general, and keeps a lot of capable people from doing what they'd love.

> As a high school CS teacher, I've seen how boys can be towards girls interested in coding.

I'm surprised. I was expecting the opposite (boys wanting more girls in the classroom!).

> All of this swings both ways, of course, and men are deterred from positions like elementary school teacher, nursing, and secretary roles.

It's interesting that there's an acknowledgement that we need more male nurses (from healthcare professionals) and male elementary school teachers (from experts in the field) and yet there are zero initiatives to do so.

By that I mean money being spent toward that goal. The same way there's a will to have more "diversity" in medicine... mainly so that people of color can go serve "their people" in underserved areas (read: not very attractive or lucrative).

But in computing we’re spending a fortune and investing time to essentially… commoditize ourselves.

> I'm surprised. I was expecting the opposite (boys wanting more girls in the classroom!).

I think they probably want to be around girls, but most boys are social morons at that age. There is also the element of them being able to get in cheap shots to impress their friends. They don't really think of the consequences.

> It's interesting that there's an acknowledgement that we need more male nurses (from healthcare professionals) and male elementary school teachers (from experts in the field) and yet there are zero initiatives to do so.

Agreed, especially on the school front, as I think it's important for kids in schools to have a range of influences during their early years.

couldn't agree more - have STEM groups and encourage everyone that wants in, to join, but don't make them sit in the 'special class' separate from everyone else.

Depends what girls think though, no? I know many who've taken part in such initiatives and enjoyed it, and seen it have an impact.

Sitting at a computer for 10 hours a day isn't a gendered thing.

There is nothing about computer science or programming that is gender specific. It, ideally, should sit around 50-50, ±5%. So yes, it is a problem that it so heavily skews male.

As to why, it's multi-faceted cultural issue, with how our society treats boys and girls starting from birth. In other words, a pipeline issue.

It is not clear that interest in extended computer use isn't gendered. For example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/

I never said or implied that programming was sexed, I told the parent that just because they are fewer female developers doesn't mean the sex imbalance is the same or even skewed heavily toward males in every STEM discipline.

> Sitting at a computer for 10 hours a day isn't a gendered thing.

Except the 10 hour a day part :) I believe the tendency to overwork is mostly a male thing.

RE: 2: I think I agree. There are lots of "CS" programs targeted towards high-school students which I have mixed feelings about. The goal shouldn't be to turn every student that walks through the door into a SWE (there's somewhat of a conflict of interest here considering most programs are sponsored by big tech companies who are desperate for talent – Microsoft does a lot in this space). Instead, I think it should serve a few roles: expose students to new opportunities (learn if you do want to be a SWE); give students the skills to understand that computers and algorithms are not magic (important from a public awareness perspective); and also to teach enough "deep" technical skills to prepare them for a world dominated by software (e.g., learning how to query databases, write small automations, etc.).

But I think most important is that intro courses need to serve as jumping off points (i.e., they should be INTRO courses). Give students a taste and let them decide if they like it and want to take another bite.

> We've gotten a lot better at recruiting CS students from underrepresented groups (women and BIPOC chiefly), but numbers drop off quickly

Are you really better at it if you can’t retain them in the long run? The stats you shared are interesting, but to me it seems to highlight that students are getting “weeded out” at the beginning of the course. I would be curious to attempt a correlation with High school GPA and SAT scores. Because, if lower performing students leave, regardless of gender or race, that’s to be expected. But if overachieving students of color leave and their (white or asian) peers with lower grades don’t, now that’s an interesting issue.

> Students arrive in intro CS courses, are sat next to students who have been coding since they were 10, and are rightfully intimidated even though they could succeed in the course.

I would argue the solution here is to have different “levels” of intro courses. Because the converse is also true; students that are coming in with a decade of coding and who already had an introduction to programming might assume they will be able to “coast out” courses and then suddenly realize they are falling behind their peers. And then drop out.

Do you know of any comparative studies with other countries? Or is this a predominately US/Canada issue?

For example, do BIPOC students in Botswana drop out at similar rates? Do non-BIPOC students in Taiwan experience similar drop out rates? What are the classes and course materials like in these countries in comparison to the US/Canada?

What about drop out numbers from international students? For example, do Polish women studying CS at American universities drop out at the same rate as American women? For those who do drop out, do they drop out for the same reasons?

If we want to get to the root of the problem we need both more breadth and more depth in our understanding. Too often we stop at the men/women (in America) or BIPOC/non-BIPOC (in America) divides, and then provide generalized solutions which have very limit impact.

I can speak as someone who has taught CS in high school in a few different East Asian countries, including Taiwan. The bias exists, but is less pronounced than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Boys will make remarks, but if you nip it quickly at the start then it's generally ok.

I teach all four years in high school and each year I get more females rolling up. My recent graduating classes have had more females, but still only 20% or so, but my entry level classes now are 50/50.

Oddly, every female I've had who takes the higher level CS classes has graduated with the highest mark you can get on the exit exams. They routinely destroy the boys on any test and with regard to programming skills. Sadly, some of those who take it at the lower level are pushed by their parents to take other classes at higher levels in preparation for university admission. Parents sometimes carry that bias that females should not be engineers.

There's some work on it. One might start at the keyphrase "Gender-equality paradox".

> This is especially important in CS especially when boys are encouraged from a young age to do "techy" and "geeky" things in ways that girls usually aren't.

It's not my experience. When I was a kid CS/IT didn't exist where I lived.

I was a math geek who loved to occupy himself with solving problems which are useless in real life and I was actively discouraged from it by parents, teachers and even bullied by peers. I still liked it but I tried not to speak about with anyone except some closest friends who accepted my weirdness. From my perspective it seemed that compared to boys the girls need more acceptance are less likely to pursue something they like if they are actively discouraged from it.

Yes, I remember back in the day the girls would always try to come into the computer lab to play video games. My friends and I were always like, "GET OUT! WE HATE WOMEN!" Then they left. The girls wanted to learn how to code so badly, but we wouldn't let them. My friends and I were getting lots of sexual attention from women, but we thought that was boring, and preferred to spend our time alone on computers. The girls were having sex, but they thought it was boring, and wanted to learn to code instead, but my friends and I physically prevented them from entering the computer lab, using our strong muscles. My friends and I all had zero sex drive, and if we had any attention from the opposite sex we would have rejected it and continued to spend all our time on computers.

Interesting that you felt the need to sexualize the girls who were interested in computers.

They are people, not objects for your pleasure. If your comment even remotely reflects your attitude towards them, then you might as well have been telling them "GET OUT! WE HATE WOMEN!".

Do you think that maybe if you treated them like people and welcomed them to the group with patient explanations, expecting nothing, they might have hung around?

Is this GPT-3? It looks like it is.

It's a parody of the ridiculous notion that geeky men try to keep women out of their hobbies. Reality is that geeky men are practically gagging for women to share their interests.

It's well documented that the behavior of geeky men discourages women who are interested in such hobbies and fields, so I'm not sure that it is entirely ridiculous for some people to assume that is intentional.

I at least try to never ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence. Geeks are not known for their social skills. Their reclusiveness and cliquishness limits their ability to learn social skills from their more skilled peers, instead trying to learn from each other, like the blind leading the blind. Combine that with hormones and even more limited experience dealing with women as people and you get them either trying to one-up each other in some of the sort of dick measuring contests they use as social dominance displays or using patronizing gestures to treat women as if they were children.