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Comment by kellyreid | Hacker News Reader

Lovely. I know plenty of men who don't have the financial ability to do something like move to NYC for a summer, but to hell with them. Let's try to find those rare women who code and throw money at them.

Listen, I'm all for supporting women in engineering. There are many female engineers in my family. I just find it appalling that Etsy is willing to just throw money at one gender and not another. It's sexist garbage.

I see their motive, and i wholly support it. They could have taken a better line of play though; Rather than straight up gender segregating, why not organically filter the scholarship candidates based on female-oriented areas of study? Etsy is largely creative and industrious and driven women, so why not just sponsor projects that will naturally be female-led?

No offense to the hacker school guys and etsy guys, but this is straight up amateurish.

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We can handle a fixed number of students each batch. We've run three so far and have always gotten enough qualified applicants who were able to make it work financially. But they were almost all men.

The Etsy scholarships are an experiment to see if we can have a batch that's 50% women. If Etsy put half of the grant money towards men, it'd do less to help that goal. If this constitutes saying "to hell with them" to men who can't afford Hacker School, then we've been doing that from the start.

why not organically filter the scholarship candidates based on female-oriented areas of study?

This would break Hacker School. We don't accept people based on a specific area of study, nor do we let companies influence the projects students work on. We simply accept people who love programming and want to become better hackers in the fullest sense of the term.

Men already get a disproportionate amount of support to help them get into Hacker School. We know this because the previous batch was predominantly men.

That should be self evident.

The only other possible explanation is that men are somehow inherently better suited for Hacker School, and I think we can all agree that that's sexist, and incorrect.

You might want to differentiate here on timescale: "Well, those men were systematically given their advantages a long time ago based on their gender, there are no time-proximal gender advantages." But it doesn't matter. There is no statute of limitations on sexism.

Plus, some of the gender-based advantages are proximal... like whether their marketing is written in a way that makes men want to apply, but women not want to... which was almost certainly the case, and I think still is.

So, given that there's already overwhelming, gender-based support for men, offering gender-based support for women seems like it's only leveling the playing field.

I'm reading a negative tone to your comment (ie "to hell with them", "throw money at them", "sexist garbage").

Do you think it's possible that rather than having negative, sexist motives for offering scholarships, they are simply going out of their way to be _supportive_ to minorities in the field?

There's also a lot of evidence that bringing in more women into any group increases its performance [for example: http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea...].

EDIT: MaxGabriel pointed out this article claims more women in a group improves performance [not equal numbers]. Thanks for the correction.

Yes, I'm quite negative on this because I feel that their methods are very poorly thought out. Good on them, as I said, I support their effort and their basic mission. That's not in question. You don't have to appeal to affirmative action or research; the concern is not their motive but their method.

Let me make sure I'm clear: I love the idea of female engineers being given incentives to enter a male-dominated field. There are a myriad of great benefits to everyone involved. The trouble is, the methods they are using are previous-level.

Seriously, a group of hackers can't figure out a more elegant process? They are literally saying "If you are a girl and ask us for money we will give it to you". That's absurd. Lets see them set up a special fund or something for female-friendly fields rather than just throwing money at women outright.

I stand by my assertion that their methods are amateurish but their intents are good. I'd like to see the people who designed this program at least speak to the topic; what else they tried, why it didn't get approved, why it didn't work, et cetera. I just want to hold other engineers to rigor and examine their methods, especially when I find the goal noble but the methods sophomoric.

They are literally saying "If you are a girl and ask us for money we will give it to you"

We never said that. This is what we said:

We're not going to lower the bar for female applicants. It frustrates us a little that we feel the need to say that, and we think it underlines the sexism (intentional and not) that so pervades the programming world.

But we want to say that now, so people don't have to waste time asking or debating the point. Women will be judged on the exact same scale as men. We think to do otherwise would be insulting and counterproductive. We care a lot about getting more women into Hacker School, but we won't do it at the expense of the quality of the batch.

That's great that you won't lower the bar for female applicants. Does that mean you will remove gender-identifying information from applications before evaluation/processing? that could be a cool way to do things and a great experiment...

I agree it would be a fascinating experiment, but I don't think this would be possible, since interviews are an essential part of our process.

My opinion is that "female-friendly fields" is (or should be) "software engineering". Thus "lets see them set up a special fund or something for female-friendly fields" reduces to the current state of the program.

Actually, that article concludes against equal proportions:

HBR: But gender does play a role?

Malone: It's a preliminary finding--and not a conventional one. The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But so far, the data show, the more women, the better.

Woolley: We have early evidence that performance may flatten out at the extreme end--that there should be a little gender diversity rather than all women.

we want more women in this batch!

No offense to the hacker school guys and etsy guys, but this is straight up amateurish.

It's called affirmative action, and some of the most highly regarded institutions in America have employed it for decades. I'm not making an appeal to authority in defense of affirmative action, I'm simply suggesting that there is nothing appalling, novel, or 'amateurish' about the practice.

I haven't really resolved whether it's justifiable to discriminate in order to mitigate the effects of discrimination. But I don't understand why it's preferable to have the same motivation and the same end achieved by a different method. If discrimination is wrong, it seems equally bad to me to filter out "people with dreadlocks" with the goal of filtering out black people, rather than just "black people."

Unless you're suggesting they 'hide' the discrimination. In which case, I don't support that position at all. Not only does that prevent discussions like the one we're having right now, it also just seems pathetic to not stand for what you believe in.

Yes, because we all live in a society with gender equality, right?

> filter the scholarship candidates based on female-oriented areas of study

Yes, girls must play only with dolls, because only you (man) should play with the cool stuff.

What is a "female-oriented" area of study, and what kinds of projects will "naturally be female-led"?

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