Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

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This is such a difficult topic. When I started my undergraduate in CompSci, the department of 300 students had exactly 3 women. The faculty had way more female instructors than it did students. The Commucation Sciences department, which was on the same campus, had the inverse student population.

I'm all in favour for letting students making their own study (and career) choices, but when the imbalance is this great, I can't but help think that valuable perspectives are lost. And that's just looking at the sexes, that doesn't even take into account what could be gained from interacting with folks with different socio-economic backgrounds, who were equally underrepresented.

Trying to keep barriers for entry low seems worth while. Organizations which help people break into non-traditional fields (for their background/sex/whatever) also seem to be worth while. Funding them seems like a no brainer. This isn't limited to girls in tech. Also boys in nursing, poor kids in law school, brown kids in politics, whatever.

> Trying to keep barriers for entry low

But the barrier is already low - you need to complete an undergraduate degree in a related field. That's it.

It is even lower. You don't need to complete an undergrad in CS to get a tech job.

That might be technically true, but it's definitely not the whole story. Things like socioeconomic background can definitely be a high barrier. I can easily imagine kids (and especially girls) in poor families being severely restricted in their study choices.

> Trying to keep barriers for entry low seems worth while.

With Section 174 (increasing business taxes on SWE salaries) + high interest rates, this is a big ask for US employers who loath hiring at the entry level in the best times.

To me, the real problem seems to be solving US employers' unwillingness to hire anyone without experience, after which the rest (hiring underrepresented groups) will follow. But why would they do this when they have all the experienced and senior engineers they want?

Is this not the exact problem DEI was created to solve, and is now being dismantled?

> With Section 174 (increasing business taxes on SWE salaries)

It looks like they’re going to fix it:

https://abgi-usa.com/section174/latest-and-greatest

My high school back in France was offering 1000euros each to girls who'd pick STEMs for the last 2 years of their studies and had 12/20 or more on their final exam.

Out of 200 girls 2 picked it, there's only so much you can do but the truth is most women prefer to work with people.

Working with people is pretty important in tech.

Or completely invisible (well mostly) perspectives based on sexuality, etc as well.

There's pretty much never been a call for more diversity in terms of queer developers that I've seen.

Even at my current job, women in tech is a big thing that we try to do a lot about, but I feel scared to bring up that there's more to diversity than race and gender.

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