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Comment by eLobato | Hacker News Reader

Will sound like an asshole to many people, but:

  Hackbright Academy Turns Men Into Developers In 10 Weeks

  Hackbright Academy Turns Blacks Into Developers In 10 Weeks

  Hackbright Academy Turns Whites Into Developers In 10 Weeks

Do we really need MORE discrimination? If I go ahead and try to join in, they will say "sorry, no men accepted"? That sounds equally as bad to me as "sorry, no woman accepted" or "sorry, no latinos accepted".

Can anybody explain?

I honestly hope the girls will get the skills they're looking for in 10 weeks, and I support that, but I truly don't get why do they have to discriminate against. Maybe so they get media coverage?

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Well, what you're seeing is a backlash from the way programming has been taught thus far. For whatever reason all computer science education is geared toward someone who's already had about 6 years of self-education. Typically that meant that women, minorities, and the poor couldn't learn programming and so never went into computer science.

Now what you're seeing is companies meeting the demand from these new groups because the education techniques for teaching computer science are changing. At first it's going to be classes like this focusing on these groups demanding these kinds of environments, but soon it will just spread to how all CS is taught.

Incidentally, Harvey Mudd university is basically demonstrating that simply changing the education model so that it works for people without prior programming experience accomplishes the same thing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/giving-women-the-a...

Quote:

> To reduce the intimidation factor, the course was divided into two sections — “gold,” for those with no prior experience, and “black” for everyone else. Java, a notoriously opaque programming language, was replaced by a more accessible language called Python. And the focus of the course changed to computational approaches to solving problems across science.

So I predict most of these "for women only classes" will fall away and be replaced with better introductory material.

> Typically that meant that women, minorities, and the poor couldn't learn programming and so never went into computer science.

I understand that poorer people have no opportunity to learn programming and other less-immediately applicable topics outside of class, but I don't see what's stopping women from learning how to code. Most middle class people today spend their entire days on facebook--why is it "harder" for a woman to take some time to learn how her computer works when countless men begin learning in their late teens/early adult years?

I think a big part of it is that there is a very strong hatred of intellectualism in the US, to the point that people who learned to use computers are called nerds and other vile things as well as abused and beaten for it. I think previously the potential of computers as a career wasn't strong enough to overcome this with many young kids, boys or girls, but more so girls.

> For whatever reason all computer science education is geared toward someone who's already had about 6 years of self-education.

I think exclusion, implicit or explicit, is bad. Especially when the course doesn't demand for any prerequisites still punishes those who don't meet the criteria. But I also think rewarding self-starters and not punishing them for being self-starters is a worthy goal. We really need two different courses for different groups.

> Can anybody explain?

Yes, historically, some groups have been discriminated at and put at a social and economic disadvantage on the basis of intrinsic factors.

Putting right an unequal playing field looks unfair only if you don't see that it is an unequal playing field.

The fact that black people were treated bad in the past wouldn't justify if you were treated as an slave just to compensate for what your ancestors did.

I don't see why this is unequal nowadays for women or other minorities but it IS unequal to men (don't think anyone can't see that fact). Equality should be the goal, not being treated differently depending on your gender.

> I don't see why this is unequal nowadays for women or other minorities

In the United States, women's median income is still 77% of men's median income. (And, yes, before you bring up all the various stupid talking points, that figure accounts for all the various factors like taking time out of a career to raise kids etc. etc. US government statistics account for all those kinds of differences and still show a gender pay gap that is closing very, very slowly.)

According to a 2003 study, white workers earn approximately 14% more than black workers in the United States across all sectors.

Only six of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are black, only 20 are women.

Prisons in the United States hold six million people, a 772% increase from 1970 to 2009. The War on Drugs has heavily targeted minority black communities. 40% of the prison population is black despite only making up 12% of the national population. We've seen the story countless times before: shitty schools, no economic opportunities, so crime becomes the only option and prison the only solution. If you don't think there is a heavily racialized component to how the prison system works in the United States, you don't understand the prison system in the United States.

And despite all the stories about "the pink dollar", gay men get paid less than their heterosexual counterparts.

In the United Kingdom, according to figures by the Office of National Statistics, women are paid 14.9% less than men.

Tell me again how men and women are equal and how we are living in a post-racial, post-discriminatory society where we are all equal.

The simple fact is that many women feel uncomfortable going into a field that is dominated by men.

Assuming you're a white male, do you feel out of place when you're in an area where everyone is a woman? How about when everyone is black? Have you walked through a neighborhood where everyone is Latino?

Being in an ovewhelming minority sucks in an irrational way. There's no logical explanation other than, "we want to feel like we belong." There are some psychological explanations for this, but you're not going to be able to give people a sense of belonging just by pretending the problem doesn't exist.

So yes, we need to do our best to make people more comfortable, and if it involves creating a female-only class where women can interact with each other, does it really harm you at all?

I am latino (Spanish), though white looking male. Been an immigrant everywhere I lived for 3 years and my accent though slight is noticeable. I never felt anything like what you said, but then again it might just be me.

It doesn't harm me, again, I hope these women become outstanding programmers, it's just I don't fully grasp how this is socially acceptable. The Swedish guy who posted here made a good point. I understand the causes, but as we develop as a society, these kind of things become less and less affirmative action and rather become more discrimination. If you ask me, I would understand something like this in Arabia Saudi and I'd even be involved if I lived in there.

You're placing entirely too much importance on particular categorizations, "comfort" has much more to do with "what you're used to", than the idea that people are constantly fretting about how population densities in their environment match up to their own self-identification.

As a bi-racial male of the darker persuasion (which in America is basically "not-white"), I find myself much more comfortable around predominantly "white" groups because that has been the most common environment for myself throughout my life.

It feels a little odd to do so, but let me point out that there are piles of these sorts of training programs that dudes can also apply to.

Perhaps they sense a gap in the market for courses aimed at women who are incredibly interested in tech but would like to study amongst some fellow women as well.

This may not be equal access, but it certainly is equal opportunity. Something has to do be done about the millions of brilliant women who are turning away from tech.

To me "Turns Women Into Developers" is an offensive phrase, as your other variations highlight - it implies that "Women" and "developers" are categories that don't overlap. However, it seems to be techcrunch's poor choice of words, not Hackbright academy's.

It makes me so, so happy that someone else picked up on this.

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