Hacker News Reader

>Each generation of CS pioneers includes a few more women with passion and intellect like Hopper or Bryon that cannot be ignored,

So your message to, say, young women who are facing barriers to success in CS is "Be one of the most exceptional women in the field, or wait a few generations until successful women in CS are no longer exceptions?"

When someone with a desire to become a programmer can say to themself "I can achieve some level of success _even if I'm not the greatest programmer of my generation_", that's a good thing. Exceptional role models are nice to have, but so are "average" role models. "Women in CS" programs might increase the latter, and I don't see how they could decrease the former, so I don't think such programs can just be written off as "not the answer".

CS should belong to women as much as men and in an ideal world it would. But you're 55, how much has the percentage of women in CS increased since you were 21?

That is a slightly disingenuous question because I know the answer which is that it hasn't, it has in fact fallen. While I wish your argument were true it is clearly not.

> I've worked in two departments headed by a woman who made all the hiring decisions and the entire team they hired was men.

Given the lack of women in the field, this isn't all that surprising and cannot be unilaterally blamed on gender biases.

what if "woman in CS" programs can help to get woman with intellect and passion into CS?

I've been in the software industry for a several decades (I have a grey beard if that helps). I have never encountered any man that I felt had a gender bias against women in computing, other than if he was an ass in real life. My wife is also a software engineer - and she has never had an issue (to the best of my knowledge). What I find frustrating is that some people choose to identify themselves as a gender. Gender becomes a convenient excuse. I can't tell you how strongly I oppose this "I define myself by my gender" view. Feminism, chauvinism, the works - I strongly oppose the lot of them. I'll say it simply ... you either see yourself as a person or a gender. If you don't see yourself as a gender, then you'll let equity (ie. NOT equality) drive your view of yourself and others.

I think it makes perfect sense to use any of your identifying properties to identify yourself, including gender. I think that disassociating with your gender in a society that obviously doesn't can probably be downright detrimental.

Do you apply this logic to other social groups as well? Any noun? Perhaps being a "software engineer" doesn't make sense if you are already a person.

Women are underrepresented in computer science for a fact, and I have personally experienced little to support either that it is the result of systemic exclusion, a bias against women or otherwise. I don't need several decades of experience in the industry, though, to say that, hey, I will never know the cause by simply evaluating my personal experience. Humble up and don't form a view on a subject if all you have to go by is any kind of anecdotal experience.

As for opposing feminism, do you have any ideas of the implications that movement has on women's rights worldwide? I have no idea what your position on things like birth control, women's suffrage and genital mutilation, or whether you think this is an ongoing battle or not, but I hope you'll agree that at least some good has come out of it.

People who work in CS are known to work with scientific methods. "What if" is simply not enough.

To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.

We, that is people who work in the field of computer science, need to demand more than guesses and beliefs when dealing with "solutions" to gender inequality. If someone has an ideas on how to improve the community and industry, those ideas need to be first tested and validated using the scientific method. Testing in Social studies are not a new concept, so we already got the tools we need.

If "woman in CS" programs can help to get women with intellect and passion into CS, it should be testable. Do that first, and then argue for it use when there is data backing it up.

In order to be testable there need to be a statistically significant number of women in CS programs so I assume from your comment that you arguing for them.

Or are you saying that these programs need to scientifically prove their value before existing in order to exist?

>Or are you saying that these programs need to scientifically prove their value before existing in order to exist?

Your wording is disingenuous. It is possible to run a case study and study on a limited scale a program that would be deployed at a much larger scale.

Your statement implies the idea is tautologically false, which it is not.

"People who work in CS are known to work with scientific methods. "What if" is simply not enough."

That's hilarious. Try to remember this next time you put a print statement in the code or adjust some constant until it's right.

The problem here is that we have no way of either experimenting meaningfully or testing most of the things we'd like to know. We can describe tiny parts of reality and assume that some correlation is in fact causation, but without actually doing something it's impossible to conclusively prove what effect will any one action have.

That's nothing new - and it's not that unseen in programming, either. I think that "waiting for a proof" in this case is just an excuse; we need to get the best approximations, of course, but in the end we just need to find the courage to go and implement a solution without a certainty that it will be the best or even good.

In other words, when your service is on fire because thousands of users want to access it simultaneously (good for you) the first thing to do is to bring it back by any means necessary, including tools like intuition and wild guesses, and formalize the process afterwards.