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Comment by haon99 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not against affirmative action on principle, but does anyone else find it a little strange that the need-based grants are only available to female programmers? They could bias the admission process in favor of female applicants (or other underrepresented demographics) without conflating financial issues, right? Or there aren't even enough female applicants without this incentive to allow for that?

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We take this approach specifically because we don't do any affirmative action or bias our admissions process in favor of specific groups. These grants are our hack for how to have a more gender-balanced environment without negatively impacting men or lowering the bar for women. The grants work because they increase the pool of qualified women who are able to do Hacker School.

Also, to clarify, the grants are funded by other companies, not Hacker School (the most recent sponsors are Dropbox, Etsy, Jane Street, Tapad, and Tumblr: https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/26-dropbox-etsy-jane-stree...).

> "We take this approach specifically because we don't do any affirmative action or bias our admissions process in favor of specific groups."

You're giving grants to women specifically because they are women. That's a bias. You're favoring a specific group. What about the men who haven't applied because they can't afford it and aren't women? You should be giving grants to underprivileged people regardless of sex. But that wouldn't get you or the companies sponsoring the grants nice press release, now would it?

To clarify:

1) We judge male and female applicants on exactly the same scale. We in no way lower the bar for women or any other group. Nor do we give women or any other group a leg up when making admissions decisions.

2) We offer grants to women who need financial assistance. By offering these grants, we do bias the pool of applicants, because we (hopefully) increase the number of women who choose to apply.

3) We have put a tremendous amount of time, energy, thought, and effort over the past few years into making Hacker School free for everyone, and we continue to work very hard to continue making this possible. We effectively give all our students a $10-15k scholarship by not charging any tuition.

Our great crime appears to be the fact that we have not yet found a way to additionally give money to everyone who can't afford to come to Hacker School.

I really like this approach to the gender imbalance problem: grow the pool, don't lower the bar. I think this is the way to go, and I hope that more tech organizations will think of it this way.

Thank you for the details. I appreciate the approach you are taking.

I don't have a problem with it - in the past, at least some (if not all) are coming directly from Etsy (http://www.etsy.com/hacker-grants). They want to attract more women into their business because they see benefits of women being well represented in their workplace.

> They could bias the admission process in favor of female applicants (or other underrepresented demographics) without conflating financial issues, right?

They could, but would that honestly be better? Would you want them to lower standards for women or reject highly qualified (male) applicants just to make room for more female applicants in the accepted pool?

It's not an ideal solution, but considering the school is tuition-free for everybody, regardless of gender, I don't think this approach is all that bad.

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