Girls Who Code

I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses. Same goes for elementary school teachers. Why is that?

Just because there's a gender imbalance doesn't necessarily mean anyone is keeping anyone out. And if a few insensitive comments can keep you from doing what you want to do in life, maybe that's something you have to deal with -- there's always going to be haters no matter what you want to do.

It's pretty obvious what pg was saying in this particular "smoking gun" quote: that figuring out a way to get more girls interested in programming at 13 is an incredibly important and hard problem. The willingness for people to quickly swallow and parrot a 1-dimensional narrative of "Paul Graham, sexist pig" based upon a few quotes taken out of context in a highly edited, 3rd hand rage-blog by fucking Vallywag is the type of behavior I expect from political spinmeister hacks trotted out on the 24 hour news channels, not from smart people who I respect.

A minor scandal erupted when was noted that there were few women in the co-ed national league, and a huge about of effort was made to recruit female players. Every family wanted the prestige, fame, and fortune that came with having a daughter in the league. Male players wanted more females playing so it didn't feel like a damn sausagefest all the time, and to help with dating (for some odd reason, most male bounceyball players were surprisingly unattractive).

Eventually it was suggested that the problem lay upstream, so major efforts were made to recruit teenage girls for the middle and high school leagues, which were also coed.

However, for some reason this attempt also failed. Finally, an anonymous poster on the Internet noted that, as a broad generalization, taller bounceyball players were more suited to the game, scoring more points. Perhaps a gender difference in height was to blame, discouraging female players and hurting them in the draft. The poster tracked down these differences in height to a disparity in average male and female birth weights, and suggested that perhaps a cocktail of experimental prenatal hormones (primarily testosterone), continued until age 15, would do the trick.

The anonymous poster was promptly downvoted and the discussion turned to topics of sexism, discrimination, and cultural bias in the bounceyball leagues. Various horror stories were recounted by female bounceyball players and a new round of self-flagellation began among those in the industry.

More women than men graduate from college and women have flooded into traditionally male majors in the sciences. There are plenty of female biologists and doctors. But they have not penetrated the most mathy majors, like engineering or Math itself.

Maybe men and women aren't interchangeable cogs, and some combination of difference in interest and average ability will always mean that the way to get females into your tech company is by having a big non-software department.

[1] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...

In terms of current harmful perceptions that can be stamped out in the short-term...I think the belief that females aren't genetically cut out to be programmers is one. The "world's first computer programmer" was a woman and COBOL, of course, was invented by Grace Hopper. These women were pioneers in early computing at a time when women were still struggling to be recognized as equal citizens. To argue that women can't make it as hackers is like arguing, post-Jackie Robinson, that blacks can't develop professional baseball skills. The lack of women computer scientists and programmers today more likely point to institutional/cultural problems rather than genetic ones.

Having read what I could over the years on the academic side of "women in tech" (i.e., academic research studying the matter, rather than opinion pieces), the consensus seems to be that the early teens are the time where the decision is taken to move away (or not) from STEM fields. That is part of why the Girls Who Code initiative & others like it is such a big deal.

There are a lot of different factors and stereotypes playing into the decision to exit STEM tracks, but among them are - "unpleasant male geeks", "programmers work alone", "girls don't need to know math", "boys figure things out" and so forth. (Clearly these are a subset of examples, and also clearly not all of these are 100% influential for any particular person, place, time). So the stereotypical 13 y/o girl and her interest in STEM is actually the target of a lot of research and policy efforts.

There's also a self-reinforcing aspect to this: heavily gender-coded places aren't typically presenting a welcome to people of the other gender. I read a academic paper on this in the last several years, but can't recall the experiment in detail or the citation. The implication is that a workspace festooned with seriously masculine widgets often tells many women that, "hey, man cave here. not so welcome".

For the interested person, the academic experiments are usually well done and their results, while not always surprising, clearly quantify certain sexist aspects in the tech world.

I understand there is cultural bias, but systemic? There are more women attending and graduating college than men, they're more economically prosperous in their early twenties as well.[1]

[1]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/27/young-w...

The quick program for Harvey Mudd seems to be 1) Make the problems more practical in application (ie controlling a robot, modelling a disease) 2) Giving students choices in what problems they are interested in 3) Segmenting students according to skill set, thus putting people who have been programming in another course that will match their pace better and allowing students who are more new to have their own pace.

These initiatives will simply not work. Imagine "Men Nurse."

Many women SIMPLY do not code for the same reason many men do not code. Most of us were not exposed to the science as kids, hence step 1 is to make Programming mandatory. Note I say programming and not C.S.. I am an amateur programmer and I can say wit confidence that this is as fundamental as basic arithmetic. Full stop.

I frankly wish they shut down "Girls Who Code" entirely and all the likes. Instead we can put our efforts into teaching everyone to code: "We Code." Because once someone does something as simple as print (2+2)-(3-2) or print $first_name + $last_name or (my favorite) <html><h1>The Website of Me</h1><p>My name is Joanna. This is my first web page.<img src='..'></p></html>, once they do this, there is simply no going back for them.

In fact, I think there is truth to what both sides say. On the pro AA side, it is true that women probably feel unwelcome in the tech industry. Even when men don't do anything consciously to exclude women, programming culture revolves around certain attitudes and mindsets that are associated with young men in our culture. E.g. being interested in science fiction, being obsessive about one's work and hobbies, . None of these things are strictly related to programming, and an excessive focus on them makes it harder for women (and minorities) to enter the field. The fact that male programmers are attracted to the minority of female programmers doesn't help with this feeling of unwelcomeness, in fact it adds to the awkwardness (although I think that most of this is completely innocent and could not be called harassment, and actual harassment is rarer in our industry than others).

On the anti-AA side, I think that women, due to reverse-discrimination and old fashion chivalry, are objectively advantaged in every field. Furthermore, some things that would seem to advantage men like long hours, stressful work, and being judged on results, are not bad or discriminatory in themselves. But they will tend to favor men over women because our society provides greater incentives for men to obtain money and positions of power. When people talk about work life balance, what they really mean is that the industry should stop providing people with an opportunity to advance their career by putting in extra time and effort.

Thank you for hearing my opinions on the issue, and I hope more people who oppose AA will answer the call to explain their viewpoints.

At one point we had a female intern who was on a 8 month work term. 3 months into her workterm, the manager offered her a full-time position, not contingent on her graduation (she was in 3rd year and planned to return to complete school). Now I'm not anyone to judge, but I will say her performance wasn't particularly impressive, especially compared to other interns on the team, one of who (male) had already graduated, interned for a total of 20 months, and took on plenty of duties. 5 months into the workterm, she ended up wiping a ton of live data of a fairly important legacy application, effectively costing the company a few hundred k. A year later she's working there full-time as expected, but from what I understand, she didn't end up graduating anyways. The male intern worked on that team for 13ish months, then finally got full-time through a different team. All I will say is that this company is one of the tech giants.

I agree we need more females in the field, but like many other people have mentioned, lowering the hiring bar in an intentional effort to hire a female hacker isn't very helpful. The problem is we're not producing enough qualified women, and overcompensating to fix that is not a good long term solution. There are plenty of very talented female hackers, and we do need them, but we also need to fix the root of the problem, and not intentionally skewing hiring to meet level of acceptable gender diversity.

Women in the field also face other challenges, such as not being as vocal as males when it comes to promotions/raises, so it's common for them to have lower salaries than their male counterparts. There are lots of issues females face in this field, but let's look at fixing the root cause.

The owner of this site appears to be a woman. Again, 20 males: http://www.bestcomputersciencedegrees.com/author/2admin/

And there is a preponderance of white males in the annals of computer history: http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm

Even among software professionals, there is divergence in the types of roles women take vs. men. Search LinkedIn (3rd & everyone else) for SQA, and you get about 25% women. Search "Full Stack" and you get about 10% women.

Is this really YC's problem to solve?

You can see female interest in programming change in the charts on these pages:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-comput...

Note that those graphs show raw numbers, not a percentage of the population -- if you adjust for the growing population, female graduation rates in computer science peak in the 1980s. As it says in the text:

"As a share of all CS bachelor's degrees granted that year, females had slipped almost 10 points, from 37% in 1984/1985 to 27% in 2003."

A family anecdote: my mom was working on her Phd in urban planning back in the 1970s and her advisor said to her "You know, in the future, many of these issues of traffic and resource allocation will be resolved through computer simulations, so you should learn to program." My mom thought that was a good idea so she took some classes and learned basic programming. She does not recall feeling like an outsider in those classes: the computer field was still new and felt wide open.

Nowadays a lot of startups talk about the need for "culture fit". This tends to limit the diversity of the gender and race and class of who is hired. For contrast, consider people like Evelyn Boyd Granville, and her acceptance at IBM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Boyd_Granville

Here on Hacker News we also discussed the story that Raganwald posted, about another black woman at IBM, though that article is now offline:

http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story

If IBM applied a filter of "culture fit" then these women would not have been hired. But IBM, and many of the big corporations in the USA, followed very liberal policies that promoted diversity in the work place.

There were some startups from the 1950s and 1960s that broke new ground in terms of diversity. Ray Kroc built up a small startup called McDonalds and in a quiet way he made feminist history in his treatment of June Martino. She was initially hired as the bookkeeper, but she was later entrusted with vast responsibilities and finally, in 1965, when McDonalds went public, she was given shares in the company, exactly like any other cofounder of a startup. This was apparently the first time in history that a woman was treated as a real cofounder and given stock.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Martino

If you look at the numbers, it seems clear that the emergence of the tech-based startup scene, in the 1990s, changed things for women. The startups have not emphasized hiring diversity. The startups tend to emphasize culture fit, and they were doing so even before that phrase came into existence. Why this should be, I am not sure. There have been startups in the past that have emphasized diversity in hiring, so I am not clear why the current generation of startups cannot do so. But what is clear is that it is not a priority for them. The big and boring corporations of the past did a better job of creating spaces for women in tech.

Edit to add: to avoid being overly innocent, we should note how much the talk of "culture" is sometimes a smokescreen to hide power dynamics. Shanley Kane said "In Silicon Valley, and the tech industry in general, a lot of people were giving these talks about what their culture was and it was really superficial and focused on the privileged aspects of the company like free food and massages." Here on Hacker News we have already discussed the post "Google's 'free food' is not free" but it is worth remembering how much the talk about "culture" is just a negotiating tactic.

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/

Instead of turning Paul's comments into a blogosphere shitstorm, maybe we would all be better off staring the issue in the face and thinking about how each of us could help make a difference on this issue

How would you help a 13-year-old -- of either gender? -- get interested in programming?

Raspberry Pi? PyGame? Lego FIRST robotics? How can some of these initiatives be spread more widely to those who maybe don't have supportive family or communities to encourage their nerdy, high-school-pariah interest in tech?

I don't think it's any harder for me to learn stuff now at 28 than it was when I was 13. If anything, it's easier, because I have a much wider baseline of knowledge that I can use to reference things. For example, I learned set theory in high school => I can apply that to relational databases today.

I do know some people, both men and women, that sort of stopped learning new stuff in their twenties, and now they're pretty much stuck. They can't keep up with technology changes (e.g., how does the router work) and they don't have a good baseline for learning new stuff. Nor the will.

Yes: a 9-5 job mentality and a lack of emphasis on nerdy type hackers doing their thing.

Motivated to do light "sys admin" work, but not coding, I guess.

Free Ruby on Rails workshops [sf] for women and their friends

http://sfrubyworkshops.com/

It's run by the same folks that run the SF Ruby meetup (the huge one)... they're neat, chill folks.

(My comment, repeated from the other similar thread that got go superseded by this one)

The problem of getting anyone, young or adult, interested in a subject --any subject-- isn't one with a simple solution. Technical subjects have the added difficulty that they require you to use your brain in non-trivial ways. Given equal exposure to the subject matter, I fail to see how a male or female subject would react differently to the idea of learning that subject. This, of course, assuming that both the male and female subjects got to that moment in time with a similar educational and perhaps even cultural frame of reference. If a mother only ever bought a little girl frilly pink and shiny things, well, it is probably unlikely that as a teenage girl or an adult woman she would even remotely show interest in learning more technical subjects. She will probably be a dancer and go into the arts or some other less "brainy" occupation. That's not to say that there aren't exceptions to this, but they are probably few and far between.

The same is true of boys. If they are brought-up in front of a playstation, shooting at things, playing sports, and well outside of more academically focused areas he will probably grow up to be a jock and then move on to careers that do well when you use half your brain. Hell, he might even go into sales! Things are vastly different if you feed your kids a constant diet of what they should be learning in order to operate at a different level when they are older. My teenage son finished MIT's CS 6.00.1x course just a few weeks ago. That did not happen magically. That was a lot of work. For me and for him! And that also required a lot of work to get to the point where he could even be shoved into that end of the pool.

My little girl is too young to think about formal learning of these kinds of subject, but this year she got introduced to Lego robotics and is starting to like it. Yet, the situation is exactly the same: It requires a ton of time and dedication on my part --as the designated nerd at home-- to keep her exposed to such subjects and make it fun. I have to get silly while teaching something useful. I have to figure out ways to make robotics fun, silly, exciting and something she wants to do. We don't buy lots of silly frilly things for her. That said, I have to tell you, it is hard to fight both genetics and exposure to such things through her peers.

I guess my message is that parents needs to be very engaged and active in bringing up a child into the sciences and technology. It will not happen by osmosis. And, I really don't think gender makes a huge difference. It might change the approach, but I don't think it is the primary determinant of success or failure. One way I've explained this in the past to friends who marvel at what my kids are doing is that this is like a Formula 1 car drafting a car in front of them. You need to drive well and use a lot of effort to get close enough to be within the zone where drafting happens. Up until that point you are using a lot more energy to chase the car in front of you. Once you get into the drafting zone you need less power to maintain the same speed. Yet, you still need that foot solidly planted on the accelerator.

With kids you have to push, push, push. I have navigated through really frustrating moments when I've gotten angry because I couldn't understand why he (my oldest son) didn't just grab that book I bought for him and launched himself into software development nirvana. Of course, I always reflected upon these things and never externalized them --not much of a motivator to yell and scream at your kid about learning something-- and realized that (a) he is still young and (b) we are not in the "draft zone" yet. It'll take a lot more effort --and this is different from kid to kid-- to get him into the "draft zone". Once we reach that zone it will require a lot less energy on my part and, if interested, he will ultimately need virtually no support from me.

This is where I look at some of the things being said about STEM education and can't help but think we are just throwing money into a big bonfire. You can't force people into learning anything. A lot of my kid's friends are, well, jocks or exhibit no interest in anything at all. They are navigating through school with no guidance or encouragement in any direction whatsoever. You can't just throw money at that and expect things to change. For most kids it requires far more work than can be done during the time they are at school. Yes, of course, there are a few kids in every sample group that need almost zero work. These kids get hooked on a subject like programming and just go, go , go. Most kids are not like that. Just like most successful businesses did not get launched with a long coding session over a weekend while eating popcorn.

Going back to my little girl, she is not seriously exposed to Lego robotics. In fact, our living room table is an official FLL table with the official field mat and everything. Yes, we are serious about this. I'd rather have a learning environment in my living room than a fancy dinning room table. As far as why there aren't more women in tech today. I don't have the answer for that. I only know that when I was a teenager girls mostly did different stuff. Not because they were being forced away from tech, they simply showed no interest in what we were doing. My guess is that it all came from home. So, as our culture changes so will that aspect of things.

Evolution?

75% of the graduates with PhDs in psychology are women and the fields of fashion and ballet/dance are dominated by women by you never hear calls for more males to enter these fields.

IMHO, computer programming, like medicine are fields that one should not enter unless they have a passion for the field.

Autism research Simon Baron-Cohen speaks of the differences between male and female brains. Boys are 8 times more likely to be autistic than girls. Autism (and the related Aspergers) and very good at systemitizing but bad at empathisizing. Females are more likely to be empathizers than males. Of course there is overlap and some women are better at sytemitizing than some men and some men are better at empathizing than some women, but that 8:1 difference in Autism in boys over girls probably is an indication of the imbalance of boys over girls who are passionate about programming computers.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizing...

These are three on-line tests from Baron-Cohen that help determine your EQ and SQ (empathizing quotient and systemitizing quotient).

http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/faces/eyestest.aspx

http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/empathyquotient/empathyquoti...

http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/systemizingquotient/systemiz...