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Comment by fudged71 | Hacker News Reader

I've wanted to mention this for a while but the topic hadn't come up. My engineering faculty tried many things to get more girls in the program, including having girls-only events with the female dean. Of course, all students got these emails, and many of us guys were left wondering why we never had the chance to meet the dean in events like these.

Excluding sometimes seems worse than the biases these programs aim to solve.

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Excluding the more privileged sometimes seems worse than the bias which excludes the less privileged?

That doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

While I don't agree with your assessment of privileges, let's look at it in another way: should boys be artificially constrained so that they don't outperform girls (and I am not implying boys would outperform girls, just that that is what society seems to think)? If you offer a robotics course only for girls, but not for boys, this is what you are effectively doing. You may end up with a better gender ratio, by preventing boys from getting into robotics (I doubt it'll work that way, but let's assume it does). Is this the way we want society to resolve this issue? Why not foster everybody's talents?

The idea behind gender segregated classes/courses is about performance, but rather about social expectations and provided a space with less bias than a mixed gender setting. Whether or not this works is one thing, but this isn't about hampering performance.

From the article, it doesn't sound like it was segregated courses. It sounds like there was a single "girls only robotics" class, and nothing corresponding for boys.

I think it's up to discussion how they are 'less privileged'.

Because now you're excluding both classes. Two exclusions don't make a right, so to speak.

Sex based discrimination doesn't help reduce sex based discrimination. Surprising, I know.

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