Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazypyro | Hacker News Reader

Are role models in CS (and even other industries) really what drives people to pursue the career? Just looking at my own experience, its hard to pinpoint a "role model".

I'm curious why there is always such a huge focus on role models (is it a grandfathered idea from the past?) and not on the herd of other problems, such as access to tools, ease of self-learning and targeted tutorials at under-represented demographics. I'd imagine tutorials that are targeted at doing things that tend to be more popular with certain demographics would be more useful than a few famous minority or women C.S. majors, but I could be wrong.

It seems dated to me, but maybe there is some strong research that correlates to the role model idea. I'm just not seeing it.

View on HN

What swampangel already said, essentially.

It's not about having somebody you look up to all the time, but just knowing you're not alone. It might not sound like a big deal, but believe me, when you're the only woman on a 20-person team, it gets lonely.

But I'd argue that you're correct in your judgment of famous role models, specifically. What's needed is not the few famous ones, but knowledge that an average person of your minority can succeed. That others like you have travelled the path before. And famous people really don't evoke "just like me" images for most people :)

Sidenote: please let's not have tutorials that are "targeted at doing things that tend to be more popular with certain demographics". The intent is good, but it inevitably leads to pinkwashing. As it turns out, women are, like men, pretty diverse in their interests. I would assume that's true for other minorities, too.

As for tools & self-learning: That's orthogonal to having representation/role models. We should neglect neither. Nor traditional learning, and many other tools to ensure success.

You're right about the pinkwashing. I didn't mean for it to sound as bad as it did.

Having a much younger little sister sort of led me to that comment. I'd enjoy if there was some way to teach her programming that she would also enjoy and undeniably, for her, it would be something stereo-typically associated with what young girls like (cute creatures, bright colors, etc.). Obviously girls, just like boys, have much more diverse interests than what society sees as the "standard", but it just seems that something targeted at stereotypical young "girl-y" interests (forgive me for using girly and not a more descriptive term) is missing, while there is lots of tutorials for stuff that is more stereo-typically associated with other demographics.

Hope that explained it without coming off as sexist or discriminatory. If not, I tried.

No worries, I didn't take it as discriminatory (or sexist). It's hard to see what "other" people need, and it's easy to fall into the stereotype trap :)

FWIW, I don't object to activities considered stereotypical per se. By all means, create a "how to animate My Little Pony" workshop. Or remote controlled sewing machines.

Just don't attach "for girls". The issue is not the activity, but associating it with a demographic instead of letting it stand on its own. (And lest we forget, guys suffer from the same stereotyping - it's considered uncool by many for a guy to do anything remotely "soft and cuddly". Let's not reinforce)

I'm curious - have you asked your sister what kinds of things she would enjoy? What programming means to her, or why she would/would not consider getting into it?

No research here, just opinions: "Representation" might be a better word than "role model".

Simply, it helps to see someone who is superficially similar to you in a job/role that you aspire to. You can imagine that person overcame many of the same obstacles that you face.

People point to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg to show that you don't need a comp sci degree to be a coder and an innovator. These examples are used to encourage people to continue in the field, not as models to pattern your behaviour after.

On the other hand, if you look at a sample of people in an industry and you don't identify with any of them, you might imagine that people like you (a) don't enjoy the work experience or (b) face some serious obstacle to success.

> Simply, it helps to see someone who is superficially similar to you in a job/role that you aspire to.

This is the part that's kind of weird to me. Wouldn't this only be true of people with too much emphasis on superficial characteristics? I grant that there are many people like this, but we usually get a lot more info about people than just gender, race, etc. If a potential CS student reads about Zuckerberg and Page and Gates and just thinks "White Male" instead of "person who loves tinkering and breaking things down and creating, just like me" etc etc, isn't that an issue with their predilection for stereotyping? It's like someone staying out of jazz (or the NBA) because they look at its history and think "it's all black people, there's no place for me there" instead of "it's all creative and brilliant musicians (or talented athletes), I would love to be a part of that".

I get that this might be a problem that's not easily solvable so we should explore other avenues as well, but it's bizarre to me that we seem to be embracing that sort of reduction of human beings into a single physical characteristic, instead of identifying it as a big part of the problem.

White males, as a group, are fairly intimidating to other groups (and often behave in exclusionary ways).

This is not an issue of "reducing to single characteristics", but of power imbalance. I can't speak for other minorities, but a lot of women are experiencing discrimination from men in some way in some place in their lives. Try looking at #YesAllWomen on twitter if you want more details.

And so it's meaningful to set an example that says "While this profession currently predominantly male, we do accept minorities, and there are many non-white/non-male people in our industry who succeeded". That is what the role model part is about - clearly communicating that it's not a clique. That privilege is at least somewhat addressed.

If there were black privilege in the NBA, yes, it'd be a lot scarier for white athletes to get in there. Looking at the odd fact that by far most quarterbacks are white (75% of them right now, and the fact that it's so low is celebrated), I think we're far from that point.

But even if we leave out the debate around privilege and pretend for the moment that it doesn't exist: Being in a minority leads to a lot of shared experiences. A creative woman interested in CS, but not in the field has more in common with other women than she has with a guy interested in exploring CS.

There are more shared experiences the longer you share that interest, and the differences vanish. But at the point where it's about getting into CS, these differences matter. And seeing somebody who is "just like you" matters, on a psychological level.

> If there were black privilege in the NBA

> most quarterbacks are white

The NBA is the National Basketball Association. The football one is the NFL. Not that this directly addresses your point or anything but that was bugging me haha sorry...

> But even if we leave out the debate around privilege

Oh thank god you said this. I haven't yet been able to figure out how the common usage of privilege [1] in such discussions is nothing more than people trying to justify the use of classical racism and sexism in the rhetorical service of those who aren't typically the beneficiaries of such disgusting tactics. And far more often than not, any attempt to think critically about these tactics is met with "you just don't get it, probably a white male" [wrong].

> Being in a minority leads to a lot of shared experiences. A creative woman interested in CS, but not in the field has more in common with other women than she has with a guy interested in exploring CS.

This is a really good point, consider me pretty much convinced. As much as we might not _want_ one's gender or race to define one's experiences, the fact remains that it still does, upstream. My assumption was that "shared love of CS" was enough of an experience to relate to someone on a non-stereotype basis, but I can totally see how that could not be true in many cases.

[1] Note that I'm not talking about the concept of privilege per se; it's been YEARS that I've been baffled by the fact that so many people are just completely unaware of the fact that success (and many other things) is (partially) a function of many many external factors that are easy to dismiss for those who aren't handicapped by them (poverty, certain sexualities, being in certain racial minorities, being female (in some contexts), being male (in others)).

It shouldn't be the main deciding factor, but it helps. It's a signal like any other, although because it's superficial, it might be something you pick up on earlier.

Most people aren't driven to just one career path in life. They start out with a few different options that narrow as they get older. Given that, if you are investigating two careers, and they both have lots of creative tinkerers, but one of them has many more people that match up with your race and gender, is it unreasonable to factor that in to your decision?

White people don't have much historical evidence that they will receive poor treatment in the NBA or the jazz community because they're white. But black people and women do have reasons to pay special attention to signals that they might not be well received in a certain community/industry/workplace. It's not their fault for being aware of that.

I take your general point (and between you and groby_b, I feel like a lot of my concerns were actually addressed), but for the life of me I really don't understand the fact that people keep replacing "someone" in my hypotheticals with "White people". I didn't say anything about a white person staying out of jazz due to black people: the person in my example could've been white or non-white hispanic or east asian or middle eastern or native american or aboriginal or south asian or...

Just to follow up, I picked white people because I'm confident they don't suffer discrimination in those areas. I'm white, so the only "someone" I feel comfortable speaking for is a white person.

I'm less certain that native americans, say, who have historically been treated poorly by just about everyone, wouldn't be watching for a different set of warning signs. I don't want to make assumptions about their experience in a given community.

I agree these discussions tend to boil down to man/woman and black/white but I think that's just what most of us in North America are most confident discussing. Anyway I'm glad it's been productive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com