Google Invests $50M in “Made With Code” Program to Get Girls Excited About CS | Hacker News Reader

Google Invests $50M in “Made With Code” Program to Get Girls Excited About CS

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59 pointsmikeevans56 comments

Why is there such a clamor to get girls to code? I never hear anyone say "We need more female lumberjacks|roofers|trash collectors|pilots" despite those being male dominated professions as well.

I never hear anyone say "We need more female lumberjacks|roofers|trash collectors|pilots"

There actually is a push to attack more female pilots, this for example: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2510471/British-Ai.... The fact you haven't heard of it probably means you don't follow that aviation market as closely as you do the tech market.

WRT to lumberjacks/roofers/trash collectors, those are the jobs that are rapidly being automated out of existence, so it's not surprising that there isn't a lot of effort to attack women to a dying industry. But there is a push to train women heavy equipment operation and some other trades: http://www.heavyconstructionacademy.com/2012/01/19/women-thr... http://www.womenbuildingfutures.com

We see the push for women in tech because it's a lucrative, growing field and that the lack of women in the field is caused in large part by various obstacles as indicated in any number of HN submittals. We'll see how it pans out.

> Why is there such a clamor to get girls to code?

From the side of people concerned about sex discrimination in society, because the perception that both the source and the effect of the problem is discrimination (on the source side, often subtle and potentially not conscious), which on the effect side leads to poorer range of opportunities and outcomes for females with similar natural abilities.

From the employer side, because programming is a high-cost labor pool and increasing the supply is expected to drive down the market clearing price, and because it is believed that (largely because the employer side sees the source as not too different from the discrimination-concern side) there is a substantial capable workforce for the field that is being pushed out but could be drawn in.

> I never hear anyone say "We need more female lumberjacks|roofers|trash collectors|pilots" despite those being male dominated professions as well.

Do you spend as much time on lumberjack/roofer/trash collector/pilot focussed forums as on places like HN? It may be that what you hear is in part a reflection of what people say -- the factors noted above do not apply equal to all those professions -- but it could also be that what you hear is a product of where you are listening.

Coding is much safer, comfortable, low-stress, well-paying, flexible (esp. for mothers), and employable than those jobs.

>Coding is much safer, comfortable, low-stress, well-paying, flexible (esp. for mothers), and employable than those jobs.

So we're back to the good ol' days of "women shouldn't do hard labor"?

What a red herring.

We're in a good future days of "nearly no one should do hard labor".

>What a red herring.

I don't think that means what you think it means.

Regardless, it seems strange to me that people are pushing for advertising coding to women in the name of gender equality, but then they seem not to care about the number of women in fields that aren't perceived so highly. I think it really throws their motivations into question.

Perhaps, strawman would be a better characteristic of your post as you were trying to distort the argument of other party.

And no, it doesn't seem strange to me that people are pushing women to learn coding. Coding skills provide great income, stability, mobility and independence. So yeah, thanks Google and others, who are trying to get more women in coding and increase their quality of life.

>Coding skills provide great income, stability, mobility and independence.

So why not try to make these skills more accessible to everyone?

Isn't it obvious?

Adoption of skills depends on the ecosystem of practitioners. Empirically, we are observing that women do not copy social behavior of the male part of the ecosystem and do not engage the subject of programming/coding/compsci.

We need to reach a threshold value, a tipping point where girls and women would see enough role models and would have enough support networks to progress in the technology industry. This may be achieved by reaching a critical mass and that is exactly what Google and others are doing.

Similarly there is no drive to get more men into early childhood education or nursing.

> Similarly there is no drive to get more men into early childhood education or nursing.

This is an oft-repeated canard in these discussions, but it's patently and demonstratively not true: getting men interested in nursing and ECE has been a large focus of those fields for years. Even a quick Google search would produce tons of information on various initiatives, studies, and scholarly articles, but here's a small sampling:

http://aamn.org/

http://web.jhu.edu/jhnmagazine/summer2009/features/men_in_nu...

https://www.discovernursing.com/men-in-nursing

http://folk.uio.no/olegmo/Men%20in%20Nursing/Evans%20J%20199...

http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/12710806

http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ618681

http://www.meninchildcare.co.uk/index.htm

http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/61263553/male-pre...

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1012564610349

There may be some initiatives by some groups, but in the popular consciousness (mainstream media outlets) it's simply not true that there is a focus on "where are all the men in childcare?" of even 1% of the focus on "we need more women programmers stat!"

But yes, it is strictly true that 'a drive' exists. A single person crusading for it would make it true.

Perhaps adrianN has this sentiment because there is never, ever, any mention of these agencies on hacker news or other news outlets that I frequent.

These organizations may exist, but no one seems to care about them. Perhaps adrianN really meant to ask why this was the case.

A google search shows a bunch of related articles in the NY Times, Boston Globe, and CNN (for example, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/business/increasingly-men-... http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2008/11/1... http://newsroom.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/21/duncan-black-male-t... - this is not an exhaustive listing or an exhaustive search).

Plenty is written about it, but it's likely that people not focused on those subjects don't notice it.

Except there is. It isn't talked about on Hacker News as much as drives to get women into programming (well, except that it gets mentioned every time the women in programming issue comes up because someone inevitably makes a comment like yours -- but its almost never an independent topic on HN) because of HN's particular focus.

a false statement. a simple google search shows that gender imbalance in nursing is something people care about.

Nurses can actually earn high salaries, but there are no nurse billionaires.

The cynic in me says that by increasing the number of programmers available they can pay less.

The same reason, I believe, why FB is so keen about immigration.

This is seriously the dumbest theory yet in these threads. Maybe it's just making the rounds now? (it's not even the first time in this very discussion!)

Not only would it be a horrible return on investment (and one that would take years to come to fruition), it's also never brought up about every other coding initiative out there. Let me know when you start bringing this up in every thread about corporate-sponsored hackathons, education events, scholarship programs, or just plain old "getting started" guides.

Good news: I see three on the front page right now! I'll wait.

They actually neutered the Blockly environment here. Try not following the instructions at https://www.madewithcode.com/project/bracelet

You can't! It tells you to use a diameter of "18"; if you try to make it "6", the environment will forcefully change it.

Is this even programming? You can't do anything here but click the buttons it tells you to. Half the fun of programming is doing oddball things your environment and its designers didn't expect. Some people call this "hacking", but it doesn't look like Google expects girls to want to hack.

Yeah, maybe "it's just a tutorial", but since when do tutorials acutally stop you from going off the rails and experimenting?

Pretty tired of hearing women who aren't programmers or in tech telling other women that they need to program.

This. I am a woman in engineering and share your sentiment. Can't describe how annoyed I have been to find non-engineer/non-programmer women beat the drums about getting more girls to code or more women into STEM while the actual deserving technical women toil away silently.

Yep. As a fellow woman in tech, I know that we have issues that need to be addressed. But what do Chelsea Clinton and Mindy Kaling have to do with this? Are they going to start programming professionally?

There are many women involved in Girls Who Code who are programmers. If you go to the site, www.madewithcode.com, the women highlighted are engineers.

Moreover, no one here is telling anyone that they need to code.

The public face for Girls Who Code is Reshma Saujani (law / politics background). As krstck pointed out, the public faces here are Mindy Kaling, Chelsea Clinton. While there are engineers involved behind the curtains in each of these programs, I don't like the fact that the ones who stand to gain the most (publicity, credibility, funding, access to resources and powerful contacts) are people who don't have anything to do with tech themselves except flying around the country giving talks about how everyone should code (Reshma Saujani, I am looking at you). I am being bitter here, but I would hope to live in a world where real engineers are the women in the limelight for the kids to look up to.

I totally agree with you that the people that kids can look up to in these programs should actually be engineers. I think there is a danger of forgetting the power of spokespeople and the ability for people who aren't engineers to help lead these organizations. I agree they shouldn't be held up as role models themselves, though, at least in this area.

Honestly, though, my experience with Girls Who Code (and why I mentioned it) has been entirely local, where the women up front have all been engineers or close enough. This is the first time I've actually heard of Reshma Saujani (or, if it's not, she wasn't notable enough to stick in my memory).

Are they programmers or engineers then?

They seem so blindly focused on that one metric of girls majoring/working in CS. So much that they have no shame about exploiting sexist stereotypes in their message, strategy, branding even all the way down to web design. I'd love to improve that metric as much as anyone. But it would be so so so much better to do it by working on the fundamentals rather than by manipulating people into CS using the very warfare that keeps them out.

I've seen cynical commenters on HN/proggit/etc. write that the reason why companies like Google are so intent on getting more female programmers, and more programmers in general, is that it'd allow for engineer wages to go down over the next decade or two due to the basic laws of supply/demand.

Not sure I fully buy into it- but it's not a crazy argument either, especially given the recent accusations of collusion to keep salaries low between major tech players.

I don't see the programmer market ever getting flooded. I think it's sort of like writing. Pretty much everyone is taught how to write but not a lot of people can do it well let alone well enough to get paid for it.

Writing and programming are basically just thinking, manifested as words or code. Most people either don't enjoy thinking, or are bad at it. I think this has and will be true for a very long time.

>Most people either don't enjoy thinking, or are bad at it.

Elaborate on the definitions and prove that with a scientific study. The arrogance here is outrageous.

It's not arrogance. It's knowing the difference in skill it takes to work on an app compared for to working on a platform or the difference between cranking out stories for the Huffington Post and writing an editorial for the New York Times. It simply takes an enormous amount of time to reach the master level of a craft. I don't think the drive to reach that level can taught. A person just needs to be obsessed. Most people don't like computers enough to stare at one at least 8 hours a day for 10 years and read programming books on the side. Likewise, most people don't want to spend all day writing. I think the percentage of people who do will remain constant.

I see the salary of high end programmers only going up.

"Sort of like writing"?? That's pretty funny. Are you under the impression that there's a writer shortage, or that most people who "write for a living" can easily sustain a middle class lifestyle?

Google has such a huge reserve of cash that it can afford philanthropic projects purely for the principle of the thing (and I suppose the good PR). A cynical interpretation isn't really warranted, in my opinion.

Why is having more programmers overall, even if it will mean lower wages, a bad thing? You could say the same things about any course about programming that doesn't specifically target 50% of the population.

It's all about the PR to be able to say you support women coders.

My main problem with this has always been that it's treating the symptom, rather than the root cause. The idea is that if you throw enough money, you can magically cause radical paradigm shifts in how the professional interests of the genders and sexes.

This might be so, in the short term. You'll likely have a nice boost in numbers, which I'm sure will look really good. But you should really be striving for long-lasting and meaningful change. You want girls to actually be passionate about programming as a craft, and not just create more disposable cogs who can churn out high-level instructions.

I'm sure a lot of employers would salivate at the latter prospect, but it's not something we should be encouraging. Even the incessant use of the word "code" and the mystical cult of personality that is being erected around this abstract concept is cause for concern. I don't think having more women coders is enough, we need more women hackers to get something more meaningful.

And when you start looking for that, you'll quickly find that the issue goes deeper than something flashy campaigns and cash can just swiftly solve. It's societal. Once you pin down the causes, you shouldn't just hurry to turn the tides, either. You should analyze the cost and benefit of doing so.

I expect a short-term boost in the number of girls in CS will lead to a long-term boost. But I guess that's the sort of thing a sociologist might study?

Perhaps. I think it'd be beneficial to have more women in CS, but there are ways to go about effecting that kind of positive social change that also corrupt or blunt social feedback mechanisms in such a way that vulnerable people will be led to pursue ends which aren't in the cards for them, or which are suboptimal for them. Effectively, such schemes transfer wealth to the vulnerable from the even more vulnerable. That should give people pause, I think.

I wanted to compare the amount of investment with the GSoC[1] program. The GSoC home page[2] says it supported over 7,500 students; since each student/mentor pair(?) receives $5500, that makes about $41m, with overhead probably about the same amount as the "Made With Code" program, although GSoC ran 3 times longer with that amount than is planned for this new program.

Either Google thinks this topic is somewhat more important, or could benefit more from the money, or the effort can be concentrated into fewer years, or Google has a bit more money now than it had when it started GSoC. Or anything else (I haven't even read what they are planning to do exactly.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_summer_of_code [2] https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/?csw=1

Previous discussion:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921360

My girlfriend, who is an iOS and OS X programmer, described this as "highly offensive."

The program-some-jewelry-without-typing did not go over well with her.

Disgusting title! An exhibit to why the program is needed. It is not for getting girls excited, it is for getting idiots like the reporter (Jordan Crook) understand that coding is not a men's thing.

Instead of teaching someone to code the better approach would be to give basic STEM education. What would a coding class do if the basics of Maths and Science are not clear.

I don't understand the focus on making women want to code. Maybe women just like different career choices then men. Does it really make sense to spend $50M on marketing to convince women to code?

Google seems to think so. IIRC, 20% of their software engineering staff are women. This is probably because 20% of the software engineers in America are women. If google could help push that number up to near parity, then they will have hundreds of thousands of new potential applicants to help create skynet 2.0.

Not unless the class sizes get that much larger at the top schools. In reality they'd just be displacing the weaker male students at admission time.

Edit: Downvoted for a tautology? This site is going the way of reddit.

This move makes me very reluctant to work at google. Would my future career be limited, because women are favored in promotions and internal recruitment? I mean this show what google's values are, and which methods they think are acceptable.

It would feel much safer and future proof to work for a more meritocratic competitor.

"This move makes me very reluctant to work at google."

If removing barriers to getting good people interested in what you supposedly love makes you "reluctant," I think that says far more about you than about Google.

"Would my future career be limited, because women are favored in promotions and internal recruitment?"

No, but you might not be as favored over women as you are now. Men in CS, we're playing the game on easy mode (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...).

Anyway cgranade, would you support internal career tracks for women only, to rectify the shortage of women higher up? Do you think women should be given extra consideration for promotion at google?

Proof by analogy? Not a single piece of evidence? Really?

No, not proof by analogy, but explanation by analogy. As Scalzi says in his follow-up, providing proof of endemic sexism is about as necessary by now as providing evidence that gravity exists when tripping over one's shoelaces. The evidence by now is clear enough that to demand evidence in every discussion is a distraction tactic, and not actually useful. Finding evidence is, because of the sheer breadth and extent of the problem, as difficult as using your favorite search engine to look up income stats, harassment at the workplace, unfair hiring practices, etc., such that demanding evidence is pretty much asking someone else to do your work for them.

(I should note that Scalzi did link to another post with more facts, over at http://www.jimchines.com/2012/05/facts-are-cool/, if you still demand that someone else go search for things online for you.)

>[B]lack males receive [prison] sentences that are approximately 10% longer I don't see how this is related to programming but yes it is correct. The effect is even larger for men/women, so that men recieve much longer sentences for the same thing than a woman would.

>The ratio of women’s and men’s median annual earnings was 77.0 This is mostly but not fully explained by choice of career. Women in the cities of US actually earn more than men.

I don't feel like responding to more, since they are unrelated to the topic at hand, proving discrimination in the workplace keeping women out of programming.

>providing proof of endemic sexism

It depends on what you define as sexism to be sure. If you define sexism as telling a woman she looks beautiful, or showing pretty women in your presentation, then yes of course you will find things like that.

>demand evidence in every discussion is a distraction tacti

Yeah, I guess it disctracts from reading poorly thought out analogies...

>income stats

Correlation does not prove causation.

>if you still demand that someone else go search for things online for you.

Wow are being really hostile. I have made no such demands. But if you try to "prove" your point by doing analogies or by linking to irrelevant stats like incarceration of black males, I will call you out.

From my anecdotal experience women are favored over men for hiring at megacorps. I think men are still treated better at work and favored for promotions though.

Quick edit/evidence: 17% of Google technical workers are female where only 11% of CS majors at my school were women.

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