Hacker News Reader

Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

"Less interest" along gender lines sounds like a good explanation... until you toss in racial lines as well. Black and Latino representation in IT is even worse than female representation. This strongly suggests that the problem is a matter of culture, not gender.

View on HN

>"Less interest" along gender lines sounds like a good explanation

And then you have to ask, what makes the gender less interested in the topic?

A lot of the time people think this is just throwing gifts to people from certain demographic to compensate for their disadvantages, but it is a tactic to attract more people.

Some girls participate at certain event and get recognition and then you get other girls to say "oh! I could do that too!"

Word get out that a bunch of women/black/latin@ got into Recurse center after being granted sponsorships and you get more women/black/latin@ applying to more places like it around the world.

> And then you have to ask, what makes the gender less interested in the topic?

There is an implied assumption that there is a moral duty to help get more women in to CS. I have yet to hear a reason for this that does not reduce to "Just because". (e.g. the notion that in ideal, fair world, programming jobs would be split 50/50, which is basically an article of faith, opinion.)

I don't think there's a moral duty to do so, but neither do I see how doing so hurts/is wrong. You're only opening tech space to people that might be as or more talented that people already in the pool, but that might be lost because they were never told "you can actually do this".

Well, and you've got to remember that people are social animals.

Is there less interest because a woman or a person of color looks at the field and sees that no one else there looks like them?

Or, more to the point, the people in the field all look like the one group that has historically dominated everyone else?

Maybe that's discouraging. I'm guessing it is. I don't have the lived-in experience of it because I'm a white male, but I do like to keep my "I'm right and I know everything" attitudes in check when I talk to women and people of color, and ask them about their experiences. One minute of listening to people is worth a million speculative web forum comments.

That's part of it, sort of. I think a lot of it boils down to kids building their expectations based on the adults they know. It's certainly my own observation from childhood. Growing up poor, I rarely interacted with adults who were educated, successful, and wealthy (except the men my father worked for, whom he despised). I don't think I knew a single engineer when I was a child. This is a huge problem for the black/latino communities, who don't have adult role models in these professions.

This is a near-daily discussion topic for me. One of my best friends is a very successful doctor and financial expert who happens to be black. He has something of a personal mission to teach financial literacy to black teenagers, because they see so little of it growing up (and I grew up without it, too). He firmly believes that software and engineering are the best path to middle class success for smart kids of color, but he's always struggling on ways to encourage it.

Black and Latino representation could simply be due to the fact that the cost of entry into tech related fields is pretty high and a lot of minorities live in poverty.

Gina mentions how she started with a $300 Lenovo laptop.

Yes. We could perhaps rescue that argument by making it more subtle: not about money, but about uninterrupted, long stretches of time to think and learn?

(How would we falsify this?)

Blacks are also horribly overrepresented in prison - likely because they grow up in poverty. This also makes it more difficult to study and that is the prize of admission to the coding group (you can learn to program for no more than the cost of a computer, an internet connection and electricity).

Yes: it's not just about money, but also about being able to take the time to study and practice.

This affects the really poor: for example, if you're working three retail jobs just to stay afloat, you're not going to have any time to hone your skills or hobbies.

But people in prison have all day to learn new skills!

And internet and computers whenever they want! (I'm being sarcastic here; not sure 'bout parent err4nt)

> you can learn to program for no more than the cost of a computer, an internet connection and electricity

which by no means will ever get you a job in the tech industry. Nice hobby, though.

This is simply not true, Gina's blog post itself talks about how she started with a $300 Lenovo; you are pontificating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com