Slashdot Mirror
Etsy Hacker Grants Support Female Programmers
samazon writes "Online retail shop Etsy announced a living-expenses grant program for women interested in attending the free Hacker School 3-month programming course. The program is hosted in various New York locations (NYU and Spotify have both hosted sessions) and not only is Etsy offering $5,000 grants to ten women who are accepted into the program, they're also hosting the summer course, and have offered enough space to double the class size to 40 students."
If 51% of the population is women, and women have an equal rate to become programmers as men, 51% of programmers should be women.
But we all know they're not.
So what is the cause of the lower-than-expected rate of female programmers, and what can we do to fix it? This is the same thinking for any minority group that is under-represented. This isn't "reverse discrimination," it's correcting for an error that has come about due to likely social, cultural, and other roadblocks that shouldn't exist.
If you think that it's not because of any such man-made roadblocks, then you must be saying that women/blacks/hispanics aren't smart enough to be programmers (which makes YOU the sexist or racist) or that they don't want to be programmers (which is wrong, just ask them).
Apply this thinking to the low rates of minorities in various job types/universities/C_O positions, etc., and you might start to see where us "progressives" are coming from.
To say that the cultural and social oppression of a minority group (discrimination) is the same as trying to counter the results of that oppression is just ridiculous.