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Code.org: More Money For CS Instructors Who Teach More Girls
theodp writes "The same cast of billionaire characters — Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Eric Schmidt — is backing FWD.us, which is lobbying Congress for more visas to 'meet our workforce needs,' as well as Code.org, which aims to popularize Computer Science education in the U.S. to address a projected CS job shortfall. In laying out the two-pronged strategy for the Senate, Microsoft General Counsel and Code.org Board member Brad Smith argued that providing more kids with a STEM education — particularly CS — was 'an issue of critical importance to our country.' But with its K-8 learn-to-code program which calls for teachers to receive 25% less money if fewer than 40% of their CS students are girls, Smith's Code.org is sending the message that training too many boys isn't an acceptable solution to the nation's CS crisis. 'When 10 or more students complete the course,' explains Code.org, "you will receive a $750 DonorsChoose.org gift code. If 40% or more of your participating students are female, you'll receive an additional $250, for a total gift of $1,000 in DonorsChoose.org funding!" The $1+ million Code.org-DonorsChoose CS education partnership appears to draw inspiration from a $5 million Google-DoonorsChoose STEM education partnership which includes nebulous conditions that disqualify schools from AP STEM funding if projected participation by female students in AP STEM programs is deemed insufficient. So, are Zuckerberg, Gates, Ballmer, and Schmidt walking-the-gender-diversity-talk at their own companies? Not according to the NY Times, which just reported that women still account for only about 25% of all employees at Code.org supporters Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. By the way, while not mentioning these specific programs, CNET reports that Slashdot owner Dice supports the STEM efforts of Code.org and Donors Choose."
Now drink.
There is no "shortfall" of coders. There's just a glut of employers who want just-in-time employees cheap. Ones they can lay off at any time. Ones they don't have to send to training classes.
Women went into IT in the late 1990s, when it looked like a good career choice. Now it isn't, so they don't.
That the gender ratio of any program's enrollment is under the direct control of teachers, and they are clearly to blame if it isn't up to some group's ideals. But why merely dock the teachers pay? Why don't we waterboard them and give them jail time instead? That will solve the problem much more quickly!
First of all, I too really want to see more females working in the tech industry. I think it's one of the more female friendly work environments around, especially since the experience can be so tailored to your interests.
That said, I don't see how those incentives are healthy or really help anything. I don't think everyone would enjoy or be good at coding; so incentives that make instructors coerce people into entering a programming class mean fewer spots for people who would enjoy and benefit from the class.
Instead we need to focus on efforts that get females to seek out classes like this (efforts like AppCampForGirls) , not get instructors to lure females into the class...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't know a single competent programmer that started programming because someone taught them how. They started programming because they wanted to.
Manipulating teachers isn't going change that outcome.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Now that most medical students are female, will the same measures be taken to punish "sexist" women doctors ?
"women still account for only about 25% of all employees at Code.org supporters "
And how many unemployed female software engineers do we have who can't find work?
Businesses can't hire people who don't exist.
Penalize teachers for things they can't control. How do you as a teacher ensure that at least 40% of your students are girls? Throw out some boys that are interested in programming?
So will the same apply to nursing teachers if not enough male students enroll?
Last time I checked, teachers in K-8 (or at any level) weren't responsible for recruiting students into their classes. In fact, I don't recall them having any say in the final course rosters at all. Why is it proposed that we punish them?
This is sexism at its very worst. Funding one gender over another only serves to create animosity between them and suppress the gender that is not given preferential treatment. Why don't we put the funding towards researching how each gender takes up information and teach to those pedagogic methodologies? Education is one of the few areas where we have made minimal progress in the last 100 years. Students are NOT getting noticeably smarter. If we achieve the ability to learn more, faster, we all will win.
*** Don't be dull.***
If the place is so great then name it.
... and ...
Talent usually falls along a bell curve. And half the programmers out there will be worse than the other half of the programmers out there.
If you're having trouble finding the good programmers then you either aren't advertising the job openings enough or there is some problem with the pay/environment/project that causes the better programmers to choose other employment.
Just say women next time. Or how bout "women and girls"
"Women" as I said is inaccurate. Strunk & White would veto your sentence expanding "women and girls" when a perfectly good english word, Female, exists to cover both terms and indeed the totality of the gender.
I fail to understand why anyone would see "female" as a creepy word unless they had some underlying issue with females themselves or were too steeped in political correctness to write well because of some absurd fear of trigger words. It's very suspicious you are not willing to attach a "real" handle even to your assertions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Really?
The politically-correct bullshit has to stop - do people REALLY believe there's a concerted effort to keep women out of coding? It must be so, because that's the only situation in which this sort of thing would matter.
What you've just told CS instructors is to MAKE SURE every last woman in their course passes, and there's a financial reward for it.
Why does it matter what chromosomes your coder bears?
-Styopa
It's easy for these assholes to talk, they were the extremely lucky ones in a winner-take-all industry which often metes out its rewards in absurd and haphazard ways.
You really want to make this world a fairer place: how about paying all your employees a decent wage, and maybe even take a cut from your ridiculously high comps? Then you might be providing an actual reason for more people to get into coding, including the ones with vaginas.
I'm not sure that facebook boy deserves to be called a billionaire. He holds more than a billion dollars worth of (horrendously overvalued) stock, but as best I have heard he does not have a billion dollars in actual currency. He won't likely be willing - or able - to sell off his stock quickly enough to reach a net worth of $1B when the stock finally tanks for the last time when the market acknowledges that facebook has no actual business plan that can produce at that level.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Congress probably does understand the law of supply and demand but just doesn't have the spine to resist billionaires.
As mentioned in prior notes, H-1B is unmistakeably a tool to flood the programming market with cheap labor to keep wages down.
What surprises me most, given all the high minded rhetoric one hears about helping "the developing world," is no one ever seems to mention that US immigration policies work to strip poor countries of their intelligentsia and commercial talent.
Maybe those billionaires didn't go to college, or even school, because anyone who did knows teachers aren't in charge of enrollment, the school is.
So this is to punish teachers for something they can't control?
Be seeing you...
As you hate gay people, we can assume you hate women equally, therefore your ability to critique my own use of terms for femailty is null and void (and NULL and nil and 0 for that matter).
P.S. Computer Janitor is one of the lamest insults I have run across in many years. Even if I were an IT administrator and not a developer, being a "janitor" for a computer is more like being a janitor in a building where you have to fight ninjas and/or pirates every day, in addition to re-arranging the structure of the building itself which changes daily and must be warped back into working order.
So calling someone a "Computer Janitor" is the equivalent of calling them a "Warrior Architect". Not exactly the put-down you had hoped for when it implies they could hospitalize you for days with a good stare and a few typed commands.
You must have had some admin work you over pretty good, computer wise, to hate them so... Good for him.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
By the way, while not mentioning these specific programs, CNET reports that Slashdot owner Dice supports the STEM efforts of Code.org and Donors Choose.
In that case, I guess I've no choice but to strongly oppose the STEM efforts of Code.org and Donors Choose...
Sexist assholes hard at work. Ignore the skilled and dedicated boys, we're trying to something something who the fuck knows.
Useless morons. I guess we can write off code.org as being anything but shitsacks.
Why isn't everyone calling it sexist? I find it discriminatory too.
The problem isn't that girls are denied an opportunity to learn coding when in college. The problem is that they're denied this opportunity when they're younger, they're told it isn't for them. Here's a good illustration. To solve the gender discrepancy we need to go for its roots, not try to cover up the symptoms.
Well that, and there's the sexual harassment issue, but the same thing applies. Don't try to force girls into computer science; make the environment more comfortable and welcoming, and they will come on their own.
Talent usually falls along a bell curve. And half the programmers out there will be worse than the other half of the programmers out there.
And that's why employers want more training: so that the skill level that's presently a standard deviation or two above the mean can become the future mean.
Kind of odd that just a few paragraphs after saying it will cap teachers' grants for classes with too many boys, Code.org instructs teachers to: 'Inspire your students: introduce computer science and make it exciting, creative and for everyone. Show your students the Code.org film, "What Most Schools Don't Teach": it features Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Black Eyed Peas founder will.i.am and NBA star Chris Bosh talking about the importance of programming."
It is statistically rare to find a female "programmer" who is competent.
I'm not trying to take anything away from the females who succeeded,
but the brain chemistry needed to program does not occur in a significant
amount of girls, the number being slightly higher than the number of males
who can take a pregnancy to term.
There are biological facts which can't be changed by social pressure. If that
were true, they'd be many, many more female programmers.
Just statin' the obvious,
Yes. Agree 100%.
ALL OF US need to *call our congressman* and explain the above statement and demand they ignore FWD.US's policy suggestions.
Just look at the people...Gates and Ballmer? These guys are awful...they are horrible examples for businesspeople & have destructive notions of how society works. Zuckerberg demonstrates some competence but still his business philosophy is just as horrible and abusive as M$'s...then of course there's Eric fucking Schmidt...he who said on Colbert that only people who do bad things worry about privacy.
These people are the bad guys. Their ideas as always crafted strategically to maximize their personal profits...
FWD.US is for corporate profit by hiring cheap overseas labor...its not about hiring US workers
Thank you Dave Raggett
I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I think whether someone learns programming is intrinsically tied to wanting to figure out "the rules". For as long as I've been alive, I've noticed that whenever I've looked at some system it was clear that it operated according to some rules that were understandable. And understanding those rules was its own reward, but it also enables more effective or efficient usage. Programming (and mathematics and physics and chemistry and...) is just learning the rules of computers (or their respective fields). We're so eager to find the rules to every system that it gets us into trouble with systems (like people) that don't have inviolate rules.
In my observation, women (as a class) are more likely than men (as a class) to discount understanding those kinds of rules, because they're useless for interacting with people - and women tend to be more people-oriented than men. It's not for anybody to say whether this is better or worse, I think it's just that there are many different kinds of people, and that they consider different things important.
As another observation, I know a lot of really great female programmers and scientists, and they all see the world broadly as I do - as something to be understood, with rules that are worth discovering. And I know many men who see the world as full of things that just happen, and the reason isn't as important or relevant as the consequences to them and the people they care about. But of the latter type, I know more women than men, and of the former, more men than women - so assuming that the former type are more likely to program (arguably the most rigorous and least-nuanced system), it's not surprising to me that more men are programmers.
Still, I'm offended by this notion that women constantly need cajoling and reassurance to do pretty much anything. Every woman I know is perfectly happy to decide to do something, or not, and they're not stupid or uninformed or incapable of deciding for themselves what they want to do or not do. If the goal is equal treatment, why do we seem to consider women as less capable of deciding their interests than men? A lot of women are behind this, but that doesn't mean it's not sexism.
I think we really need to separate access and opportunity from results. The former is the important one, though admittedly hard to measure. But emphasizing for percentages leads to some really peverse outcomes. Just as an example, I went to university with several top-notch female coders - and each one had to spend a lot of effort both throughout university and when they entered industry that they weren't there to fill some admissions or HR quota. It's ridiculous, of course, as they were top-notch - but quotas, implicit or explicit, by definition lower the bar from "as competent as possible" to "as competent as possible, while meeting the quota" , so the only logical conclusion is that the average within the quota is lower than the average outside it (otherwise they wouldn't need a quota). It's really messed up that we've made what should be labeled sexist thinking, into a reasonable conclusion - all in the name of giving a leg up to minorities!
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I don't really agree with the poster above you, but to state maternity/paternity leave is a 50/50 thing is just nonsense. Paternity leave (at least in the USA) is virtually nonexistent.
I know this is a repeated meme, and I, myself, taught myself C when I was 14. However, I've never seen any statistics about this, I wonder if this really is the usual case.
Fuck this. Quotas in order to solve supposed social problems do more harm than good.
I can see it now, teachers keeping boys from their CS class because otherwise they'd have a bad ratio. Screw you, politically correct asshole social engineering feminists!
In my opinion so far, Code.org is constantly more concerned with 'creating excitement' and 'promotion' over a consistent message or actual content.
By spending more money to teach a specific sex they are promoting sexism. Great. How PC.
Assuming the issue is real, is the gender disparity and situation sufficiently similar between sports and CS education to adapt Title IX's compliance test? How does Title IX's implementation actually work in practice?
Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Eric Schmidt ;)
none?
Find me the people also talking about the lack of men in childhood education and healthcare, aand then I may believe they care about gender equality, rather than mollifying feminists.
The problem with quotas is they assume that a perfect ratio of people of a given race/gender will actually want to do a given career. Forget about the cultural differences that tend to follow races and genders that may predispose one group towards a given path than another group. If there are too many white or asian males who want to be in IT, then sorry some of them were just born the wrong color and/or should cut their dick off, so sayeth the lord affirmative action.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
It will be very interesting to see if giving more money for more girls will have an impact or not. If it has one, it will suggests teachers drive girls off coding. If it has none, it will suggests girls are less interested than boys in coding.
So it make sense from a corporate bottom line POV.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The only time I liked a stable job was when I thought there was one. A few layoffs large and small disabused me of that notion - even if not laid off you still see plenty of people go who *you* thought were invaluable to the company.
There may still be a few but ALL companies change. Ten years in a company is a large accomplishment now, even if you aren't the one that changes enough to find a new company (and you should be).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I totally agree with what you are saying. Transitioning from C to C++ and Java was not that hard. Transitioning from Java to Objective-C was not that hard. Many of the concepts are fundamental as you say...
And yet I think there are not that many people who would enjoy or tolerate the work it takes to learn how to express the concepts you know in new languages. Those that can though, I think are the most valuable ones because they are in general thinking at a more abstract level. So it means there is some stability, but only if you have a certain temperament.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, if they were really interested in having girls program, and they wanted people with nothing to do with programming, they should have had e.g. Beyonce and Miley Cyrus instead of will.i.am and Chris Bosh. But no, it's do as we say and not as we do.
This isn't about there being 'more' men than women in IT/Dev right now, it's about there always having been a WHOLE LOT more. Whether this will alleviate the issue is another debate, but to claim that there being ONE field in science which men don't dominate is reason to start making accommodations for men is completely missing the big picture.
It is not an easy thing to get people interested in technical fields if they aren't already. Particularly since they are challenging compared to some of the "soft" fields like the humanities. It isn't like a teacher can just "try harder" and make it happen.
A somewhat related example: I work at an engineering college at a university. One of our (very few) female electrical engineering professors taught an honors intro to engineering section for women. All girls, all academically motivated enough to be in the honors college. She was excited since being one of the few girls in the boys club, she wants to see more women in engineering.
The result? Extremely low retention, just like every other intro engineering class. Very, very few of the women decided they wanted to go on studying engineering. Here they had a role model in a very real way: A very successful woman, a full professor, who loved the material, and who hadn't had to trade off her personal goals or anything (she's married and has a family), yet it didn't really make a difference. They just weren't that interested by and large.
So should she be penalized when she teaches normal engineering classes, which are like 90%+ male? What should she do? She's just about as good an example/role model as you can ask for, she cares about more women being in engineering. Short of discriminating against male students, there's little she can, yet no difference is to be made.
Men go away for maternity leave too
I should think not. PATERnity leave on the other hand...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I have a hunch that boys will be allowed in CS classes as long as their number dont damage the "40% girls" proportions.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Didn't the computer industry start out with a lot of women involved? I am thinking of Grace Hopper who basically invented the COBAL language and the term computer bug. In fact, the word computer originally referred to the people (almost exclusively women) that operated the machine and not the machine itself. There is a shortage now, but I don't think saying there has always been one is completely accurate.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
How will schools manipulate women and girls info CS rather than biology or chemistry in order to get more money for teachers.
Will girl computer scientists be worth more to an employer than boys?
I know that there are those out there who refuse to believe that some people have innate talents and everything is nurture and not nature - but coercing girls intoa field to get more money for teachers will result in a lot of unhappy coders who might have been happy architects or MDs - or even (gasp) writers or artists.
...they can pay chick wages.