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Is Computer Science Education Racist and Sexist?
theodp writes "What's wrong with this picture?" asked Code.org at its launch earlier this year, lamenting the lack of Computer Science students in a race and gender reference-free infographic. But as the organization has grown via public/private partnerships and inked agreements to drive the CS curriculum for the Chicago and NYC school systems, the same stats webpage has adopted a new gender and racial equity focus, positioning Computer Science education as "a chance to level the playing field" for women, Hispanic and African American students. The new message is consistent with the recently-forged Code.org partnership with the NSF-funded Exploring Computer Science (ECS, "a K-12/university partnership committed to democratizing computer science") and Computer Science Principles (CSP, "a new course under development that seeks to broaden participation in computing and computer science"). According to The Research Behind ECS, an "insidious 'virtual segregation' that maintains inequality" is to blame for keeping the number of African Americans and Latino/as CS students disproportionately low. So, what might the future of Code.org's proposed equity-based U.S. K-12 CS education look like? "Including culturally relevant instructional materials represented a driving focus of our course development," explained ECS Team members who now advise Code.org. "Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more. These types of lessons are important for students to build personal relationships with computer science concepts and applications – an important process for discovering the relevance of computer science for their own life." And — ironically for Code.org — it could mean less coding."
Is Computer Science Education Racist and Sexist?
Well, no. Unless there are roaming gangs of white nerdy kids beating up anyone with the wrong color that I haven't heard of.
I don't see anyone complaining that nursing or primary school teaching is sexist, yet those professions have a definite bias towards one sex.
So men tend to like computers more than women, does anyone seriously think this is somehow the industry keeping women from participating? (well, ok, but only because a lot of the "men" in the industry tend to be about as mature as the primary school children I referred to earlier!)
Racist? I can't answer that so readily, but I know a lot of foreign chappies working in IT, and my last company actively discriminated against white guys by only hiring Indian developers - though admittedly they were located in India, and cost a lot less. The one previous to that recruited a lot of Lithuanians, so they could hardly be said to discriminate against the usual native causcasian population.
Now ageist... that is definitely a problem in IT.
The white male dominance of computer science begins with little girls being given dolls instead of engineering toys, and poor children (which includes many racial minorities, although not because they're racial minorities) going to shitty schools where they're lucky if their education is only twenty years out of date.
- There are crazy stock valuations of computer companies that have almost no revenue.
- People claim that everyone should write computer software including those with minimal STEM background and minmal interest in such.
- When crazy articles about computer science racism starting appearing.
Computers science is a poor fit as a vehicle to level the playing field. Its not the sort of job you can do well if you don't have some sort of inherent interest or curiosity in.
Certainly any group can have members that have such an interest in programming. Finding those individuals would be a good thing. I just have severe reservations against trying to push anyone into this field. I've seen too many programmers who got into the field not because they have any inherent interest or curiosity rather somebody told them it was a good career path. They don't do well.
Should some sort of CS or programming classes be availably to anyone in K-12 that is interested or curious? Sure. It would be a great elective class.
From near the end of the ECS Team Member link:
The learning environment of the more advanced computer science classrooms has supported the culture of these students and often made others to feel as "outsiders," as if their concerns, perspectives, were not valued in the field.
So what exactly does that mean? I don't remember any CS classes having a "culture" of any kind. Unless they are saying that "dry and sometimes boring" is "white culture"?
The whole reason you TAKE a CS class is because you are a relative "outsider" to the concepts being presented and want in.
They talk about the solution being "vision of success" for all cultures. But in the end the only possible "success" from a CS class is a better understanding of how to build software. Not only is that not tied in to a culture, ideally it's not even tied to a language! It's totally abstract, yet they seem to want to make it more concrete somehow...
I don't understand how the deride access as "not being enough" when access is EVERYTHING. Grafting hip-hip or graffiti into a college CS class is way, way too late. You want to help people from "other cultures" - well then figure out how to get them something they can and will program on when they are five years old up until college age. Then if it takes they will happily end up at the "dull" CS classes years later to learn mastery of the thing that they love.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In computer related fields nobody cares how hot you are.
possibly the wrongest thing I've ever read on Slashdot! :-)
You don't need an above average IQ for CS, you just need to think you have one.
Why would you want to make computer science "more appealing" to women? Just look at science students and computer science students in Russia. Women are the majority!
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
This is totally bullshit and it's being done for bullshit political reasons. Nothing good comes from the politicization of science and yet the politicians cannot resist making a political issue of the lack of "diversity" in CS education. In my own CS experience nobody gave a shit about whether you were black, white, asian or latino and yes we had all of those races represented in the program. What mattered was whether or not you could hack it and continue advancing through the curriculum. The grades were always on a curve and the competition was intense. If you weren't smart enough or fast enough you washed out. In CS, as in other sciences, people respect knowledge, ability and intelligence, not the color of your skin or your cultural background. If you wanted to major in foo-fa the Humanities department was on the other side of campus.
Children of English or British ancestry are handicapped by their cultural heritage, so they deserve extra stimuli and attention in education.
Their language is fraught with an enormous vocabularity, which impediments their efforts to become literate. To make things worse, the spelling is arcane, non-intuitive, and non-phonetic, and then American, British, Canadian, etc. English have different spellings.
Their ascent in the scientific and computing subjects is further jeopardised by a labyrinthine system of ancient units of measurement, which drives even the smart to seek a career in the humanities.
"Cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more."
As a black software engineer I am tired of needing things dumbed down (or "hipped up") to be made more acceptable to minorities. We don't need skateboarding, "graffiti art", or dancing to teach a kid how to code. Just like we didn't need a substandard English (Ebonics) to teach kids how to properly read and write.
If under representation of minorites in computer science is racist, I'd love to know what they think of the under representation of non-Asian minorities in all science, medicine, and technology fields. By their metric there would be rampant racism.
Racism is a real thing, and a very terrible thing, and it's offensive to assume a lack of minority representation automatically means racism. I came from a culture that shunned academic excellence of any kind, and I think that's the reason there is under representation. But nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room which is asking people to blame their perceptions and beliefs instead of their environment. Racism makes a convenient enemy when the enemy is within.
Colleges Cut Men’s Programs to Satisfy Title IX
Sokal's Hoax
Yes, There’s a War on Boys in Schools
What About Our Boys?
The direction this is likely to go is easily predictable.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
It's applied mathematics how much more abstract and removed do you want it to be ?
What this is about is getting particular groups of people interested in the subject. That may be good or bad, but the problem is not with the material.
Actually, you have to be able to think very logically. However, good logic skills also correlate with higher average IQs. There is also a bias in the black community that devalues education as it "trains you to be like the man" and ruins street cred.
As a manager in IT, I used to go out of my way to hire attractive women in CS, but they are just super rare. They hardly exist, and the smart ones are very expensive.
All in all, people need to relax and understand we are all different. Just like most pro sports are dominated by blacks because they kick ass athletically, the geeky "brain" sports are dominated by people who spend more time developing their brains (Chinese, Indians, and whites typically). If we would stop judging people for being "weak" or "stupid", humans wouldn't have such a big issue with this simple fact. Fact is, we make fun of dumb jocks and geeky nerds. For a long long time, it was totally uncool to be a weak geeky nerd (Revenge of the Nerds anyone??). It's only because geeks make the most money (on average) that we are cool now. Otherwise, we'd still be outcasts as we were for 30 years.
So, again - if you want to be great in CS, you have to exercise your brain. And it helps if you are introverted and truly enjoy sitting in front of a computer screen for 13 hours a day. Simple as that. If that isn't you, you aren't going to be a good programmer.
I don't see anyone complaining that nursing or primary school teaching is sexist, yet those professions have a definite bias towards one sex.
If you haven't heard any complaints, it can only be because you haven't been listening:
Why Men Don't Teach Elementary School [ABC News, March]
Men in Nursing [October]
Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Interesting how biasing hiring towards women is not considered sexist yet biasing towards men, is? All in the name of 'equality' of course.
in my company. We prefer real science or engineering grads to CS people.
The difference is that CS people (from my interviewing over the past 4 years) don't have a clue about real world problem solving.
CS grads seem to think that they know everything but in reality they know very little that is of practical use at the sharp end.
Then there is their inability to understand that Flight Avionic Systems must be tested properly and 'near enough' is nowhere near good enough.
Wrong race. In my experience, whites are one of several minorities in Computer Science. Both in my B.S. and M.S., more than half of my classmates were Hindu males.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Most regular people eventually figure out that it's not really important whether the football team is better than the basketball team, or whether you bought a Toyota or a Ford.
I totally agree with your point that CS becomes a peer group, which is just a kind of human thing that happens.
Where I disagree is that CS or programming in general gets any more people with social issues than any other. I've met lots of people who did NOT figure out the things you mentioned, who were fixated on something they asserted with begin better - that itself is a VERY human trait, to the point where I almost think it's harder to rise above that than not as a normal human.
Some CS students just also are not great at social interaction, but I don't think we should lump that with the group association thing as they are distinct. And there again I don't think it's more prevalent in CS, it's just that in other fields the people who are not great at social interaction have to work with others and so improve to some degree, where the computer field allows to nearly complete isolation if you wish.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
apparently this only applies when one of the state-chosen 'winner' groups shows proclivities for certain skillsets.. welcome to newspeak 'equality'.
Hindu is not an ethnicity.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
And people wonder if computer science education is sexist... With such paragons of enlightened thinking how could any woman feel unwelcome in a CS class?
Ok, Code.org. Ok, feminists. You want to solve this thing?
We're going to need to conscript womyn-born-womyn into STEM classes. Demand that they at least get an associates degree in something STEM related before they be allowed to graduate with their Women's Studies or English major.
Sterilize them until they're able to do that. Take away the option of being a Single Mother.
If they don't enroll in a STEM class by the time they're 19, require their parents to throw them out of the streets until they starve.
Womyn-born-womyn are TOO PRIVILEGED, and THAT is why they don't enroll in fields that are "too technical."
If we given womyn-born-womyn the same options as assigned males, as I outlined above, we'll see an improvement in enrollment in that demographic.
Otherwise, what the fuck ever. Let womyn-born-womyn continue to choose to be Single Mothers or to marry to a man who will provide them with an income instead of EARNING IT THEIR FUCKING SELVES.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
I don't have personal relationships with concepts and applications. I have an intellectual relationship with them. I have personal relationships with people.
You don't need an above average IQ for CS, you just need to think you have one.
Then thanks to the Dunning/Kruger effect, everyone can learn CS! :-)
Koans and fables for the software engineer
It's wrong but it's easier to understand what is meant without having to mention "with the dot not the feather".
Ethnicity overloading can be a bitch.
lucm, indeed.
Which, predictably, chases plenty of women away. However, the men are damned no matter which choice they make -- if she leaves because they chase her away on purpose, it's their fault. If she leaves because they try too hard to keep her, it's their fault. And if they treat her the same as they would a man, and she leaves, well, that's their fault too!
There's nothing wrong with helping women (and other minorities) deal with actual bullying and dismissive attitude that does, in fact, exist.
The problem with this program is that what they propose instead is basically to sugar-coat CS itself to attract more people from the desired minority groups. Which is not really solving the problem, and is going to backfire big time when a guy who went into the program because it let him "artistically express his cultural background" faces a manager who wants him to write some mundane piece of code by the end of this week.
Which you can read all about in my article, "Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines true?"
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It'll bite him sooner than that, when the compiler or interpreter responds to his attempts with pages of error messages. It turns out that it's not practical to handicap the computers such that white males must write syntactically perfect programs to get any results at all, while minorities and women are allowed some number of errors depending on their relative disadvantage. It's even less practical to allow semantically incorrect programs to work properly merely because they are authored by a disadvantaged person.
Is Computer Science Education Racist and Sexist?
Well, no. Unless there are roaming gangs of white nerdy kids beating up anyone with the wrong color that I haven't heard of.
Yesterday a roving gang of white nerdy kids pummeled me for a half hour. I think I broke a nail.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Wow, I just had a flashback. My grandmother used to call anyone with a certain color of skin "hindu", and didn't seem concerned at all that she was almost always wrong. (We had a fairly large Indian population where I grew up that were mostly Sikhs, not Hindus.) Of course, she was a profound racist. Some people exist to be a warning to others.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Oh, probably, as much as anything is.
Can People Make Money Off This?
You betcha.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
IT/Software Development is one of the rare, if not unique, fields where people can be very paid well, the job market is currently hot, and one can learn everything from inexpensive books(or even free online courses) combined with motivation. It's positively egalitarian. If the premise had to do with medicine and law, where there's required expensive schooling and potential for a "good ol' boys" club atmosphere, then I'd find it more believable.
When I've interviewed for development positions where the person went to school was of little importance. In fact, our CTO(who has his BS and MS in CS from Stanford) even jokes that it's the people straight from academia that sometimes seem the most incompetent. The only things we care about are if you know your stuff and have some body of previous work you can point to and talk about. But then I work in Silicon Valley where a competent developer can pretty much write his own ticket right now.
My experience in commercial development the last 13 years had me working with females. They were almost always foreign born, often with English as a second language. Yes, it's mostly males, but a large part of them are East Asians and Indians, not all white males.
In short, the bar of entry in my experience is low as long as you're motivated and competent. Why aren't there more women? Look at practically every engineering and scientific accomplishment in human history. Are you going to tell it's just culture that has kept those accomplishments relegated almost entirely to men?
We guys however, were unrecognized gems. 18 charisma, EVERY ONE.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Which is of course why they're now so fixated on the 'brogrammer'. Much like the manager class doesn't want to believe programmers are their equals, and thus do not deserve the kind salary the free market requires, the social justice types refuse to accept that those uncouth programmers deserve the salaries they do have, and must be knuckle dragging agents of the patriarchy to thwart the asocial introvert stereotype.
You would have a point with gamers, if anyone even knew who each other were. you cannot be sexist or racist towards "teabagger484", it is impossible.
Yet there are nicknames that do identify, or at least hint, at the gender - and when those appear, OP's observations are spot on.
I'm male, but I play online under a name that is not in and of itself gender-specific, but it can be interpreted that way when cultural stereotypes are applied (it has the word "kitten" in it). Every now and then someone will take it to mean that I'm female, and the way they start talking to you then is really very different, and often demeaning either explicitly or in its implications (e.g. "oh wow a girl who knows how to play! WILL YOU MARRY ME?!").
Racist and Sexist?
The labels "Racist" and "Sexist" are like ketchup . . . you can put them on anything.
Even where it is neither appropriate nor warranted.
University CS programs will now be required to include these "culturally relevant instructional materials" . . . otherwise, they will be judged "substandard" by the government, and the university will lose any government funding.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
As a manager in IT, I used to go out of my way to hire attractive women in CS, but they are just super rare. They hardly exist, and the smart ones are very expensive.
I've seen the job ads:
WANTED: COMPUTER PROGRAMMER
Job spec:
(Goodbye karma)
Yes, but there is no reason to believe that their hints, or straight out telling, are correct/truthful.
Have you ever thought that you were demeaned because they thought that you were a man pretending to be a girl, or a girl looking for attention, in a place where her boobs do not give her a advantage. Not because these people are sexist. Sex does not exist on the internet, so sexism is impossible.
One quote I quite like:
"If I can pontificate a bit, for your edification. One of the rules of the Internet is: "there are no girls on the Internet." This rule does not mean what you think it means. In real life, people like you merely for being a girl. They want to fuck you, so they pay attention to you and they pretend what you have to say is interesting, whether or not you are genuinely interesting, or that you are smart of clever, whether or not you are actually smart or clever. On the Internet, there is no chance to fuck you; this means the advantage of being a "girl" does not exist. You don't get a bonus to conversation just because someone wants to put their cock in you.
When you make a post like "hurr durr, I'm a gurl," you are begging for attention. The only reason to post it is because you want your girl-advantage back, because you are too vapid or too stupid to do or say anything interesting without it. You are forgetting the rule "there are no girls on the Internet." The one way around this rule, the one way you can get your "girlness" back on the Internet, is to post your tits. This is, and should be, degrading for you, an admission that the only interesting thing about you is your naked body."
A girl on the Internet will be treated worse than she is used to, as everyone on the internet is treated like a white man, so it is no wonder they consider the Internet sexist. But everyone being treated identical is not sexism.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Its not the sort of job you can do well if you don't have some sort of inherent interest or curiosity in.,
I used to think that too, but since I've met a number of people who don't really like programming but are still very good at it. YMMV.
Don't like their employer, job, assigned programming tasks?
Or if they were free to indulge in whatever project held some interest or curiosity they would not enjoy the necessary programming?
I can understand getting burned out on tasks that are devoid of challenge or interest. I would just be surprised to find a person who was truly good at programming who never wrote a piece of code that was not a school nor work assignment. Who never did any programming simply because they were curious or otherwise personally motivated. I think such a person would be a true rarity.
Have you ever thought that you were demeaned because they thought that you were a man pretending to be a girl, or a girl looking for attention, in a place where her boobs do not give her a advantage.
Well, since I clearly weren't looking for any advantage of a sort, for those people to presume such would be sexist in and of itself.
Sex does not exist on the internet, so sexism is impossible.
This is plainly wrong, as is your quote. Just because there's no immediate possibility of getting sex doesn't mean that brains still don't get to behave as if it was there when dealing with what they perceive as a member of the opposite sex. That's because the brain was wired up long before such remote contact was a possibility.
The "white knight in shining armor" syndrome on the Internet is particularly well documented, and has a strong gender bias.
The whole 'diversity' program is patronizing. It was designed to be so that it inflames different groups over the differences that are supposedly irrelevant. After a few generations, society suddenly has a lot of people with strong, 'righteous' feelings over these supposedly irrelevant attributes which, unfortunately, is the best way to drive people to the polls..or to the streets in 'revolution.' Masturbatory pseudo-intellectualism like the links in this story are just a way to make this crapola appeal to the 'intelligentsia'. These code.org people are just pushing the narrative because they want to drive down wages as far as they can.
Computer science is about as gender agnostic as it gets. The old hacker ethos from the 80s and 90s was based solely on merit. I remember the days when the net was considered the great equalizer because of its anonymity. The only thing that mattered was how good your code was. Race, gender, age, and culture did not matter as there was no way to know.
I find it particularly interesting that these people want us to teach the girls until they discover we are young and male. The irony is WE are the ones blamed for being gender biases.
You want me to teach your kids CS but then accuse me of being a pedophile for wanting to teach kids? Well then, fuck off. They can teach themselves, just like I taught myself.
Think he means Arabic. And you are right, worldwide I would say there are probably more Arabic and Asian programmers than Caucasian. Does that mean computer science education is racist or sexist? No.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
While I entirely agree with you on that one (I've been in more 'some sort of technical group/club/class' contexts than I can remember where having the temerity to join while female was treated as an implicit invitation for every optimist in the place to hit on you(well beyond the bounds of taste, being asked to fuck off, etc. so spare me the 'feminism is killing fun!!!') until you gave up in disgust and left.
What concerns me is that the assorted 'multicultural' bullshit described in TFA sounds more like some kind of racist farce than like an actual inclusion strategy: "Hey, black kid, you 'urban' types like skatesboards and graffiti, right? How about some programming with skateboards and graffiti?" and will do absolutely nothing to address the 'entire class looks you up and down, because you are not one of us and/or we are interested only in fucking you' school of dissuading people from taking up technical subjects.
It's not as though pasty white guys take up comp sci because it "expresses their anglo-saxon heritage".
Its sort of the chicken and egg problem here. Is it that a particular set of occupations is preferred by particular set of people because that particular set of people like it more or is it because others find it harder to get into it.
I don't seriously think any specific changes need to be made for a specific outreach to other diverse groups of people, but if getting in is contrastingly hard for those diverse groups, perhaps looking into why might be warranted. If it comes down to the general course load for the minority students are greater due to the lack of preparation typical on high schools with high concentrations of them, then perhaps increasing the standards and availability of those high schools can correct the issues. But if it is some inherent s&p500 company will not higher someone who lists Compton CA as their address on the application, then we got other problems to address.
My guess will be that the disproportionate amounts of poverty within minority communities plays a large role in the expectations of students who often want more immediate gratification of employment even if it means less over all income earned in a life time. Or in other words, growing up in a family of 4 with a household income of $25k, getting a career expecting to make $50k or so might be more attractive then someone who grew up in a family setting making $80K. So other avenues are taken.
"an attractive candidate for the job" is a phrase that means different things than "an attractive woman", which is what the poster said. In any case, "attractive" would be an unusual word to apply to "candidate" unless one is speaking of physical attributes. Prospects are attractive, because you are drawn to them. Candidates are more likely to be called promising. Of course, that doesn't rule out just a slip of the tongue, figuratively speaking, but still, considering the rest of the post and everything, I'm kinda thinking that yeah, "physically attractive" was what was meant.
This is a very narrow definition of what constitutes racism, one that unfortunately has the broadest acceptance in American culture. By this definition, racism must be deliberate and an aspect of a person's identity. The person must identify as being or not being a certain race, and applying an absolutist belief that one race is superior or inferior to the others. Further more, that valuation is taken as something concrete and consequential, upon which the person must act when race rises as a relevant factor in their social interactions with others. Most people are not racist in this way because it is stupid and stigmatized. But if CSE is not racist or sexist, how do you account for the extreme overrepresentation of white males in CSE?
But that is not the sort of racism (or sexism, which I'm not including for brevity,) that articles like this are addressing. The title, by including the term 'racism' is unfortunately inflammatory because almost nobody wants to be identified as a racist. A better title would have been rephrased as 'unintentionally discriminatory' or something similarly benign instead. Racism, as it is currently understood within academia and sociology (and by most non-white people in America), is the attribution of the assumed qualities of of a group to an individual based on their perceived race. Everybody does this. We visually evaluate people and make snap intuitive judgments, and unfortunately, race factors into this, even if only at a subconscious levels beneath other factors such as socio-economic class and beauty. At our best, we try to mitigate the affects of these judgments in our day-to-day lives, but at our worst, we pretend they are justified. It should not be seen, though, as a matter of the person being a racist person, but rather a particular judgment or action being perceived as racist. If you ever get called racist, you're best off apologizing for the act or judgment and moving on. Denying that something is racist more often falls in line with pretending it is justified, although the intention was more likely to have been to disassociate oneself from the definition of racism in the previous paragraph.
What the article attempts to address is not an exculsively race-related issue, but one that also ties in heavily with class. For dealing with black subsets of the population, there is an unfortunate overrepresentation of black people in the lower socio-economic class. Though I forget the specific statistics, I believe that the approximation is that where black people make up 10% of the American population, they make up 50% of the lower class, meaning that where class-based discriminatory practices exist, they will also be consequentially racially discriminatory (though not inherently racist). CS is heavily class-based in its discrimination, as access to computers and appropriate education is much more limited to families in lower classes than to those coming from more stable or privileged socio-economic backgrounds.
If the article's cultural design tools are meant to address an underrepresentation of non-white minorities in CS, there is value in that, but it is not entirely un-problematic. Things such as teaching cultural histories and linking them to CS reinforce the ideas of cultural/racial identities and could be in that sense considered racist, and the graffiti art could be much more considered classist, but until the groups are no longer disproportionately overrepresented in the lower class, offering cultural and lower class-based points of identification for people in a predominantly white, middle class area of study is one of the only (and statistically most effective) ways to encourage the underrepresented to cross the culture gap. Overall it's not a perfect solution, but it is a corrective one. The only other real options are pretending that racial, class-based, and sexist discrimination are not relevant in CS, and that unfortunately leads to doing nothing and consequently perpetuating the same discriminatory practices that are currently in place.
When I started learning programming, back in the early 1970's, there were 3 main races that I could see - Indians (from India), Caucasians (from Europe/America) and East Asians (Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese)
As the years gone by, more races were added, from the African continent and from South America (mainly Argentine, Brazil, Chile and Peru)
As for those "hyphenated-Americans" such as "Latino-Americans" or "African-Americans", yes, I saw them too, but their number is small.
Their number is small not because of racism - as far as I know, we in the tech field treasure people with skills, not people with a particular skin-hue - the main cause of their number is because of their culture do not care for people with brains.
I have had co-workers from the Latino-American and African-American communities and they told me of their struggle to "survive" the daily gauntlet from their own people - taunts, bully, threats and physical assaults.
It's okay to be a nerd if you are a white, an Indian, a Japanese, but if you happen to be an African American, a nerd is someone to be stepped on, to be pushed around, to be beaten.
If there is "racism" related to computer-science, the "racism" came not from the nerds, but from those who want to kick the nerds around.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Show me one example where coding is sexist or racist. When I say an example, show me syntax, I program in C, C++, PHP, ASM, PERL, PYHTON, BASH, SH, a variety of web languages and other desktop languages. I have yet to see syntax which is racist or sexist.
Just a few off the top of my head...
This is liberal political correctness run amok. It is a bunch of meaningless politically correct, victimization complex garbage. If the aformentioned groups fail to avail themselves of college education for these IT subjects, there is only one group for them to blame, themselves. No one is stopping them from doing so. The article is basically full of a nonsense, meaningless drivel and window dressing. The idea that they cannot learn what a b-tree is without a dicussion of graffiti and gang identification is absurd. The constant obsessive compulsive drive to find sexism and racism in everything is nauseating. Nowhere in computer science textbooks do I find anything that suggests that this field is off limits to the aforementioned groups. This is an example of someone inventing a controversy to both falsely accuse someone of non-existant infractions and create a scapegoating of people for whom are not responsible for whatever they are complaining about. I believe in personal responsibility, of group X or group Y feels they need a computer science education, do it, the fact computer textbooks do not have a discussion of hip hop music is not an excuse for them not being motivated to do so. Some wish to shift blame to others for these groups not doing X or Y, when these groups only have themselves to blame for not being motivated.
That was the title of a book looking at attrition among CMU CS students. It's a death of a thousand cuts for women, and remember that we're talking CMU so these are bright motivated people.
Getting a programming assignment about football scores is a hint that you don't belong. It's not an assault, more like a paper cut, but what happens to you after a thousand paper cuts?
A hint to whom? Geeks who never even thought about trying out for football, and were held in contempt by those who did?
Women are no less sexist than men. So is it a problem? We are not selecting or encouraging exactly the best people. This has economic and scientific consequences, and it has social consequences. If the work "sexism" doesn't apply to this, then you need a word that does, because there's plenty to discuss here.
Basic interest? Gender based interference by ones own gender? It really isn't as easy as the blame game might seem at first
Having participated in many "take our son's and daughters to work day" events at the University I worked at, we did try to encourage young women to look at the technical fields. Keeping in mind that this was originally "Take your daughter to work day", it was the underlying purpose of the whole thing.
Working in an overwhelmingly technology and science arena, these were by and large, the sons and daughters of Engineers, computer technologists, and scientists. They were offspring of dedicated people and encouraged by their parents toward technology.
We polled the kids on what they wanted to be. The young ladies almost universally did not want to go into tech. The closest was a couple of young women who wanted to become mathematicians. Lot's of Veterinarians and Lawyers, precious few wanting to be like daddy or mommy.
And it is a pity. The lady engineers I worked with said that our push to get women in those positions really helped them in their career path. One indeed received almost yearly promotions. This was a fantastic place for a technically minded female to be employed.
Why? I am not completely certain, but I am a firm believer that an engineer or scientist knows exactly what they want to be at a pretty early age, regardless of gender. And in large part, trying to dissuade them is useless.
Some of the excuses, like young women are discouraged from mathematics, or the perennial variations on "men are pigs", really don't fit. And some of the excuses end up painting women into a corner, like if men can deter women from subjects like math, or if they can be deterred by men away from science in general, well then the woman wasn't really all that interested in the first place, or was just too "weak" for the field. Becoming an engineer or scientist is no place for people who become easly discouraged.
And all of the women I worked with in engineering and Computer IT or science were well received by the men. In my office we had a lot of turnover, but we tried to always have a good mix - and yes, this did often mean that if all other things were equal, the woman got the job.
And interestingly enough, some of the women engineers I worked with noted that the biggest opposition they ever received was from other women. "You want to do what?" That's a nerdy thing to want to do! But it is not acceptable to blame other women. And there is still the issue of apparently easy discouragement. I had similar questions and statements back in school. A lot of the other kids called me "Perfesser", and it was a pejoritive. Like I cared - a lot of them are working as insurance salesmen now, and I did what I set out to do So my guess is that it is going to take a long time to solve the problem. Which is why I have become convinced that if we decide that gender balance must be obtained, we will have to force young women into the field, and likewise keep young men out of the field. A title IX program, like that in college sports.
I do doubt that will make for either happy people or the best people for the job though.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
A few years ago my wife and I took our daughters to a stage show. In front of us while waiting in line to be admitted was another couple with two little boys. The boys had in their possession an assortment of Disney princess dolls. The father saw the Disney princess-themed dress on one of my daughters and pointed it out enthusiastically to his sons. I asked the couple about the dolls. They went on for a short while about breaking gender stereotypes. I replied:
"You seem very well-informed about gender issues. Were you brought up with dolls (looking at the man) and trucks (looking at the woman)?"
"No, quite the opposite.", said the man, "My Dad is overdosed on testosterone. Football...", etc.
"And despite your stereotypical upbringing, you have this keen awareness about gender issues. Why don't you think your boys are as capable as you were in developing an awareness of gender issues?"
The conversation went downhill from there. I want to ask a similar question of the brain trust that has given code.org a new gender and racial equity focus. Why do you think females and non-whites are unable to find the same appeal in computer science that you and I have found? I sure as hell wasn't drawn by some illusory "Hey, this is only for nerdy white males" appeal. I fell in love with the logic of it, and the absolutely beautiful art of solving problems with programming language constructs.
Damn it. Didn't realize I wasn't logged-in.
but everything is better with Ketchup! Is everything better with Racism and Sexism?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Is Computer Science Education Racist and Sexist?
No. No. No. Fucking no!
It is not. As a Hispanic, no one prevented me from getting into Computer Science, graduating from that field and making a good career out of it just based on my race, ethnicity or whatever. It was just me, myself and my efforts. My sister, being a Hispanic woman, she did not have a "racial" problem getting into Math (and graduating). There are no Jim-Crow-like establishments that prevents people like me from getting into STEM. So, no, Computer Science education is not racist.
Saying so is just bullshit race baiting designed to distract people from the actual social problems that pervade the African American and Hispanic communities. It is a lot easier to race bait than to actually fix shit. This is pretty much what this whole endeavor amounts to.
People choose STEM (and in particular Computer Science) based on a variety of social factors. In the US, women shy away to go into STEM, but you see this as less of an issue with the many Chinese and Indian female colleagues I have had the honor to work with. The same occurs with African American and Hispanic students.
To begin with (and I say this from the POV of a minority) our African American and Hispanic cultures have significant problems that lead students away from certain subjects and careers. This is in parallel with American society at large where women are conditioned to stay away from STEM fields.
Consider the following: it is well known that many African American kids (and Hispanic kids to a lesser) degree do not know how to swim. But we know that the causes are cultural as well as economical: African American and Hispanic neighborhoods are on average of a lower income than Non-Hispanic Caucasian and Asian communities, with poorer infrastructure and less amenities: that include pools. Furthermore, lower income means lesser variety of extra-curricular activities (including swimming.)
But we don't go and ask "is swimming racist"? It would be a stupid question for obvious reasons. But why is it then that when people ask the same about Computer Science (and STEM in general) we do not see this as a stupid question?
"Including culturally relevant instructional materials represented a driving focus of our course development," explained ECS Team members who now advise Code.org. "Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more. These types of lessons are important for students to build personal relationships with computer science concepts and applications – an important process for discovering the relevance of computer science for their own life." And — ironically for Code.org — it could mean less coding."
Computer Science is the field of computing, an off shot of Discrete Mathematics. This is not about artistic expression, but hard science of numbers and computing. We could also propose the same for Math and Physics because not that many Hispanics and African Americans and American-born women go into those fields.
The solution is not to plaster Computer Science education with multicultural trivia and singing kumbaya and shit. The solution involves solving the economic gaps that pervade in the African American and Hispanic communities (and let's be honest, to have those communities solve the systemic cultural issues that keep *us* from partaking in process of fostering technology and science.)
Anything less than that is lipstick-on-a-pig, sugar-coating bullshit.
And yet nerds who would sooner gargle ground glass than go to a football game don't seem to have any problems with it.