Slashdot Mirror
Google: Teach Girls Coding, Get $2,500; Teach Boys, Get $0
theodp (442580) writes "'Public school teachers,' reads the headline at Khan Academy (KA), 'introduce your students to coding and earn $1000 or more for your classroom!' Read the fine print, however, and you'll see that the Google-bankrolled offer is likely to ensure that girls, not boys, are going to be their Computer Science teachers' pets. 'Google wants public high school students, especially girls, to discover the magic of coding,' KA explains to teachers. 'You'll receive a $100 DonorsChoose.org gift code for every female student who completes the [JS 101: Drawing & Animation] course. When 4 or more female students complete it, we'll email you an additional $500 gift code as a thank-you for helping your students learn to code.' While 'one teacher cannot have more than 20 of the $100 gift codes activated on their DonorsChoose.org projects,' adds KA, 'if the teacher has more than 20 female students complete the curriculum, s/he will still be sent gift codes, and the teacher can use the additional gift codes on another teacher's DonorsChoose.org project.' So, is girls-are-golden-boys-are-worthless funding for teachers' projects incongruent with Khan Academy's other initiatives, such as its exclusive partnership with CollegeBoard to eliminate inequality among students studying for the SAT?"
How is this not sex discrimination? Or does the US not have such laws against discriminating based on gender?
Such blatant sexism is simply not acceptable in todays society
Maybe I don't know 'privilege' when I see it. When I disagree with something like this, but am unable to voice my opinion when it comes up without risk of social ostracism or damaging my career, it sure doesn't feel like privilege to me.
So lets have some discrimination of boys to fix it!
Makes perfect sense.
Teach girls coding, girls trick guys into doing coding for them.
If the reward were equally spread amongst boys and girls, girls would simply continue to fall behind in such areas. There is already an inequality in schools in that subject. Schools also get special grant money for minorities and the disabled who attend their institution. This is no different.
there are a lot of lonely rich nerds in the high tech & IT industry
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
...so they can pay them less. amirite?
I agree that girls and boys should be encouraged to learn computer programming. However penalizing boys because they are boys is not the way to do it. Favoring boys to the exclusion of girls was the norm for so many years that I cannot see why favoring girls to the exclusion of boys is something that is even considered. There is a problem with the number of girls who go into technical fields such as coding and engineering and that problem needs to be solved. However, looking at the problems of boys by looking at the number of boys who become criminals and antisocial actors shown by the number of men and boys incarcerated is a very large problem which needs to be addressed.
Teach an African to code = $100
Teach an Asian or Indian to code = $0
No, seriously, why would anyone do anything else if the goal is gender parity in the industry?
Let's take gender out of the equation. Say you have a jar full of ten million marbles. 95% are green, 5% are yellow. 10000 marbles are added to the jar every year. Your goal is to make the jar 50% green, 50% yellow, and you can't take any marbles out of the jar. Changing the distribution of marbles added each year to 50/50 will never make the entire jar 50/50. The only way to solve the problem without removing existing marbles from the jar is to raise the distribution of marbles added to more than 50% yellow. Clearly the most effective solution problem is to only add yellow marbles to the jar at all.
Back in the real world: you either need to fire men who don't deserve it, hire equal numbers of men and women and wait a generation or two for enough people to retire, or try to hire more women than men. Because math.
Then you are not going to be very productive anyway.
If you have to bribe people to code, they clearly do not enjoy coding.
Affirmative Action is one of many useful tools in equalising people where inequality exists. It's not always appropriate, but here it seems like it'd be beneficial (provided they can't game the system). Encouraging the participation of females in computer science is a good thing; having females choose another profession purely because they believe CS is a 'male thing' is sad.
The SAT comparison is beyond moronic, and I assume the poster is aware of that. Stop trying to create drama out of nothing - leave that to the professional media outlets, because you'll never beat them at their game.
* To have women enter into:
- car/truck mechanics
- tradeswomen (electricians, plumbers, roofers etc.)
- name any other field typically more male?
* For men to become/work in
- hair stylists
- Elementary school teachers
- healthcare (not as doctors)
- name any other field dominated typically by women
Some times there are [we'll call them] 'natural' inclinations to certain fields for good reason. Encouragement and balance is good, but artificial over-correction ... I don't believe that's helpful. That said ... Google is a private company and can have at it, even though it smells discriminatory to me.
In school sports the boy's sports programs are granted a lot more money, even with Title 9. Do you think Ole Miss or Ohio State are as generous as the girls programs (including admissions) as they are with boys football? If benefactors want to pay girls more to learn programming then it is wonderful?
we'll email you an additional $500 gift code
What's a "gift code"? Is that some new term for virus?
> There is a problem with the number of girls who go into technical fields such as coding and engineering and that problem needs to be solved.
Why?
I know five nurses, all woman. Two of them earn over $100K a year. Very few men work as nurses. Is that a problem that needs to be solved?
Why not a box of Visual Studio 2013 Professional?
A geeky guy suddenly find himself out of a jahb - victim of downsizing, outsourcing, H1B1-jeebies etc etc - and thinks up a plan to take advantage of this new program by dressing up as a woman and teaching inner-city girls all about the ins-and-outs of programming, and in the process learns a little bit about something called life.
"He taught them how to code, but they taught him how to live."
From the producers of Mrs Doubtfire and I Spit on Your Grave, this summer Paramount Pictures brings you a feel-good, down-on-your-luck, rags-to-riches, local-boy-make-good, shaggy-dog, fish-out-of-water, girl-meets-boy, boy-turns-into-girl story.
Michael Cera in Class Act.
Bottom line: Incentives aren't needed to get boys interested in coding. They do it anyway. There is a viscious circle: coding is seen as a "boys' thing," and when girls attempt to enter the culture, they face numerous social barriers-- most notably from the coders themselves. As the vitrioloc comments to this news articele would indicate.
Khan Academy and Google are using financial incentives to try to break this cycle, and I applaud them for this effort.
I was always taught that discrimination was evil. Maybe Google has a different definition.
This is so flagrantly sexist that it's absurd. But luckily for Google, it's the politically correct form of sexism. It's been decreed that programming being male dominated is bad, and thus taking sexist action to fix it is okay.
This of course totally ignores that university education as a whole has become majority female, and many professions are becoming majority female that didn't used to be. That by and large we're doing a lousy job of educating boys is not considered a problem, so making that problem worse by trying to exclude them from one of the areas they still do well in is considered okay.
Sure, it's total BS. But it's PC BS, and that's good enough, right?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
to a whole field is a problem for sure. it's weak and lazy thinking.
In school sports the boy's sports programs are granted a lot more money, even with Title 9. Do you think Ole Miss or Ohio State are as generous as the girls programs (including admissions) as they are with boys football? If benefactors want to pay girls more to learn programming then it is wonderful?
Are you saying that colleges put more money into the sports programs of male tennis, swimming, track and field than they do for the women? Or are you confusing the cost of a football program with these other costs? Before claiming discrimination in college sports, one needs to look at the net cost of those various programs, not the total costs. While I have no doubt that there is still an imbalance, it isn't as great as it would appear on the surface.
As far as benefactors wanting to pay girls more to learn to program, would you fell the same if it were whites, or males, heterosexuals? If it would not be okay to discriminate against others by only funding these groups, why is it okay to do so for girls? While it is laudable to encourage more girls into computer science, it would seem that there are better solutions than outward discrimination.
Besides, why wouldn't Google want to encourage more kids all together?
That's what this kind of initiative says. The implication is that it's the teacher's faults boys are doing better than girls at programming and they need to deliberately do more to even the odds. Is the female graduation rate lower because they're dumber and need more help from teachers? Are the teachers actively discriminating against girls? Or is the disparity because there are less girls interested in this field for entirely different and varying reasons? A doctor that asks the patient detailed questions and tries to find the root cause and then prescribe a drug is usually more successful than the one who just asks what you're feeling and writes a prescription to see what happens. Can't help but wonder if they investigated the source and magnitude of the disparity before putting together a misguided initiative like this.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
..continues. It is projects and plans like this that perpetuate the fact that girls (and women in general) need help to square up with boys, without which, they will always play second fiddle. Do not get me wrong, I do understand that their is inequality between boys and girls, but I do not think that knee-jerk reactions like this are the solution to the problem. This should be discontinued -
Speaking as someone who's been coding for a few years, I can tell you that KhanAcademy has a lot of work to do, on their course material.
The syntax in their sandbox is actually different, from the syntax you would use OUT of the sandbox. It took me a lot of annoyance to figure out exactly what differences mattered, because the differences ARE NOT DOCUMENTED.
You can't void functions, and you have to declare them as variables in KA, or they don't work.
You can't say:
void myfunction(){
stuff;
}
and you have to say
var myfunction = function(){
stuff;
}
Also, it has a knockoff of Clippy from MS Word that pops up whenever you don't get done closing your parens fast enough, freezing your whole graphical interface, saying "Oh Noes! It looks like you're trying to blah blah blah" and yeah.
In closing, it's a great way to get introduced to how SYNTAX works, in general, but to actually learn JS, I think a lot of improvement is needed.
The key difference is between between separate treatment and unequal treatment.
The male waiters with man-boobs at Hooters definitely get unequal treatment.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The hypocrisy of feminism and so-called 'affirmative action' is once again in full sunlight for all to see. Nice to know that google is funding the use of relevant discriminators to decide who is worthy for khan's program. Oh, wait..
Please, don't bother replying with the whole 'check your privilege' thing, because it's women (and the other protected castes) who have the privilege today. This is because left wing doctrine insists on a default assumption that one group as a whole is oppressed and the other, the oppressor, based solely on the attribute(s) that isn't/aren't supposed to matter. The proof for 'patriarchy', today, requires diving into some nutty math (like that 77% on the dollar myth) and conspiracy theory, but the proof for 'matriarchy' (enforced by male as well as female feminist politicians), is in the law, on university campuses, and in the media.
If we want a society that operates on equal opportunity, we need law that doesn't compel private organizations to discriminate (in selecting for or against) on supposedly irrelevant attributes.
The clear benefit: The more tech saavy the women, the more Google services they'll feed information to GOOG from.
Who is really at fault here for gender bias/discrimination, Google or Khan Academy (KA)? Is this a Google program that KA applied for or is it an internal program of KA that they applied to Google for grant funding?
KA is in control of their curriculum and teachers, couldn't they simply tell the teachers to encourage more girls to enter the field? Why are they having to give teachers financial incentives to do so? OTOH, if this is all Google's doing, what do they have against boys? If a class has 20 seats and you are going to pay for girls to take those seats, then aren't you limiting the number of boys who could take them? One would think that if Google wants to encourage more youth to enter computer science, that they wouldn't care if they were male or female.
People seem to think this is some kind of affirmative action, but it is not. Girls were not discriminated against, they weren't prohibited or kept out of computer science classes. For whatever reason, they chose to take other classes. People holding that this is okay from some sort of false inequality, would be outraged if the funds were only available for boys or LGBT or heterosexuals, etc. So, why is it okay only for girls? This isn't affirmative action, it is discrimination.
Discrimination is always wrong.
I think the problem can be more generally stated: Private interests should not be permitted to make conditional donations to public education. The RIAA should not be allowed to pay for copyright enforcement education, Coca Cola should not be allowed to pay to have exclusive vending machine rights, and Microsoft should not be allowed to pay on condition of an MS Office mandate. The mere fact that we can all agree that more women in STEM would be a good thing does not make it right for a private interest to exert influence on the public education system.
If Google believes corporations should give more for public education funding, it should be lobbying for increased corporate taxation, and better regulation of offshore-based tax fraud. If they want to be seen as individually generous, they should make unconditional grants. Allowing them to buy control of public services is a path to ruin.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
http://www.communityactionskag...
"I need a young energetic person that is 18yrs -30yrs old to work as a Sign Spinner in Burlington Wa."
How is that fair? Sure, 31-39 isn't a protective class like 40+ are, but still. That just seems so wrong.
Speaking of the gender issue, we should focus on why girls aren't getting into coding, like someone else said. And I seriously hope no teacher turns away boys just to get the funding. First come, first serve. If teaches encourage girls to take the class simply to get the $100 gift codes, what would that say?
So what? There is an incentive that an outside funder is providing to active the desired result (more women coders). What's the problem?
i find it interesting what you write here because this (the pressure from other women, behavior from other males) is not what I have experienced in the european countries where I have been at all. The problem there mostly is that women (statistically) just are not interested in the topic, just as they are not interested in e.g. electrotechnics.
Now we could argue endlessly why that would be: is it in the genes? is it the upbringing? is it how these fields are portrayed in culture? I don't know, but the fact of the matter is that women, on average, just simply do not want this kind of job. And when I talk to some of them now, after I had this job, as a male, for a couple of decades, I think they might have a point.
Poe's law strikes again it seems.
I really, really can't tell if this is satirist or a wingnut.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
this sums up the facts rather well, thank you.
Good luck with that marriage. Wonder how many promotions she's fucked her way up to by now?
I hope your wife gets fired. Dumb bitch should step aside and let someone qualified take her position. Be it a man or a woman, someone who actually earned their diploma legitimately should be taking that position.
If you are a white male under 40, you are on your own in the US. If you are over 40, then "you don't fit in" or "do not have the skills" is the reason you are given when not selected for a job - exactly what "skills" are absent are never stated but with today's laundry lists of skills for jobs, they can always find something.
You can always find a (legal) reason not to hire someone - anonymous employer.
People can always try to sue Google over this kind of discrimination, but they may not win. First of all, unless you are a person who was personally affected by this, what would likely happen is that the lawsuit would get thrown out, especially on appeal where higher courts often rule that you can't sue just because you don't like something if you're not personally affected by it. So it would require a male student to sue to get the ball rolling. Second there would have to be some kind of proof like a verifiable situation where a male student was refused assistance because the teacher only wanted to help females to get the reward. Third, and this may be most important of all, literally anything can happen in court. Nobody knows what juries or judges will do. The case might go before someone who isn't interested in this issue at all and feels that women have traditionally been discriminated against so this is OK or you might get a very conservative judge/jury who is just adamantly against this kind of "help" for anybody at all who would rule in favor of the boy. Then the losing party can appeal and the exact opposite verdict can happen on appeal and so on. Could take years to resolve it, maybe ultimately ending in a Supreme Court ruling. By the time it finally gets resolved, it may be too late (depending on the age of the student) for anything to be accomplished even if the boy wins. He may already be in college and have learned programming or moved on to some other area of study.
There simply are not enough women in the construction field either. Why aren't we looking to have parity in auto mechanics and plumbers too? I'm all for equal rights, but not to the point of putting on blinders.
I'm sure I'll be modded a troll for this. But men and women are different in general. Obviously there are exceptions. But women tend to be more empathetic than men.That's one reason they excel in nursing and teaching. They are also better multi-taskers. Again, there are of course exceptions. But this is why I think we are starting to see more women in CEO and management roles.
Part of it probably has to do with evolution. Traditional roles for men have been more single task focused. Successful men were good at hunting, building, etc. So those traits got passed down to their progeny. Successful mothers took care of damn near everything else. I have nothing but the utmost respect for "stay at home moms". Children are demanding as hell. They need damn near constant attention as they randomly do crazy shit, or need cleaned, fed, held, etc. When my wife is ill and I have to take care of things, I find it can get extremely stressful. I like to get a task done and move on to the next. But that's not how things work with kids. Successful mothers were able to do multiple things and drop what they are doing at a moments notice to take care of kids, or what ever else needed to be done. This too was passed down to their descendants.
But now after a couple million years of this paradigm how practical is it to think human nature can change in a couple of generations? It feels like political correctness to the point of insanity. But I'm very likely wrong and a couple of $100 gift cards will undo millions of years of evolution.
Bait Slashdotters with programming themed battle of the sexes discussion: Priceless.
May the Maths Be with you!
They are saying that computer programming equal computer science and people focus on the gender part? Really? That's hardly the issue. The point is Google and other corporations are not interested in Computer Science and are only interested promoting people to become code monkeys. That's the real issue. They don't care about education. They want a cheap workforce.
A gift code is not the same thing as $1000.
Then you are not going to be very productive anyway.
If you have to bribe people to code, they clearly do not enjoy coding.
Who gives a shit?
My avocation is an artist and my vocation is a software developer.
I develop software to make a living and pay my student loans.
What's it going to be?
Follow you passion and struggle to make a living and default on student loans? Or do what I able to do and make a living?
I think this nonsense of only hiring people who are passionate about what they are doing cuts out a lot of able folks who can do the job well. And passions doesn't last forever. Burnout occurs - especially in development - and if you are solely doing it for passion, then you are going to be miserable in the future.
Passion is for marriage or partner.
Simple as that. It's like wanting boys to play with dolls and girls to play with toy cars. Is not lack of competence of women, is lack of interest.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
What if Google only paid Catholics who learn to code? Would it still be OK?
When you can't handle the message you attack the messenger.
Sarcasm aside, I think there are some concerns that Google is incentivizing sexual discrimination. The teacher has a financial incentive concentrate their efforts to encourage girls to become coders. This means that if both a boy and girl student shows an aptitude towards coding and needs encouragement, the teacher is more likely to spend extra time with the girl at the expense of the boy.
That topic is equal pay for qualified workers, we are discussing equal education for public school students. Google offering a bounty for girl coders isn't related to Obama pandering for the female votes for the upcoming mid-term elections.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
In school sports the boy's sports programs are granted a lot more money, even with Title 9. Do you think Ole Miss or Ohio State are as generous as the girls programs (including admissions) as they are with boys football?
There is a big issue right now with male college basketball players thinking about unionizing or similar exactly because schools do take funding that they generate and give it away to the other sports teams in an attempt to be fair. To answer your question, no schools don't give the same resources to all genders and all sports. They take resources away from the earners and give it to others so that female marathon runners can get sports scholarships just like the boys playing football. Whether this situation is good or bad is being debated right now, but the point is what you want to happen is already happening.
If benefactors want to pay girls more to learn programming then it is wonderful?
Let me rephrase that to give you some perspective:
If employers want to pay men more than women isn't it wonderful?
This is so ignorant you must be living in a bubble.
There are a huge number of barriers against girls and women. Men are more likely to get interviews, once interviewed they're more likely to get hired. Once hired, they're more likely to get good positions and promotions, not to mention higher pay. In the workplace, women face discrimination, sexist comments, and slurs. They are still a small minority of coders.
Most males are totally blind to the obstacles women face and take the status quo as akin to the "natural" state. They conclude women are just inferior. But they aren't.
Calling this plan "the politically correct form of sexism" is classic doublespeak. If you had a shred of awareness, you'd understand this was the opposite, it's a tiny attempt to *correct* institutionalized sexism.
In school sports the boy's sports programs are granted a lot more money, even with Title 9. Do you think Ole Miss or Ohio State are as generous as the girls programs (including admissions) as they are with boys football? If benefactors want to pay girls more to learn programming then it is wonderful?
This post implies that Ole Miss has a Football team ::ducks::
Some boys will do it anyway while some sort of effort is required to overcome the "math is too hard" social conditioning acting on the girls.
Since when is JS coding?
Wow... have we fallen that far? I thought that when I wrote "Where in the Bible does it say that Girls should code?", I thought it was *obvious* it was satire, but I guess thanks to Colbert, there are people who really do believe he's a right wing-nut.
Either that or the conversation has become so extreme that writing anything, even *UFO aliens did it*, is considered legitimate debate from a CNN contributor. Wow. Seriously Wow.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Computer accessibility is expensive, I agree that this money should definitely go towards the disabled, they have a lot more overhead to deal with, what with the need for magnification displays, refreshable braille terminals, speech-to-text dictation software, wheelchair-accessible desks and all sorts of other things. I've seen accessible keyboards with large keys meant to help people with motor control difficulties, they look like Fisher-Price toys and they cost over $300.
Accessibility is a niche market, and that comes with very high prices, much like nearly everything else that's made for the disabled. It really sucks, but it's hard to say what's fair or not, considering these companies are making very small runs of products that aren't going to be purchased by a lot of people. I think these companies also expect disabled people to have a lot of "lawsuit money" available to spend on these gadgets, too. While some people with disabilities have indeed received a sum for whatever made them disabled if someone else is at fault AND if they won their case (car accidents, delivery room complications, workplace injuries, etc.,) but that isn't always the situation, and often they have to struggle just as badly or worse to get by as the rest of the able-bodied, able-minded population.
Let girls brush up on their math and logic and then come back to earn things on their merits, not their biology. I wouldn't be surprised if the key thing holding girls back from coding is [i]girls themselves[/i]. Whether they be conforming to preconceived gender roles (which lots of people do, not just women), caving to social pressures from their plastic bitch girlfriends not to pursue a career with "a bunch of smelly, creepy dorks, because ewwwwww," or whatever the case may be, let's figure out what it is instead of just derping out with the lame we're-just-not-funding-this-enough excuse. If women wanted to become coders, considering that there's nothing and nobody stopping from them doing so already, logic would follow that they would already be pursuing that dream. Nothing stopping them but themselves.
Personally, I'd like to share my workplace with people who are passionate about their work and skilled in their field, not people who just took that path in life because it had the most funding opportunities available even though it didn't look all that interesting or appealing. Gender doesn't even enter into the equation for me, the difference is clear between a coworker who is absolutely immersed in the passion of their career, and a coworker who's there because "fuck it, they were hiring." The latter are a pain in the ass to deal with regardless of what's between their legs, they always need their hands held, they're always lazy and fobbing shit off on other people, and they all generally suck in ways that wouldn't excite anybody.
Looks like testosterone needs to find some vacuum...
Identify gender as female. I wonder what a transgender coder is worth?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
its for the same reason that males are not greatly into horseback riding.
Interests
I'm an adult male, in my 60's. I think it's a damn good idea, girls and women need our love and support. Too much goes to guys simply because they're male, and it ain't right. Women need the extra support and encouragement, because in so many ways they're discouraged and led down bullshit paths that will never do them any good. I'd like to see more women in every role and every level of things. In many ways women are smarter, and better, than mere men. Unfortunately, most guys live a lot of years before they learn that, if they ever do.
Then it's funny how back in 1987 just over 50% of the introductory computer science subject at the University I went to were female. It was just about the only chance for engineering students like myself to share a classroom with more than two girls. That subject was compulsory for all later programming subjects so the answer was not as simple as not doing it at high school.
I don't think it's as simple as the women not liking programming. Women facing a very small chance of being employed in the field is a different story. I think that's one reason the enrolement numbers have declined so much.
This was the best troll, congrats!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
While I don't agree with the premise per se (it should be gender neutral); I do personally believe there are two types of coders: those who do it for the love and those who do it for the money. Pay enough money (or have the real potential to earn a substantial amount) and people will do it. Where girls / women may not love to code, they do have unique insights which should be cultivated / encouraged; hence, useful in programming.
Regards,
MBC1977,
But if so then I do not understand: if women are so interested in programming as men, so why would they are employed less than a male programmer?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I'm all for equality but how does this make sense. If the same article appeared offering boys $1000 to learn programming and not girls it would make the news.
The anime "I My Me! Strawberry Eggs" had that sort of theme with a guy that had trouble getting a job as a teacher.
Google has many offices in many nations. In fact, there's one up the street from me here in Waterloo, ON, Canada. Open this up. I could use the cash.
No, just like any sort of targetted scholarship so no big deal. They want girls, masons, catholics or whoever the charity is putting up a scholarship for so that's who they pay it to.
Thank you for going there. This needs more attention.
Most people have been human their whole lives with an understanding of human nature which goes back as far as humans have existed. There are reasons for our body forms, our mental and emotional structures and patterns and more. Yet somehow, in a window of less than 50-60 years, all of that wisdom and understanding is to be challenged as completely false and that it is opportunity which is to blame for women not being involved in certain fields and occupations and discrimination against women which yields lower pay for women.
Study after study has shown that most of the occupational choice issues are just that -- choices. Women are born with careers in being female and most are practically obsessed with merely being female. (By comparison, how often do men go around seriously saying "because I'm a man!"? I haven't seen or heard anything like that in more than 20 years.) And even the POTUS who is supporting propaganda about an alleged "war on women" spouts out nonsense about 77 cents on the dollar and when challenged with that very "problem" in his own administration, they make excuses which sound REMARKABLY like the results of so many studies on the matter. And if what the POTUS says is true of his administration, how can they make claims of 77/100 with a straight face against the rest of the nation? It's completely disingenuous.
At the end of the day, women want what they want. I would personally prefer to see more geek girls out there giving me fewer awkward conversations with people I would otherwise have nothing in common. That's not the way it goes. And here's stark reality no one ever seems to talk about.
Women with careers are frequently torn between two careers where one is motherhood. Heaven help the woman who is accused of being an unfit mother. Does this seem at all reasonable or fair to you? What's the end-game? Population decrease among more intelligent people?
Are these issues being pushed to distract or to destroy? Both? We should all be at least a little skeptical of the motives behind all of this.
Another thing that was far less funny is those women I mentioned could not manage to find jobs in IT despite having the same degree and the same grades as the boys. I've seen proportionally more women in technical roles at mine sites, power stations, foundaries, oil refineries, a steelworks and chemical plants than I have in IT! I'm sure word of sex discrimination got around so less women tried to break into a career that they had little chance of entering.
That such discrimination was going on in the 1990s is very well established with a pile of statistics and court transcripts. Whether it is still going on or not today would be harder to measure than hindsight, but what went on before looks like it did drive those girls away so far less are even attempting to study it these days.
However, my anecdote above shows why I think your "but girls don't like it" suggestion has no merit at all.
Okay, kiddies, gather round. Auntie is going to explain to you little soandsos why this is a good thing and not TEH EVUL REVARSE DISCIRMINASHUNZ like about 85 people have already cried. And I think I do mean cried.
Let me lay you down some truths about being a woman in IT: I love programming, me. Been programming since I got my hands on a TRS-80 during a summer gifted program. I've moved from BASIC to Pascal to C / C++ to .net and java and javascript and lately Python, with god alone knows how many steps in between. I hope to be able to spend the rest of my life doing this. And in all that time, I have *never* worked in a place where the women weren't outnumbered 2 to 1. Every dang time. Now, why is that? Is it because girls aren't interested in this stuff? Well, more like girls are *told* we aren't interested in this stuff, and we have to find out to the contrary ourselves. The same old 19th century B.S. about how our brains would overheat if exposed to math and such is still in there today, vestigially steering us away from STEM in general and computers in particular. And that sucks.
See, the thing is, sexism is like racism--you get the big ugly obvious kind, everyone can see that, but then as well you get much more the subtle kind, where the person doing it doesn't even realize it. Like that friend of yours in college who went and did blackface for Halloween that one year (and yet swore up and down that he, like, totally wasn't a racist, dude) vs the hiring manager who is more likely to hire someone their own color, not out of malice or anything, just because human beings tend to take a shine to people that resemble them. It's built in to us. And it goes out into the culture we live in, and we soak it up like radiation. And the cycle just keeps on going.
So. Enter things like Affirmative Action, and this here bounty thingie. The idea behind these things is not to discriminate, rather it is to *compensate for the discrimination that is already there*. We already know the bias rolls in favor of men over women, or whites over blacks. We know this. We don't like it. We wish it would go away. But it's there. No matter how nice it feels to pretend we are above that sort of thing, if we are honest we know it's in there. Lurking. Lurrrrrrrking. And so we throw these things into the mix to try to tilt the needle back toward the middle.
Look: I would love to live in a world where these things were not necessary. That would be great. But this ain't that world. If it makes you feel any better, know that no amount of things like this will ever push you from your top slot in computer classes. You'll *always* be the teacher's pets. You got it made. Seriously. We ain't looking to displace you: we're just trying to give our sisters a boost-up. That first rung on the IT ladder is rather higher up there when you're a girl (and they're spaced farther apart as you go up, I might add). There's a lot of potential tech talent lurking on the distaff side, and it takes a hell of an initial push to get it moving against the flow of how we've been raised.
And I'll just leave you with one more thing: to those who say that girls who come through a system like this--be it teacher bounties, be it special scholarships, whatever--don't have what it takes to be a coder, or are just in it for the money or whatever, I want you to understand that we go to work every day outnumbered. We're in a field--and have been since the beginning--where no matter what we do, how much we build or accomplish, some people still can't quite believe we're here. We have to fight like mama bears for every bit of respect we got. And any woman who plows through all of this B.S. and is still there, doing it every day, kicking code and stomping bugs, you better BELIEVE they love what they're doing. And that's why we get up and go every single damn day, putting up with all of it. And if you know what that is say amen, and if you don't well you never well. And I wish you success in management.
What's really fun, is sitting through company mandated discrimination classes and realizing you show up no where on the list.
Of course, any question as to what you do is met with a stern response of "you're already privileged and get better treatment than everyone else, so there is no need for you to complain".
We all have to pay for the sins of our fathers and grandfathers I suppose.
Google has picked a side. Fine. I'll use my freedom of choice to choose another product. Google and its partner corporations have chosen to actively deny males from participation. I see no reason then, as a male, to actively support those corporations that promote bigotry against 50% of the population while simultaneously expecting that same 50% of the population to support their profits. I'm out and Google can go fuck itself.
Try stepping out of the kitchen. Less chips are likely to land on your shoulders.
In school sports the boy's sports programs are granted a lot more money, even with Title 9. Do you think Ole Miss or Ohio State are as generous as the girls programs (including admissions) as they are with boys football? If benefactors want to pay girls more to learn programming then it is wonderful?
I believe you are mistaken, to be quite honest. The university I went to bent over backwards to comply with Title 9. They cut every men's sport that was not profitable (down to football, basketball, and wrestling). They also had to recruit female athletes from out of state/country in order to match scholarship funding. They put out adverts in the school paper indicating scholarships were available for walk-on female athletes. They had a women's equestrian team (which is very expensive) specifically so they could balance out football spending. It was almost impossible to be a male athlete at my school unless you were a superstar. You could walk on to the women's soccer team and get a sport's scholarship. Does that seem very fair to the men?
I think Ole Miss and Ohio state GET a lot more money from the football program that helps pay for the other sports, be they men's or women's sports. When putting more money into the men's football program increases revenue that supports the non-revenue sports, it's not a bad investment.
I won't address the discrimination aspects of this. Obviously it is. The question is this sort of discrimination OK given the fact that there is a possibly a less overt form of discrimination keeping women out of some technical fields.
Here's what I know. When I completed my computer science degree in the late 80's over 30% of the graduates were women. Now it's about 12%. Why? What has changed? Why was it so low in the first place? The first software developer I ever hired (this was back in the 90's) was a woman. The last time I tried to hire a developer I had zero women applicants. Not one.
Here is something else I found interesting. My son is in the 8th grade and for the last year or so we've being going to high school open houses to help select a high school. One of them had tables set up in the gym where you could talk to coaches and other people involved in their extra-curricular activities like sports, chess club, and robotics. I was talking to the parents of one of the girls in his class recently and found out that their daughter wanted to visit the robotics club table but refused to do so until all the boys from her class had left. She didn't want them to see her there. Again - why? I didn't get a clear answer from the parents before I had to leave but apparently even girls who have interests in these fields are at some level being discouraged from pursuing them.
And as a parent of a daughter I can see that there are cultural norms pushing them towards certain types of activities and discouraging them others. It happens with boys too. I even catch myself doing it. I have to consciously remember to do things that will help spark my daughter's interest in science where with my son I just seem to do it automatically. And it's not because my son is any more interested than my daughter.
Right, there is sexism in college sports, but it's not in the massive amounts of money pumped into men's football and basketball. The sexism is why people are willing to pay huge amounts of money to see men play football and basketball, but not women.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
This is an algorithm to limit the population growth. Patriarchy tipically produces population growth, whereas matriarchy produces population decline. This is simply because women want to marry and procreate with men of higher status. So if you propel the average status of females to higher than the status of males in a society, you reduce the incidence of women finding partners and procreating. If you want to reduce human numbers, you simply prioritize education and social status for women over men.
Recent articles about the clashes over rents in Sillicion Valley show that there's simply enough people there, no need to produce more.
schools have been focusing on girls and math for the better part of 50 years. so this makes perfect sense, you encourage teachers to teach programming to the students that get the most attention from their math teachers.
lose != loose
Just like China, Google's HR is trying to stay on top of the crisis or having too many males and not enough women...HR recognised the issue of socially awkward engineers with no game for women. Solution to increase moral is to import (hire) more nerdy women!
Wait, drawing and animation is computer science? Since when?
Am I the only one who noticed that the "computer science" class being incentivised for female students has barely anything to do with computer SCIENCE at all? This is art class, using computers as a medium, not computer science. Why not incentivize women to use C++, or to roll their own LFS distribution? Oh wait, because that would actually be relevant, and even the morons behind this program realize they still have to choose a "computery" course that's likely to be more appealing to women, and have skills transferrable to interior decorating rather than system-critical application design.
Drawing and Animation is something you can teach to any Mac-tard wearing a glove on their mouse-hand. I'd never hire a sysadmin or coder because of their experience in 3DSMax and Adobe Premiere. What the fuck is going on here?
My alma mater lost its baseball program to title 9. Men's gymnastics and wrestling are an endangered species. Basically, if you like a sport that isn't football, and you have a penis, then no college athletics for you.
Title 9 can die in a fire, as far as I'm concerned.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Where can my students set their gender? Some of your students may have already set their gender when they signed up for a Khan Academy account. If they haven't yet, or you want to make sure it's set, ask them to visit their settings page by clicking their name in the top right corner and clicking "Settings" in that menu. There, they can set their gender. If we find that you have students that have completed the course but have not specified their gender yet, we will notify you.
I predict a lot of "girls" are going to complete this course.
I am disgusted.
Racism at its worst.
You also seem confused on 'laws' and possibly on 'gender'.
Offering a girl-specific incentive is not the same thing as discriminating against boys. Discrimination implies some scarcity coupled with biased allocation (i.e., 50 available slots and 40 of them go to girls). There is no scarcity in programming knowledge--anyone is free to learn. I don't understand any argument for how this discourages boys from learning programming. If anything this is intended to partially offset existing institutionalized discrimination against girls.
Now, about 'laws'. Google is a private company which is free to offer a sex-specific charity. Ever heard of the 'Boy Scouts'?
But this program isn't about getting girls to choose programming as a career, it's about getting them to try it.
Way back in the old, olden days (the 80's), as a Business major, I had to take an Introduction to Computers course. I had never touched a computer and was dreading it. In high school, only the geeky boys liked computers. I was not geeky, and not a boy.
It turned out I loved programming and was hooked by the end of that course. I've now been a developer for over 25 years. Had I not been encouraged (well, forced) to try programming, I never would have.
That is the goal of the incentive.
Both pay women more than men.
I happened to also go to college, and I assure you, men also cheated on their assignments. I witnessed men trading assignments and even stealing other people's homework, and the bastards didn't even put out first!
This is the first post that introdues the legal aspect of discrimination, so let's get this straight. This Google-backed offer via Khan academy is, without a doubt, discrimination in a social or cognitive sense. It is not discrimination in a legal sense. Please never conflate the two. See CrankyFool and ShaghaiBill below for a spot-on (though certainly not exhaustive) description of the legal case.
So who is pushing for conflating the two? The Victim Lobby. Don't fall for it.
-pax humana
There's a similar code.org program for ALL kids.
http://help.donorschoose.org/app/answers/detail/a_id/454/kw/google/related/1/session/L2F2LzEvdGltZS8xMzk3MTQ1Njk0L3NpZC9FQkRvMXNSbA%3D%3D
That's the beauty of privately funded programs. The one providing the funds gets to choose the beneficiaries. What's more American than that? If I see a need to fund a program for boys, then I am free to do so.
I don't see how this is any different than scholarships. Or are they sexist and discriminatory too?
Well, the problem is seeing sick people in the hospital and thinking the doctors are making people sick. Correlation is not causation. Girls have equal opportunity and are making the choice not to be in CS and IT, that doesn't mean there's sexism or any reason to try to fix it.
There's overt sexism and there's subtle sexism.
My son is about to enter high school and where I live we have a number of choices. The high schools try to attract students and most of them have an open house at some point during the year for current 7th and 8th graders. One of these schools set up tables in their gym for all of their extra-curricular activities. Along with all the sports and things like the chess club and drama club was the robotics club.
I was talking to one of the parents of a girl in my son's class afterward. Even though their daughter wanted to talk to the people at the robotics club table, she refused to do so, - until all the boys from her class had left the open house. The topic of the conversation changed before I got a clear answer as to why she was worried about the boys seeing her, but clearly she was. The fact is that as a society we subtly and sometimes not so subtly encourage and discourage girls and boys from engaging in certain activities based on gender. This can be a real problem if it leaves men or women out of lucrative fields or causes worker shortages. And this is what's happening.
And the thing is that it's gotten worse. Back in the late 80's when I got my degree about 30% of CS students were women. Now it's about 12%. The last time I tried to hire a developer I had zero women applicants.
You began with making a good point about how women are told not to be interested in certain fields of work.
Then you fucked it all up by arguing that being "outnumbered" is fundamentally a bad thing, for really no other good reason than "there's more of those people than there are of us people, and that makes me uncomfortable." Who's the sexist now? Oh, but you're a woman, so you're not capable of sexism, amirite?
Fucking hell. If you want to work with more women, work in a field that more women actually want to work in, like nursing. This isn't Afghanistan, any female coders you aren't working with probably just aren't qualified, and whether you like it or not, the male applicants probably managed to prove their merit on their own, without demanding the position based on how they were born, and then continuing to bitch and whine after getting that oh-so-difficult-to-acquire job because the gender equity isn't exactly 50/50. If you're really working for a company that would hire a dumbshit male coder over a brilliant female coder based on gender discrimination alone (which I doubt), then why the hell are you working for them? You mentioned being outnumbered 2-to-1, with the proportion that this "problem" is being blown up to, I'd say you're lucky to have that many other women to work with in your field, and are in even less of a position to complain than some other female IT workers who are the *only* female in their department.
You should have known you're getting into a field where the majority of workers is male. You should either learn to get comfortable with that, or stop pissing in everyone else's cornflakes. None of your male coworkers have a conspiracy against you and all womenkind to keep you off the computer. They probably welcome having a woman working alongside them that isn't going to disparage them for being "dorks" or "nerds" or all the other shit that non-technical women would cut their balls off with. They probably quite relish the fact they can be around women who see them for their intellectual talents and actually have something in common with. But you don't see this, all you see is a bunch of oppressive penises slapping you in the face when you go in to work, and that's YOUR problem, not theirs.
You're probably the kind of intimidating, uptight, PC types who would never date someone in their own workplace because of either strict adherence to corporate policies or just a sense of that it "might lower you" who then goes on to complain that you're not getting laid enough and/or can't find anyone who matches your interests.
But yeah, you go fight the power, giiiiiiirl. Go give your "sisters" a boost as you mentioned, all the while being completely blind to the fact that every time you give someone a boost based on gender, you're doing so at the expense of what would be a boost to someone who would have gotten there through hard work, dedication, high tuition and book costs, perseverence, student loans and the competitive nature of job applications that EVERYONE (not just women) have to contend with. Go ruin the opportunities of those people, because you need to fix some gap or some shit to make yourself feel better about the shortcomings of your gender.
Geez. Women, huh? Maybe if you feminazis didn't whine so much people would hire you more, they wouldn't be so scared of you turning on them after giving you a paycheque and a career. That's called liability, work your way up to a position where your job depends on liability management and you'll understand.
Okay, let's look at the reasons given for the lack of women in computers & see how these hold up in reality...
1) Women don't have the brains to do this: Judging by the amount of female doctors, scientists and lawyers who use similar high-level analytical skills everyday this is definitely not true. Especially considering a larger percentage of the programming workforce were female in the 60s/70s than now.
2) Girls get put off by boys hogging the hardware: Have you met any teenage girls recently? Probably every single one of them will have at the very least a laptop and a smartphone and schools nearly always have a single computer per user. Hence the girls have access to the same kit at the boys.
3) Sexism! : Perhaps but you know the most glamorous industries tend to be very, very sexist. I bet your 20yr old daughter would get hit on more and sneered at if she worked in merchant banking or fashion or Hollywood. The military is notorious for having horrendous problems with sexual assault (and you can get killed as part of the job), yet lots of women still join.
4) Lack of role models: Again, possibly but have you noticed there's plenty of female tech CEOs and managers these days? Have you also noticed how when TV programs interview programmers they'll ALWAYS manage to speak to a super cool attractive female one? Even in the world of gaming there's a ton of confident women doing their own thing and many of these are very pretty. I mention looks not to be a pig, but because one argument trotted out is that somehow attractive women don't do tech, and teenage girls are worried that being a coder will doom them to a life of Amy Farah Fowler fashion emulation.
5) Long hours: This definitely has some merit but appears to be a problem with the professions full stop & needs to be addressed.
6) Cultural programming: We may be making progress. In popular representations of computer people there are two types - the nerd loser, and the eccentric millionaire/billionaire. As with the perception of 'nerd girl' looks mentioned above, the popular culture basically says 'Hey girls, go into this industry and you'll be stuck in a cubicle next to gangs of drooling man-boy-virgins who all look like shit. Your job will accord little respect, unless you work at Facebook or Google the pay will be crap, you'll never get a boyfriend and the easiest thing to do is get out quick and into management'
Management gets more pay, is easier (well, some of the time) and you don't get treated like a character from the IT Crowd. Example: Say you're at a social gathering...
'Hey there, what sort of work do you do?'
'I'm an Information Systems manager'
'That sounds quite difficult'
'Can be'
Or...
'What work do you do?'
'I'm a computer programmer'
'Oh cool. I keep getting pop-ups on my laptop for Slovakian strippers. Do I have a virus?'
'Errr, maybe. I'm really a systems programmer, writing code for new hardware'
'Brilliant. My PC keeps crashing. Could you fix it for me one day?'
7) More cultural programming and the repulsiveness of the geeks: The media make nerds look unfuckable which is strange as the same media can often make characters who are dreadful human beings seem quite sexy (Dr House, Dexter, Walter White). This may create a perception where young women want to avoid computing because they see it as dooming them to a life of drudgery with unattractive men. Of course there may be some truth in that, but unattractive and strange men can be found in every sphere of existence. I'm willing to bet this media meme poison is a big reason why there aren't that many women in computers these days. Much like some heterosexual males may avoid certain industries because they perceive them to be the preserve of gay men based on media stereotypes.
Sorry to bring it all down to 'no one wants to sleep with the nerds' but methinks that's the big social hurdle. Thank you popular culture.
...those women I mentioned could not manage to find jobs in IT despite having the same degree and the same grades as the boys
I understand that. But what I asked was why this happens.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Maybe one day this type of affirmative action program will help an otherwise unqualified student get into Harvard and get elected President of the United States.
Lol, total bullshit. That's not sexism, that's wanting to watch the best athletes.
I'll tell you what, let's end this travesty of injustice. Combine all sports, unisex. You play sports based solely on your ability, mixed-sex.
This should solve the (lol) "sexism" problem, right? No?
Knows that libtards are the biggest racists and sexists of all.
Im sure there are some inner city schools who wish they had such artificial encourgement applied equally.
All nonsense.
The fact is that if you're a baller, and/or a shot caller, brawler you will do well in IT. Period. If you know multiple scripting languages, code in your spare time, and in general have a natural affinity for technology you will do well regardless of any other factors.
No amount of whining or statistical analysis will change that, if you've been in IT for any period of time you know and understand this.
Are low-level, average, barely good enough women being 'scriminated (sic) against? Maybe. But plenty of men in that low rung get the shit end of the deal too.
That's because you are a grade A moron. It's clearly low-level "satire" (actually petty, pandering sarcasm), you dunce cap.
Back in 1987, computing was still the "super job of the future" being touted as the next big thing to get rich as the turn of the century rolled up (kind of like the stupid "drop out of school and be a social network entrepreneur" going around now). You had plenty of people of both sexes trying to "break in" to it back then, and the dollar signs they were seeing weren't perl scalars.
If we assume that there is no other difference between boys' and girls' ability to program than the type of instruction they each receive, then it doesn't seem like an unreasonable method to incentivize teachers to explore alternative methods for instructing or motivating girls to explore programming.
This strikes me as an interesting experiment without any explicit harm to the participants.
What would be useful is if Google gathered the methodologies the most successful teachers used to get more girls to complete the course and made that information available so other instructors could try to duplicate their results.
. . . which is why all this bullcrap is always being sprayed on the rest of us. Where is this so-called meritocracy I've read about all my effing life? The closest I've ever come to any meritocratic system was the US military during the draft.
. . . that cyber stalker?
You people will get your nose bent out of shape at any goddamn thing, won't you?
Gender shouldn't matter when it comes to writing code, period. Turns out, it does in some ways that are not good for the industry as a whole. We're missing about half the insight that the inconvenient gender (aka "women") could bring to the table if the tech industry wasn't a sweaty jock party.
So, Google is trying to do something about it. Might be the *wrong* thing (I don't think so, but I'm not omnipotent) but at least THEY ARE TRYING TO DO *SOMETHING*, which is a lot more than I see any of you other meatsacks doing. You can either start being part of the solution, or just go to Hell.
If it gets more women coding, then more power to them.
If it gets more women in tech, more power to them.
If it will shut up your goddamn special snowflake whining, full power to them.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
. . . then everyone would be for the nationalization of American school systems and establishing a meritocratic educational system to replace the present capitalist educational systems.
I am here to collect the check for the large amount of money I receive for existing. I mean, apparently that is part of my entitlement. That, and everything else they use as a reason to give benefits to protected classes that are not male and white.
As someone who has never been racist, never been sexist, and always supported equal rights the current age of SJW is nightmarish. SJWs discriminate against me at all turns, calling me rapist and conspirator.
SJWs are the worst. They discriminate against men, and sexually objectify gays.
Black men, mostly.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
One of the things I've been noticing, as I've been working with young women trying to actually get into IT after high school (relatives and friends, all US citizens), is that all of the programs seem to only care about girls in middle school.
They seem to think that someone with a 2 year AA degree or 4 year Bachelors degree can't become an IT person, and doesn't want to.
This is false. I've known many younger - and even older - women who want to work in IT, in their mid-20s to mid-40s.
Something is fishy here.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Wow, it's amazing how so many posts here completely forget about ... well about all of humany history. Yes, it is discriminatory to give girl coders a bonus. You know what else was discriminatory? Giving freed slaves 40 acres and a mule; it was absolutely unfair to say "white men, no mule for you!", but we did it anyway. How terribly unfair.
Just because something is discriminatory doesn't make it bad, and if you live in a fantasyland where you think history just goes out the window, and everyone is equal now so we should all just be treated exactly the same ... well then you live in a fantasy land. Come to the real world.
Now, that being said, there are often less discriminatory ways to fix past social injustices. Take affirmitive action: you can do it by race and be controversial, or you can do it by social class. If (say) African-Americans really are doing worse in society (as they are), they will be over-represented in the poorest social classes, and so a social-class based affirmitive action system would have the effect of benefiting (poor) African-Americans, without explicitly singling them out.
But it's not like Google can say "if you're a kid (of either gender), and you can see in to the future that you're not going to become a programmer, we'll give you $100". So in this case singling out girls is absolutely the right way to go, unless you think it's a good thing to have a highly desirable profession like programming VASTLY dominated by men.
This money is coming from somewhere or someone. And, People or organisations can give money to whoever they damn well please. Marissa Mayer wants to encourage girls to start coding? Great. Zuckerberg wants to give money to people if they grow awkward, curly hair? Amazing.
PROTIP: You're allowed to do the exact same thing. If you really care, you can go start a non-profit that offers the same for boys or both genders.
People like you are the reason I had to whine for years for my parents to get me Micro-Machines as a child. Some girls like to play with cars. Some girls like to rip apart computers or code in C#. But they won't know that unless they're given the opportunity to try it on their own.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
So just because women are stupid, my sons will end up getting less education because they are male?
I believe that competitive sports are simply more of a man's thing and the difference in budget simply reflects this. Like with programming, you won't get parity without discrimination.
The reason I think this is that men will almost always beat women if put together in the same competition, even when strength is not a significant advantage.
Note :
- I'm only talking about competitive sports. Women probably enjoy physical activity as much as men do, and maybe more.
- Of course some women are better at sports than most men, here I am talking about same relative level competitions, like the Olympics.
I understand you. But you are an exception, all patterns have exceptions.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I'd say we've got a pretty big freaking problem.
Yeah, and 95.6% of all Fortune 1000 CEOs are male.
Regarding the gender gap in college: Boys get lower grades than girls, and report liking school less, not because girls are naturally more studious or because schools aren't "boy-friendly" enough, they write. Rather, "our research shows that boys' underperformance in school has more to do with society's norms about masculinity Boys involved in extracurricular cultural activities such as music, art, drama, and foreign languages report higher levels of school engagement and get better grades than other boys. But these activities are often denigrated as un-masculine."
There is, however, still a significant gender gap in STEM careers, with most positions being held by men. So, yeah, there is a problem, but the problem isn't related to educational opportunities for men. There is gender inequality in STEM careers and women aren't usually encouraged to pursue those kinds of careers. So offering a subsidy to teachers who make a point of enabling girls to pursue STEM careers isn't discrimination, exactly ... it is an effort to correct discrimination that is already occurring.
If you are interested in some of the reasons that might cause men to have higher rates of homelessness, or to attend college less frequently, this documentary is probably a good place to start.
Are the teachers actively discriminating against girls?
In a word? yes, they are.
..since they have to fork out all kinds of extra bonuses to get the women educated in the first place.
Simple as that. It's like wanting boys to play with dolls and girls to play with toy cars. Is not lack of competence of women, is lack of interest.
They're not dolls, they're action figures!!!
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
So if you pay men 100% more than women then that's okay because 'Absence of an incentive is not really a "penalty"'?
You're wrong.
There... FTFY.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I'm not really sure why you went with the athletics/race analogy, when it's already an accepted and expected practice for male athletic departments to receive more funding, focus, scholarships, etc., both in subsidy and charitable donations, than female counterparts. I assume you were up in arms before this, due to the fact that it's much easier for a male athlete to get a taxpayer subsidized college degree than a female one? It's funny, because for all the outrage here, few people are mentioning the already existing discriminatory practices in place against women, even though they're going to affect a lot more people than some gimmicky PR stunt by Google.
Source
Better yet, teach them to become gender discrimination lawyers. It's more lucrative, more status, better hours, less pizza-grease, less RSI, and less age discrimination than programming.
Table-ized A.I.
Whenever you feel confused as if something is discrimination think on the opposite. What would happen if it was the other way around? See?
There is no problem if there are more men than women in tech. It's not a problem. It's a choice. It's the same thing that I don't want to become a hair stylist, or a esthetician.
Why would we want girls in software development? All it means is that we'll have these moody, needy people on the team, who either call in sick once a month for a week, or are a pain to be around while they go through their nature cycle.
That doesn't explain why women CS graduates have been in decline since the 80s.
Did you read the "despite having the same degree and the same grades as the boys" above before coming up with such pointless ignorant drivel?
And I answered in sentence number 3.
They were discriminated against for being female - far more so than in other technical professions.
The same started to happen to men in teaching as well, the trends were noticed and now very few women even try to get into IT and very few men try to get into classroom teaching. So now both trends are entrenched whether discrimination is happening now or not.
I had that anecdote reinforced not long ago when I went to a presentation about computer networking hardware and the only woman in the room of about 50 IT people was in sales and had no technical background.
Ask her what forces are conspiring against her to keep her away from her TRUE interests.
And, of course, it's simply impossible that your son is any more interested than your daughter - after all, you encouraged them both equally, right? Oh wait, your children aren't little machines that respond in direct proportion to encouragement.
Try asking your daughter's girl friends - they probably don't think it's "cool" and they don't want to be considered a nerd - something trivially simple.
Boys are interested in video games - mostly because they're violent, and therefore there's peer encouragement to enter into the world of video games to fit in (the gateway) and coding (hacker culture) as an extension, and later can lead to studying computer science college, etc.
Neither of which has anything to do with your ability as an IT baller.
Tell me then - how do the people hiring spot the "IT baller" and how do the girls with the same training and experience and equivalent marks as the boys not become "IT ballers"? Please try to base your answer on something related to reality in some way.
Don't be put off too much by the situation where the average engineering graduate is going to be looking down on the best "IT baller" and the staff even more so. If the boys coming out of IT are so fucking special then what's wrong with the girls that produce code that's just as good?
You were looking at the wrong list. Look at the list of evil oppressor overlords.
If the boys coming out of IT are so fucking special then what's wrong with the girls that produce code that's just as good?
You haven't proven that the girls produce code that's just as good. Computer Science grades are very different from ability to code.
There is slight evidence that girls produced less good code - the fact that they weren't hired in spite of similar grades to people who did get hired. Could be discrimination - girls lose productivity by getting pregnant, after all. But there are arguments against that - pregnant nurses and teachers are much more unable to work than pregnant coders.
And then girls joining Computer Science in 1980s couldn't have more contact with computers before joining, than girls joining Computer Science in 1990s, and more so for 2000s. Yet girls joined less in 1990s and 2000s - more evidence that girls knowing what computer programming is like, before joining Computer Science, DO NOT join computer science.
In 1980s, they could have joined just because it was a "new" field, which they had no idea of, and likely to provide indoor jobs like typists had.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I don't have to do I? All I had to do is show the metrics that HR people use didn't I? That's all they have to go on to sort good coders from bad.
Bingo.
For some reason IT lagged the other technical fields that way and it has become entrenched. As I wrote above, I saw more women in heavy engineering than I'm seeing coding in nice airconditioned office environments. So what is it that makes coding somehow more manly than designing and implementing (on site) underground mining ventilation or deciding how to keep the roof up in parts of a mine? I don't expect an answer - it's just an illustration of how stupid the "girls are not suited to that sort of office work" view is. I'd like to be able to go to an IT conference where there is at least one woman in the room, and preferably something approaching the number of women that were in classes of mechanical engineering subjects that I was running 13 years ago when people were complaining about the low number of women in engineering. I can not see how the far lower ratio in IT can be excused - it's clearly a simple case of women getting excluded from the profession.
To credibly say it is a simple case of exclusion, you DO have to prove women are as good as men in coding.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Before you chimed in looking for another argument with me we were discussing hiring.
So you can code better than Adele Goldberg and Radia Perlman? You must be pretty hot shit. Or maybe you are just a piece of shit pretending to be better than half the population. Got anything to say about people from different races why we are at it?
Gee, this charity is giving teachers money for their classroom if they teach girls to code! That's discriminatory!
Gee, this other charity is only giving black people in Africa free food and water! That's discriminatory!
Gee, this other charity is gives poor people skills training for the workforce for free, but not to rich people! That's discriminatory!
rinse, repeat.
Coming in on this kind of late, but this is closer to scholarships than discrimination. Think of all the scholarships that exist for Native Americans, African Americans, people that are left handed, red haired people, people that can say the alphabet backwards while standing on their heads drinking a fifth of jager and humming the star spangled banner between the letters (there really should be a scholarship for this...that's more talent than most collegiates have now, all together). Yes, there are even scholarships for women ( http://www.scholarshipsandgrants.us/scholarships-for-women/ )...and that's just here in the US. So, yeah, you're not eligible for them if you're a man. The government has determined that they are not discrimination. Neither is this. Google isn't making teachers teach girls only. They're just offering an incentive to improve the statistics of women in the IT field greatly. Which really is kind of needed - more eyes make for shallow problems. The more eyes we get into the world of writing code, looking at code, writing and supporting open code, the better. If it rankles you that google's encouraging teachers to teach girls, go to your favourite corporation and suggest they set up a 'scholarship' type fund for encouraging boys to be homemakers, seamstresses, knitters, and wet nurses.
And no, I'm not white-knighting here. I dislike feminism, and most all -ism's. When you let other people do your thinking for you, you might as well go ahead and give them your ID, wallet, and bank account numbers anyways since you're giving up the most important gift we have (thought).
Rule of Acquisition #3: Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.
More women are attending and graduating from colleges, how are they not protected?