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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?
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?
Teach an African to code = $100
Teach an Asian or Indian to code = $0
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.
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?
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
Or... you know... hire the best person for the job, not set a goal of having a 50/50 distribution?
Humans are not marbles, we are all unique, all have our strengths and weaknesses, and different ways of thinking.
Hire the right person for the job in hand, don't hire people based on some magical need to have a particular distribution. I really don't get this desire...
However penalizing boys
Absence of an incentive is not really a "penalty". They aren't excluding boys in any way, simply adding a little something extra for people who actually get girls to participate.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
You could paint the green marbles yellow - oh wait keep those scissors away from me!
Because none of the professions you're talking about are generally well paid. IT is abundant in jobs that are:
- Well paid
- Well respected
- Have no apparent attributes that make one gender likely more capable in the field than any other gender
And yet there's a massive gender gap in this industry. Nobody really knows why. I've worked alongside men, women, different races, different ages, and I can't honestly say I've noticed any particular group showed signs of being more capable than any other group. I've known terrible women programmers and awesome women programmers. I've known terrible men programmers and good ones. Races? Tougher, as I've worked alongside very few non-whites (is this gap being addressed too?) but the people I worked alongside who weren't white were good.
So we have a respected, well paid, career path, that is superficially accessible to all, and yet at least one identifiable group making up 50% of the population sees it as inaccessible, or avoids it for other reasons. We should be concerned.
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 -
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"!
'scuse me, I might be from a different corner of the planet where we don't dump a metric ton of fabric on our females until you can't see them anymore, but unless you happen to be from such a place, how the hell were boys favored to the exclusion of girls by any institution when it came to programming?
If anything, the problem is parents/relatives/peer groups trying to press girls into traditional female roles, telling them that they can't do that or that they should busy themselves with more "girly" things. But that's hardly something a school or government can remedy. Or, rather, should. I'm no fan of handing over to a school or other institution what values my kids should learn. Even if that carries the risk that some idiot parents keeps telling their girls that their job is to be bare foot and pregnant.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
0 in 5 is statistically about right, considering 6.6% of nurses in the US are men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
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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.
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The answer to "why" is that your scenario presupposes that a 50/50 distribution of green and yellow marbles is a valid, just and reasonable goal. If only 10000 marbles want to be added to the jar every year and 95% of them are green, then I question that validity, justness and reasonableness.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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
your scenario presupposes that a 50/50 distribution of green and yellow marbles is a valid, just and reasonable goal.
No it doesn't — it presupposes that a 50/50 distribution is the desired goal of whoever is manipulating the jar of marbles. I think it's pretty clear that gender parity is in fact what the people making the incentive want.
If you don't think that is valid, just, or reasonable, you're free not to. You should argue that point with the people funding the incentive. Money is speech, so they're well within their first amendment rights, but maybe you could convince them.
Of course, you haven't provided any arguments at all why a 50/50 distribution of men and woman in the industry isn't a desired goal...
And also, there's the tiny problem that saying "having as many women as men in the IT industry isn't valid, just, or reasonable" does makes you sound like a bit of a dick.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Why is liking video games, specifically FPS and MMOs, a necessity to being a programmer?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Identify gender as female. I wonder what a transgender coder is worth?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
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.
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.
:) because i'm a gaming elitists, my argument was more along the lines of, those are things that i have known to generate enthusiasm for programming in my own life and among my own friends. i'm sure there are others, but i refuse to credit casual gaming with anything positive :).
and gaming in general is a good gateway drug for programming, because it's nifty and fun. and because nobody dreams of growing up to program database management systems... unless they're hella atypical.
So what I'm hearing is that the true problem is the bad business sense of the people controlling the jar.
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.
That's just it - I can't make a blanket statement about it without knowing the details. Why are they trying to pay the males more? Is their a greater wrong they are trying to correct or are they just trying to be dicks? In truth, it's an absurd hypothetical.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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 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?
Well, I personally think that the people controlling the jar have good business sense, and that gender parity in the IT industry is a good thing. That's probably true on a number of axes: the IT industry is too male, too pale, and too immature.
But whether you agree with that statement or not, I'm pretty sure that we can agree that they didn't set out to encourage more guys to take computer science courses and bungle it really badly.
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
There is no intrinsic value in someone's bodily traits that they cannot control, so "male and pale" are irrelevant factors for indoor jobs that aren't physically demanding. Adding vaginas and darker skin (or subtracting the same) has no effect to the ability to write code, create procedure analysis reports, put toothpase tubes in boxes, or use a microscope. Gender parity is flat-out irrelevant from the standpoint of hiring someone in a business to perform specific tasks.
Here's another interesting way to examine it: in "gender-dominated job" arguments, replace "male/female" with "tall/short" and see how the emotions change. Gender naturally being a binary trait only makes it lower-hanging fruit for an "us vs. them" discrimination war, but perhaps there aren't enough short people in tech either! Why aren't we seeing a "more short people in tech initiative?" People are just as likely to be discriminated against for their height as their gender.
What part of "if only 10000 marbles want to be added to the jar every year and 95% of them are green" did you not understand?
The argument is that there are fundamentally two possible reasons why fewer women become programmers: either A) they are prevented from doing so, or B) they merely don't want to do so in the first place. If the actual predominant reason is the latter, then trying to coerce additional women to become programmers against their natural inclination (or, vice-versa, to try to restrict men from becoming programmers even though they want to) is unjust.
I think it would be prudent for somebody to prove the problem exists (i.e., that the predominant reason is A, not B) before trying to solve it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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'?
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!
There is no intrinsic value in someone's bodily traits that they cannot control, so "male and pale" are irrelevant factors for indoor jobs that aren't physically demanding. Adding vaginas and darker skin (or subtracting the same) has no effect to the ability to write code, create procedure analysis reports, put toothpase tubes in boxes, or use a microscope. Gender parity is flat-out irrelevant from the standpoint of hiring someone in a business to perform specific tasks.
Not even remotely true. The diversity of viewpoints exposed by hiring as broad a variety of people as possible make for better decision making, better analysis, and ultimate better software.
Here's another interesting way to examine it: in "gender-dominated job" arguments, replace "male/female" with "tall/short" and see how the emotions change. Gender naturally being a binary trait only makes it lower-hanging fruit for an "us vs. them" discrimination war, but perhaps there aren't enough short people in tech either! Why aren't we seeing a "more short people in tech initiative?" People are just as likely to be discriminated against for their height as their gender.
Ok, I'll bite. Having a decent variety of people of all heights (from very very tall to quite short) on a team would certainly allow you to design a better shelving system — the diversity of viewpoints allows for a much broader basis for design and accessibility. In this case "viewpoint" is even used literally: when you're 6'3", the top of the fridge is a shelf, and when you're 5'2", the top of the fridge is invisible.
More industry diversity is good, period.
That's an argument why 50/50 parity isn't possible, not an argument why it's not desirable.
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.
Or... you know... hire the best person for the job, not set a goal of having a 50/50 distribution?
Makes sense for the employee, but not for the employer; for the same reason that having a football team made up entirely of quarterbacks is a bad idea. A diversity of hiring (not just gender, but age, experience, background, and yes, skin colour) makes for a more diverse team that understands a much larger potential target market. It also has a much broader base of experiences to draw from during planning and decision making. All of this ultimately results in better software and better products.
I appreciate what you're saying. I would like to add that diversity of viewpoints isn't necessarily achieved through diversity of skin color or gender (though there are undeniable socioeconomic forces out there that are race- and gender-heavy); viewpoints, quite literally, are all in a person's head. The value of viewpoint diversity is also dependent on what task is being performed. If someone is exclusively performing research and gathering hard data, diversity of viewpoints is of negligible value; if they're designing a product for public consumption, diversity of viewpoints is often more valuable than gold and can make or break the product.
Agreed, with one tiny exception — undetected bias in gathering hard data/sampling can cause huge problems... diversity could potentially help with that.
, then there is the distinct possibility that the teacher will deny access to the class for some male students and recruit female students to take their places.
Well, that would be the injustice, not the incentive to recruit women. If resources are scarce, then some fair method of rationing should be employed. First come, first serve. Random lottery. That sort of thing.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Are you sure you haven't got that backwards? 50/50 parity is certainly possible (for example, if you threw out all the excess male programmers, made additional females do programming at gunpoint, or some combination of the two), but achieving 50/50 parity using either of those means would not be desirable.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
...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
No, the goal is to take the jar from 80% men/20% women to 80% men/ 80% women and keep the total payroll cost the same. I welcome more women to the field, and I'm always pleased to see schools get more cash, but this particular move by Google is about increasing the supply of coders overall.
Nullius in verba
It's hard to say without understanding more. Why are you trying to help these white people get better grades? Is there some problem you are addressing or are you just being a racist dick?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
Mechanics, plumbers and electricians are all paid rather well.
. . . 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.
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.
If I read it right, it's capped out at $2500 for four female students. So even if they fill all 25 seats with girls, they're not making any extra bank. It's more likely that they'll be lucky to hit the cap with 4 girls in a class with 20 guys.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
But right now, girls are losing out due to other factors (historical, societal, biological?). Presumably you have two objectives:
a) Bring up the girls while,
b) Not pushing down the boys
So the boys get exactly what they had before: a chance at programming instruction. If the incentives work, the girls get access to jobs that have traditionally been the domain of the boys. That the boys have to now share the teaching resources given to the girls is sort of the point...
The ideal situation is that the top boys will still stick with programming, but the top girls will now have a shot. The lower-tier boys will lose out unless additional teaching resources are provided. Again, that is sort of the point. They can compete in some of the slots that have just been freed up in the fields of education and nursing.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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
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!!!
Men can't bear children, work is the only thing that gives their lives meaning. They also have to pay for dates. Women should get a stipend to cover gas, lunch, and tampons, but it's only fair for 95% of the payroll to be reserved for the pathetic males.
There... FTFY.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Maybe not in your country, but in many those fields are nicely paid..
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
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.
Are we talking about pay in this story? No. Employment and pay is somewhere that discrimination is (mostly) considered unacceptable. This does not apply to performers.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Whenever you feel confused as if something is discrimination think on the opposite. What would happen if it was the other way around? See?
Because that's what you end up doing in high-school computer classes after you've finished your work, and high-school computer classes are so easy that anyone with enough talent to be a decent programmer finishes the work really quickly.
My friends and I, along with a bunch of non-geeks who just wanted an easy A, took a CCNA class in high school. We spent literally 90+% of our time in that class playing Counterstrike or Starcraft. (The non-geeks were less adept; they spent 50-80% of their time playing browser-based games or chatting with each other.)
It's also what the CS majors do in college.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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?
And this is a perfect example of exactly what I was talking about. Using 95% of a handful of CEO positions being male to try and paint over the enormous number of men *dying* on the very bottom while women vastly outnumber them (almost more than 3:1) everywhere else other than that miniscule handful of the previous generation's holdouts in the very top.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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?
Rule of Acquisition #3: Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.