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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?
So lets have some discrimination of boys to fix it!
Makes perfect sense.
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.
...so they can pay them less. amirite?
Then you are not going to be very productive anyway.
If you have to bribe people to code, they clearly do not enjoy coding.
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?
Which is funny in a sad kind of way, because it leads to programs like this one. It's the circle of life, fueled by the angst of misogynists*.
There's a lot to criticize about the implementation of this program, but dipshits like the one we're talking about make it clear why some facets of the program have an appeal.
*Referring to the asshole we're referring to and his "women are tricky" as the misogynist.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
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.
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.
It teaches that women are weaker, less capable, and less useful unless given something that man aren't (effectively punishing the male students for no good reason other than they were born male.)
Of course, try starting an official "United Caucasion College Fund"....
This country is so full of $#!+ with it's claims of "equailty" and non-discrimination....
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"!
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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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.
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.
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
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 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!"
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.