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?"

Comments

Sex discrimination.

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this not sex discrimination? Or does the US not have such laws against discriminating based on gender?

Re:Sex discrimination.

[squiggleslash]

Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!

It might be worth determining why "sex discrimination" is an issue, and seeing whether the concept is a problem in this case for the same underlying problems, rather than simply jumping on it and implying it's wrong because it's discrimination.

In particular, we are NOT in a situation where men/boys feel they're unable, or that it's undesirable, to follow a career in the computing fields, and the policy above doesn't and will not change that. Should that change, should men genuinely end up being excluded and unable to enter a legitimate career field like this one, then we obviously need to re-examine the policies in question.

We often say "X is wrong" as shorthand for "X, when done with the effect of Y, is wrong". We say, for example, that kidnapping is wrong. That doesn't stop us from non-consensually grabbing suspected kidnappers off the street, handcuffing them, stuffing them in the back seat of a police car, and after following a lengthy legal process to make sure we got the right person, sticking them in an 8x8 cell they can't escape from. How is that not kidnapping? Well, it is kidnapping, but it's considered acceptable for a reason...

Re:Sex discrimination.

[Opportunist]

Even hardcore feminists start to disagree with "positive discrimination", i.e. preference of women to men when hiring. Because it defeats the goal of equality and equal treatment.

As long as it remains, the misogynists will have the argument that the woman only got her position because she's the "quote female", the woman that had to be hired to fulfill some kind of bullshit law. She can be successful, she can be not only good at her job, she can be better than any man in the role, yet still she's going to be the "quota woman".

If you want equality, start at being equal. Slap every HR idiot with the book of law if he doesn't hire you because you're a woman, but don't insist in getting a "woman quota". You're hurting the struggle for equal rights more than the HR idiot ever could.

Re:Sex discrimination.

[Thanshin]

So if you are a white straight male, or in some cases a male period, you are not a "protected class"

Think of the male periods!

Re:Sex discrimination.

[CrankyFool]

You misunderstand the concept of a "protected class."

Employment law indicates that discrimination or harassment based on protected classifications is illegal. A protected classification is something like "gender," but not "being a woman." So if you discriminate against someone because she's a woman, that's illegal because you're discriminating based on a protected class (gender); and if you discriminate against someone because he's a man, that's ALSO illegal because you yet again are discriminating based on a protected class (gender).

Same thing about race, national origin, and a few other classifications (military service, in a few states sexual orientation, etc).

That doesn't mean, however, that you can't have a charity that focuses on one gender or race, or an organization focused on one gender (e.g. girl scouts or boy scouts); it also doesn't mean that an entity seeking to donate money must donate money equally to all genders -- protected classifications are an area in employment law, not every facet of life.

Re:Sex discrimination.

[bmo]

Why women apparently feel unable or unwilling to following a career in the computing fields.

Just look at the comments here in this "enlightened place."

Assholes abound.

--
BMO

Re:Sex discrimination.

[serviscope_minor]

As long as it remains, the misogynists will have the argument that

The misogynists will always have an argument because they're working from an unshakable personal assumption that they are superior because of their gender. There's really no point pandering to them since they'll just writch to another argument.

You're hurting the struggle for equal rights more than the HR idiot ever could.

Except, well, no. I wish I could find the citation for this, but my google-fu is weak today.

There was quite recently a big study done across academia on the relative qualifications (which in academis includes things nicely numeric like number of citations and number of publications in journals with a certain impact factor etc) which seemed to do all the right things controlling for the different gender ratios in different subjects etc.

End result: the US with it's huge positive discrimination drive has the situation where men and women appear to compete opn an equal footing.

For Europe which does not, women on aberage required substantially better records for the same job compared to men.

So while what you say would be 100% true if there wasn't massive discrimination, there is unfortunately, massive discrimination.

Re:Sex discrimination.

[Attila Dimedici]

What, you still think that the actual wording of the law matters any more?

Re:Sex discrimination.

[Shadow of Eternity]

Men are 70-90% of the homeless and well over 90% of workplace deaths and suicides but barely 1/3 of college graduates. Not only ARE we in a situation where men are unable to follow a career in these fields, we're in a situation where men are unable to follow a career in virtually EVERY field or in many cases even *continue to live*.

I'd say we've got a pretty big freaking problem.

Re:Sex discrimination.

[MightyYar]

If I chose to go to a strip club, I would feel appropriate tipping the (female) dancers but not the (male) bouncers with my privately owned dollars.

No, man, you have to get a random dance from either a dude or a lady. And they have to be a random age and weight. No discrimination allowed :)

Discrimination of girls is bad and unethical

[jopet]

So lets have some discrimination of boys to fix it!

Makes perfect sense.

Re:Discrimination of girls is bad and unethical

[LWATCDR]

So a program that would pay basketball programs for having more white players would be okay? How about one for straight male fashion designers?
Sorry but this is discrimination in the form of incentives. I would rather see money spent on putting good tech teachers and technology in low performing schools so you help everyone in an area to have greater opportunities. I agree that teachers need to provide the same opportunities to everyone but putting a bounty on one group will by it's very nature cause that group to get preferential treatment.
I often wonder if the the cultural issues are more the women not going into tech at an early age vs men. Hopefully people like Jerry Ellsworth and Marissa Mayer cand help turn that around.

Re:Discrimination of girls is bad and unethical

[Opportunist]

If the teacher can only hope to get paid if he teaches girls, it pretty much means boys are disallowed from participating.

Tell you what: Try to start a contest like that with the stakes reversed. I.e. get paid for boys and get jack for girls. Then watch the shitstorm.

Re:Discrimination of girls is bad and unethical

[VortexCortex]

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. I mean, we don't have a shortage of STEM workers.

Hell, even the girls that DO like to code are looking at Silicon Valley, where you're considered dead at the family raising age of 40, and making far better decisions about the future than the silly guys who will do what they like to do whether it's very profitable or smart in the long term sense -- Just look at the Mathematicians and Scientists who scrap and fight for funding, they're not doing it for the money... You can code for a hobby and make games or something, but have a real job elsewhere that's got more stability than churn.

So what's the deal? If they know men and women are different, and that cross-culturally more egalitarian societies have even larger sex differences (probably because people are more free to do what they like doing), then they know no amount of teaching girls to code is going to fix the "gender gap" in the shitty STEM fields. So what's up with all the claims of anti-women discrimination when there isn't any evidence of that at all in the west? Ah, well they can leverage false guilt and shame and say, "We tried as hard as we can! We have a shortage of female workers in STEM! Title IX! Let us have more (lower paid) H1B employees and to correct the SEXIST M:F ratio!" You don't want to be called a SEXIST even if we have absolutely zero evidence of that, do you?! Ugh.

Yeah, that's exactly what's going on. To be perfectly clear: We can accept that our gender differences will produce trends in the workplace without limiting individuals to only following the trends, and without or shaming them if they do so. However, all this inequality nonsense is rubbish. Equal Opportunity won't produce equal ratios of M:F because males and females are different! Look, it's not sexist that there are so few male romance novelists, right? Guys just don't want to do that job nearly as much as women do. Where's the research that shows the percentage of girls vs guys that actually enjoy STEM work (not just those that think they'll enjoy it as a prestigious high status position, then bail, like 80% of female participants from my gamedev group, when they realize how much time and social life they'll be sacrificing for thankless work mostly no one will appreciate)? I mean, you'd think that before shouting "SEXISM" they'd at least want to know for sure that it's not just women opting to take a different career path (like therapy, psychiatry, teaching or other female dominated fields), Right?!

Wrong. Where's the outrage that there aren't enough male teachers, therapists, romance novelists, or more female coal miners, brick layers, waste management technicians, etc? Isn't that "sexist"? These Social Justice Warrior campaigns are just self selecting data and refusing to test the null hypothesis so they can leverage false victimhood to suit their political and economic agendas just like they've been doing so for at least the past three decades. You can expect as much from these fucking sexist and racist bigots, always. Not satisfied with making College into a social justice indoctrination camp they're bringing the totalitarian Orwellian bullshit to the lower grade levels; The better to brain wash your kids with, my dear.

Next thing you know they'll want

It would be inequal to provide equal rewards

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It would be inequal to provide equal rewards

[redmid17]

There's also a complete inequality in girls graduating high school, enrolling in college, and graduating college. I'm all for making sure that girls are given every opportunity to succeed and not prevented or discouraged from going down a path they want to try, but frankly there are many larger issues that need to be worked on before you started down this path? That said, it's Google's money to do with as they please. They clearly see some benefit to this and it doesn't mean that the money they donate here would have gone to equalizing the current gender gap in education or that they don't give money to that cause already.

clearly google wants women developers

[kcmastrpc]

...so they can pay them less. amirite?

If ur not coding because you like it . . .

[walterbyrd]

Then you are not going to be very productive anyway.

If you have to bribe people to code, they clearly do not enjoy coding.

Equality? How about sports?

[Andover Chick]

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?

Why is that a problem?

[walterbyrd]

> 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?

Re:Why is that a problem?

[jbeaupre]

Unless you visit your local shaman for healthcare, there is probably quite a bit of technology involved.

Premise for a movie

[korbulon]

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.

Politically correct sexism

[Tridus]

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?

Re:I'd say your extrapolation of 'people you know'

[mwvdlee]

0 in 5 is statistically about right, considering 6.6% of nurses in the US are men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

title ix issue

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

Girls are discouraged from entering the field

[unimacs]

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.

Please

[machineghost]

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.