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Girls Take All In $50 Million Google Learn-to-Code Initiative
theodp writes: On Thursday, Google announced a $50 million initiative to inspire girls to code called Made with Code. As part of the initiative, Google said it will also be "rewarding teachers who support girls who take CS courses on Codecademy or Khan Academy." The rewards are similar to earlier coding and STEM programs run by Code.org and Google that offered lower funding or no funding at all to teachers if participation by female students was deemed unacceptable to the sponsoring organizations. The announcement is all the more intriguing in light of a Google job posting seeking a K-12 Computer Science Education Outreach Program Manager to "work closely with external leaders and company executives to influence activities that drive toward collaborative efforts to achieve major 'moonshots' in education on a global scale." Perhaps towards that end, Google recently hired the Executive Director of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), who was coincidentally also a Code.org Advisory Board member. And Code.org — itself a Made With Code grantee — recently managed to lure away the ACM's Director of Public Policy to be its COO. So, are these kinds of private-public K-12 CS education initiatives (and associated NSF studies) a good idea? Some of the nation's leading CS educators sure seem to think so (video).
... wait to see if this increases the number of women taking these courses and going into CS. If it does then that suggests that women are interested and just needed the right environment or some encouragement. If it doesn't we can conclude that they just are not interested because of genetics or whatever.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They seem to be backing googles blocky instead of MIT's Scratch
Is there a downside to this?
Thanks!
The program makes all sorts of sexist assumptions like 'how to make bracelets', Dance games, etc. It automatically assumes that girls will only be interested in fluff projects not real world problems or the day to day grind of coding.
They need to show all sides of the industry instead of trying to candy coat it.
Are you a girl? Great! Here's all kinds of grant money to help people make that happen.
Are you a boy? Get out of my classroom, if we have too many of you it will threaten our grant money.
That's "progress" for you.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
End of story.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
That sounds like the older generation. The modern-day "brogrammers" don't fit that profile at all.
So now Google thinks they need to pay women to learn to code? What an absolutely sexist campaign. Women are plenty capable of learning to code, they don't need cash payouts by patriarchal companies; this is akin to prostitution and Google should be ashamed.
Unless people have changed, good programmers - and I'd count myself in those ranks in my past - don't need to be encouraged. I'd have cut off my arm in my younger days to get access to what people have for free now.
Based on my interactions with students through robotics programs, etc, the kids that are going to do this are going to do it anyway.
This is good money after bad. Girls that are going to code will do so anyway; nobody is crying about the lack of men in primary education or nursing. Coding is a solitary endeavor and very little is going to change about that. I recall the millions spent on "women in engineering" programs - and by and large, those percentages haven't moved either.
Would love to be wrong.. but I doubt it.
Ah, the good old days, when civil rights activists fought for equality. Much better than today where the fight is typically for special rights and inequality.
There's been an ever-increasing push over the last 10 or 12 years to get more girls and women into tech, with almost no visible results; in fact, the number of women in tech has been declining for decades. This seems odd at first, but the reason this push is constantly being attempted at all is that it's part of a larger effort to increase the pool of applicants and decrease salaries. It's the same reason that Facebook, Google, et al. want to increase the number of H1-B visa workers.
There is nothing stopping a girl or woman from learning programming/networking/etc. if she wants to, and these increasingly bizarre, desperate, and creepy attempts to lure in women will end up pushing away the ones who might have pursued tech careers otherwise.
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
Those fucking douche monkeys should all be sterilized so they can't reproduce another generation of fucking shitty ass javascript and ruby programmers.
I can say for certain, that in the world of Enterprise-level IT and application development, these people do not stand a chance.
I don't blame misogyny for girls not getting into programming, because I don't think computer programming is necessarily characterized by social interaction. The lone "cowboy[/cowgirl] coder" is much more of the norm than our zealous gender imbalance adjusters think.
When I was getting into programming in the 90's I certainly didn't rely on anybody else's affirmation -- I learned how to program sitting by myself at my computer(s) with very little in the way of two way communication with the outside world. I realize it's not the 90's anymore, but the argument that says you have to have a vibrant Twitter presence and go to local programmer meetups to be a coder today is, quite frankly, hogwash. It's about the code, friend.
Here's another theory that I will probably be flamed for -- maybe girls don't get into programming as often for the same reason that female deer don't bash heads against each other as often as the males do. Maybe it boils down to testosterone. Males of many species have an impulsive drive to accomplish certain things, and in humans' case this is largely independent of intellectual aptitude. Yes, girls are smart. Many could be good programmers. But do they want to? Are they driven to? Am I (at least partially) driven to my peculiar lifestyle of being glued to a screen and eschewing much social interaction because of testosterone? ("Yeah, you'd like to _think_ so" I can hear my naysayer naysaying.) But these are questions I honestly ask.
Because sexualization of women whenever the topic of women in IT comes up is a great way to interest more women in IT?
"Close the door! What, were you born in a barn?" -- Police chief, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
>Much better than today where the fight is typically for special rights and inequality.
No it's not. That's just something the ignorant conservatives claim as they see their white christianist privilege fading. Have you immersed yourself in the wingnut hate-radio/loon-blog/Fox News subculture?
She would most likely start cutting down one of her microseconds to strangle some folks. We don't need to do stuff like this we need to get kids to learn from the beginning that
1 Girls are not SEX OBJECTS
2 Smart and Pretty are not exclusive of each other
3 Some girls can do Math and some boys can't do Math (and science and tech and...)
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Why doesn't someone put fifty million into figuring our why fewer young men are graduating from universities than ever before, instead of trying to "lean in" on what feminists perceive as "soft skill white collar" industries.
Sounds good?
Maybe the "whatever" is that we are importing a steady stream of H-1B workers to reduce salaries, and that you're about as likely to find a job in IT after 45 as you are to find one in the NBA.
Maybe the "right environment" is where we only allow H-1B visas when unemployment is below 4%, and make it a felony to fake job postings to give jobs to foreigners instead of Americans.
45-year old guy here says you are full of it. Unless we are confining the job search a very narrow area with a history of ageism (Silicon Valley), I call bs on that kind of statements (statements I've been seeing for the last 20 years). Some of my colleagues/ex-colleagues are approaching their late 50's and are still getting well-paid, 6-figure gigs (both perm and contract).
If you are worth your shit, you will get a job in IT regardless of your age.
offered lower funding or no funding at all to teachers if participation by female students was deemed unacceptable
So basically the headline is completely debunked by the third sentence of the summary. It is NOT "all."
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
My salary has been steadily increasing and I certainly haven't found that there are skilled developers sitting idle at home. I can collect a small fortune in placement fees, if only I know some out-of-work developers I wouldn't be ashamed to recommend.
The simple fact from where I am standing is: There is a lot of work and there are not enough skilled people to do it yet we are only using 50% of the population.
But the sector has a massive negative image. Not even so much anti-women as anti-human. If you don't fight for yourself you won't get raises by just doing a good job and managers will happily have you do 80 hours with no compensation if they can get away with it. So a LOT of good developers I know have started their own businesses to get out of the rat race. You really got to love coding to stay with it when you can make money in consulting.
But part of the problem is the gigantic hatred you see on this site and sites like tweakers any time a story of this kind comes up. "The girls are getting some money, UNFAIR!". Crybabies. There are tons of initiatives to promote coding in general, plenty of competitions if you so wish, plenty of events to visit often with booth babes. No booth boys.
Let it go! Or at least accept that if this news story makes your blood boil, you got issues. And your issues are poisoning your work place or are even the reason you can't find a job despite your leet skills.
Nobody with real skills fears competition. If you see a new employee as anything but "FINALLY, some HELP, here is ticket 1000-9999, I take the remaining 1 million until you are up to speed", you are not a developer, real developers don't have enough spare time to worry about their jobs.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I am for it, as long as it isn't also construed to discourage the boys. That's the last thing we need to do to our "educational" indoctrination system.
In fact, anything that undoes the dumbing down to match the lowest achievers that has been done in the last 80 years or more needs to be undone itself.
Reading comprehension for instance, went down when they dropped phonics back in the 40's. That was a monumental mistake IMO. So now, in 2014, we have 3+ generations of people who cannot read the daily fish wrap in 15 minutes, even if it doesn't have anything in it but Ford advertisements. Not only that, but the writers (I hesitate to call them Journalists) of 75% of that drivel have no real command of the English language, both in terms of sentence structure, and spelling.
Our present system sits heavily on those blessed with a high IQ, teaching them how to scam for welfare rather than how to use those smarts to move us ahead.
I don't personally care if the child with a lower IQ ever "graduates" from high school. But the child with an IQ in the 150 range looks at the subjects being required today, is bored out of his skull, and gets a poorer grade because he just doesn't care, there are many more important things to think about than a geography lesson based on a book whose copyright is 40 years old & 20% of the countries discussed don't even exist today.
I know something about that since I was one of "those kids". I quit school as soon as I could, and went to work fixing the then new tv's in the late '40's. Since, I've had fingerprints in some very unusual places, and eventually retired from a nearly 20 year stint as the very well paid, 30% above what the market size usually pays, Chief Engineer at a TV station.
Its a very short push to my 80th and having just survived a Pulmonary Embolism that about punched my ticket, I'm less inclined to STFU when something isn't right.
Seems to me that IT workers aren't worth that have been paid.
Some of them aren't. Some of them are worth more than what they are paid. Same in all careers and walks of life. Welcome to this thing that we call life.
I am all for intervention to ensure equal opportunity.
But I am opposed to interventions to manipulate equal outcomes.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
What does that prove? And "pander" is an emotionally loaded word...but you're using "queers and pansy [sic]" so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
You're assuming a base morality that a lot of Slashdotters don't share.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
And we wonder why we can't get girls interested in this field at a young age...
Some of the leading computer pioneers already have. ;) Willingly or not.
I know a couple trans women from Canada who use the phrase "tall woman with a laptop" as code for other trans women. Because apparently if you see a tall woman using a laptop in a public place, odds are abnormally high that she's trans. ;)
"Close the door! What, were you born in a barn?" -- Police chief, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
Focusing on the line that says "rewarding teachers who support girls who take CS courses on Codecademy or Khan Academy." Why should that matter? If they take a CS course from somewhere else does that mean they don't qualify? Seems more like drummed up business then actually caring about driving interest in CS.
Really? What did he say?
The only reason Google is doing this is they're about to get hammered for having a nearly all-male workforce. Truly, Google could care less whether this program actually accomplishes anything or whether more women get into coding. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, well, they can always say they've poured a few million dollars into the effort and they tried.
Frankly, I could care less whether the program works or not, or even the fact that it is aimed squarely at women. This is because a lot of coders out there today have no clue how computers work, and barely understand what they're doing. The whole idea that all we need to do is encourage people to code and we'll magically get more coders is ludicrous. Steinway could start a program to get more kids interested in playing the piano, and the result would be a million kids who could play "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star", and little else, and perhaps a handful of Harry Connick Jrs. Like surgery, or music, or higher math, or prose, it takes a certain amount of talent to be really good at programming, and there are only so many people who have that talent.
For a few million dollars Google has bought themselves a lot of good will, and probably staved off a lawsuit or two, without changing much of anything.
Proverbs 21:19
Asian males and white males get screwed.
http://www.thisismetis.com/rub...
Fancy, you substituted "Christianist" privilege for male privilege. I guess you're on the cutting edge.
One of the side effects of white-knighting is that now and then you'll find yourself tilting at windmills, as you're doing today.
Nobody is complaining about competition; the problem is the tech giants' efforts to undermine skilled workers pursuing a career doing what they love in favor of less-skilled (read: cheap) ones who are only in it for the money. There is no regard for the quality of code produced, no effort to ensure that American tech companies remain relevant in a global economy, just the race to the bottom, and no amount of warm-and-fuzzy cooing about girls being just as good as boys or pastel websites about how awesome grrrrl coders are will change that.
Please also keep in mind that not only do women and foreigners tend to work for far less money than American men, they are much less likely to "talk back" or "make waves" or whatever else you want to call it, which is why there are concentrated, industry-wide efforts to push more women and H1-B's into tech, and no such efforts for more African-American or Latino-American men. It doesn't really get much more obvious, cynical, or self-serving than this, regardless of how desperately you want to believe in your own anecdotal evidence of a shortage that we all know simply does not exist. If your company can't find enough quality workers, then your company sucks at compensation, or recruiting, or advertising open positions, or anything else involved in the process of attracting, growing, and retaining talent.
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
Actually, that's borne out pretty well in the graph posted by Rei above.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nQ-n...
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The assumption behind providing equal opportunity is that it will lead to equal outcomes, at least statistically speaking. By necessity, manipulating opportunities means manipulating outcomes (unless, of course, you assume that manipulation of opportunities has no impact on outcomes). So you're saying that you're for improving the opportunities for women, so long as it doesn't change the current outcomes? Sounds not much different from the men who complain that women are taking their jobs.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Is the goal here to engage otherwise disinterested parties with the hope of said parties gaining employment?
Doesn't that suggest a shortage of viable, potential employees for those positions? Well? Are we really that short on coders that we have to start chasing currently disinterested people to fill those positions? Assuming for a moment that there is an abundance of currently viable coders on the market, wouldn't this then suggest that "better" employees for this position will be female? Wouldn't that then potentially lead to situations where otherwise disinterested women are being employed over interested men? Who's output would you expect to be better?
How does that make any damn sense?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Tokolosh differentiated between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.
Equality of opportunity is close to human rights, freedom from prejudice. e.g. everyone gets an education.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Equality of outcome is a political concept, an arbitrary target is set (e.g. with sex/gender often a 50:50 participation outcome) and individuals are supported unequally to achieve this outcome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
I agree, equality of opportunity is worthy of intervention, equality of outcome is not.
Whatever the gender, whatever the race, any program, any effort aiming to advance a certain sex (or a certain race) only is sexist (or racist).
Some of this sexism (or racism) might be justified by the past injustices — to straighten a bent stick, goes the analogy, you need to bend it in the other direction somewhat — but I don't buy it. Certainly not in this case.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
With aviation, the problem is that it's an extremely military oriented thing. How many of the male pilots out there are ex-military, it's a fairly high percentage. And until relatively recently...women were excluded from pilot MOS's. Not only that but as a hobby, it's an expensive one.
most of the guys currently dominating c.s. learned to code in their parents' basement when they were 12, because they wanted to.
And what was the gateway? Games! And what were video games considered? A guy thing. What did all those old video game ads show? Dad and son playing with mom and sis watching. So the basement coders existed because at that time, computers were considered a part of the "male nerd" sphere of things and not something for everyone.
"Computers are for everyone, not just nerds" really didn't start taking hold until the late 90's when the internet boom started and gave a reason for people other than nerds and gamers to own computers in the home.
Hey, what's your Tumblr user name?
Can you cite the birth statistics of how many more females are born compared to males?
As far as I know it's pretty much equal, but there are way more females alive because a lot of males die in war, in accidents, die naturally earlier in life, etc.
Why not any company gives some millions of dollars to stimulate boys to work at women dominated jobs?
Someone has a good explanation for this asymmetry?
Women-male dominated industries and occupations us and canada:
http://www.catalyst.org/knowle...
The assumption behind providing equal opportunity is that it will lead to equal outcomes, at least statistically speaking.
That's not an assumption I'm familiar with. It's common sense that equal opportunities won't lead to equal outcomes based on physical characteristics like sex... just look at the NBA. There is equal opportunity there, but there has only been 1 woman who played basketball professionally in the NBA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Meyers)
Not at all an equal outcome.
As someone who tutors in CS while finishing up his bachelors, I think this is great. Too many times I see women who have the skills to be a good programmer but don't have someone pushing them hard to be a great programmer because it's assumed that the field just "isn't for Women." Women can be just as good at engineering, programming, math and science as men and I think the industry as a whole can stand to get a bit more even in terms of gender representation. If anything, encouring the women in our country to get into these more technical fields could help drive the men who are competing with them to work harder and perhaps we'll be importing less tech savvy people from other countries. My $0.02.
your comment is insightful and I agree with this part very much:
It isindeed about the code...that's why this statement is off-kilter
see, 'testosterone' isnt some magic "bro juice"...it causes you to have serious "non-bro" problems like bitch tits if you don't *****balance it with estrogen****** and other hormones
it's a balance and our industry is ****OFF BALANCE*****
It's about the code, friend
have you seen code?
so many coding languages are ridiculously illogical, made with duct tape and peanut shells, hacked with other languages
it's a mess
it's alienating to someone who is used to, say, turning a screwdriver and always knowing what will happen with that tool when used
learning coding has evolved to become a Dungeons & Dragons-style death march
you *litterally* have to become borderline autistic to code properly
why, why would anyone choose to enter such a profession?
our industry is *built* to alienate women
we need them to help cut through the bullshit
Thank you Dave Raggett
Girls take a 50 million dollars in a contest designed for them!
Film at 11.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Efforts to get women into STEM is largely a waste of money. It's not discrimination keeping women out, it's their own drives leading them elsewhere:
http://rixstep.com/2/20111127,...
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Yes it is, you've just been brainwashed. That's indicated by your hyper-string of ad hominem.
People like that don't want to interest women in IT. To them, a woman who is anything other than a warm, sandwich preparing fleshlight is horrifying. It's appropriate that they were labeled Anonymous Cowards.
Women are still far under-represented in the large coal mining and garbage collection industries. Obviously we won't have true gender equality until we have 50% women software engineers, coal miners, and garbage collectors. What are feminists doing about this egregious imbalance in industries other than STEM?
You are assigning assumptions, putting words in my mouth and then disparaging me for something I did not say or imply. Shame.
Let me set you straight. I hope for equal outcomes, and all power to women/immigrants/LGBTs/darker-skinned if they achieve equality (whatever that means), or even go on to dominate. So I am very much for change, disruptive change, even.
But affirmative action has a bad track record and ultimately is counterproductive for numerous reasons.
Yes, I am a dead white male, an engineer (the real kind), work in a high-tech design company. As a lead engineer I have chosen to surround myself with talented team members and guess what? The gender balance is even, although more male for the old-timers like me, more female for the juniors. We are happy and productive.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Our local schools won't support this because it is GIRLS only. I am all for getting women involved in anything really, but sexual discrimination is sexual discrimination regardless of whether you allow only boys or only girls, or only handicaps etc...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You seem threatened for some reason, in spite of a general lack of female participation in your field.
Removing economic stumbling blocks is one way to determine whether girls can be interested in IT.
Another way would be providing the more misogynistic men working in the field with crazy glue chapsticks.
Post what is ultimately a political topic on a technology forum and be shocked and amazed by the tech people dismissing the asshattery with a wave of the hand and going back to what they really care about... which isn't some collection of billionaires and politicians trying to spend money on things that will make us like them.
That's all they're doing. LIKE US... LOVE US... we do these things... we help koalas!... LOVE US... you see the same thing with actors sometimes when their career starts going sideways... they'll start getting really into the environment...
But this topic.
Sexism.
End of story... what more needs be said?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Is there any data on the lack of women in...let's say...welding? I've known of 1 woman welder in my lifetime. Where's the hype for women in welding?! This story is getting old fast. /. has a story on it every other month. Please find something new.
I won't post about boys vs girls in this post, that's not what's salient. What matters is temperament.
I used to work for the company that supplied the London Stock Exchange with internet services. They would tell us what they wanted, and we would make that appear on the internet for them. This was around 2001, a difficult time for any company providing internet services, particularly those who supplied the top 1%. We built a lot of software for them, fast, and brilliant.
I had a pool of about 8 people I could call on to create any project. Five of those eight people were males, typical males. We drank down the pup together, yelled, expressed our innermost feelings, fought, cheered, and did what males do together in the pub. The other three were women with social responsibilities, children, spouses and the like to watch after and almost never came to the pub.
Many of the males were what you might call brilliant, and some, genius. We hired well. But when assigning a project I would never place two or more of these "genius" males on it because they would, for sure, fuck it right up. The women, although they would never be recognised as genius provided something essential, temperament.
I would always assign one or more of the females, whoever had the temperament to reign in the and counterbalance the males on the project. Without them, the males tended to do a "half assed job" or worse. With the females, together, they put out excellent code.
Now, this isn't based on sex, though it is frequently divided along sexual lines, but rather the approach to code and work.
I for one support more "women" in CS, whether they are male, female or somewhere on the spectrum. Balance is greater than genius.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Where the fuck are these brogrammers?? I've worked in software for over a decade, in Silly Valley, NYC, and Boston.. with over a dozen companies of different sizes and industries.... and never yet met even a single person I would describe as a "brogrammer".
If anyone knows some real, live brogrammers in SF or LA, by all means PLEASE introduce me to them. I want to see one of these creatures first-hand!
Until then, I'm gonna go on assuming the brogrammer stereotype is a 100% fictional creation of the corpmedia.
sure that's fine, you're not a bro
i'm talking about scale...i don't care about *1* language made by a women...that's nothing
i want to see cadres of women programmers...actual **coders**
they'd definitely spruce up the place and make things interesting
Thank you Dave Raggett
Wrong, male babies are more common than female ones. 107 to 100 ---> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
More than 50% of living humans are female because of other factors as sibling poster mentioned.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
You have just done the same individuality-stripping stereotyping that you implicitly denounced.
Sure. What we know is that we have unequal outcomes. Some amount of this is likely due to inequality of opportunity, based on observing a lot of unequal-outcome situations before. Since inequality of opportunity can be subtle, it behooves us to look at seriously unequal-outcome situations and experiment to see what's going on.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
OMG Ponies++
Table-ized A.I.
"No, it's more like "why is ~50% of the country not pursuing IT?"... it seems like an issue that should be researched."
I think the appropriate answer to your "concerned" question should be along the lines of "screw you, misandrist pig".
Why is there absolutely no concern to research why 50% of the population (males) accounts for less than 40% of all college students (and continue to trend downwards)?
Given that education is ever more important in the information economy, shouldn't THAT be also an issue that should be researched?
Are boys not worth the same level of concern? Should companies like Google be skewing these ratios even more against male students?
How do you get equality in CS jobs? We tried tackling it from the top down, but people tend to react badly to proclamations from on high about actually start to push back against it. So now the effort is being made to start from the bottom up, getting more women into CS so that their presence makes the culture change and thus makes it easier for future women to follow in their footsteps.
Do you have a better plan? "Do nothing, there is no problem" is not a plan, BTW.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is simply a case of reverse discrimination, which harms things overall.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
With boys doing so poorly in our gynocentric school hell - they offer money only to teachers who encourage girls. They won't be happy until only .. 10% of college students are male, instead of the 40% and dropping now. Why not just offer money to falsely accuse male students of sexual harassment and then they can suicide at 13 or 14 instead of suffering through until the 20's before blessed death and escape of this male-hate society.
.
Unbelievable you probably can't see this.
I find this disgusting.
My daughter and one of my stepsons want(/wanted) to code games. There's a million and one opportunities available to my daughter. But my son's dreams were crushed pretty quickly because he doesn't learn in the "normal" way - he learns it with real-world examples, hands-on experiences, and while being allowed to fidget and doodle. But explain the rules to him and then give him a sheet of busywork and he's lost. Over and over he was reprimanded for the teacher's lack of ability to teach him in a way he could learn. Told he had no future in coding because he "couldn't" do things. Bullied and made fun of for mistakes and inability to sit still much more than a normal boy-child. But give me 5 minutes of doing things with him in the ways he can learn and suddenly he could do all that work he "couldn't" do.
That son is now 13 and has given up on coding (despite my efforts the drive was just killed in him before I got to him). My daughter is now 7 and already beginning to make games. She really isn't any better or worse than stepson was in the beginning. But she can sit still and learn in the "normal" way (i.e. the common girl's way) and she's a GIRL who's interested so they throw all kinds of opportunities her way. If she goes to a coding class and a boy bullies her? Or so much as giggles when she makes a mistake? It's stopped immediately. And here's a gold star for trying while you have a vagina.
It's obvious to me, even around my tits; you don't get equality by raising women higher. You get it by treating all genders EQUALLY. And if that means less women than men like to code? So what. Shouldn't we be encouraging kids to do what they want to do rather than pushing them into one thing or another because of their gender?
And if you don't want equality for boys, think about this: all of these girls are going to be screwed when (if) they eventually want to start a family; there will be no smart men with careers, no equals for them.
I don't agree that the educational system is more favorable to girls; there's plenty of cultural differences that are extremely hard to eliminate (there was a study of who teachers call on in California schools, once, and found that they tended to call on boys even when made aware of what they were doing). It treats the sexes differently, which is unfortunate.
From my point of view, the sex imbalance in college is worth investigating. From yours, it appears that perhaps men are less attracted to college than women.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Much of society sees IT in the stereotyped large round glasses and buck toothed, geek!. We actually had one woman in our department that didn't want people to know where she worked. I think she'd have rather been called a "street walker" than a member of the IT staff. OTOH it's not just IT, but most, if not all science jobs. As the one OWSer remarked in an interview after being asked if she knew all the good paying jobs were there, why didn't she pursue a degree in one of those fields replied, "Oh, that's too hard!". IOW they want to get good paying jobs without having to work for them and there is the social stigma in schools against good grades and even more so for science. This is as much the students fault as society and peer pressure. The "nerd syndrome". They are wrapped up in their field and have no interest in socializing, writing, or communicating. They can't understand that for almost any job, it takes a well rounded individual. This shows up in the quality of applicants we see in their attitudes, and inability to communicate. Many have problems putting, complete, coherent sentences together when talking, let alone writing. They may be geniuses, but come across sounding like airheads. We used to have computing contests for high schools at the university. Invariably a couple of schools would have teams of "computer whizzes". Not once did any of them ever finish. We'd give them a relatively simple problem to solve. They could write good code, but knew nothing about problem solving. What did they think we do with computers? Recently on one of the news groups, (might have been here) a guy was complaining about the system. He had good grades and claimed to have sent out over a hundred resumes with out one answer. It was evident he lacked writing and communications skills from his comments. However he could not accept that the problem was him and not the system. He'd lash out at anyone who tried to show him how to improve. Poor communications skills, poor writing ability, and a bad attitude that was apparent in his writing. Communications skills and writing ability are almost as important as your major and can get you in the door, or prevent the most skilled from entering. Problem is, most that lack those skills are the last to admit, or recognize the problem. It's just so much easier to blame some one or something else rather than changing because that takes admitting you're wrong and takes effort, a lot of effort to change. I was a computer systems project manager for a large, multinational corporation. Herding engineers, programmers, and techs could sometimes be like herding cats, but generally went well. In teams like that, being able to communicate clearly between disciplines is paramount. Those with good communications skills made my job easy. Those without didn't stay long.
To interest men in traditionally female occupations? If not, why not?
I've noticed that women from other cultures, specifically Indians, Pakistanis, and Chinese, are more likely than American women to get into computer science. This is despite those cultures having their own issues with women's rights.
I've noticed it both in college, where there were very few women in CS but of those women every single one was non-American, and professionally, where the vast majority of female programmers are non-American.
So why is this? I don't believe that Americans are somehow more sexist or misogynistic than Pakistanis, for example. My personal opinion is that the sexism/gender roles/stereotyping is a red herring. The reason women from those cultures participate in CS is twofold:
1. CS is more appreciated in those cultures. Look at the comments on this article calling high school boys who are into CS losers, neckbeards, virgins, etc. That's not how it is in the developing world. CS is awesome, it's a gateway to wealth, a ticket to travel the world if you want.
2. Women in cultures that face more serious misogyny than American women are better at dealing with it in America. I mean I know women from Pakistan who were not allowed to drive, had to wear a hijab or other head covering when leaving the house (and dress very modestly at all times), felt unsafe using public transit, etc. Then they come here and it's like, oh a guy made a joke, or oh look booth babes. Big deal. Guys will be guys. Laugh about it.
My plan for getting more women into CS (and I agree that's a worthy goal), if I were king, would first and foremost be to change the anti-intellectual culture prevalent in America. When smart guys are popular for being smart and smart girls are popular for being smart you'd see a lot more people go into CS, math, engineering, etc. And I'd tone down the crazy political correctness that teaches women to focus more on problems than moving forward.
Why the fuck does everything have to be equal? Not everyone deserves to be equal. A lot of people are better at their job than me, including some women, and they are rewarded appropriately for it. I do not have a tantrum because of this, and I do not feel that google should give me a billion pounds to fix this apparent crime.