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Google Is Offering Free Coding Lessons To Women and Minorities
redletterdave writes: According to a blog post from Gregg Pollack, CEO of the Code School, Google is paying for three free months for any women and minorities interested in tech to expand their skills. The offer is part of Google's $50 million "Made With Code" initiative, which aims to help close the gender gap in tech. While Google is also offering the same vouchers to the women in attendance at its annual I/O developers conference this week, the search giant has released an online application that's available to women everywhere. Google says its available vouchers for women number in the "thousands."
I don't even know what you're trying to say. How do you propose to fix the obvious and real problem of underrepresentation of over half of our population? Is it to have more classes dominated by white guy brogrammers? Get the one token girl in there, right?
Your attitude is the problem. I'm going to make some assumptions, here: you're a mid- to late-twenties white guy. You've never been in an office full of people who are different than you are. You've never spent any time in a work environment in which you have no peers of your gender. You have _not the slightest clue_ how much privilege you have had and continue to have.
I _am_ a white guy who had a very large amount of privilege globally-speaking, but through various life experiences I have developed the ability to recognize that. You should, too.
People who espouse this attitude are scared that they won't be able to get a job because they're the white guy who showed up. That some woman who is better than they are is going to be allowed to show that she is good, and it's not so easy for you to walk into a job.
I find your dismissive attitude repulsive.
If someone offered something like that for white males only,
They essentially did, the fallout from that is why we have the problems they're trying to fix.
Well, here's the thing: it is, but... in this country, there is a broadly acknowledged scale of power and influence wielded by various groups. At the top (sorry!) Western European derived white men. Until the ... oh, let's say the 70s ... this dominance was universally acknowledged and unchallenged. And from their lofty pinnacle, where they are automatically taken seriously and respected unless they are truly vicious imbeciles, they looked down and said, "thus it has been decreed by the gentle Lord almighty."
There were always exceptions and complications - a middle-class afro-american in New York may have been much better off than a white male hillbilly (though that hillbilly probably thought he was 'better', for various pseudoscientific and religious meanings of that word). And there may have been women who were truly in charge of men (mothers over sons, sometimes, and husbands, less often). But these are, after all, impressionistic and statistical verities.
It is also broadly (if not universally) acknowledged that white men reached that pinnacle of influence and power through a variety of means, including thrift, hard work, inbred talent, high self-image, self-confidence, and taking things from others, backed by disease and an army. Go several generations down, and the appalachian who settled on free land that the US army had liberated via ethnic cleansing becomes a legendary hero, raising his self up by his own bootstraps with no help from nobody, particularly not from no candy-ass Eastern government.
So, here we are, and some privileges are being handed out to non-white non-men. The men, natch, cry "racism" and "sexism". To which we can only say, "well, okay". It's a classic tactic to declare everyone even and the battle over once you've taken all the prizes, and then cry later when someone wonders if it's really fair. It's also classic at that point to say things like "life isn't fair."