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."

Comments

Asian

[wisnoskij]

So basically everyone who is not an Asian?

Need doublethink training

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd still like someone to rationally explain to me how giving such free benefits to women and the ever-so-indistinct category of "minority," specifically because of their gender and/or "race," (and for which those not in those categories are excluded) is not sexism and racism.

Re:Need doublethink training

[ganjadude]

if half your customers are women, is it not safe to say that women already like what you are offering?? as such why the artificial need for diversity??

I'd love some free Google classes

[MetalliQaZ]

But I'm a white male. I have nothing Google wants. :(

I don't know about this one...

[Alex Vulpes]

I get what they're trying to do, but this seems like the wrong approach. You don't fix discrimination with more discrimination, even if it's in the opposite direction.

Seems like it would be better to find out why the industry is so racial/gender imbalanced, and try to solve that problem (whatever it turns out to be) rather than covering up the symptoms.

Re:I don't know about this one...

[leereyno]

There is no problem to be solved.

Women who want to become software engineers are free to do so. There are no barriers. That women tend to choose other careers is the result of human nature. Like it or not, boys and girls are different, and those differences are immutable.

As for "minorities," the very term is meaningless. Anyone of any color, creed, sex, or religion is (in America at least) free to pursue these careers. Trying to bean count the number of Inuit who are code jockeys is ridiculous and ultimately degrading to those being counted.

Google is being shook down by the race and sex hustlers, nothing more. They company is all too aware that these free classes are not going to change the demographics of software engineers. They're doing this as a PR stunt to fend off the hustlers, who will eventually move on to some other target who is more willing to be shook down.

Men are an extreme minority in the child care services industry. Early childhood development programs at colleges and universities are essentially estrogen clubs. There are no men anywhere. Why? Because human nature is what it is, and the nature of men does not include such things.

Sexism and racism

[msobkow]

Sexism and racism are perfectly acceptable if you're against men and whites.

Re:Raising Interest

[Darinbob]

Maybe you grew up in an environment where no one said "you don't want to program, boys don't do that sort of thing".

And I didn't start programming because I wanted to write a program that did something specific, I started programming because I wanted to know how computers work. The same sort of thinking that caused me to take my toys apart to see what made them work, open up watches and make them never work again, and so on. Boys do that and parents may frown a bit, but often when girls do that (or did at my age) then parents are much quicker to step in and direct them to other activities that were approved for girls.

How many boys growing up were told "don't study so much, or you'll never find a good wife" or "girls don't like bookish boys"?

Re:Canceling out the problem

[russotto]

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?

I agree that underrepresentation is real and obvious; I do not agree that it is obvious that this is a problem, and I certainly don't think it's the sort of problem which is so dire that the ends justify nearly any means.

Is it to have more classes dominated by white guy brogrammers?

Please. You know brogramming was a hoax, right? That the reason the hoax was funny is because the stereotype of geeks is so far from the stereotype of nerds that the juxtaposition is funny. There may be a few brogrammers out there in a life-imitates-art kind of way. But it isn't and never was any sort of norm.

You've never been in an office full of people who are different than you are.

That's sort of amusing, as I'm the only white American on my team right now.

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.

I'm supposed to believe that I had and continue to have it easy because I'm a white man, and that this justifies any amount of discrimination against me? That any (e.g.) white woman has had it infinitely more difficult than me? No, I do not subscribe to your philosophy.

Unbalanced employment pool at Google

[mbkennel]

What else is a small minority at Google?

Programmers over 45 years old.

Funny, they aren't getting free classes. I guess youth privilege is still golden.

Re:Raising Interest

[Mr.CRC]

Are you lost? Did your time machine break down? Because the world you describe is the distant past.

I'm a compulsive electronics designer and computer hacker. I have oscilloscopes, power supplies, machine tools, etc. all laying around the house, even in the living room. My wife (Asian) has a M.S. in Physics and was a geek as a young lady, and now just wants to make dresses.

My daughter is welcome to use my equipment any time. We've tried to encourage her to be interested in making better toys using the tools. We've tried to encourage her to learn about electronics and build robots by buying her kits and spending time with her to complete them.

Guess what? The only reason she wants to build the kits is to get my attention, and the only reason she cares about electronics is because she needs my lab power supplies to power her dollhouse LEDs since I haven't finished the 8-channel dimming/driver board for it yet.

She's a girl and wants to do girly stuff, and no amount of surrounding her with equipment is going to change that. Unless something *intrinsically* within her wants to do it, she won't, despite that fact that her environment has been heavily biased in a "tech" direction.

What are we to do? Throw all her home-made dolls away and FORCE her to do "science and engineering" stuff?

All evidence seems to indicate that girls just don't want to do these things as frequently as boys.

Only people stupid enough to look at men (with penises) and women (with vaginas), with completely different hormonal systems, anatomy, and significant differences in brain structure, and declare "men and women are the same" could see a problem with this.

The ultimate irony is that the liberal feminists are in exactly the same camp as the old-school (Christian) conservatives that they think they are more enlightened than and liberating us from:

They hate nature! They do not want to understand nature, and are instead at war with it. Does anyone see this?

This is as fundamentally anti-science and inhuman as theistic religion, because only true understanding of reality and how to work WITH it is the answer to any of our real problems.