School Defied Google and US Government, Let Boys Program White House Xmas Trees

theodp writes This holiday season, Google and the National Parks partnered to let girls program the White House Christmas tree lights. While the initiative earned kudos in Fast Company's 9 Giant Leaps For Women In Science and Technology In 2014, it also prompted an act of civil disobedience of sorts from St. Augustine of Canterbury School, which decided Google and the U.S. government wouldn't determine which of their kids would be allowed to participate in the coding event. "We decided to open it up to all our students, both boys and girls so that they could be a part of such an historic event, and have it be the kickoff to our Hour of Code week," explained Debra Knox, a technology teacher at St. Augustine.

Comments

Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Shadow of Eternity]

they really should be reversing most of those programs. Girls are utterly dominating every aspect of education, including almost all STEM fields, to the point of being nearly 2/3rds of college graduates. At this point they're not "helping" girls, they're blatantly doing nothing more than sabotaging boys even further.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry about your tiny penis.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... what?!? Having worked in the S, E, and M of the STEM fields, at multiple universities, in multiple countries... you are full of it.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

they really should be reversing most of those programs. Girls are utterly dominating every aspect of education, including almost all STEM fields, to the point of being nearly 2/3rds of college graduates. At this point they're not "helping" girls, they're blatantly doing nothing more than sabotaging boys even further.

Careful. SRS and other SJW's will show up any minute now to label you a "neckbearded, virgin, fedora-wearing red-piller shitlord", because muh soggy knees. They'll probably "check your privilege" with a large rubber dildo in your anal cavity. How dare you defy the screeching radfem matriarchy! :P

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you share some source links that support your statements? Thanks.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw your meaningless anecdote, and this is about the US, not multiple countries.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to list girls dominated STEM fields?

Other then that, you are on spot. Boys are loosing in education a lot. Girls go to college more, girls graduate more, girls read more and get better grades while boys drop out more. The way school system is set up, boys are alienated by it. For some reason, field being girls dominated is fine while boys being more successful is a problem.

Things boys stereotypically like (adventure books, play fights, toy guns etc) are frowned upon and boys are essentially punished for liking them.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a social justice warrior, but then I took an arrow to muh soggy knee...

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

So what I'm getting out of this, is that even though schools cater to women and men can't graduate, they're still overwhelmingly hired for the top paying jobs? Therefore the only sexism going on is against men. Poor babbies.

What a incredible amount of cognitive dissonance you all must deal with daily.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[FirephoxRising]

He's talking about in education coming through now, I don't see many girls at work, but there are more in my uni class than men.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

The "top paying jobs" are a tiny minority, and only a handful of men or women will ever get anywhere near them.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

I agree.

Sexism exists, and is very rampant in society. However, its plainly obvious that the sexism isn't government imposed, its not made by tech geeks, or programs, or education, or business institutions.

You also have to be kidding me if you think it was a few computer geeks, engineers, or nerds of any era who decided, or at in any way formed mainstream society's gender rules. Before any of the social darwinist apologists come back here with some shitty science, throwing out terms they barely understand, not understanding how they don't apply, because its convienant for their political position, lets discus gender roles in larger society.

Gender roles come from two places in modern America: One, Churches and other bastation of traditionalism; Two, MTV, advertising, and materialist pop culture. These determine what people think they should be doing. Niether of them promotes women in technology, and its mostly people adherent to the standards set forth from either that self-re-enforce those standards.

Now this is where I tell you don't look at me. I'm an outcast, a nerd, a hacker, I have no say in the matter, regardless of being gifted with computers, both groups look at me as a freak and an outcast. I didn't make that society. Anything I do to change it will be met with open hostility because I am viewed as a freak, and very low on the totem pole of both. So this is I what I want my fellow techies to do. Simply repeat this, fold your arms, say we simply live in the society you made for us, that we have no say in, and let the mainstream sort their own fucking problems out, and welcome whatever girls want to try tech out with open arms. Also, don't namefag me. If you agree with me, make the idea yours and repeat it in your words, great ideas are meant to be shared.

I see a lot of us taking sides in the traditionalist vs materialist debate, and its a place where we have no place. The mainstream is looking for someone to blame, and I say we simply fold our arms and reply "its not our fault society isn't the way you want it to be".

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to show some statistics on this? The industry seems pretty male-dominated even in the younger age brackets, so if nobody's graduating why are so many men getting hired?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[_xeno_]

I only have my own personal anecdote, but I was the top boy in my highschool class by far. That didn't even get me into the top 10% of my class, though, since the top 10% were all girls. I think the only other boy in the honor society was a boy from the next year's class but I can't remember. (I know who the next highest boy in the school's ranking was but I don't remember whether or not he hit the cutoff for honor society.)

This was during the 90s in a public high school, so it wasn't like the population was simply unbalanced. This is hardly a new problem. Our education system simply doesn't engage with boys and hasn't for years at this point.

If you want links, though, it isn't hard to find them:

Itâ(TM)s Time to Worry: Boys Are Rapidly Falling Behind Girls in School
How to Make School Better for Boys: Start by acknowledging that boys are languishing while girls are succeeding.
Education: Boys Falling Behind Girls in Many Areas (Paywalled, so I have no idea what it says)

Those were just the top results on Google.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a university environment. From undergraduate through professor emeritus, men outnumber woman by a huge margin.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[rtb61]

We've tried the patriarchy and it's not really working all that well, quite poorly in fact. Perhaps trying out a matriarchy wouldn't be all that bad. The Mosuo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... seems quite interesting and likely would be far more socially balanced.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Fwipp]

You might not influence MTV culture, but you are part of nerd culture.

We all have a responsibility to make our own corners of the world better, and one of the problems nerd culture is plagued with is sexism.

Don't throw up your hands and blame MTV for poisoning nerd spaces - work with others to make your culture better for all nerds.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

One of those countries I've worked and lived in (and grew up in) was the US. Also, TFA starts off with the example of Maryam Mirzakhani, who is from Iran. Third example in TFA was from Italy. Further down, someone from the Phillipines.

So... your complaint was what exactly?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Fwipp]

Boys are loosing in education a lot.

Clearly.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Lokinator]

Ad hominem, much?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Boys are loosing in education a lot.

So... you're a boy, I presume?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[pepty]

This is hardly a new problem. Our education system simply doesn't engage with boys and hasn't for years at this point.

The thing is, I don't think the US school system was more engaging in the past. Sure, there were more vocational programs back then, but as mentioned in your links, vocational programs were traditionally offered to lower performing students who weren't headed for college. If anything school was much less engaging: more drills and fewer games, boring textbooks that were full of text instead of pictures, computer aided learning was learning to program, etc.

How about this: it's not that schools are less engaging than they used to be, it's that the outside world is much more engaging. There are more distractions than ever before for kids, and the designers of those distractions are much more skilled and have much better tools for holding their attention than in the past. At the same time, schools have decided to focus on attempting to make everything interesting instead of on giving people the ability to grind through stuff they find boring. The tenacity and discipline to slog through boring stuff is what gets you the opportunities and skills to do fun stuff.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[thesupraman]

Dont forget the elephant in the corner, which is is OH so fashionable to ignore.

Who is teaching our children?

Really, especially in younger education, go and look at the male/female TEACHER ratio.

Any women claim they are unfairly treated in education? BS. They ARE education now, if they are unfairly treated it is by themselves.

It is boys that are getting hammered, by a even increasing demand of a feminised education system for them to conform to feminine standards.

Want equality? Show me the push for more men in teaching!

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Teachers have above average pay? And esteem? Have you seen some of the education debates these days?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[the phantom]

It is a fairly well known problem that men and minorities are underrepresented in the teaching profession, particularly in the lower grades. If you were paying any attention at all to the teaching community, you would know that teacher education programs are trying to recruit and retain more men. A quick Google search to get you started...

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[retchdog]

sure, why not? logical fallacies only apply to logical arguments. when someone is just spewing bullshit, anything goes.

if females are dominating STEM fields by 2:1, i'll eat my shoes.

i agree that "incentive" programs are also bullshit, but why stoop to that level?

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[retchdog]

uh, yeah, i've had extensive elite education in STEM, in the US. it's mostly a sausage fest. statistics will back this up and, no, they're not fabricated by teh feminist conspiracy.

i have to conclude that anyone who's bitterly complaining about women having taken over STEM is just a delusional loser who probably just couldn't hack it.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at the public schools exclusively is unbalanced because it leaves out the many outstanding male students, generally ones from wealthy or privileged backgrounds, who attend private schools. I myself was among them during the 90s and although I wasn't the valedictorian I was in the top 5% of my class and it's my recollection that we had about an even number of boys and girls in the honors courses.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Shadow of Eternity]

Nerd culture isn't remotely plagued by sexism, it's one of the least sexist cultures out there. That's nothing more than the latest straw man in a long line of straw man invented by bullies to justify shitting all over nerds as the root of all evil. A hundred years ago pinball made people alcoholics and gamblers, thirty years ago D&D made people worship satan and molest children, ten years ago videogames made people violent, and today it's the misogyny-apocalypse on the internet.

Meanwhile actual female nerds say the opposite, and are promptly called "house ni**ers" and doxed by the latest round of hipsters who've found a new target for their bullying and mendacious handwringing.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

These are quality jobs with long-tenure, good time off, above-average pay, well above average benefits, and place of esteem in the US culture.

Place of esteem in the US culture? What? Teachers are reviled and despised all over the place, they aren't respected, they're denigrated for even having a pretense at the former anyway.

It's blantly sexist that so many government entities continue to give preference to women applicants, and that no special programs have been created to get more men into education fields.

No special programs have been created? Troops to Teachers is one that substantially fills the role. Others are MenTeach and Call Me MISTER. You may wish for bigger efforts, but this isn't new.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Shadow of Eternity]

No, it's definitely teachers actively screwing boys. They're literally being graded worse just for being boys.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[dhasenan]

> Any women claim they are unfairly treated in education? BS. They ARE education now, if they are unfairly treated it is by themselves.

87% of public school teachers are women. 44% of public school principals are women. Women's political representation is even lower. So anything institutionalized needs to come from men as well as women -- and we know there's institutionalized discrimination with so few women at higher levels in education.

In college education, women are roughly even with men in part-time positions. At the higher levels in full-time positions, though, women only comprise a third of university faculty.

Women can exhibit misogyny. This is especially true with unconscious bias; however, unconscious bias affects everyone in society. Saying "they're doing it to themselves" might have an element of truth in it, but the thrust of the statement is to deflect blame onto the injured party and avoid having to do anything about the problem. It's a combination of laziness and misogyny.

> Want equality? Show me the push for more men in teaching!

Eliminating the impact of gender roles on employment opportunities is an explicit goal of feminism.

Do you have any idea why most grade school and elementary teachers are women? It was introduced as a way of reducing costs when introducing public education. Women could be paid half as much, you see, to do the same work. That's why schoolteachers are paid so little today. That combined with the expectation that men must be the primary wageearners in a family prevents most men from becoming schoolteachers. If we paid schoolteachers a decent salary for something as important as educating entire generations of our citizens, the women in that field would have better quality of living, and more men would be attracted to the field.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

3rd Wave feminism is about materialism (jobs are a resource, we are fighting men for them), sexual liberation (we have sex with who we want, and if or when the kids come along, society (all men, or the guy I was seeing at the time, or the last guy I saw) pay for it), paternal monopoly (men have no right to their children, society and women have more rights than they do), and public shaming of men because they are men (many, many examples). It is a dogma of domination only a very small minority of real fools agree with.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/12/04/the-sexodus-part-1-the-men-giving-up-on-women-and-checking-out-of-society/
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/12/09/the-sexodus-part-2-dishonest-feminist-panics-leave-male-sexuality-in-crisis/

The net effect of this dogma is that upwards of 10% of men over 45 in the US are unmarried and have no children; in Japan that statistic is up to 25%. The trend is increasing 1% year over year, which means within the current 18 to 25 crowd in the US, about 30-40% of those boys in that group will never get married, and never have kids, out of choice; for Japan that statistic is going to be 45%-55% higher. Now if you look at the increasingly violent trends in fetishism in Japan and now the US, and the increase in "lad culture", the net result is eventually going to be something very, very horrific and bloody. Those roosters are starting to come home to roost; about once a month now, fetishist porn stars are ending up behind bars for maiming or killing people with drugs or various cutting tools.

If you treat men like animals, they will act like animals. And really, ever since Carrie Nation in the 1800's, that's what feminism has really been about, is about getting men not to act like a bunch of petulant children and to have some discipline and self respect.

How about we end this social equality bullshit before it does some real and permanent damage?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed with the sibling. Like most female-dominated fields, teaching is woefully under-paid and under-repspected. I commonly see people talking about teaching being a "passion" profession; that is, teachers accept the poor compensation because they are passionate about teaching such that the salaries only make sense if you consider them to be paid partially in being able to work a job they are passionate about. Other "passion" professions include other educational jobs like museum/zoo curators as well as jobs in academia.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Lehk228]

they're blatantly doing nothing more than sabotaging boys even further

this is the primary objective of feminism.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

But who controls the schools? The funding? The states? The federal government? It's the Republicans. Every level above the teachers is ruled by the Republicans. It is dishonest to say that women have any say whatsoever in education.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no, the teachers' unions control the schools, and they're radical anti-republicans.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[shutdown -p now]

Even so, you'd expect the proportion by any random factor X to be the same as in the general population.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Oligonicella]

This from an AC. Very worthwhile observation, especially with not cite.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

You are aware that CS is one of the few STEM fields that is still ridiculously male-dominated, right? The statistics you are quoting are so ridiculously not relevant it would be difficult to be more wrong about what you are writing about. Also this isn't a zero-sum game: efforts to deal with low female participation in computer science are going to go hand in hand with efforts to deal with low male engagement in education.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Bite The Pillow]

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskMen...

Define push, and further define the evidence you are willing to accept. It is out there. I don't argue that women are by and large the teachers. The unfairly treated comment is a straw man.

The question is about comp sci, and whether it is controlled by a gender. Not, as far as I can see, about education in general.

I have shown you, as you could equally discover, a push for more men in teaching. It is ineffective. How are boys demanded to conform to a feminised system?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine it would leave out equally as many outstanding female students.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Oligonicella]

I love how people referring to "successful" matriarchies always wind up pointing to primitive cultures.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[GoddersUK]

Biology and related sciences? At my uni (not in the US, but I think our two countries are comparable) hemistry (at UG and PG level, perhaps less so above because it will take time to filter through) is 50/50. Similarly for stats and the medical schools, among others. Source: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/srs/stati...

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Sample size is too small.

Even if it's not too small, if we assume the above comments chain to be making valid points, clearly the problem doesn't lie with female access to relevant education.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Ash-Fox]

Those roosters are starting to come home to roost; about once a month now, fetishist porn stars are ending up behind bars for maiming or killing people with drugs or various cutting tools.

I doubt it will come to that. Unusual fetishes do not translate to maiming or killing people.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[drinkypoo]

I love how people referring to "successful" matriarchies always wind up pointing to primitive cultures.

Which cultures develop technologically is only occasionally a result of specific leadership and is typically more a result of resources.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Ash-Fox]

Note: I am not the OP.

You might not influence MTV culture, but you are part of nerd culture.

What is nerd culture?

I admit I am technical, I like technical subjects, science fiction, programming, participate in hacker spaces.

We all have a responsibility to make our own corners of the world better, and one of the problems nerd culture is plagued with is sexism.

I have little idea what you mean by this? I picked up my copy of 2600 and I struggle to find anything sexist in this, please clarify?

work with others to make your culture better for all nerds.

I haven't really seen any sexism taking place in the activities I enjoy. They do seem male dominated, but I am not seeing any sexism which causes that? Back to my copy of 2600, what would you suggest I do to improve 2600 as a subscriber?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually non-primative matriarchies were more common than most realise. It was not unusual both in eastern and western cultures less than 200 years ago for the matriarchs of the family to control the purse strings of the family and give the working men a stripend for spending money.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how it usually works, you know. In order to unite people, they need a common enemy. Someone to blame everything on. It's all the better if it's as non-specific as possible. There was a time when it was fashionable to hate the Jews, for example. So a lot of groups bullied them because they were successful and others were not. We know how that turned out...

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[lucm]

This is a fascinating study because it shows that soft skills are rewarded better than hard skills in elementary school. This is almost unavoidable as teachers, themselves products of social science programs, have a strong bias toward process as opposed to results.

Unfortunately, this leads to students that are ill-equipped to face the highly competitive western business culture. Already we can see the damage: an increasing number of people who can't cope with reality without the help of big pharma (SSRI, benzodiazepine, opioids, cannabis, etc).

It is unfortunate that we are getting closer and closer to something similar to the "perfect society" in Demolition Man. See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[kenh]

Teachers have above average pay? And esteem? Have you seen some of the education debates these days?

Yes, the vast majority of public school teachers earn above-average pay. In NJ, the school district I just moved out of paid starting, first-year (no experience) teachers with a BA over $50K/year with full benefits. The average HOUSEHOLD income in New Jersey is around $60K/year. Teachers cry poverty because in many communities some students parents make more than the teachers do, and that makes them feel unappreciated.

Yes, teachers are held in a position of esteem in most communities - it is very common for parents to teach their children to not only respect, but try and emulate their teacher (every community in America is not an inner-city war zone). There's an interesting phenomenon - everyone I ask says 'I respect teachers and think they should be paid much more than they are (they typically don't know what their child's teacher is paid, they 'just know' they are under-paid - because the teacher's union says they are), but NO ONE ELSE respects teachers. Watch how parents act at parent-teacher night, they (typically) respect teachers.

The education debates are one-sided money-grabs with teachers crying poverty to taxpayers that typically earn much less than them.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Maxwell]

Read through the top then on this live list: magical Women outnumber men article list The list is constantly updated.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[shaitand]

I'd have to agree it's a sausage fest but I've seen zero indication it's for any reason beyond a lack of interest on the part of females.

Just because one gender tends to populate a field doesn't mean something is actually broken or needs fixing. A gender agnostic field should be built around what works best to advance that field not attempts to appeal to or advance a gender.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

oh me, personally, I'm all for being better than pop culture, but fighting it is going to be real hard. and again, no one wants to fight against pop culture, not the least because the same "feminists" who take a heavy hand to nerd culture, and the first to defend MTV and pop culture, along the same lines. Sexism, and even worse, flat out rape, and rape apologism seems fine as long as advertisement money keeps flowing. Thats my point.

The nerds don't have the stomache for an us against the world struggle like the hardcore/punk scene does/did, even if they have far more resources and far more leverage to fight it. When you start hitting back against the sources of advertisement money, you are asking for a fight with the last thing holding our capitalist economy together.

Thats what it will take. I'm willing to do what it takes, I am willing to unite various culture/counter-culture forces. You are not. Do not blame me.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

Consumerism will be the end of us all. In the eyes of MTV and material culture, women who don't fit the mainstream standards of beauty and feminity created soley for advertising purposes, and made to be sex objects aren't even really women.

Its like they are enforcing gender roles, and getting pissed off gender roles exist.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for Mosuoculture in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings. Log in or create an account to start the Mosuoculture article, alternatively use the Article Wizard, or add a request for it. Search for "Mosuoculture" in existing articles. Look for pages within Wikipedia that link to this title.

pseudo-intellectual bullshit. The main problem with patriarchy isn't patriarchy, its capitalism. Patriarchy never existed in a vacuum, but as a mere tool as part of larger systems. But it seems with liberalism, hate filled pseudo-science seems to trumph any real critique of the system. As expected..

Looks like wikipedia deleted your page because it doesn't mean standards. wonder why. Now off to the dustbin of history along with social darwinism, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, and the rest your politically motivated pseudo-science.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[loonycyborg]

Notice how proportion of men grows with target age category. I'd say it reflects some widespread notion of gender roles. Like only women should educate kiddies. I bet kindergarten/high school teacher doesn't get paid as well as college professor either..

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Fwipp]

"Willing to do what it takes" = folding our arms and abdicating responsibility?

Like, I'm literally a socialist with anarchist tendencies - I get that problems are structural and pervasive and that we need to overhaul some shit. I guess our difference is that you figure us nerds as a whole won't fight against culture, even though our differences from the mainstream are a common source of pride. And you know, maybe you're right, but that doesn't mean we can't improve it in small ways.

I figure that the nerds that won't fight against the mainstream (and continue to propagate harmful ideas from it while absolving themselves of responsibility) are part of the problem - and that nerds are the best tool we have to reform nerd culture. Like you observe, a lot of nerds are put off by non-nerd feminists telling them what to do, because it feels like more of the same bullying they're so tired of. That's why we need *good* nerds who are willing to lead by example and convince their compatriots to be less shitty - and to a large extent, we're succeeding.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you haven't had extensive, elite education in English. It's so bad, it casts doubt on the veracity of your statements.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

All of the alarmist MRAs in this post are acting like something is oppressing men now and they really missed the point of the entire post and ignored well-established statistics that NO expert or anyone knowledgeable would contest. Even anecdotally the overwhelming amount of men in the STEM fields is extremely apparent and universal across virtually any anecdotes that I've heard of. LOL at responding to intelligent posts by saying it must not be global/local when it is definitely a global trend and a local trend as well.

DON'T CHANGE THE SUBJECT. This is about STEM fields, not about other areas of education. The post is specifically about encouraging women via social programs to go into STEM fields. they want to make the argument that the boys should be allowed to program the Christmas tree by pointing to information on education which is completely unrelated STEM fields. At least some of the dishonest people in these comments must have googled and noticed there is a massive disparity in STEM fields. noticing this, they derailed the discussion. this post is not about other areas of education which this post is not about. They are getting into aspects of general education amongst elementary school kids. there are many discussions about education worthy of merit, but you don't dishonestly derail other discussions to have them! the people who haven't seen the statistics and don't have anecdotal experience in STEM fields should refrain from pulling statements out of their asses when they know but they don't have the proper knowledge to make those statements, especially in such an alarmist manner.

What happened to the discussion about getting kids interested in STEM fields and looking at the disparity at university levels? Is anyone, who is looked at the actual statistics were works in a stem field, actually contesting that the massive disparity in STEM fields is in favor of men? I did a very simple Google search and found a whole bunch of credible results immediately. I am including a link to one and a link to Wikipedia which summarizes and includes citations for various statistics of the disparity. there are actually many other sites that summarize these things as well and are easy to find but I'm not going to bother going through them all just to refute the doubters (who will say that any article, study, or other source isn't representative of the science which they have not seen any way) who refuse to do a basic search on stem disparity and from ignorance conclude that it's anything other than uncontroversial statistics. I've already posted this and I'm posting from a cell phone so it is annoying. Once again, there are no experts actually contesting that there is a massive disparity in STEM fields. They might disagree on why that exists, but clearly it exists.

I get sick and tired of whining MRAs who complain every time that someone is trying to correct an imbalance that is already greatly in favor of men and do so with complete ignorance of the factual reality. As someone else stated, there is no feminist conspiracy and the issue of STEM fields does show lack of balance in favor of men and please stop lying and spreading misinformation on subjects which you have no knowledge about. I expect some SJW like responses from MRAs saying how we must discuss this issue right here right now in this post because clearly hijacking every post about women's issues, where there is a disparity in favor of men, makes total sense in order to boost men up in other areas. God forbid we have a real discussion of these disparities without someone trying to make it like men are just being torn down to pieces by virtue of this and that we must discuss men men men, the historically dominant force in history. Sexist nonsense trying to silence women's issues via SJW tactics which MRAs claim to detest. space. I agree with another poster saying that these people probably just couldn't hack it in STEM fields and are whining even though the facts are completely against them and they presumably knew this on some level if they

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

All of the alarmist MRAs

PLONK

No need to read any further.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[fufufang]

It really depends on which branch of STEM. Biology and chemistry are more balanced, but if you study Computer Science, good luck finding girls in your own department. I think works need to be done to make certain branches of STEM subjects to look cool.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[goose-incarnated]

The only example of matriarchy[1] in the world resulted in a backwards, primitive, iron-age society which has never produced anything of value for the rest of mankind (or animal-kind, if you will). I don't think that that was what you wanted to show.

[1] The Mosuo aren't fully matriarchical either, to be honest.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

Just because one gender tends to populate a field doesn't mean something is actually broken or needs fixing.

This is true, in general and abstractly.

But in this case, the predominance of one gender in all STEM fields does indeed demonstrate that something is actually broken and needs fixing.

Nature, science, and common sense show that while consensus provides great short-term efficiency, diversity is universally superior to monoculture in the long term. This is as true in the marketplace of ideas and the STEM fields as it is in the jungle or on the farm.

There does indeed exist a systemic cultural bias pushing women out of technical fields. It exists as a thousand little things, none of which is individually morally incorrect, none of which ought be banned, all of which can be rationalized, all of which ought be examined thoughtfully. Correcting this bias requires not zeroing the bias -- highly unlikely and in fact not at all effective -- but a proactive encouragement toward diversity. To see this demonstrated mathematically, see: http://ncase.me/polygons/

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

No need to read any further.

This is about STEM fields, not about other areas of education.

FTFY

http://www.forbes.com/sites/wo...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Shadow of Eternity]

CS is 10% or less of conferred degrees, thank you for demonstrating exactly the kind of mendacious red herring people rely on to derail from the facts though.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Shadow of Eternity]

And in one post you demonstrate exactly the problem. Even when we're talking about men getting utterly fucked AND blamed for it at the same time women are the real victims.

Here's a thought experiment: Disprove an accusation of "objectification". You can't, because it's no different than "you're a witch" or "you're a communist".

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Shadow of Eternity]

Women are within 5% of parity in Math, Statistics, and the Physical Sciences three years ago. They're nearly SIXTY PERCENT of all biology graduates and at least that many if not a full 2/3rds or more of fucking EVERYTHING else.

The only one changing the subject here is you and the other shameless FUD spreaders trying to wave a red herring like CompSci that's only 10% of conferred degrees. You're a bunch of mendacious dissemblers screaming "pay no attention to literally every measure of academic success and every other degree out there, look only at our dishonest cherry picked outliers!".

It is an indisputable fact that women absolutely DOMINATE every aspect of the US education system from start to finish and top to bottom. There is no disparity anywhere in the education system which FAVORS men, only disparities ranging from profound to catastrophic which harm them, and it's disgusting that this is still not enough for people like you. It's not fucking derailing to point this out on a news story specifically about boys being openly thrown to the wolves.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Shadow of Eternity]

FTFY: http://www.randalolson.com/201...

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that poor short term thinking? There is a pool of intelligent people who would have the talent but don't seek it because of pressure to fall into other rolls through social norms. When ever somebody cry's about this being unfair, when the goal is to broaden the fields young woman envision themselves working in, it just seems really self centered and sheltered.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[NoKaOi]

uh, yeah, i've had extensive elite education in STEM, in the US. it's mostly a sausage fest. statistics will back this up and, no, they're not fabricated by teh feminist conspiracy.

I agree, but that sure as hell doesn't give them the right to be sexist, and disallow certain people from participating based solely on their gender. The Civil Rights Act, which has been law for 50 years, specifically disallows it. Just because it's in favor of a minority doesn't change it. And they weren't just favoring girls in cases where otherwise the merit was equal (affirmative action), they were specifically disallowing boys.

How would people feel if the sentence had instead read: "This holiday season, Google and the National Parks partnered to let boys program the White House Christmas tree lights," and instead they banned girls from participating? How is one direction of sexism moral, ethical, and legal, if the other isn't?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

The teacher who was actively screwing boys at my high school made sure she only screwed the 18 year olds.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

Teachers also have a much higher education level than the average worker. Teachers make below average wages compared to workers with the same level of education.

Where is the outrage over this?

For one example: this thread. For less outrage and more attempted solutions, I refer you to this post.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and the fact that most teachers are women demonstrates that indeed something is actually broken and needs fixing.
Also, most nurses are female, such a monoculture cannot be healthy. And most garbagemen are men, and surprisingly nobody tries to change that name into garbagehumans.
The problem is, how do we measure what the actual problem is? What is the non-broken ratio of the sexes? And how do You know that it is 50-50? If it wasn't 50-50, how would we know? If less women apply, how can we know the reasons for it -- is it the sex bias of the employers, or is it a free choice of the individual?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

Care to list girls dominated STEM fields?

Vaginal physics?

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TheRaven64]

I've seen zero indication it's for any reason beyond a lack of interest on the part of females

That's certainly true by the time that you get to university level, but the important question is why? One of my hats is to be responsible for computer science admissions at an all-women Cambridge college. From what we see from international applicants, it's pretty clear that there are cultural factors putting off women in the UK and US from the subject. We're losing out on some of the top talent because something is putting them off even considering the subject by the time they're 14-16 years old (applications are at 17, but A-level selection is at 15-16 and that's strongly influenced by GCSE choices at 13-14).

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TheRaven64]

If you want to fix the imbalance in STEM, fix this one first. There was a study a few years ago that showed that female primary school teachers who were insecure about maths were the biggest reason that girls were put off mathematical subjects. Girls, on average, develop empathy at a younger age and if they have a maths teacher who is not confident, then they pick up on it. If it's a male teacher, it doesn't have any effect. If it's a female teacher, then they learn that maths is hard for girls. Boys at that age tend to be totally oblivious to whether the teacher is unsure of the subject.

There are two ways to fix this: more men, or more women with a decent education in maths, in primary education. Given the shortage of the latter, more men seems an easy solution. Shame that we've decided that any man who wants to be a primary school teacher is pedophile...

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, could you please tell me where this STEM environment is where there are so many women? I should be so lucky to move there.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to list girls dominated STEM fields?

Women are a majority of Bachelor's degree earners in Psychology (by far), Social Sciences, and Biology. They are close to even in Math and Statistics (45.9%), behind in Physical Sciences, Geo-Sciences, and really behind in Engineering (20.5%) and Computer Science (25.1%).

Overall though, across all Science and Engineering fields, women are 50.4% of Bachelor's degree holders.

source

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what the numbers are for STEM fields, but I think it's fairly interesting that we have a big multi-media push going on to get girls in STEM fields. I don't see anything like that to address the lopsided gender distribution in primary education.

You don't see any of the massive campaigns to deal with education? Oh, you want to stop talking about trying to get good results in education and talk about gender distribution. In contrast, I don't think anyone is thinking that STEM fields are ignoring results. It's all about what needs the most work.

These are quality jobs with long-tenure, good time off, above-average pay, well above average benefits, and place of esteem in the US culture.

So... you're also in primary education? Or you're telling us all how economically stupid you are? Well no matter, you suddenly lost your will to look at numbers, so...

STEM average salary: $79,640
Primary educator salary: $56,383
Per capita personal income: $42,693

Average salary is above average, true, but I earned more as a STEM graduate student than the starting salary of a teacher. And this bit about good time off, place of esteem... um, have you even met a teacher after graduating? None of my friends that have gone into teaching have said how easy it is... always difficult to find full-time job, always working far more hours than the contract really says... I don't even know what argument you're trying to make about "benefits", as you don't seem to mention what these are.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Time_Ngler]

garbage humans -> waste collectors

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerd culture is rape culture. End of discussion. Nerds hate women because they know no woman will ever, ever want anything to do with a socially inept neckbearded smelly loser. That's why nerds fantasize over rape-related crap like Leia in a slave costume and so on. If you need a reason why we Cool Kids shit on you, just check yourselves in a mirror: covering you in shit is actually an improvement.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[AmiMoJo]

Whatever the reason for girls being pushed away from doing the things they want to do, we can help fix it. In fact we were doing pretty well back in the 80s and 90s, but then something went wrong and the numbers have dropped off quite sharply.

Part of it is a backlash from people complaining about sexism when they see people trying to help girls, but there are many other reasons and as you say most of them are nothing to do with geek culture itself. That doesn't change anything though, we have still have an opportunity to deal with it, as well as all the other problems with society.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[AmiMoJo]

The article you linked to does not support your assertion. She is talking about the past, when we know things were better because more women went into CS. The internet was a different place back then... She went on to IRC, where as these days it would be Google and StackExchange.

As she says in the article, girls today won't have her experience. Their parents have been warned about the internet, and while it's mostly nonsense we can't discount the experiences of people like Brianna Wu or Zoe Quinn, or the girl's own experiences when they want to play on XBOX Live etc. It's also interesting that even in her account the people on IRC assumed she was male.

I remember what it was like back then. People were nicer, there was more of a community feel to the net. The numbers confirm it - more women went into CS back then.

I agree that misogyny on the internet isn't some kind of apocalypse. It's a problem, sure, but the reasons why girls are not going into CS are deeper and more subtle.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[AmiMoJo]

I agree that it is a problem that males are under-represented in many subject areas, but that doesn't mean that the under-representation of women in CS isn't a problem as well. Since there used to be more women in CS there must be some explanation for the decline, and women tell us it's because of various factors putting them off. We can address those things, while not ignoring the other problems, so I don't see why you are getting your knickers in a twist so badly.

Only on Slashdot does the "because of problem A we must ignore problem B" logic seem to fly. Only on Slashdot do people expect everyone to address what they perceive as the biggest problem to the exclusion of all others, and berate them for even trying to fix the other issues.

Feel free to post some stories about efforts to help males in education. Thing is, Slashdot is a tech news site, and tech is the one area where males dominate, so it might not be on-topic. Even so, non-tech educational stories do get posted regularly so why not try?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[BlueStrat]

because muh soggy knees.

I used to be a social justice warrior, but then I took an arrow to muh soggy knee...

Wasn't Soggy Knee where a Native American swim team was killed or something?

Strat

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[AmiMoJo]

I agree, but that sure as hell doesn't give them the right to be sexist, and disallow certain people from participating based solely on their gender.

Fortunately they didn't. I read TFA and about the scheme they were participating in, and as far as I can tell it never excluded boys at all. The school didn't have to fight to get them in, they just went to the web site and followed the tutorial material.

The scheme was aimed at girls, sure. It never excluded boys though, they were free to participate as they in fact did at this school. The outrage and sexism angle seems to be entirely manufactured by people who either didn't RTFA or just like to rant and feel victimized.

It's the same with efforts to get more women to apply for tech jobs. People just assume that it means excluding men or favouring women even if they are inferior candidates. It doesn't. It just means making an effort to get more to apply in the first place, and then picking the best person for the job regardless of gender.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

while it's mostly nonsense we can't discount the experiences of people like Brianna Wu or Zoe Quinn

Actually it's pretty trivial to show that those don't count. Zoe Quinn actively went looking for trouble, she trolled a support forum for men and tried to make it look like they were harassing her in order to get her "game" greenlit on Steam. Didn't work that time, her static HTML wasn't greenlit as a "game". So she created a new harassment campaign around August. This one worked.

Brianna Wu is identical. She actively faked "death threats" towards her (and we know they're fake, they're word-for-word copies of death threats sent to gamers) in order to promote her freemium iOS game. (Don't know how well that worked, since I don't think Apple releases IAP data.)

It's a problem, sure, but the reasons why girls are not going into CS are deeper and more subtle.

Here's a random guess: they don't want to? When I hit college, the boys tended to go into engineering courses, and the girls tended to go into the medical and educational fields. Yet for some reason the lack of men in teaching and nursing isn't the end of the world, but the lack of women code-monkeys is a sign of impending doom. It makes no sense why one is so important and the other isn't. Men and women are different, let them be different.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Gender roles come from two places in modern America: One, Churches and other bastation of traditionalism; Two, MTV, advertising, and materialist pop culture.

And parents, and schools, and the work environment, and the collegiate environment, and movies and TV shows and books and magazines and toy shelves and other boys and girls and internet commenters and ...

You're oversimplifying this because it's convenient for your political position. Ah, I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.

we simply live in the society you made for us, that we have no say in, and let the mainstream sort their own fucking problems out

All you're saying is you won't accept any personal responsibility and won't change your attitudes. That's just the status quo, reiterated. It doesn't make you an outcast, it makes you a boring conservative, albeit with heavy emo/hipster/narcissist overtones.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerd culture isn't remotely plagued by sexism, it's one of the least sexist cultures out there

There's no lie so convincing as the one you tell yourself.

If it's so "not sexist", why are there so few women in it? For God's sake, wake up and smell the fucking coffee.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Schools here in upstate NY make double the pay for comparable jobs (tech or otherwise).

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[WindBourne]

First off, quite a bit of a stretch there. You will find psychiatry, biology, ecology, etc dominated by women. It is 90-10, but more like 60-70% women. OTOH, if you are talking the hard science, then yeah, that is a sausage fest.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Rockoon]

I agree that it is a problem that males are under-represented in many subject areas, but that doesn't mean that the under-representation of women in CS isn't a problem as well.

No, thats exactly what it means in spite of your claim that it isn't. The onus is on you to show that a problem actually exists, much like the onus was on those that claimed that females are favored to provide citations (which they did.)

This is how it works. Really. I guess the education system screwed you out of knowing that.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

However, its plainly obvious that the sexism isn't government imposed

This would be more convincing if we weren't in the comment section of a story about government-imposed sexism.

(To be more precise, about a particular instance in which government-mandated sexism was not enforced.)

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[LordLimecat]

Gender roles come from two places in modern America: One, Churches and other bastation of traditionalism;

Im no expert on any of this, but I have read a little history on the period and I seemed to recall this being generally false. Lo and behold wikipedia agrees:

The formal education of girls and women began in the middle of the 19th century and was intimately tied to the conception that society had of the appropriate role for women to assume in life....Many early women's colleges began as female seminaries and were responsible for producing an important corps of educators
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

In fact, apparently the first women's college in the US was Salem College, a protestant institution established in 1772 by a denomination that was notable for believing in equal gender roles at a time that society did not reflect this.

The revisionism as regards christianity and its relationships with education and women is astounding to me. You'll get things like this page, which allege that the loss of property rights in Rome was due to Christian policy in 306 AD-- despite the fact that Diocletian had just gotten done persecuting the church (as in seizing property and burning churches), and that Constantine would not become (supposedly) Christian for another decade or so. People will talk about the educational backwardism of Christianity, and ignore the role that religious orders played in the creation of universities in europe in the middle ages. Like you, people talk of how Christianity has tried to stifle women's education and utterly ignore its role in the creation of institutions dedicated to their education in a time when society had no desire to do so.

The mainstream is looking for someone to blame,

And so are you.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

You dodged the question. Let me rephrase. Imagine all of the circumstances were the same. Except you substitute boys everywhere you see the word girls. I am not saying you ban anyone, just encourage it to boys instead. Would that have been fair to girls? Hell no. Therefore it wasn't fair to the boys in this situation.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[taylorius]

I agree completely, however it won't happen. A voluble minority of the female population will never accept that they're no longer oppressed, and will whine and complain and protest in perpetuum. Men, desperate to make them shut up for ten minutes, will cave in to their meritless demands, and boys will suffer even more.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[taylorius]

But why does this diversity necessarily have to involve both sexes? Why not just let the best, most motivated people participate in stem? Diversity may be better than a monoculture, but a politically enforced enforced diversity will be worse than either.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[taylorius]

Maybe girls / women just aren't as interested, statistically. Why is that not an acceptable conclusion?

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Garbagemen are sanitation engineers.

We should obviously add a "G" to the "STEM" acronym and start recruiting posthaste. Perhaps decorating the bins with snowflakes and making them pink would attract more diversity?

There's no physical strength barrier anymore either - in my area, the engineers drive a truck and a robot arm does all the lifting and dumping.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

they want to make the argument that the boys should be allowed to program the Christmas tree by pointing to information on education which is completely unrelated STEM fields.

How about they should be allowed to do so because they shouldn't be discriminated against for being boys?

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider that on those occasions when men want to get in a female dominated field like primary education or daycare that a nontrivial portion of our society actively attacks them without much opposition. Nothing wrong there? Men take a huge portion of hazardous jobs with horrendous working conditions. We need to encourage women to get into those as well.

I'm tired of made up problems. I work with a number of women in a very male dominated field. They're in this because they're good and they wouldn't last if they weren't. We should not actively discourage or block anybody from doing anything they want to and (this is important) have the ability for, but beyond that we don't owe anybody the dumbing down of ANY profession by putting people in it who don't really want to be there, which is what happens when you try to meet artificial "diversity" numbers too often. If you are not looking at qualified people there's a problem. If they're simply not present you have a choice: accept lesser candidates or accept that's how it is.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily, do you expect the world top heavyweight boxers to be equally drawn from men and women?

Looking at the top 0.01% and saying, hmm this isnt representative is misleading because to a large extent it isnt a part of the normal workforce and simple statistical assumptions are dubious.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

I figure that the nerds that won't fight against the mainstream

Nerds fought and fight against the mainstream by not participating in it. Nerds are not popular; it may be easy for non-nerds to assume nerd is chic now, but they are fooled by things with a nerdy flavor (smart phones, Apple products, etc.) being popular.
Why are you pushing the responsibility of changing the mainstream on nerds?

That's why we need *good* nerds

Did anyone else just shudder?

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue he was getting at is that it isn't considered a problem if women dominate a group; it's only OMGWRONGBAD if men do. Same goes with race--All white bad, all anything else just fine.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[JoshuaZ]

If you genuinely think this then you haven't been paying attention. The primary point of feminism has been historically to put men and women on equal footing and give them equal opportunities. The fields in question, computer science, are actually a case in point: the percentage of females in computer related fields actually used to be higher. It actually dropped with the rise of the personal computer which was advertised as a thing for young boys. See http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding and it still hasn't gotten to the point it was in the 1980s. And when skilled people, of any gender, aren't going to the fields where their skills can be most useful, we all suffer.

Yes, there are some radical feminists who have some very bad ideas or end goals, but that's going to occur in any political movement. Paying attention to outliers is not helpful. If someone had said in 1970 that the movement for racial equality's primary objective was to sabotage white people that would be the exact same sort of thing, and it would have the exact same things wrong with it.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Ol Olsoc]

I'm nut certain how to define "utterly", but the majority of college graduates at all levels are now indeed female

If you don't believe me, here is the Guvmint weighing in on the matter:

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/d...

We will perhaps one day reach the point where the apparent need to grease the skids for females will ring as hollow as Republican laments of "Won't someone think of the wealthiest?" Perhaps nearer than we think.

http://spectator.org/articles/...

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Richy_T]

Here's a shocker: Women are not a minority (in the US)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

So this is actually repressing a minority (males).

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a random guess: they don't want to? When I hit college, the boys tended to go into engineering courses, and the girls tended to go into the medical and educational fields. Yet for some reason the lack of men in teaching and nursing isn't the end of the world, but the lack of women code-monkeys is a sign of impending doom. It makes no sense why one is so important and the other isn't. Men and women are different, let them be different.

It's probably a simple problem. The people wringing their hands over the lack of women in CS related fields see a problem. Call them feminists or SJW's, it doesn't matter. They have a cause they want to fight for - more representation of women in men-dominated fields. Now look at Bio and Sociology - where women are dominating the numbers. Do they care? No - not a bit. It's not their fight. Their goal is a 50-50 split based upon gender. If it goes lopsided in their favor, who cares? If someone complains about the overrepresentation of women in certain fields - it DOES become their fight. They are only interested in increasing percentages of their chosen group. Equality to them is only achieved if they increase their numbers where they see themselves at a disadvantage. Not by decreasing their numbers - no matter what the situation may be - to achieve "equality".

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Ol Olsoc]

uh, yeah, i've had extensive elite education in STEM, in the US. it's mostly a sausage fest. statistics will back this up and, no, they're not fabricated by teh feminist conspiracy.

i have to conclude that anyone who's bitterly complaining about women having taken over STEM is just a delusional loser who probably just couldn't hack it.

The Veterinary field might be a better example of female dominance. And amazingly enough, that dominance is blamed on men being sexist discriminating pigs.

http://www.justvetdata.com/mee...

http://veterinarybusiness.dvm3...

But wait, if 80 percent of veterinarians are women, is it the men (who are claimed to be "running away from female dominated fields" somehow responsible for the lower pay and greater debt of the 80 percent? Jesus Christ, if 8 out of ten people in a room are female, at some point you might try not blaming the 2 guys for every problem. Better stop at 99 percent so you'll have at least one guy left to blame.

Something doesn't quite compute. One might be able to make an alternative speculation that a lot of women simply do not like men.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[mrchaotica]

Garbagemen are sanitation engineers.

No they're not. Sanitation engineers are civil engineers who design waste collection systems (e.g. water treatment plants).

Saying the guy on the truck is a sanitation engineer is like saying the dumbass at Jiffy Lube is an automotive engineer.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

"Gender roles come from two places in modern America: One, Churches and other bastation of traditionalism; Two, MTV, advertising, and materialist pop culture. "

Right. Just a huge coincidence that our socially constructed gender roles align so closely to what we would expect if they were biologically determined.
The idea of gender as a social construct is poisonous to society. It's ideology attempting to override evidence, just like creationism.
Creationism gets no love here for that reason, but the Social Justice movement does, for some reason.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Im no expert on any of this, but I have read a little history on the period and I seemed to recall this being generally false. Lo and behold wikipedia agrees:

I don't see how the wiki agrees with you and disagrees the with the GP. If anything, you're reinforcing GP's point.

The GP said the church and traditionalism is the source of much of society's view on gender roles. He's not saying the church isn't about teaching girls, but rather that they ARE teaching girls (and everyone else) the church's values, which include gender roles.

You pointing out that the church was responsible for the first women colleges actually reinforces the GP's idea, not refute it.

In fact, apparently the first women's college in the US was Salem College, a protestant institution established in 1772 by a denomination that was notable for believing in equal gender roles at a time that society did not reflect this.

You're continuing to make the GP's point. The flip side of that one denomination being so notable for believing in equal gender roles implies that many other denominations did NOT believe as such.

The revisionism as regards christianity and its relationships with education and women is astounding to me.

Except, as I said, you and the GP seem to agree with each other more than disagree.

I think the one doing revisions is you. You're somehow interpreting the GP to be against you, trying to find reason to be offended so you can go off on the rest of your post about how the church are somehow victims.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[drinkypoo]

This is the argument from apathy. You didn't cause it, so you shouldn't do anything about it.

But the world is chock-full of problems that aren't going to be fixed by those who created them, so you can either throw up your hands and say "fuck it" or you can do something.

It's frustrating to have to clean up other people's messes, but it's depressing to live in a mess.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[meta-monkey]

Also, that men are rightfully terrified of being alone with small children. All it takes is one mom with a chip on her shoulder to say "molester" and there goes life, freedom, family, career...

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[meta-monkey]

Regardless of whether or not boys were outright banned, it was made clear boys were not welcome, and this was an activity for girls.

If you advertised for a job and included the line "whites preferred," that wouldn't be racist at all, right? Because I mean, you'd take a minority, but you'd just much prefer whites.

It's still bullshit. Just have a program for children to program the Christmas tree, and don't let gender be any part of it. That said, I still think the entire premise of these "get kids to code" endeavors is suspect. It's just the billionaires' club trying to produce a glut of programmers so they can depress wages. Just another part of the "no poaching" collusion & H1B hustle.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[phlinn]

You're right, clearly we need more women in prison.

In all seriousness, I wouldn't expect that. Assume for the sake of argument that IQ tests are actually reasonable proxies for raw intelligence. As I understand it, the means are roughly the same but men have a larger standard deviation. Which means if you are studying a field only suitable for high IQ's, you will have more men than women.

The accuracy of IQ tests is questionable, but I think there is some truth to distributions being different between the sexes. It fits with the available evidence. However, it's always a mistake to judge an individual by the group they happen to be in rather than their individual observable characteristics.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Ralph Wiggam]

I'd have to agree it's a sausage fest but I've seen zero indication it's for any reason beyond a lack of interest on the part of females.

Maybe if there were programs to get young girls interested in programming, like something involving the White House Christmas tree, we would see more participation as they get older.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[LordLimecat]

The GP said the church and traditionalism is the source of much of society's view on gender roles.

And that is not reinforced by any bit of history I am aware of. Christianity has tended to improve women's rights, not degrade them, and I posed evidence to support this. I have seen precious little to suggest that GP is correct-- but as I say I am no expert on this so perhaps one of you two could provide sources.

The flip side of that one denomination being so notable for believing in equal gender roles implies that many other denominations did NOT believe as such.

Not necessarily, just that perhaps they made less of a big deal about it. Nevertheless a large number of the women's colleges that sprang up were seminaries, if Wikipedia and some quick googling be believed. The entire reason I objected and did spot research is because it struck me how many venerable old women's colleges are religiously (protestant / catholic) affiliated; it seems disingenuous to claim that Christianity is holding the women back academically in spite of that.

You're right that this is a particularly sensitive area for me, because I see these sort of attacks all over the place, and its highly irritating that this sort of stuff becomes "generally known fact" despite being quite incorrect. It seems to me the only way to fight these pervasive myths is to be sensitive to them and respond with sourced facts whenever I see them.

GP was not being directly confrontational, but he was laying a huge portion of the blame directly on Christianity as being a traditionalist enforcer of the oppression of women; he simply phrased it much more tactfully than that.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[shaitand]

"But in this case, the predominance of one gender in all STEM fields does indeed demonstrate that something is actually broken and needs fixing.

Nature, science, and common sense show that while consensus provides great short-term efficiency, diversity is universally superior to monoculture in the long term."

Nature, science, and common sense all agree that STEM are very much all heavily built on a particular flavor of mental processing and also that male and female brains are literally wired differently.

Female brains are wired to trade off an unknown capacity in exchange for superior group dynamics processing. The vast majority of those with an apptitude for STEM show impaired social skills, aka group dynamics processing. Has it ever occurred to you the two are related?

"There does indeed exist a systemic cultural bias pushing women out of technical fields."

Do you have any actual evidence of this? Either these fields are legitimately gender agnostic, in which case gender is an irrelevant characteristic and diversifying adds no value or they are not gender agnostic in which case the most likely explanation for male dominance of the field is that it lends itself to the wiring of the male brain. Either way, no pro-active action is required.

Also, is your hypothetical bias one which leads to women choosing other fields or one in which others push them out? So long as a woman who chooses to pursue a STEM career and make the same social and family relation sacrifices as a male does not meet any more active opposition than a male there is nothing to fix as no individual is unfairly discriminated against.

"To see this demonstrated mathematically"

Cute but not actually valid. The problem is the assumption of benefit to shape diversification. Diversification for it's own sake is not beneficial. As above with technology, if race and gender have no impact on performance in a career as we assume then diversification of race and gender carry no benefits. We can safely ignore gender altogether in all such areas and group all participants as "people."

It is false to assume we should have an even distribution of squares and triangles for it's own sake. We should only do so if there is a benefit and as long as every shape is free to go wherever it likes without resistance any energy spent trying to pro-actively diversify them is wasted effort that could have been utilized for something which does provide an actual benefit.

Trying to force diversification that individuals don't actually want is no different than what anglo europeans tried to do with native americans. It destroys culture, if females have a culture which encourages socially focused endeavors over STEM who are you to assume you know better and try to destroy their culture? If males have a culture that values STEM over socially focused endeavors and males and females exist in roughly equal parts that IS diversification, diversification between pursuit of objective fields vs socially focused interests.

There is no question that our society historically undervalued women and unfairly biased against them. But on the large scale, there is no evidence we are as a society or species actually better off with the consequences of fixing that problem. Actually, if anything the result is that our economy is built on the concept of dual income families now, which means no parent staying home to guide and raise children.

Do you really think that gender income disparity or diversification of a non-functional criteria like gender in STEM is more important than the functional development of future generations of our species? I don't. Women should be able to choose to pursue whatever they wish without barrier (or advantage) but our species and our children are best served if they generally choose to be stay at home moms. It is impossible to have an even distribution of genders in the workplace and the majority of women choosing to pursue the career that benefits our society the most.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TheRaven64]

Because it's not born out internationally. You can see this at conferences, where universities from some countries (Israel, Iran and Korea, for example) have either an even or female-dominated mixture, but universities from the UK and US are predominantly male. Our gender balance in international students is quite close to even. There's nothing innate about girls' brains that puts them off, something cultural is. And it's not an acceptable conclusion to me that we're losing out on around 30% of the top applicants because something at school is putting them off.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes same thing at my high school... all the girls were in the "gifted" section.
At my university, the classes were not dominated by girls, but it was pretty darn close to 50 - 50. (Engineering Department BTW)
I know for sure on all of my team projects, we were at least half female.
In fact, in all of my classes, as a white male, I was ALWAYS in the minority.
Oh and EVERY student that got awards for high grades was female.
If someone is trying to hold them back, they are miserably failing at it!!

By the way, I never really cared; as a Christian I look at everyone as a human being, not based on their skin color.
Anyone who still classifies people based on skin color is just naive, and intellectually shallow.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Dishevel]

This is not about truth. This is about people with no skills or abilities being able to feel good about themselves by "kind of" changing the meaning of words.

Sanitation Engineers, Assistant (TO) the Branch Manager :) and so on. One day truth will be important again, but that day is not now. Now is scoreless games where everyone is a winner.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[shaitand]

Sure, but does it matter? We shouldn't adopt the objective of eliminating cultural bias just for the sake of doing it. That's what Europeans tried to do to Native Americans and erase their culture.

If there is an actual barrier to someone choosing a career that is a problem. But there is no barrier here, some just feel that people should be making different choices. That top talent is pursuing something else instead and benefiting our society.

Science has shown the female brain is wired to have increased aptitude for social dynamics and unsurprisingly it is fields along those lines that women often choose to pursue. Pursuing these fields would be a downhill path of natural aptitude for most women even if they are perfectly capable of excelling in other fields. People certainly have greater satisfaction pursuing things they are naturally good at. Have you considered that the cultural bias of women in the UK and US might be steering women toward pursuits in a way that aligns with the greatest overall interests of women?

I definitely have mixed feelings about increasing diversification. I don't want to see any individual facing a societal uphill battle in pursuing their dreams. But that increased aptitude for social dynamics also happens to be exactly what is most beneficial in managing a family and raising psychologically functional children. Women with this aptitude are the rule not the exception, men are the exception and not the rule. If every couple with children has the parent with the most social aptitude stay home and properly raise functional children the net result should statistically be far more males than females in the workplace with an increasing disparity peaking somewhere in roles of higher seniority occupied by individuals 35+ yrs old. And sure enough as we've seen increased gender diversity in the workplace we've seen increased psychological dysfunction in children. Worse we are getting more and more entrenched in an economy that depends on dual income households. Most women I talk to who have a child or want to have a child say they want to stay home with that child, most families can't the loss of income.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Gender roles come from two places in modern America: One, Churches and other bastation of traditionalism; Two, MTV, advertising, and materialist pop culture. These determine what people think they should be doing. Niether of them promotes women in technology, and its mostly people adherent to the standards set forth from either that self-re-enforce those standards.

Gender roles also come from parents. I am happy to teach my daughters about traditional female gender roles. It's not all we teach them, but it's certainly introduced to them that their mother, and their grandmother, and her mother, and her grandmother all worked for only a short period of time, from when they were done school until they got married ,and then they all made the decision to have children, and then returned to work 20-25 years later.

Which also teaches them that women need to choose a partner rich enough to singlehandedly support the family for 20-25 years. Not being antagonistic to your post here, just my observations over years of parenting a pair of girls have made me cynical.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[gzuckier]

The article you linked to does not support your assertion. She is talking about the past, when we know things were better because more women went into CS. The internet was a different place back then... She went on to IRC, where as these days it would be Google and StackExchange.

As she says in the article, girls today won't have her experience. Their parents have been warned about the internet, and while it's mostly nonsense we can't discount the experiences of people like Brianna Wu or Zoe Quinn, or the girl's own experiences when they want to play on XBOX Live etc. It's also interesting that even in her account the people on IRC assumed she was male.

I remember what it was like back then. People were nicer, there was more of a community feel to the net. The numbers confirm it - more women went into CS back then.

I agree that misogyny on the internet isn't some kind of apocalypse. It's a problem, sure, but the reasons why girls are not going into CS are deeper and more subtle.

What's happened is that nerd/tech/CS has become mainstream business, and the general sexism of business has taken it over. Take "Mad Men", add 40 years of technological development.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[AvitarX]

It's not that the truth isn't important, it's that good feels can reduce the amount of pay required to do the work.

If you can pay low, but make the secretaries title fancier, if it keeps people at the company for less money, of course it will be done.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[AvitarX]

Any male I knew that went into k-12 education was actively sought after by every school they applied to. Many private schools even offering signing bonuses.

The k-12 education system is actively working to counteract the poor balance if teacher gender.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how people referring to "successful" matriarchies always wind up pointing to primitive cultures.

Your should talk to the Ashkenazic Jewish community.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

+5 from me. You hit all the points. Male and female just are different. That doesn't make one better or more important than the other. It does mean that one might be better at some things and the other is better at other things but all the things are important.

Anyways good job on stating it better that I would have.
I would have just said...
Suck it up princess... and if your a guy you better damn well work and provide for your family the best you can and quite being a lazy pos.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[gzuckier]

3rd Wave feminism is about materialism (jobs are a resource, we are fighting men for them), sexual liberation (we have sex with who we want, and if or when the kids come along, society (all men, or the guy I was seeing at the time, or the last guy I saw) pay for it), paternal monopoly (men have no right to their children, society and women have more rights than they do), and public shaming of men because they are men (many, many examples). It is a dogma of domination only a very small minority of real fools agree with.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/12/04/the-sexodus-part-1-the-men-giving-up-on-women-and-checking-out-of-society/ http://www.breitbart.com/londo...

The net effect of this dogma is that upwards of 10% of men over 45 in the US are unmarried and have no children; in Japan that statistic is up to 25%. The trend is increasing 1% year over year, which means within the current 18 to 25 crowd in the US, about 30-40% of those boys in that group will never get married, and never have kids, out of choice; for Japan that statistic is going to be 45%-55% higher. Now if you look at the increasingly violent trends in fetishism in Japan and now the US, and the increase in "lad culture", the net result is eventually going to be something very, very horrific and bloody. Those roosters are starting to come home to roost; about once a month now, fetishist porn stars are ending up behind bars for maiming or killing people with drugs or various cutting tools.

If you treat men like animals, they will act like animals. And really, ever since Carrie Nation in the 1800's, that's what feminism has really been about, is about getting men not to act like a bunch of petulant children and to have some discipline and self respect.

How about we end this social equality bullshit before it does some real and permanent damage?

Soo... women having sex with lots of people leads to lots of men having no sex, which leads to them cutting people up? Who were these men having sex with before, they need to continue.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

1) The program was never closed to boys - it was just being promoted to girls more heavily than to boys.
2) I guess you're not one of those STEM college grads - listen to your non sequitur: Girls being nearly 2/3rds of college graduates does NOT mean they dominate "almost all" stem fields. They might not dominate any STEM fields. Those two figures (STEM grads vs college grads) just aren't linked, until we get more data. Do you have any more?

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[shaitand]

Maybe. But why is it we need to get young girls interested in programming? So long as we've removed the barriers for girls that choose to enter a field I say mission accomplished. What is the benefit? Increased opportunity for programmers to encounter mates? Study after study shows there is no lack of programmers in the United States only an increased desire to import workers on visas who can't freely move between job opportunities and thereby reduce the impact of competition on salaries.

Making sure girls can choose to pursue anything they like is important. But there is no reason we should try to influence what girls choose to pursue. And if, as a society, we were going to do that we should be trying to encourage them to choose what benefits society the most. It is, and presumably always will be, best for our society if girls choose to stay home and raise a psychologically functional next generation (at least if those girls choose to have children).

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[gzuckier]

Thanks for pointing this out. Teachers in almost all communities make an above average wage. In most districts, they have benefits that are far above average. The 2012 Chicago teacher's strike was a great example. Teachers asked for a 30% raise over 4 years, and ended up getting about 17.6%. Nationwide, the average wage increase for 2012-2014 was just about 1%. The median salary is $76,000, and the school district covers 88% of the cost of health benefits, nearly 10% better than the state average for all employers. They also contribute to a defined benefit pension plan and a contribution based retirement plan similar to a 401k. They work 39 weeks a year, and have paid sick time and paid vacation on top of that. In Chicago, the median income for a household - not a person but for a household - was $38,625. Men had a median income of $35,154.

This means that men are being systematically taken advantage of. There are 32,000 teachers in Chicago, and with so many of the being women, the difference is that men are being deprived of jobs that are substantially above average in pay and benefits, to the tunes of tens of million of dollars a year.

Where is the outrage over this?

Public school teachers in Chicago? The extra salary is combat pay.
These figures just demonstrate the effect of the diminished role of unions in modern employment. Private school teachers, who are not unionized don't make near these sums or benefits, nor do they have protections like tenure. Teaching is skilled labor, with a high degree of responsibility, requiring lots of post-secondary education; the points usually brought up to defend the high incomes of medical doctors. As anybody with a PhD can tell you, that's not what determines income; it's supply and demand.
When the 99.99% complain about the .01%, that's attacked as classism; they're supposed to reserve their antagonism for the working class folks next door who make more than they do.
Cutting the salaries of teachers or any other unionized workers won't raise your income any; quite the opposite, as they will then be motivated to compete with you in the job market, allowing your employer to bid lower. The cure is not to get teachers or other unions to join into the race to the bottom which has characterized salaries and wages and benefits for the past 30 years.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[gzuckier]

Teachers also have a much higher education level than the average worker. Teachers make below average wages compared to workers with the same level of education.

Which is largely because.... they're mostly women.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[gzuckier]

I only have my own personal anecdote, but I was the top boy in my highschool class by far. That didn't even get me into the top 10% of my class, though, since the top 10% were all girls. I think the only other boy in the honor society was a boy from the next year's class but I can't remember. (I know who the next highest boy in the school's ranking was but I don't remember whether or not he hit the cutoff for honor society.)

This was during the 90s in a public high school, so it wasn't like the population was simply unbalanced. This is hardly a new problem. Our education system simply doesn't engage with boys and hasn't for years at this point.

If you want links, though, it isn't hard to find them:

Itâ(TM)s Time to Worry: Boys Are Rapidly Falling Behind Girls in School How to Make School Better for Boys: Start by acknowledging that boys are languishing while girls are succeeding. Education: Boys Falling Behind Girls in Many Areas (Paywalled, so I have no idea what it says)

Those were just the top results on Google.

Indeed. Our educational system simply doesn't engage with kids in general, it's just that girls don't act out the general frustration in as obvious a fashion as boys do. By the time you get to higher education, you've selected out the kids who really can't deal with it at all. No other modern industry has the failure rate that we accept as normal in our educational system.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Your factoid is irrelevant to the discussion, and therefore your conclusion is erroneous.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[gzuckier]

No, it's definitely teachers actively screwing boys. They're literally being graded worse just for being boys.

?? "just for being boys"? Did you miss the part that said: "it's because of their classroom behavior, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts."? It was in the second sentence fer crissake.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[shaitand]

Yes, with the understanding that what is true of whole is not always true of individual elements. I don't have a stat for the exceptions to the rule but it is rather large, I'd guess something 10-30% of individuals of either gender. So it IS critical that as a society we don't make assumptions or put up barriers that hinder the 10-30% of the population that will be wired to pursue the same things as 70-90% of the other gender.

We just shouldn't be giving them an advantage or trying to artificially correct beyond that disparity.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not supposed to be graded for "classroom behaviour", they're supposed to be graded for how well they do their school work. If you penalise males for normal male behaviour, that's discrimination (certainly it would be seen that way if it were the other way round).

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

I have some social workers I'd like to introduce you to.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Zxern]

Actually valuing soft skills over hard skills will prepare them perfectly for the job environment in the western business culture. Everything coming out of HR at my company is stating this. Soft skills are far more valuable than hard skills when it comes to job progression. If you're good bs'er you'll move up the corporate ladder far faster than the next guy regardless of your comparative hard skill level.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

$25K for 9 months, with tenure only adhering after many years of service and most positions year-to-year, and the esteem of having parents show up to shout you down every few months at parent-teacher-night are "quality jobs?" Good lord.

And by the way, there have been special programs to try to get more men into education - not because they're "good jobs," but because it would be good for kids, especially in early childhood ed, to be exposed to good male role models early. But guys with that kind of education would usually rather maximize their earnings by going into another field - say tech.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Fwipp]

Not fighting to change the mainstream - fighting to resist these bad things in nerd culture, which you've said comes from mainstream culture.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

> the school district I just moved out of paid starting, first-year (no experience) teachers with a BA over $50K/year with full benefits.
> The average HOUSEHOLD income in New Jersey is around $60K/year.

Incommensurate comparands. BZZT!! Thanks for playing. Compare income in the district with teacher income in the district, and compare average teacher income in the state with average income in the state. And don't just take ONE job listing.

By the way, it is VERY unlikely to be a BA-only job. Most teaching jobs in the northeast require an MAT, or at least a cert.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

During an introductory seminar for new students, early in my first semester of graduate school, the Director of Graduate Research - an old white male professor in my department - spoke awkwardly, but enthusiastically about the high percentage of female students in the room and the comparatively high percentage of female faculty and staff in the department. It set me on edge a little. I tried to set it aside - to tell myself that this was a well-meaning professor and that I shouldn’t be fighting allies, even if they weren’t doing things exactly the way I thought they should, but the negative feelings were there. I felt oddly singled out and lumped into an arbitrary group. I felt like a female. Not a student. Not a potential scientist. Not an equal contributor to my chosen field. Not even a person. I was just a female. I was one of many, in fact, and therefore proof of the changing scientific scene - of the apparent new lack of sexism. Wouldn’t that be nice?

It’s true that there are more female students in my department - currently 19 out of 33 - but does this really translate into a decrease in sexism? The idea that getting more girls, particularly young girls, interested and invested in STEM fields has been trending for a while. When I was in school, I went on a ‘women in tech’ field trip. I got to miss school for it and it was a lot of fun - but that was over a decade ago and, despite a strong increase in the number of women majoring in math and science at the undergraduate and, to a lesser extent, graduate levels - women are still vastly outnumbered by men at the higher levels. While programs like the one in which I participated are certainly useful (my own advisor told me she didn’t know women were allowed to be scientists until she was in high school and went on a similar field trip), arbitrarily pushing girls into STEM fields is hardly the same as nurturing interests and building confidence.

If we’re getting more women into STEM fields early on, but not keeping them, something is clearly wrong with our approach. If it’s important to have more women in STEM fields (and, believe me, it is: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/11/141107-gender-studies-women-scientific-research-feminist/), then we need to have them at the highest levels as well as the lowest. Right now, that’s not the case. Even in my department there’s only 7 female professors (and this is including assistant and associate professors) out of 27 total. Only 2 of the 7 females are full professors and the Department Head as well as the Director of Graduate Research are both men. Women are dropping off the higher they go and I think there’s a medley of reasons for that.

One of the reasons women don’t stay is that they lack mentors—a numbers issue. Another reason might be that women feel pressured to go into STEM fields and then find themselves not interested enough in the actual field to deal with the stresses that come with it. Another, I’m certain, is the fact that sexism does exist (http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract) in science and dealing with it is HARD. It hurts. It’s frustrating. A good friend of mine decided not to pursue math as a graduate student because of a sexist professor. I’ve yet to meet someone as interested in and excited about math as she was, but she said the way that professor made her feel was not worth it. He ruined the whole experience. I’ve had my own experiences with sexism, but none as startling and unpleasant as what I experienced in a class that was 87% female during my first semester of graduate school.

That very professor I mentioned earlier, the Director of Graduate Research in my department and the one who made a big show of talking about how many female students were present in the lecture hall during seminar, was one of my professors in my first semester, and my first real introduction to the kind of sexism that was unapologetic and unfixable. He would consistently

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

We've tried the patriarchy and it's not really working all that well, quite poorly in fact. Perhaps trying out a matriarchy wouldn't be all that bad. The Mosuo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... seems quite interesting and likely would be far more socially balanced.

I think the article you actually want is this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo

Note what it actually says about culture, it seems to be mixed and not purely matriarchal or patriarchal.

They have aspects of a matriarchal culture: women are often the head of the house, inheritance is through the female line, and women make business decisions. However, unlike a matriarchy, the political power tends to be in the hands of males.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

"namefag" ? Yeah, society is to blame for you being an asshole.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[romons]

The House of Representatives is 17% percent female. The Senate is also 17% female. There are 5.2% female CEOs among the fortune 500 companies. Since there are MORE females than males, these statistics are even more of a poke in the eye. I wouldn't start worrying about maintaining your undeserved elevated status for a few more years.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Christianity has tended to improve women's rights, not degrade them, and I posed evidence to support this.

Again, I don't see how that conflicts with the other poster's point. He didn't say Christianity didn't improve women's rights. He didn't say Christianity was bad for women's rights.

He pointed out that the church is one of the two major shapers of gender roles. This is in fact a lesser claim than yours. He just say the church plays a part. You say the church plays a part AND it has been a force of good. Evidence for your claim is evidence for his, as his claim is contained within yours.

You're right that this is a particularly sensitive area for me, because I see these sort of attacks all over the place,

I don't know what sort of attacks you've seen in other places, but I don't see this one by the above poster as an attack.

It seems to me the only way to fight these pervasive myths is to be sensitive to them and respond with sourced facts whenever I see them.

See above. I see his claims contained in yours. What pervasive myths?

GP was not being directly confrontational, but he was laying a huge portion of the blame directly on Christianity as being a traditionalist enforcer of the oppression

I disagree. The quoted statement about gender roles coming from the Church was in the context of discussing gender roles in society. The poster prefaced it as such. I don't think he's trying to assign blame or say traditionalism is oppressive and bad. Car analogy: pointing out that Bob is driving the car isn't saying Bob is a bad person.

The closest he did to say something negative is claiming that the Church doesn't promote women in tech. First, that claim isn't necessarily negative. One of the ongoing debates is that whether it's really a bad thing that we don't promote women into tech. Why not let women decide for themselves what they want to do?

Second, the claim is neither proven nor disproved by your evidence. Yeah, so the first women's colleges were originally seminaries. That doesn't tell us if those schools promoted women into tech.

he simply phrased it much more tactfully than that.

Or he didn't mean that at all, just like how NDT tweeting about Issac Newton isn't an attack on Christmas.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Shadow of Eternity]

A domestic abuser that lied to start a vicious bullying campaign against a suicide support forum and has been caught red handed retweeting offers from the GNAA to pay up to $20 for fake tweets "threatening" her, a mentally unstable pathological liar who publicly admitted to running fake accounts and has been proven to have been lying about leaving her home, and xbox-live where research such as PEW's has proven MEN face significantly more, more violent, and more severe harassment.

Those are your three examples. And you use them to support the misogynist argument that women are weak and need special treatment because they can't handle the same or even anywhere near the level of trolling and harassment men face on a constant basis.

OR maybe it's got more to do with the fact that CS is a mere 10% of all degrees conferred, is essentially a dying field, and the combination of demonizing and pathologizing nerds along with fearmongering like yours is what's keeping women away.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[shizzle]

Which also teaches them that women need to choose a partner rich enough to singlehandedly support the family for 20-25 years. Not being antagonistic to your post here, just my observations over years of parenting a pair of girls have made me cynical.

Are you saying this is a bad thing? I would replace "rich enough" with "with enough earnings potential", but once you do that, I don't see this as being unequivocally bad. I don't want my daughters choosing mates based solely on maximizing earnings potential, but I certainly don't want them ignoring that factor completely either. That is, if they do choose someone who does not have much in the way of earnings potential, they should be aware of what they're getting into, and aware that this will mean that they'll have to settle for a lower standard of living and/or not have the option of being a stay-at-home mom (whether that's something they want or not).

Meanwhile, the more women factor earnings potential into mate selection, the more incentive there is for young men to pursue education and careers rather than move into their parents' basements and play Xbox. Of course, it's more complicated than that---that education and those careers have to be attainable--but certainly men will do just about anything to gain favor in the eyes of women, and it would be good to channel this incentive into economic productivity.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Shadow of Eternity]

Since there used to be more women in CS there must be some explanation for the decline, and women tell us it's because of various factors putting them off. We can address those things, while not ignoring the other problems, so I don't see why you are getting your knickers in a twist so badly.

We can, but we're NOT. What we're doing is actively harming and excluding boys. That's literally what this entire submission is about, a school refusing to submit to feminist demands and policies that actively harm and exclude and already extremely at-risk group of students.

Only on Slashdot does the "because of problem A we must ignore problem B" logic seem to fly. Only on Slashdot do people expect everyone to address what they perceive as the biggest problem to the exclusion of all others, and berate them for even trying to fix the other issues.

You're projecting animojo, that's how feminists react whenever someone brings up men being half of all rape and domestic violence victims when you stop using Mary Koss' rigged-to-exclude-men definition of the term "rape".

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Shadow of Eternity]

And the entire rest of the article goes on to explain how that's a gender based prejudice.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[HappyPsycho]

The question is why?

If the answer is that the small subset of men who enter the teaching field teach better then cool (maybe thats the trend that these institutions have seen). However if it is just to make up diversity numbers and they are worse teachers then that is a very bad practice. I don't have kids but I would want the best teacher for them regardless of gender.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[gzuckier]

And the entire rest of the article goes on to explain how that's a gender based prejudice.

You read this: "The authors attribute this misalignment to what they called non-cognitive skills, or "how well each child was engaged in the classroom, how often the child externalized or internalized problems, how often the child lost control and how well the child developed interpersonal skills." They even report evidence of a grade bonus for boys with test scores and behavior like their girl counterparts." and you understand it as "gender based prejudice"?

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you really just include cannabis in "big pharma"? Nothing against the rest of your points but if anything, cannabis antagonizes "big pharma".

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[uninformedLuddite]

I know three qualified male teachers. Two have left the profession and the one remaining has a camera set up to record his lessons in their entirety. The problem with being a male teacher (according to the three I actually know) is that girls can destroy a male teacher's career and future.
One of them resigned as accusations from an empowered young feminist who didn't like the fact he had failed her for being a lazy cow effectively destroyed him. No evidence was required just the say so of a girl who was known as being a bitch and the school bike by her fellow students (and the administration).

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Get real you lying misandric sexist chauvinist bigot feminazi. Go irrational hate men somewhere else.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

The why is because females can get married, get pregnant, quite their jobs after stealing 3 months of maternity leave with no plans to return, divorce the father and get child support for 18 years and alimony for the rest of her life.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Shadow of Eternity]

Did you seriously just ask if I read people literally saying "Boys are penalized unless they behave like girls" as measuring a gender based prejudice?

The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, boys are represented in grade distributions below where their test scores would predict.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[AmiMoJo]

You are reading your own biases into it. It doesn't make it at all clear that boys are not welcome. I don't get that impression at all. And, sure enough, when the school got boys involved they were not rejected or made to feel unwelcome at all.

I find it ironic that people claim that toys like Lego and Mechano are just as accessible to girls, then complain that just because this course features girls in the advertising that is somehow exclusionary. Can't have it both ways.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed about the "get kids to code" premise. They don't get kids to play doctor so why downplay the skills required to build a program.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[lucm]

Don't get fooled by the "small shop" illusion. Look at GW Pharmaceuticals, which has a market cap of 1.3 billion.

https://www.google.com/finance...

This is big business. If you have Netflix look at the documentaries there's a bunch of them (Green rush, etc.).

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[maccodemonkey]

To be fair, teacher pay sucks. We all know it. There isn't a debate there.

So you don't exactly make a solid point by saying "Hey look! Women dominate in all the crappy low paying jobs! How are they oppressed?"

Do women dominate in teaching because they choose to go into teaching, or because society is corralling them into teaching because it's pretty much on the bottom end of the career ladder?

I'll tell you, any time I look at teaching (which I'd be interested in), I go "hell no" when I see the pay scales, and go back to my normal engineering job.

If you think discrimination is not a thing, perhaps you're deluded enough to think that women, as a large group, are all collectively putting themselves into low paying, low recognition work.

For bonus points, break out gender ratios in education teaching by pay scale. You'll find as the level of academia and pay increases, the ratio of women also declines. Gee, that's funny.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Working in CS (10+yrs) I'd agree about the sausage fest and the general feeling IT is for boy nerds only, if you're a girl in IT there must be something wrong with you. It would be nice to have more girls that are genuinely interested in pursuing excellence in developing systems. It'd be nice to not be the only girl at the table.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[gzuckier]

Did you seriously just ask if I read people literally saying "Boys are penalized unless they behave like girls" as measuring a gender based prejudice?

The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, boys are represented in grade distributions below where their test scores would predict.

No, unless your understanding of literally is "not literally".

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[goose-incarnated]

How are you so consistently wrong?

Since there used to be more women in CS there must be some explanation for the decline, and women tell us it's because of various factors putting them off

No, there is no published study (links welcome) that says that women in CS experience more off-putting factors than women did in (for example) veterinary science. That is how empirical studies work - you don't get to point at a number without having another number for reference, call it a fitment test.

And your constant leaping from "there used to be more women in CS previously than there is now" to "It must be because of sexism" is illogical and irrational; you have been provided repeatedly with lots of other, more plausible, explanations after which you go silent on the thread. Just like your numerous "Slashdot filled with sexists posts" claims - Myself, and others, have repeatedly asked you to link to these numerous posts, and you always go silent.

I'm sorry, but this faith of yours is like any other religion - it deserves the scorn it gets.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[goose-incarnated]

She is talking about the past, when we know things were better because more women went into CS

What makes you think that women had it better when they went into CS? In fact, the opposite seems to be true - the more liberated a female population is, the less they go into CS, while the less liberated a female population is the more they go into CS. There's a high correlation between those countries where females have fewer rights and the number of female CS graduates.

Reality, using empirical evidence that you can go collect yourself if you want to, shows that only women with fewer optins go into CS. This is not the first time that this correlation has been pointed out to you, but you conveniently go silent whenever data exists that disproves your faith-based leanings.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[goose-incarnated]

In fact we were doing pretty well back in the 80s and 90s, but then something went wrong and the numbers have dropped off quite sharply.

Maybe something went right? Time and time again you have been informed that there is a high correlation between fewer rights for women and women going into CS. You, and the rest of the stuck-in-the-dark-ages religious nuts deny keep going silent when presented with the fact that women who have fewer rights go into CS. That's the real reason that there were more women in CS in the US before - it was because they had fewer options.

Go look it up yourself - I've tired of posting these links for you to read which you then ignore when the next religious SJW story breaks. The stats show quite clearly that, currently, women with fewer options go into CS.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TheRaven64]

The why is because females can get married, get pregnant, quite their jobs after stealing 3 months of maternity leave with no plans to return, divorce the father and get child support for 18 years and alimony for the rest of her life.

All before the age of 17? Women in your country sound like they have very impressive time management.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, teaching used to be almost entirely male dominated. Once more women started getting into the teaching field, the men left to elsewhere, and the teaching jobs actually started paying less, leading more men to go to higher paying jobs, and even less pay for teachers since they were women.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

and other traditional sources. One of which is the family.

Now let me ask you something, is computer programming(or its analog working with any sorts of machinery) a traditionalist gender role for women?

I'm going to guess not, which is the reason why more men are programmers. Now, being a lowly nerd, I'm not one to tell you or the rest of society how to run its business and how to, or how not to raise your kids.

The point I'm trying to make is don't blame the nerds for the society you've made.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

And in one post you demonstrate exactly the problem. Even when we're talking about men getting utterly fucked AND blamed for it at the same time women are the real victims.

The real problem is capitalism, and its effects on society, the rise of "social capital", or the use of reputation and popularity as capital, and the ability to manage it as such.

Its the cold reality of capitalist society, is that since a handful of corporations made a huge market out of selling you. your opinions, your consumption habbits, etc..., your Freedoms, and right to self-identify and make choices for yourself comes second to their profits. In this system, any and all rights, as well as transgressions and even what morales are, are strictly relivant to how much money you are bringing the system in.

This is not a battle of the sexes, its pure class exploitment. Gamers disobeying advertiser-cum-journalists get called out on making sexist remarks. Celebrities who continue to add value do not get called out on rape.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Biology

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with your overall comment I must say that psychology and social science are not STEM. They are not science but rather liberal arts.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

You are reading your own biases into it.

Funny how that reasoning doesn't work the other way around. If a woman claims something is sexist and somebody tells her she's just reading her own biases into it, that somebody is sexist and we all should just believe the woman.

It doesn't make it at all clear that boys are not welcome. I don't get that impression at all.

Funny how this doesn't works if it's a man saying he doesn't find something to be sexist against women.

And, sure enough, when the school got boys involved they were not rejected or made to feel unwelcome at all.

Doesn't matter. The point is your logic wouldn't work if circumstances were reversed: if a program is advertised towards boys, it doesn't matter even if girls are accepted, the feminists would have a field day.

I find it ironic that people claim that toys like Lego and Mechano are just as accessible to girls, then complain that just because this course features girls in the advertising that is somehow exclusionary. Can't have it both ways.

As the other AC said, you're dodging the question.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Waste Engineering Professionals

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and the fact that most teachers are women demonstrates that indeed something is actually broken and needs fixing.
Also, most nurses are female, such a monoculture cannot be healthy. And most garbagemen are men, and surprisingly nobody tries to change that name into garbagehumans.
The problem is, how do we measure what the actual problem is? What is the non-broken ratio of the sexes? And how do You know that it is 50-50? If it wasn't 50-50, how would we know? If less women apply, how can we know the reasons for it -- is it the sex bias of the employers, or is it a free choice of the individual?

they are called sanitation engineers.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[AvitarX]

I suspect that they assume that there's a benefit in the non-teaching interactions of having students interact with both male and female teachers.

This could be true or false, but it was not about teaching quality strictly, but the belief that having both men and women in the students' lives would be beneficial.

I was more trying to illustrate that I don't feel that men that go into teaching are under attack.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

male and female brains are literally wired differently.

Yes, hormones -- particularly testosterone -- have an effect on neuronal connections. Men and women are more alike than they are different, but they are qualitatively different to a minor degree. How much of this difference is due to biology and how much is due to cultural conditioning? There is no consensus. How much of the difference actually gives men an advantage in STEM fields?

"the brains of 949 young men and women were scanned at the University of Pennsylvania... [the] findings demonstrated that women are better disposed to deal with ‘analytical’ and ‘intuitive’ tasks at the same time. Men, meanwhile, were better at complex motor skills."

Which of those sounds like a more effective computer programmer? A more effective scientist?

Do you have any actual evidence of this?

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Even if we assume that men are indeed more apt at science and technology -- a questionable assumption -- it does not fit the facts of hiring practices.

Diversification for it's own sake is not beneficial.

I disagree: the result of diversification is indeed beneficial in itself. Ecological, a diverse population is more robustly equipped to survive disasters than a highly integrated and cohesive population. A diverse population has many chances to survive and thrive in the face of changing environmental conditions where a mono- or oligo-culture would collapse. From a systems standpoint, diversity in a population is similar to redundancy in a network. A diversity of viewpoints helps to solve problems in novel ways, allowing us to escape local maxima.

Surely a person with superior group dynamics processing has a lot to contribute to software projects dealing with massive parallelization and to teams dealing with the social dynamics of humans in proximity. Surely a person with well-integrated analysis and intuition has a lot to contribute to a project with a large legacy codebase.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

It is false to assume we should have an even distribution of squares and triangles for it's own sake.

Add in the natural and useful distrust of the unfamiliar that we each possess. We get segregation, ghettoization, and balkanization. We create an us, we create a them, and We are usually right, and They are usually wrong, and this leads to crime and war. We see this happening today with rich vs. poor, rural vs. urban, democrats vs. republicans, SJWs vs. MRAs. Both camps are right, both camps are wrong, and we won't be able to distinguish the signal from the noise until we stop yelling and listen to each other.

When we seek diversity for its own sake, we make it more difficult to create a Them. All the nastiness that arises from us vs. them thinking dissolves.

the result is that our economy is built on the concept of dual income families now, which means no parent staying home to guide and raise children.

The problem of missing caregivers -- and many other problems related to the raising of children -- are firmly rooted in the deification of the nuclear family in the early 20th century. "Dad is always away at work" was already a problem before the move towards dual incomes. Communities of adults are much more effective at raising children than a single breadwinner and a single homemaker can ever be. Don't forget the issues that occur when one or both roles go missing, whether by choice or by chance. Not to mention that the move to dual income families has at least as much to do with wage stagnation than it does with

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

Let's worry about giving an advantage or trying to artificially correct beyond the disparity AFTER we correct for the still-existing artificial bias below the disparity.

Quotas are a bad solution.

Actively promoting diversity as a worthwhile goal in itself is a good start.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

Yes, and the fact that most teachers are women demonstrates that indeed something is actually broken and needs fixing.
Also, most nurses are female, such a monoculture cannot be healthy.

Yes, I agree. Those are further examples of the same issue, and similarly unhealthy. More women are teachers, more men are principals and superintendents. More women are nurses, more men are doctors.

And most garbagemen are men

There are likely factors here arising from macro biological differences in physical strength and risk aversion. Professional occupations are more concerned with factors influenced by micro biological and culturally-influenced psychological differences in knowledge and aptitude. However I am inclined to say that there is unwarranted bias in the waste management field quite similar to the bias the military is slowly starting to overcome.

The problem is, how do we measure what the actual problem is?

First off let's bring the focus back to the topic at hand: STEM occupations. There exist studies that show, given functionally identical resumes, hiring managers in STEM fields rate men as more qualified than women. When similar future studies show no such difference, we are can triumphantly declare centuries of systemic gender bias solved.

We can count indicators of manipulation of the free choice of the individual by other cultural biases as binary factors: do marketers show any boys at all playing with LEGO Friends, any girls playing with Technic? Does Barbie say "Math is Hard"? Does the classroom teacher?

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

Yes, and the fact that most teachers are women demonstrates that indeed something is actually broken and needs fixing.

Do note that I explicitly said that the mere fact of a gender disparity is not an indicator that something is actually broken and needs fixing.

That mere fact is, however, a good reason to start looking.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

Do you have any actual evidence of this?

Ooh here's a good one: there is negligible difference in mathematical ability between genders, yet stereotypes about male superiority exist and have been quantitatively measured:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

Because cultural stereotypes affect people's confidence, performance, efficacy, and motivation. Look up stereotype threat effects.

Who called for a politically enforced diversity? Quotas are facile and ineffective. I am calling for individuals to seek diversity for its own sake.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

I remember what it was like back then. People were nicer, there was more of a community feel to the net. The numbers confirm it - more women went into CS back then.

then you'd don't remember the internet. I've been yelling at people online for over 20 years now, and its nicer than its ever been.

People wouldn't hestitate to kick ban you for n00b questions of DoS your 14.4 k modem off the internet. Now "reddit" is the frontpage of the internet, back then it was goatse.cx, and watching a man strech his asshole wide enough to park a school bus in it was the standard initiation ritual. god help you if you had a *.ipt.aol.com ip hostname on IRC.

Unless you were talking about the "proffesional" side of the internet world, which was full of uptight untalented dickheads who's entire scene has all but been suplanted by the hackers. Some dickhead that went to work for a computer company 8 hours a day then went home didn't build the internet, or contribute to it's culture.

If you even remember /. from the 1990s, it was geeks vs suits. I don't give a fuck about the suits. I care that the hacker scene welcomes girls who have talent, and more importantly aren't more liberal arts types in disguise.

While I certainly don't want to discount the misogyny out there, and the girls who just want to play and get harrassed, I really can't count Zoe Quinn as a game developer. I heard about the story third hand, and I listened to all the sides.(haven't been a "real" gamer in well over 15 years), I checked out the #gamergate sites, and even played Depression Quest(I would have never played it, but thank you #GG for striessand effecting me). While I agree #gamergate is a gross overreaction, I'll say this: I'll really hesitate to call Zoe Quin a developer. Its painfully obvious she's a liberal arts types, and not really a programmer. This is obvious by comparing how simple and primative the mechanics of "Depression Quest" are, to how complex and advanced both story, text, verbage, and overall writing skill demonstrated in the game. Her real calling and talent is plainly languge arts, not computer programming. Simply put, "Depression Question", was a talented writer trying to make a video game, as a writer, without too much thought into trying to appreciate how game designers think.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

OR maybe it's got more to do with the fact that CS is a mere 10% of all degrees conferred, is essentially a dying field, and the combination of demonizing and pathologizing nerds along with fearmongering like yours is what's keeping women away.

the best are self-taught. This is slashdot. geeks rule, suits drool. Thats from back when the geek scene was about tech, and tech rights. There was no talk at all about genders because it was 95% male, and we wanted more women in tech, but didn't have the damnest idea of how to get them.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

"Willing to do what it takes" = folding our arms and abdicating responsibility?

What are you willing to do? This has got to be good? I'm willing to fight against mainstream society, and to some extent have been all my life. You seem ready to push a bunch of nerds around. I'm not about to go to war without an army though.

Like you observe, a lot of nerds are put off by non-nerd feminists telling them what to do, because it feels like more of the same bullying they're so tired of

Especially when I hear more about #gamergate, and some people who should know better apologizing for Bill Cosby's rape habits. If its one struggle, then its one struggle. I've noticed even with so called socialists there is too many apologism, and even a tolerance for classism, that disgustingly has many ignoring sexism and racism if done through a classist lense.

I hold Anarchist(mutualist) political and social views, but I don't identify by the label, because I think many modern day anarchists leave much to be desired. Even worse, is mainstream modern feminists absolutely disgust me, because they seem to be dominated by neo-liberal capitalist and classist apologists who leverage gender issues to protect capitalist intrests. I think Emma Goldman is spinning in her grave.(pink drill bits for fracking anyone?). At the same time, I completely understand that men and women are not equal in society, and might agree with some of their talking points.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

you completely missed my argument, and attacked a strawman. I said that religeon is a big influence in re-enforce traditional gender roles, not that all religeon believes in traditional gender roles.

But thank you for taking my words out of context.

And so are you.

and you're digging for motive.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

And that is not reinforced by any bit of history I am aware of. Christianity has tended to improve women's rights, not degrade them, and I posed evidence to support this. I have seen precious little to suggest that GP is correct-- but as I say I am no expert on this so perhaps one of you two could provide sources.

I never said that, and you never provided otherwise. You seem to have an unrelated bone to pick, so you made an argument and then posted something completely off topic on a wierd tangent.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the constant barrage about how it's OMGSOMISOGYNIST can't be helping...

If I heard a field had a huge problem with men, I'd avoid it because I have options.

In practice, the parts I've noticed haven't really done the misogyny thing, except for the odd asshole.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

And most garbagemen are men

There are likely factors here arising from macro biological differences in physical strength and risk aversion. Professional occupations are more concerned with factors influenced by micro biological and culturally-influenced psychological differences in knowledge and aptitude.

And one set of factors can have sex-differentiated ability, but the other cannot, because that would be offensive.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

One set of factors has obvious, macro level effects. The other has subtle psychological and mental effects. Those subtle effects are more difficult to measure and less well understood. Some of our popular/stereotypical understanding of these subtle psychological and mental effects is demonstrably false yet still pervasive. e.g it is a commonly believed that men have better analytical and mathematical ability than women. This is a myth: men and women in fact have about the same ability.

It's not about being inoffensive, it's about being correct. It's about improving society for everyone.

In my own anecdotal experience, yes: women are both more adept at teaching in classrooms and more inclined to be teachers than men are. But different students learn in different ways and need to be exposed to diverse viewpoints in order to learn effectively throughout school. We didn't always believe this: for centuries and still in some places, school was a function of the church and all teachers were male. Sometimes all students as well.

In my own personal anecdotal experience, yes: mean are more adept and interested in understanding how machines work. But IMO this difference is easier to explain by cultural influence than it is by biological differences. 2 year old girls are just as interested in figuring out how the world works as 2 year old boys. But boys are encouraged to take things apart and build them while girls are encouraged to look pretty and make friends.

With computer science in particular, there is absolutely no evidence that men have any innate neurological advantage over women, yet we outnumber women by at an order of magnitude at least. Women are said to be better than men at understanding the integration of independent parts into a larger group dynamic. Men are said to be better at spatial manipulation. We have equal ability at math. Software engineering requires all these skills, but in my own practice, I find systems thinking skills more useful and applicable than the other two.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[shaitand]

"AFTER we correct for the still-existing artificial bias below the disparity"

You are making the assumption that there is one.

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

I already know many social workers. I also know many teachers. Like teachers, social workers also have above average education and make below average wages. I think both are indicative of the same root issues. It's largely a problem of short term thinking.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

OK, this is about programming, not other areas of education.

we don’t really have a STEM gender gap in the U.S.: we have an ET gender gap!

Re: Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[TimboJones]

No assumption. Check the links in my other replies to you. I'll even gather the most relevant ones again:
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

The problem is, If I tried doing something about it, I'd be attacked by the people who wanted me to help.

The sad truth is, I'm not moving an inch on this until we can highlight the root of the problem, instead of lynching scape goats, which does far more harm than good.

This is like saying, I don't want to bother arresting minor drug users, especially the poor, because if I tried arresting the large trafficers I'd get lynched from supporters of large cartels, with the blessing of the so called activists

until someone wants to confront sexist stereotypes in the founts of culture, and challenge pop culture, there will always be sexism. Until I have a partner in confronting classism, racism and sexism are never going away because the two are a function of classism.

The reason is because I cannot go to war with an army I do not have, and sometimes doing nothing is more prudent, because I'd make more of a mess than I'd solve. I am putting my foot down, and I am not going to let self-described "feminists" use gender issues as a wedge against people who are either poor, or with low social status.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[rtb61]

'ER' Patriarchy generated capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., they changed it, oh the horror.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[rtb61]

I was thinking success in the family unit and not success in exploitation of resources and people. Not all people consider that all that much of a success but more of a path to eventual over exploitation or resources and eventual extinction.

Re:Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[davydagger]

congradulates, there are a handful of societies out there that are matrilinial, I don't see how they are any better or worse.

'ER' Patriarchy generated capitalism

No, Patriarchy predates capitalist society by a very long margin, as it was the building block of feudalist society, i.e arranged marraige, and the rule of lords that required offspring, and political marraiges to keep power. The first woman's rights movements happened around the same time that classical liberals took a foothold, and was picked up as a cause by socialists around the same time(such as emma goldman).

As liberalism(classical) became capitalism, past victims of oppression because easy targets for exploitation, and profit was to be made, and the economy dependant on this exploitation.

In today's society, our economy revolves around material society selling goods which requires a strict social hiearchy based on consumption. Because sex is big part of this pecking order, and primary motivation to climb the ladder, capitalists make it hard for women to be anything but trophies and posession of those who continue to further the system the most.

Under socialism, any sort of hiearchy, to include patriarchy would cause a problem, for everyone, not because of any feel good bullshit, but because it would enable an elite based on status based on skill and ability as exploiters. Since these people have already proven themselves better at exploitation, they would rapidly exploit the rest of what was supposed to be the 'privledged' section of society.

The man women example, is that in the golden age of patriarchy, i.e. feudalism, fathers married off their daughters for social and political gain. The only men that had women, where either status'ed, or paid for whores. The lower class of men, beneath the point where they could purchase a wife, or whores, generally resorted to homosexuality. Companionship was something you paid for.

Another example was under slavery in the USA, whites where privledged because they were not kept as slaves. However, when it came time to vote, slaveholding states had more representation than voters, because they had slaves. Any organization and fraternity between Free workers became useless, because they could always be undercut by slave labor. So the mere existance of slaves oppresses everyone but people who have enough slaves to use them as capital.

That doesn't get to the fact as long as there is hiearchy and privledge it needs to be protected, because all social constructs are made up, and at somepoint people start ignoring bad ideas.

As long as you have a privledged group, you have hiearchy and explotation, the demands enforcement, who become the only people who benefit from the equation.

There is no amount of high-falutan pseudo-intellectual garbage that will change that, end of story.

also, from your article:

They have aspects of a matriarchal culture: women are often the head of the house, inheritance is through the female line, and women make business decisions. However, unlike a matriarchy, the political power tends to be in the hands of males

welp, rules that one out, but you've yet to show how its measurably better than comparable societies without any matrilialism.

'Defied'

[Anonymous Coward]

The white house is shit these days

Re:'Defied'

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been shit for 6 years. Obama defies US citizens and the US Constitution with his abuse of power when he usurps the legislative process and unilaterally takes action on immigration, obamacare, the environment. It goes on and on. He's even in denial that voters repudiated him in the 2014 mid-terms.

Re: 'Defied'

[Lallo]

Yes. Our entire government is, of course, Obama. We shouldn't lay any blame at the feet of senators and house representatives for the state our country is in. Obama is the problem, and surely when we "vote" a new president into office, everything will be merry-go-rounds made of rainbows, fields of chocolate covered dandelions and rain will taste like lemonade! Our government is not run by one man. And there is no aspect of it that is running satisfactorily, stop trying to lay it all at one person's feet. In relation to the actual article, I find it quite refreshing. I'm not saying that girls get more or anything, but how is it promoting equality to give exclusive rights on a project to one group of people?

Re: 'Defied'

[KenHansen]

Everyone is equal, some are just more equal than others. I remember my alma mater decided one year to vastly increase the number of women accepted into their freshman class. rather than accept the top 400 applicants regardless of gender, they accepted the top 125 female applicants, most of whom never expected to be accepted - they applied because their father graduated from there - and the failure rate was astronomical... Typically half the freshman class failed out before sophomore year, for the girls it was more like 75-80% of Friedman girls failed out. How did that help those girls?

Re: 'Defied'

[KenHansen]

Freshman, not Friedman girls...

Re: 'Defied'

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Our entire government is, of course, Obama. We shouldn't lay any blame at the feet of senators and house representatives for the state our country is in. Obama is the problem, and surely when we "vote" a new president into office, everything will be merry-go-rounds made of rainbows, fields of chocolate covered dandelions and rain will taste like lemonade!

Our government is not run by one man. And there is no aspect of it that is running satisfactorily, stop trying to lay it all at one person's feet.

In relation to the actual article, I find it quite refreshing. I'm not saying that girls get more or anything, but how is it promoting equality to give exclusive rights on a project to one group of people?

Oh cut the crap.

Senator Obama campaigned on the promise to close Gitmo - and President Obama didn't do it. Despite his being Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and Gitmo being run by the military, President Obama hasn't closed Gitmo.

But he turned around and issued an executive order to effect amnesty despite the fact the Constitution explicitly makes control of immigration and naturalization a Congressional power? Despite him saying until just a few months ago he didn't have the power?

What about the NSA's warrantless wiretaps? If Obama can violate the law to change Obamacare deadlines or enact de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants, why the hell can't he shut down warrantless wiretaps - something Senator Obama said was unconstitutional.

Re: 'Defied'

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you seriously suggesting that he should have just ordered the gates opened and let all those people with really big chips on their shoulders out to run amok? Even though some of them weren't guilty, they now have a huge axe to grind against the US for the torture and general abuse.

Moving them to the US or other facilities would require an act of congress and the jackasses in congress have refused even when a community volunteered to let the government use their empty super-max prison for the prisoners.

Re: 'Defied'

[Anonymous Coward]

Um. Yes. With a substantial reparation payment on top. That's how justice might work, instead of scary-cat ass-covering.

Re: 'Defied'

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you seriously suggesting that he should have just ordered the gates opened and let all those people with really big chips on their shoulders out to run amok? Even though some of them weren't guilty, they now have a huge axe to grind against the US for the torture and general abuse.

Moving them to the US or other facilities would require an act of congress and the jackasses in congress have refused even when a community volunteered to let the government use their empty super-max prison for the prisoners.

Obama's utter hypocrisy on Gitmo is independent of anyone's position on whether or not Gitmo is legal, a good idea, a bad idea, totally unconstitutional or just fine under the US Constitution.

He claims he doesn't have the power to close Gitmo, but it's a military installation and he's clearly Commander-in-Chief of the military.

Obama's got a helluva lot more inherent power to unilaterally close Gitmo than he does to unilaterally change Obamacare deadlines or effect amnesty for illegal immigrants.

It's a matter of what he WANTS to do.

Re: 'Defied'

[Anonymous Coward]

Butthead, Congress passed a law prohibiting him from transferring any prisoners from Gitmo AFTER HE WAS ELECTED.

Re: 'Defied'

[kenh]

Congress can't 'pass a law' without Obama signing it - when did Obama sign the bill (making it law) that prevents him from transferring gizmo detainees? I suspect they put a line in a budget CR that says no money can be spent transferring gitmo prisoners.

Re: 'Defied'

[Anonymous Coward]

Congress can't 'pass a law' without Obama signing it - when did Obama sign the bill (making it law) that prevents him from transferring gizmo detainees? I suspect they put a line in a budget CR that says no money can be spent transferring gitmo prisoners.

Don't forget, they can also not pass a law authorizing him to do anything about Gitmo, but since the prison was already authorized, they can keep authorizing it.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/02/1348849/-Defense-authorization-bill-won-t-include-language-Obama-sought-to-close-Guant-namo-prison

Re: 'Defied'

[Anonymous Coward]

But how many of them married a nice college man? That's the winning metric.

Re: 'Defied'

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though some of them weren't guilty, they now have a huge axe to grind against the US for the torture and general abuse.

So you're saying the US should continue to punish them indefinitely for something that the US did in the first place?

Re: 'Defied'

[CrimsonAvenger]

The big problem with transferring people out of Gitmo is that NOONE WANTS THEM.

In order to release those people, we have to send them somewhere. That "somewhere" has to be willing to take them (there are actually a few places like this, for some of the detainees) AND has to promise not to just kill them on arrival (the few places mentioned above don't seem to be willing to do this part).

Which means, ultimately, the choice we have is to either keep them in Gitmo, or to release them into the USA.

And we don't want them either....

Re: 'Defied'

[drinkypoo]

Which means, ultimately, the choice we have is to either keep them in Gitmo, or to release them into the USA.

We could transfer them to a prison inside the USA which met at least the standards they have to meet here, which are pretty pitiful as it is. Why aren't we doing that? Answer, because there would be more pressure to treat those people like human beings, with rights.

And we don't want them either....

Then why have we got them? That's bullshit.

Only missing the point a little bit

[Anonymous Coward]

But whatever, it's not like this is anything shocking or new.

Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[argStyopa]

...for their terrific job and a wonderful tree display.

And kudos also to the admins with the balls to tell the administration and Google to fuck off with their politically-correct bullshit.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet when atheists demand the right to put up non-Christian Christmas decorations be put out, Christian organizations scream bloody murder.

Politically-correct bullshit works both ways

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Anonymous Coward]

...for their terrific job and a wonderful tree display.

And kudos also to the admins with the balls to tell the administration and Google to fuck off with their politically-correct bullshit.

What this world needs is more people with balls

As long as we stop standing against those politically-correct assholes they think they get the right to steamroll over everything

Fuck 'em!

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Anonymous Coward]

The politically correct option is no decorations. It's the government, not a fucking art house. Spend my money on the citizens, not feel good bullshit.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember, fucktard, that feminists and by extension programs like these are not about equality. They're about equality, not signing up for the draft, and having special rights (Violence Against Women Act, anyone?).

Get your white knight ass out of here. I'll bet you were picked last for the team in gym class.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Anonymous Coward]

...for their terrific job and a wonderful tree display.

And kudos also to the admins with the balls to tell the administration and Google to fuck off with their politically-correct bullshit.

Fuck yeah, you nailed it right on the head and I totally agree with everything you said, people like us need to let the world know whats right and whats wrong. Fuck this PC bullshit, Google and the US Govt can go fuck themselves, and so can those bitches who want to take over OUR fields. STEM means Science Technology Engineering for Men.

You and all the others who believe in our cause need to be more vocal to let the world know that we WILL NOT be beaten down for being men. STEM is a boys club, not a fucking girls club. Girls belong in the kitchen, not taking over our jobs.

Murica!

amiright?

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[LordLucless]

Christmas trees are non-Christian Christmas decorations. They were imported into Christmas from the pagan Yule festival. Christian decorations would be crosses, crucifixes or nativity scenes.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Anonymous Coward]

The politically correct option is no decorations. It's the government, not a fucking art house. Spend my money on the citizens, not feel good bullshit.

What's Obamacare (feel-good money to insurance companies, bullshit for the rest of us) got to do with this?

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Anonymous Coward]

> non-Christian Christmas decorations

Isn't that like dehydrated water?

Re: Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Anonymous Coward]

"not signing up for the draft, and having special rights (Violence Against Women Act, anyone?)."

Not to burst your bubble, but I'm not allowed to sign up for the draft. Who made the draft? Men. But I skirted around it by voluntarily enlisting so you or your son wouldn't have to serve. I am all for having the draft be for everyone, especially the rich.

And men peer pressure other men into not reporting domestic violence. Men oppress men in this case. So if you wish for stronger domestic laws that protect men, stop shooting your own foot.

I'm not saying men don't get shafted, a lot, just like we ALL get shafted by something. But weak examples, man.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[msauve]

Santa is just Satan, misspelled.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Fwipp]

You know that VAWA covers men, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

That seriously took me less than 15 seconds to find.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[laurencetux]

actually truth be told the whole idea of a mid winter celebration was taken from the Pagan/Wiccan/Druids On another note the Proper nativity scene would have (depending on scale) the Magi NEXT DOOR or DOWN THE BLOCK. Oh and in march/april lets chat about Easter

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[tompaulco]

Atheists are welcome to put up nothing all they want. Nobody is stopping them from doing nothing.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[tehdaemon]

Comes in 16oz packages. Just add 16oz of fresh water to reconstitute.

T

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Oligonicella]

And many aphorisms, if not most, are simply stupid.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Oligonicella]

Atheists enjoy celebrations too. Mid winter is just a celebration. I enjoy the celebration, the joy, the extension of good will and feelings and especially the songs that simply broadcast happiness. Being snide simply comes across as being snide, not clever.

Re: Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[reanjr9417]

Wicca, really? Cause Wicca dates back all the way to the 20th century.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you rad your own link? "Individual organizations have not been successful in using VAWA to provide equal coverage for men."

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[argStyopa]

So (aside from being anonymous, so you don't have to stand by what you say), you must then believe firmly that 'counteractive' discrimination is better than no discrimination?

Please let me know the quantitative metric at which we decide that 'counteractive' discrimination has reached a point of overcorrection at which we can then apply counter-counteractive discrimination? Because discrimination is apparently what we want to keep doing, as long as it's the "right" discrimination?

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[mwvdlee]

No. Satan is just Santa, misunderstood.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[AmiMoJo]

I went to the actual web site (https://www.madewithcode.com/) and it doesn't appear to exclude males at all. It is aimed at encouraging women to participate, if you click on the "code the holidays" link it just lets you start learning without even having to sign up, and certainly without declaring your gender.

The whole controversy seems to be made-up.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah. They happen to share the same name, but there's nothing to Christian about modern - or historical - Christmas.
It's easier in languages where they have separate names: "Non-Christian Yule decorations" sounds fine.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[theodp]

In the press release, the National Parks Foundation and Google left no doubt that this was intended to be a for-girls-only event The Google for Education blog also drove home this point: "Earlier this year, we introduced a program called Made with Code to inspire millions of girls to try coding, and help them understand the creative things they can do with computer science. Starting today on madewithcode.com, girls can use the introductory programming language Blockly to animate the lights of the state and territory trees that will decorate President's Park, one of America's 401 national parks and home to the White House, through the holiday season." BTW, Google did require kids to declare their gender on other sites (Khan Academy, Codecademy) so that public school teachers would only receive $1,000+ in funding rewards for encouraging girls to code. A current Google-Codecademy promo takes things further, asking kids to declare their gender and race, apparently to exclude all boys from a $100 per-student reward ("gift codes will be distributed only to girls"}, and white/Asian boys from a $1,000 per-10-students bonus ("Why is the bonus funding specifically geared for girls and students of color?").

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Anonymous Coward]

Saban is just Satan with a typo.

Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids

[Fwipp]

Did you follow through to the source (marked as "Dubious - discuss") ? The link leads to some dude's blog, where he says nothing about whether or not individual organization have been able to provide coverage for men.

When reading Wikipedia about "controversial" subjects (which preventing domestic violence apparently is, now), you've got to look at the sources for anything that doesn't appear strictly factual.

The second link is absolute crap!

[BarbaraHudson]

I know it's not the style to read the articles, but the second link goes to a web site that shows a different story, and if you don't sign up, shoves you to their front page.

Link bait.

Re:The second link is absolute crap!

[BarbaraHudson]

Sorry - 3rd link.

Re:The second link is absolute crap!

[theodp]

Try this one: St. Augustine Students Join Google's Made With Code Initiative and Light Up Holiday Trees With Code: Although Googleâ(TM)s Made with Code is a movement launched in June 2014 to inspire millions of girls to learn to code, and to help them see coding as a means to pursue their dream careers, âoewe decided to open it up to all our students, both boys and girls so that they could be a part of such an historic event, and have it be the kickoff to our Hour of Code week,â commented Debra Knox, Technology Teacher at St. Augustine.

BVlow Out of Preportion

[Frosty Piss]

There is no reason to believe that there are equil numbers of boys and girls interested in programming. This does not say anything about if there are girls that "can do it", but that different people, different sexes have different interests.

Re:BVlow Out of Preportion

[93 Escort Wagon]

There is no reason to believe that there are equil numbers of boys and girls interested in programming.

There aren't equal numbers of boys and girls, period - more boys are born than girls (it's around 52% IIRC).

Re:BVlow Out of Preportion

[Anonymous Coward]

Only because so many Republcians murder baby girls. They hate women and don't want to have one. Also, since they are irrationally against abortion, they are comitting murder rather than abortion. They truly are baby killers.

Re:BVlow Out of Preportion

[ceoyoyo]

True. But the ratio hits 50/50 in the US by about age 35 as more boys die. Thereafter it's an accelerating plunge to 80% female by age 80.

Re:BVlow Out of Preportion

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not blown out of proportion iif Google or the White House had really said that no boys should be allowed to do the job. Imagine if they had said "no girl programmers." When Google and the White House are saying things like that, it's a serious scandal.

That's assuming the story is being correctly reported.

Makes things worse

[auzy]

We do need more women in the tech field, but my feeling is that having exclusively female projects like this can actually widen the gap.

What it basically says is that girls and boys can't work together, and it doesn't teach guys to work as coworkers with women. Furthermore, boys who wanted to join in, later in life may feel jealous that women always get what they want, and may avoid hiring women.

A better approach would have been to have 2 trees, 1 for the females, 1 for the males.Nobody would feel left out then.

Re:Makes things worse

[Anonymous Coward]

A better approach would have been to have 2 trees, 1 for the females, 1 for the males. Nobody would feel left out then.

Except the differently gendered. Just have one tree for everyone and have done with it.

Re:Makes things worse

[Anonymous Coward]

No such animal. however, yes, there should be one tree for equal opportunity.

Re:Makes things worse

[ShaunC]

We do need more women in the tech field

Why? Honest question.

No one seems to be up in arms over women being underrepresented as, say, firefighters or airline pilots. No one's pushing men to become hair stylists or librarians. Yet millions and millions of dollars are being spent on exclusionary girls-only events like this, telling girls that they must learn to code. I don't get it. What's wrong with just encouraging kids, whatever genitalia they have, to follow their interests, whatever those may be? If a girl is into tech, or a boy is into makeup, encourage them to pursue those careers and bust up the stereotypes. I don't find sense in telling girls they need to be in the tech field, any more than telling boys they need to grow up and be cosmetologists.

Re:Makes things worse

[bsolar]

What it basically says is that girls and boys can't work together, and it doesn't teach guys to work as coworkers with women.

It also doesn't teach girls to work as coworkers with men.

Re:Makes things worse

[Anonymous Coward]

No such animal.

I think you'll find there is. They don't put a T into LGBT for shits 'n' giggles.

Re:Makes things worse

[Anonymous Coward]

"Skills shortage"

Women are easier to bully into low wages and long hours then men are. As such, they're highly desirable in the tech industry at the moment.

Re:Makes things worse

[drinkypoo]

We do need more women in the tech field

Why? Honest question.

For the benefit of the men, of course. But really, everyone would benefit from more integration of more kinds. When businesses more accurately reflect the makeup of the nation, they better serve the nation. Corporations are legal fictions which could not exist without the nation, so they should serve it to some degree.

Re:Makes things worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Low wages maybe, but AFAIK women are generally much better at keeping to 40 hour workweeks than men.

Re:Makes things worse

[Anonymous Coward]

really? Because I have read plenty in the past about issues of sexism in firefighting being a lot worse than other professions (its well known in the community) and if you just google right now it's clear there are a number of people and programs that wish for more equal treatment there and representation. Likewise googling for pilot representation brings women's programs in the field for pilots, air traffic controllers, dispatchers and so on. It is strange that you bring up hair styling and librarians which word clearly much lower class jobs than those in STEM fields and thus there is less emphasis on them. Obviously, there will be a strong focus on correcting disparities in fields that are either considered more important, higher paying, or otherwise worthy of notice. STEM fields also represent many jobs, far more than those that you randomly picked out as examples, and you just make assumptions about the reasons for the disparity without anything to back it up. STEM fields are also valued for their great contributions to society such as medicine, technology, and otherwise greatly improving our quality of life. This is why there is an emphasis on them in addition to what was previously stated.

Why not actually question why there is a disparity with actual science? This is hardly an easily resolved and understood scientific issue, if you look at the studies. In addition, you suggests that these programs are about forcing women into it which is not only a straw man argument against those supporting them but not even remotely true. The point of the programs is to give exposure so that if they are interested, they have the opportunity to learn more in an environment with female scientists and engineers can give them an idea of what the industry is like from a female perspective in a very encouraging way that counteracts any potential issues they might face.

You make claims, without any reason to believe in them, even in spite of the historical and present day discouragement women from going into STEM fields especially amongst more conservative areas of the country. Why not try to address this disparity by creating a safe environment where they will feel comfortable and like they will not be discouraged by either males or females and so they can focus on their work and interest in the STEM fields without having to feel like a social outcast within their group? it is hard to suss out subconscious prejudices that exist, so even if you were fortunate enough to be in an area with low amounts of sexism within the stem areas of interest for high school level and below, there may be things you're not aware of. Those with gender bias these tend not to be self aware of them. In addition, you need to focus specifically on the fields and not conflate it with all of nerd culture as if it is so homogenous in spite of wildly varying disparities throughout.

Given the huge disparity in STEM fields it would be foolhardy to assume that none of it is due to significant sexist attitudes, especially given the historical overtly sexist attitudes and present day over attitudes by conservatives especially conservative families discouraging their own children and pigeonholing them into nice neat holes gender wise.you need to address this somehow and one way of avoiding or mitigating discouragement is to have female stem professionals tell the girls about their own experiences with gender stereotypes and pigeonholing and tell them that there is nothing wrong with wanting to pursue this field regardless of what family, friends, teachers, or other peers might say. Working with them directly on projects in addition to speaking to them helps make them feel more comfortable. You must understand that people who enforce gender stereotypes like this started doing it to kids at a very young age and so you want to get to them as young as possible so they're prepared and ready to be strong and resilient against anyone who might tell them the Dacian pursue something they are genuinely interested in. Please, avoid straw man argument sugge

Re:Makes things worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is even more desirable. 30 hr weeks means they're more easily replaceable as cogs for the work schedule, just like servers at a restaurant.

Re:Makes things worse

[auzy]

Things are a bit different in those occupations though. I'm a male, and there are many women who are avoiding computing simply because of the way they are being treated (I didn't want to believe it either). But, in occupations such as nursing, where there are less men, they aren't finding that men aren't being hired simply because of a persons gender. In fact, they are actively being encouraged to join and hired.

But women on the other hand are often being treated badly, the moment they contribute to any computing discussion (many female blogs are absolutely buried in comments from 10 year old guys saying how they will mistreat them). So targeting high schools is only a good thing.

But, I don't believe discriminating against men to get women into the field is the right way either, which is the case here. I was the only guy in my high school who knew C++, and I wouldn't have been happy if Google wouldn't let me join in with a major project, despite being a super nerd in my spare time instead of going to parties. Its the wrong approach.

Re:Makes things worse

[stdarg]

When businesses more accurately reflect the makeup of the nation, they better serve the nation.

It's racist to even make that claim. Racism is "the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races."

You're saying that an all white company can't serve as well as one with more black people. That's racist against whites because you think they can't serve black people on their own, and it's racist against blacks because you think they need special accommodations to be adequately served.

Re:Makes things worse

[drinkypoo]

It's racist to even make that claim.

You could easily think that if you're bound and determined to find racism everywhere. But that's not really thinking. It's just knee-jerking.

Racism is "the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races."

But that's not what I'm saying.

You're saying that an all white company can't serve as well as one with more black people.

No, I'm saying it won't.

That's racist against whites because you think they can't serve black people on their own,

I think they won't.

and it's racist against blacks because you think they need special accommodations to be adequately served.

No, I think they need to be served by people who understand and care about the issues which affect them in particular. Which, simply by the typically racist and segregationist nature of our society, means other black people. Sure, there's exceptions. Some people are more tuned into other cultures than are other people. That doesn't take away from the general point.

There's nothing racist about observing that black and white people are treated differently in our society, and further, that they are treated differently by black and white people — or, if you like, white and black people. Observing racism is not itself racism. On the other hand, when someone assumes that an observation of racism is racism, I assume that they are racist — because of all the times I've been accused of racism by people who made it abundantly clear that they were racist themselves, typically either in the preceding or following sentence.

Re:Makes things worse

[Anonymous Coward]

They would use the tree assigned to the gender they identify with. (I'm not advocating segregated trees, or a strict gender binary.)

Re:Makes things worse

[Intrepid imaginaut]

But women on the other hand are often being treated badly, the moment they contribute to any computing discussion (many female blogs are absolutely buried in comments from 10 year old guys saying how they will mistreat them).

This is a tall stack of bullshit on a par with creationism.

The reason IT is getting attention is because lunatic feminists endless search for people to hate dovetails nicely with the upper crust of the tech industry's desire for cheaper workers. Doubling the workforce halves the wages, and these are the same people currently being sued for conspiring to keep worker wages down in silicon valley.

Re:Makes things worse

[stdarg]

No, I'm saying it won't.

That's the same thing as saying they can't when you're generalizing about large groups.

Observe: I'm not saying black people can't make good doctors, but black people won't make good doctors. What??

No, I think they need to be served by people who understand and care about the issues which affect them in particular.

White people can understand and care about issues affecting black people. Black people can understand and care about issues affecting white people. To deny that is to say there's something inherent in white/black people that prevents them from understanding certain things that other people can understand, and that's racist.

Observing racism is not itself racism.

That's not always true, of course, because the classification of something as racist can be subjective. If I attribute some behavior that one black person exhibits (say, an interracial crime) to "Oh, yeah of course, he's doing that because blacks are all racist against whites" then that is definitely racist.

But that's just nitpicking. I see your point and my serious response is that observation is different from calling for action. Saying black people are treated differently is one thing. It's quite another to say that white people can't (sorry, won't) treat black people better and that only black people can treat black people correctly.

Re:Makes things worse

[malkavian]

If I remember aright, there are 9 gender classifications in hospital records.. Those include a few medical issues such as lack of identifiable gender and hemaphroditic.. Sometimes, someone doesn't identify with one or the other..

Re:Makes things worse

[auzy]

In one place I worked, the CEO said they don't hire women because all they do is "sit around and look pretty, and hang out on facebook". At another, the director was worried about sexual harassment issues.

The problem isn't the workers, its the people doing the hiring, and the CEO's. I agree that women don't seem to be as interested in IT, but, with all due respect, there are serious problems in our industry, and you sir, are actually the one saying bullshit (but you might not realise it).

And yes, this is written by a guy. And no, I don't support everything women claims, but, the above is just my experience (its the side of the story which people like yourself may not hear about).

Re:Makes things worse

[Intrepid imaginaut]

In one place I worked, the CEO said they don't hire women because all they do is "sit around and look pretty, and hang out on facebook". At another, the director was worried about sexual harassment issues.

The problem isn't the workers, its the people doing the hiring, and the CEO's. I agree that women don't seem to be as interested in IT, but, with all due respect, there are serious problems in our industry, and you sir, are actually the one saying bullshit (but you might not realise it).

And yes, this is written by a guy. And no, I don't support everything women claims, but, the above is just my experience (its the side of the story which people like yourself may not hear about).

I call you a liar, fool and propagandist.

Re:Makes things worse

[auzy]

That's nice. I hear that the best form of debate is where you just to call everything you don't agree with bullshit. Fortunately for you, you may even get a few upvotes.

However, judging by the fact that you seem to receive very few upvotes at all for any of the comments you post (but quite a few downvotes), I'm going to suggest that you change strategy, and maybe accept that you can be wrong. Because, applied to software, you sound like the kind of guy who will claim that a problem doesn't exist (because you can't replicate it), until your coworkers find it and fix it for you.

Those two stories are totally legit. Believe it or not, I actually forgot about them until recently because they are from 5-10 years ago. Every male including myself knows that every female pretty much strolls online and gets harassed. And, stuff like that needs to change. I don't believe from a business point of view women will ever get full pay parity (because if they have kids they will be away from work, etc), but, things are worse than that. The Christmas tree thing had good intentions, but the plan is kind of flawed

Re:Makes things worse

[Intrepid imaginaut]

However, judging by the fact that you seem to receive very few upvotes at all for any of the comments you post (but quite a few downvotes), I'm going to suggest that you change strategy, and maybe accept that you can be wrong.

Oh don't you worry about my karma cupcake, I've got it to burn and burn and burn. I have to wonder whether or not you can say the same, although I suspect not.

Because, applied to software, you sound like the kind of guy who will claim that a problem doesn't exist (because you can't replicate it), until your coworkers find it and fix it for you.

You've never worked in software.

Those two stories are totally legit.

Of COURSE they're legit, who wouldn't believe baseless anecdotes spouted by an anonymous zealot on teh intarwebz. Perhap's you'd like the keys to my car while you're at it...?

Every male including myself knows that every female pretty much strolls online and gets harassed.

Aahahahaha! Hoo, go back to agitprop school champ, I'm going to share this with the very _very_ many women I know who are going to laugh even harder than me, at you.

If it's any comfort, you won't get to see the mockery.

Although I hope that in some weird spiritual way, you feel it.

Discrimination *is* discrimnation

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether you like it or not, discrimination against boys is discrimination

By trying to exclude the boys from the team, Google and the Democrats are telling the world that it is okay to discriminate against the boys

Re:Discrimination *is* discrimnation

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether you like it or not, discrimination against boys is discrimination

Yeah, so what. Some discrimination is bad, and some is good. Just like any fucking thing else. For example:

By trying to exclude the boys from the [from the girls' basketball] team, Google and the Democrats are telling the world that it is okay to discriminate against the boys

Entitled white male whiners. Y'all just can't stand to see anything that isn't yours. Ah well, your day is coming; continue to complain and kvetch about it while you still can.

Re:Discrimination *is* discrimnation

[Rockoon]

By trying to exclude the boys from the team, Google and the Democrats are telling the world that it is okay to discriminate against the boys

Discrimination is nothing new for the Democrats. When its not about color or sex, its about class. Always defining a divide. Always pitting groups against each other.

Re:Discrimination *is* discrimnation

[Anonymous Coward]

Discrimination is nothing new for the Democrats. When its not about color or sex, its about class. Always defining a divide. Always pitting groups against each other.

Since you're throwing around generalizations:

Discrimination is nothing new for the Republicans. They practice it all the time and hate it when Democrats (and independents) point it out.

Re:Discrimination *is* discrimnation

[gzuckier]

Whether you like it or not, discrimination against boys is discrimination

By trying to exclude the boys from the team, Google and the Democrats are telling the world that it is okay to discriminate against the boys

And while they're at it end the discrimination that keeps boys out of girls' rest rooms. Why is it that folks who are against one type of discrimination are always in favor of the other?

Re:Discrimination *is* discrimnation

[gzuckier]

By trying to exclude the boys from the team, Google and the Democrats are telling the world that it is okay to discriminate against the boys

Discrimination is nothing new for the Democrats. When its not about color or sex, its about class. Always defining a divide. Always pitting groups against each other.

Meaning, "the Democrats refuse to let white Christian heterosexual English-speaking men who own some property run everything like God intended".

Re:Discrimination *is* discrimnation

[mr.dreadful]

This comment is "Score 5: Insightful"? Really? I'm with you about discrimination being a wider issue, but then you bring up the Democrats without making a real point. You are welcome to your political beliefs, but you'll need to craft a better argument then "those Dem's think its okay to discriminate." If you want to just shout your ideology without backing it up, go for it, but you scuttled a potentially interesting conversation by getting all "mouth-breathery."

Re:Discrimination *is* discrimnation

[Anonymous Coward]

If ethnic minorities, women and other groups would just accept their rightful position, there would be no divisions. It's always the fault of those damn Democrats riling up the lower orders to want more than they deserve.

Bogus and Sexist Programs

[pubwvj]

These "Girls Only" programs are bogus and sexist. If they did it "Boys Only" there would be cries of discrimination and lawsuits. It is illegal to do sexual discrimination yet our government does it over and over "Girls Only." Time to cut the crap.

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[FirephoxRising]

+1 Insightful

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[Anonymous Coward]

Should we maybe have a white boys club?

*cough*original US government*cough*

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[Anonymous Coward]

It is illegal to do sexual discrimination yet our government does it over and over "Girls Only."

The government isn't the source of most of the "girls only" stuff, which there frankly isn't much off. There's also plenty of boys/men's only schools, social clubs, fraternal organizations, etc. We're only now opening some government jobs (combat positions in the military) to women, and even now that's going slowly with plenty of opposition.

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just boys. Those boys turn into men and then get a whole new set of hoops (read: feminist-created laws) to jump through ...

Domestic Violence - Women are equally on par with men when it comes to Inimate Partner Violence, but all you hear/read about is men as perpetrators and women as victims when it comes to DB.

Divorce - Women get custody of children in 82%+ cases in the US, whie men get to make child support payments, and, if the wife was a SAHM, he gets to also pay her spousal support/maintenance. But all you hear/read about are the "deadbeat dads" (who, coincidentally, make up 1% of divorced fathers. Also, for women who DO have to pay child support, they pay it far less of the time than men (on average) do.

False Rape Allegations - The man's name is immediately thrust into the limelight before any due process, while the woman is held in anonymity. Feminists lie about the 1-in-5 figure as the US government's own data suggests it 2% of women who will get secually assaulted in their lifetime. However, once the woman has pointed her finger at a man, his life is basically ruined EVEN IF he is found innocent later.

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[tompaulco]

Same with other programs. We have Ebony awards which are only for Blacks, Latino awards which are only for Hispanics, and all of the awards in which a white person can participate is required to include all races.
Racism is still rampant and encouraged in America. You are required to treat people differently based on the color of their skin. There are certain things you can say to one race and not to another. You can defend yourself in your home or place of business from one race but not from another.

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 Earn Your Own Damn Points

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[skam240]

Yes, you're right to address the rampant award show oriented rascism present in this country. For too long this problem has been glossed over by the liberal media! White people need to stand up to this horrible oppression!

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah because England and France were such melting pots at the time. It's amazing how those white guys were able to trample all over those other vibrantly integrated cultures in Europe back in the 1700s.

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[AmiMoJo]

It's not "girls only". Boys can participate too. Just go to the site and try it - it doesn't require you to be female at all.

The programme is aimed at attracting girls to try some coding, sure, but it isn't excluding anyone.

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[BlueStrat]

Should we maybe have a white boys club?

*cough*original US government*cough*

How about a club for the first legal owner of a black slave in the American Colonies, like black colonist Anthony Johnson, who owned the first legally recognized slave in the American Colonies, black man John Casor?

If you were intellectually honest, you would admit that Washington and many of the other Founders abhorred slavery as evidenced by numerous letters and documents and were doing all they could to bring about it's eventual end while simultaneously trying to convince these same slave-states to join the emerging U.S.

Discrimination against people is wrong. There is no "good" discrimination. There is no "Affirmative Action", only retribution based on hatred carried on, like an endless vendetta. It only keeps the cycle of racial/ethnic/class resentment and hatred alive like domestic violence passes on from generation to generation.

Strat

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Er what? Have you seen the list of womens programmes funded by the US government?

Re:Bogus and Sexist Programs

[stdarg]

Wrong. For example, on https://www.madewithcode.com/c... you can see a list of grantees that Google gave money to. One of them is Girls Who Code. Go to http://girlswhocode.com/progra... and look at the signup link. It takes you to this form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Jp00FbcDXSig4eoGMDSy979gal7rpo4YYMZ_eCeS_pM/viewform) which asks:

Your Current Grade or the Grade of Students You Work With (if applicable)
Note: Only current 10th and 11th grade female students are eligible to apply for the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Programs in 2015.

It's amazing that you genuinely thought that programs targeted at getting girls into coding would necessarily include boys. How did you come to that conclusion anyway?

Huh

[Anonymous Coward]

So how is influencing girls to take up programing any different from discouraging them? In both cases you are forcing your own ideals and opinions onto them,
rather than letting them figure out for themselves on what the hell they want to do as individuals with their own identities.
Except that in the case of influencing them to take it up, you cover up your forced social engineering with self-righteous justification much like annoying religious fanatics do when organized religion goes nuts and they think they know better than you on what is good for you.
For the past few years, i couldn't help but create parallels between feminism and religion as organizations, hilariously they have too much in common now. Feminism has become a thought policing self-righteous religion, in an ideological political manner. The political equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church for the modern age. Heh.

Re:Huh

[Anonymous Coward]

So how is influencing girls to take up programing any different from discouraging them?

Because one is meant to address a gender imbalance and the other is what led to the same in the first place.

The political equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church for the modern age.

WBC are a bunch of immoral lawyers who pretend to have extreme religious values just so they can sue public bodies for big bucks. The feminists you talk about, while misguided and frankly moronic, are at least genuinely acting for what they think is right.

And if it had been meant to be *BOYS* only...

[Anonymous Coward]

If the White House had said they'd limit the tree programming to BOYS only, imagine the shitstorm that would have ensued.

Dear Ms. Knox

[Tokolosh]

Thank you for restoring my faith.

You have:
1. Showed that discrimination is not cool.
2. That disobedience is sometimes appropriate.

These are most valuable lessons,

I look forward to the day when there is gender parity among teaching staff at all public schools.

Re:Dear Ms. Knox

[Anonymous Coward]

You will never see gender parity among teaching staff at all public schools until men accused of sex crimes are protected from being publicly identified until they are convicted. As long as any demented child or parent knows that a simple accusation of sexual misconduct is sufficient to have a teacher removed from the school, and maybe permanently fired, you are going to find very few men teaching underage children.

Re:Dear Ms. Knox

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for restoring my faith.

You have:
1. Showed that discrimination is not cool.
2. That disobedience is sometimes appropriate.

These are most valuable lessons,

I look forward to the day when there is gender parity among teaching staff at all public schools.

Well said, and good for them.

The new equality

[KenHansen]

Girls succeed when boys are excluded!

Discrimination hurts both sexes

[Anonymous Coward]

When there is opportunity for only girls it doesn't help change the gender gap of certein careers. It hurts males because then they don't get experience, and it hurts females by not making them work for opportunities

Festivus yes! Bagels no!

[ArcadeMan]

The Festivus pole doesn't require blinking lights.

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Kudo's to St. Augustine of Canterbury school

[Lokinator]

Diversity is not about just moving the bigotry and discrimination around from one group to another, nor is it about creating artificial safe spaces that suppress both competition and actual achievement. It is with pleasure I note that apparently the leaders of St. Augustine have realized this and declined to participate in musical bigotry chairs. Let boys and girls, hetero and not, religious and secular, of dark hue and light participate on an equal playing field - defeating the racist meme as youth of all descriptions work to simply create the most effective approaches and, in this instance, the greatest beauty. Education shouldn't be about who has the coolest grievance or privilege card - it should be about who, through intellectual achievement, is best suited to a limited opportunity - and when opportunities are broad, they should be offered broadly without consideration of race, gender, orientation, religion, creed or philosophy.

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Defy

[Anonymous Coward]

Colorado/Washington state give the feds the finger and legalize weed. Race baiting mayors get publicly snubbed by their police force. Ranchers and their neighbors send rent seeking feds packing. Whole states publicly disregard immigration laws. Stupid symbolism like "girls only" Christmas tree programming get thwarted and then mocked.

I want more of all of this. Fuck the powers that be. They're wrecking this country and citizens need to tell them to fuck off.

This nation is not and has never been a big romper room of compliant children. We have a long history of defiance that must continue.

Whoa, wait, Fast Company?

[Baloo Uriza]

OK, some things really make me wonder.

• Fast Company still exists, even after trying to sue Fucked Company, repeatedly, for trademark infringement, quite fraudulently given parody laws?
• Fast Company's starting to do things that Pud from Fucked Company would do?

Seriously, my mind is blown here.

Political correctness = tyranny

[hessian]

The point is to use the quest for equality to justify penalizing anyone who rises above "equal," thus ensuring that all favors get handed out by the state or its ideological fanatic supporters.

This resembles... Communism? National Socialism? Totalitarianism? ...something where the agenda of control has replaced trying to achieve anything. We could have had a moon base by now, instead we will all be equal comrades under the People's Reich.

Re:Political correctness = tyranny

[Anonymous Coward]

you gonna blame "political correctness" for the collapse of the US space program?

man, you guys really have some nutters

Re:Political correctness = tyranny

[newcastlejon]

This resembles... Communism? National Socialism? Totalitarianism?

Democracy according to C. S. Lewis.

Re:Political correctness = tyranny

[skam240]

Yes, Hitler and Stalin got their start at Christmas tree events for children.

Re:Political correctness = tyranny

[Anonymous Coward]

This resembles... Communism? National Socialism? Totalitarianism? ...something where the agenda of control has replaced trying to achieve anything. We could have had a moon base by now, instead we will all be equal comrades under the People's Reich.

Uh no, the Nazi's have their secret moon base already, because their totalitarian agenda of control allows them to get stuff done. And they sure don't penalize those who rise above...as long as they are the right sorts. It is those who deserve to be kept down yet resent it that must be crushed under their boot. They expressly don't believe in equality, they have a definite hierarchy of superiority.

But hey, maybe you still believe in the Handicapper General.

Re:Political correctness = tyranny

[drinkypoo]

We could have had a moon base by now,

Wait, really? We don't have a moon base because of political correctness? You're going to have to draw us a map. Please. I can't wait. Making popcorn now.

Civil disobedience

[andy1307]

Yeah....this is just like Selma...

I don't want to see gender pairty

[Sycraft-fu]

The thing is, you find that as nations get more free and accepting of men and women to do what they please, gender parity isn't something that develops. In fact, some careers stratify even more. This isn't a bad thing, this is because men and women tend to have different interests. When things are fair and equal and you can pursue the career you wish, what they wish on average is different. That doesn't mean there aren't outliers, of course, but that you will find some careers are "gendered" in that one gender prefers them more than the other.

We shouldn't try and stop that. We should just make sure that the reason someone chooses a career is because they want it, not because they have been prevented from entering another field and this is their second choice, and also not because they were pressured in to it. We want people to be truly free to do what they desire, without artificial barriers to that.

Re:I don't want to see gender pairty

[Tokolosh]

Amen! {I was being facetious in my post above]

sound like the H1B's we say that we open it to usc

[Joe_Dragon]

sound like the H1B's we say that we open it to usc but we really do not.

Climate means men won't teach

[s.petry]

Simple, every male teacher is a punching bag with a huge target on them. You smiled at the girl when she turned in her paper, you are a pedophile man! Girl hugs the male teacher, he goes to jail. Female teacher fucks a student, claims "alcohol was the problem" and walks away. Wholly fuck, you would not be able to pay me enough to teach with the current climate. No, I quit mentoring too for similar reasons! The only way a guy can be safe in a school is to have a woman with him 100% of the time, and he's still fucked if she decides he's no longer needed.

Re:Climate means men won't teach

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's worse and more subtle than that. When a male meets an attractive woman, say in a bar or a coffee shop, and she asks what he does for a living, "I teach school" instantly kills his chances with her. Teaching is incompatible with getting laid, because teaching is considered a dead-end, low-salary job. It's not like you'll ever get promoted for your skill in teaching: you can go back to school and get a principal's ("educational leadership") degree and apply for an administrative job, but there's no internal advancement within teaching. There's no reward structure to attract men who want to attract women: they all go into business and make money. All that's left of the men are the hardcore idealists who believe in that "teach the children well" song (these usually marry other teachers and become strong, family-oriented types), and the men who can't get laid normally and so become pedos.

Re:Climate means men won't teach

[dwywit]

The "climate", as you use the term, is a big problem, and it worried me when my kids started school. We chose to send them to a private primary school (neo-humanist), and get involved. I've been a classroom helper with specialised tutoring in IT and making/editing videos, helping out in the cafeteria, etc for 11 years now, and my youngest child has just finished there.

I took a big cut in annual income to be able to work the sort of hours that allowed my participation, but it's brought the benefits. My kids are fit & healthy - the cafeteria doesn't carry junk food, period - it's all freshly made, and although lunches from home are encouraged, they have to meet certain standards - no packs of crisps, no "muesli bars", no packaged sweets, no cup noodles, etc. The kids are allowed bare feet, allowed to climb trees, and swim in the creek at the school. The local public high school teachers that these kids end up with have consistently praised the amount self-reliance and maturity of kids from this school.

I'm also well-known to the teachers, staff & other parents (especially the others that are into participation), and that's a valuable reputation. I've never had problems with parents leaving their children here for sleepovers, and vice versa - I trust my children's friends' parents. The seventh-grade teacher (female) once left me alone in charge of the whole class for an hour while she went home to collect some materials she'd forgotten.

Get involved, people - even it you have to take a pay cut to do it. Change the climate, and start with yourself.

Re:Climate means men won't teach

[Anonymous Coward]

You smiled at the girl when she turned in her paper, you are a pedophile man! Girl hugs the male teacher, he goes to jail.

Note, these are two highly American traits -- the hugging and the arbitrary smiling. You'll be considered a bit of a freak in many parts of the world if you do that around adults even if you aren't a teacher. You're basically complaining that you can't behave in a way that many people think is dumb anyway.

(Most of eastern Europe cultures don't distinguish so much between smiling and laughing, and as the Russians say, a person that laughs for no reason must be an idiot.)

Re: Climate means men won't teach

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice but irrelevant. The point was that a male is judged differently by the rules of American culture. Other cultures can have different norms but that's scarcely the point.

Re:Climate means men won't teach

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great that your participation has worked so well to the advantage of these students. But the fact remains that one allegation could completely derail your future participation, make you a pariah, or even land you in jail.

Do you think all of those stories about wrongly accused male teachers targeted un-liked or unsuccessful men? Most of them, like you, were good at their jobs, well liked by parents and staff, and made a positive impact on their students lives.

Re:Climate means men won't teach

[the phantom]

And Russians stand uncomfortably close by American standards. If I were to stand as close to an American student as most Russians would, I would be considered weird and creepy. Americans also consider eye contact to be very important when, say, disciplining a child. Lots of Hispanic cultures prefer that children look down and away when being disciplined, which causes a lot of American teachers to assume that their Hispanic students are ignoring them or being defiant.

Moral of the story: different cultures accept different things. Americans often smile at each other, and a male teacher should not be considered suspicious because of this.

WHAT THE FUCK

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of asshole politician or business tells little boys, "No, you are not allowed to participate in this event because it's for girls only."? And this is to teach children about the equality of the sexes? Good going morons.

Title IX

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't this girls-only program violate Title IX?

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Discrimination is good ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether you like it or not, discrimination against boys is discrimination

Yeah, so what. Some discrimination is bad, and some is good

What kind of fucking shit is this ??

Discrimination is good ?

Oh man ! You liberals never failed to astound me with your motherfucking bullshit !

Discrimination, no matter from whom, to whom, or in any form, is bad

If this world is to be equal, no one should be discriminated upon. NO ONE !!!

Re:Discrimination is good ???

[Anonymous Coward]

I discriminate when I choose which key to use when unlocking the door to my house. I discriminate when I go shopping. When I participate in an interview, I discriminate on technical abilities. When I look for a job, I discriminate on things like compensation and location. Discrimination is an essential part of daily life.

Liberals? I think an aspect or two about your viewpoint is contrary to the status quo, thus liberal.

I think meritless discrimination is a real problem that should not be corrected with more meritless discrimination. Two wrongs make a right or something? I think the basic idea is to encourage or force situations that challenge existing culture in order to break down "bad culture". Even if the idea is sound, I disagree with the method.
It also seems like trying to cure a disease one symptom at a time. "Too many boys over here let's force in more girls..." "Oh too many whites over here let's force in more non-whites." ...
"Let's end segregation of whites and blacks." 50 years later... "maybe we shouldn't have gender segregated bathrooms either..."

I'll stray from the meritless discrimination a bit, but there are many paths to incompetent driving, yet we have to campaign and legislate for each one that gets enough attention
Drunk driving is bad mmkay --> Wait er soo is texting and driving
 

Re:Discrimination is good ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Democratic Party members and voters are racist. News at eleven.

Slashdot sure has gone downhill

[Anonymous Coward]

We thought it would be great if girls could use computer science to own that space and design unique trees,” said Google spokeswoman Samantha Smith. Boys can participate, too, she added, but the emphasis is on girls, because they’re so underrepresented in computer and engineering careers.

School Defied Google and US Government

[janenichols]

It is good that education from IT firms are needed.At the same the gender discriminating was not required as few days ago the same program turned up for girls as well. As being educated, the firms should keep programs which doesn't disturb both the genders. I think education cannot be categorized as gender!!

Debian could learn something

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian rejects game due to authors opinion on women.

A properly licensed opensource casino video game was
recently posted to the debian bug tracker as a request
for packaging, as is the standard method for pursuing
such things in debian.

The bug was quickly closed, tagged as "won't fix"
The reason given by one of the debian developers
alluded to the authors past anti-feminist remarks:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...

The piece of software in question is licensed
under the GPL and is one of the only of it's
kind for linux (ascii-art console slot machine software)

Is professing progressive politics now a hard requirement
for being allowed to contribute to free software projects?

Girl children should be married to men.

[Anonymous Coward]

Girl children should be married to men.
It is allowed in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 22 28-29, hebrew).

America is a feminist cuntry. The whole world is it seems.

So Fu**n tired of this female sh**t

[Anonymous Coward]

So Fu**n tired of this female sh**t

That is all....

This is the thin end of the wedge

[Chrisq]

What next? The school could be treating everyone equally regardless of race, gender, or background. Surely this must be stopped ;-)

Why the fuck

[YoungManKlaus]

do you need a programmer for Christmas lights? Ok US Christmas lights are insane, but still ...

Many of you have too much spare time.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the fact that the St. Augustine of Canterbury School took it upon themselves to right a perceived wrong. That represents freedom of thought, independent (not government) planning, action without reprisal and education without politics. It's still funny how nobody comments on "Xmas Trees" in the title but will spend hours defending a statistical point backed by an obscure online publication or an unsupported observation by self-proclaimed expert or someone in the field. Stop your whining (and just blogging) and physically do something about it! Take the energy and passion you display on your keyboard and make it kinetic. By the way, I spoke to your mothers, they want you to turn off the video games, move out of the basement, and get some sun.

Stem is sexist

[gmclapp]

I'm so sick of reading about what gender/sex programmers and engineers are. Color blindness is the key to ending racism, and highlighting the gender/sex of people in this field is doing anything but helping end sexism.

Re:Stem is sexist

[Anonymous Coward]

No, see, our government believes we must fight fire with fire. The solution to racism is more racism. The solution to gender bias is more gender bias. And, so it goes...

Government has lost its way

[Anonymous Coward]

Government has very few jobs. The two most important ones are to defend our country, and to defend our individual rights.

Government has completely lost sight of both of those jobs. We gallivant around the world fighting illegal, unprovoked wars, which only brings more danger to our citizens. And, government goes out of its way to elevate the rights of special interest groups above those of others.

Why can't we just have equal rights for everybody, regardless of gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, or whatever? A human is a human right? Why must we have a government engaged in constant bias against whites, bias against males, bias against the successful, and so on?

JEWS.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is all you need to know about this latest Bolshevik attack on civilisation. Why don't girls learn to program if they want to? They don't want to, that's why. That's why, throughout history, MEN have invented and built almost EVERYTHING in existence. And yet received no thanks for our efforts, thanks to the JEW and his nation-wrecking bullshit.

WELL DONE

[giulioprisco]

WELL DONE! Kudos to the school.

Integration is the key to more women in STEM

[Zeorge]

Integration as in boys and girls working together early on. So that when either are in a hiring capacity they blip right over the name (and try and determine sex) and go straight to their experience/qualifications and hire on that alone. If neither are used to being integrated then the disparity will continue to exist.

Public school != Private school

[s.petry]

I gave the examples regarding public school, not private school. Public schools must follow Government laws and mandates, which is quite different from Private schools who don't have to follow the same rules.. just pass the same tests. I know because from K-7 grades my kid was in private school. There was no private high school close enough to where we lived for him to finish in private school so we had to switch to public. Public schools are extremely hostile toward men, and the bureaucracy ensures that it is. Public school advancement requires following the "program" and ratting out anyone doing anything differently. Making people look bad so that you look good, and it's way too easy to make a guy look bad.

Poor little fee-fees

[Anonymous Coward]

It is very telling that a bunch of boys are sitting around whining about being left out of a programming contest offered by the highest elected office in the US, which has always been closed to women.

Claiming reverse sexism is kind of like dropping the biggest silent but deadly fart in the room. We know you stink but we are too polite to tell you.

Considering how few boys graduate at ALL

[Anonymous Coward]

My IT group has twenty engineers. All are male. I interviewed 60 people in 2014. All were male. It hasn't gotten any better in the 20 years I've been in IT. In my math and science courses in college, everything above the simple stuff needed for other degrees, there was one female in all my math classes combined. Twenty years later it's no surprise that there are few females when they are unrepresented in school.

I'm of the opinion that competition is good. Frankly, the folks I've been getting for interviews pretty much suck. I want more people interviewing. I want competition instead of the issue now where anyone who can run "./configure" calls himself a developer and anyone who can "apt-get install httpd" thinks he's a system engineer.

Most guys here couldn't handle a classroom

[Anonymous Coward]

--and wouldn't find the compensation commensurate with the work involved.

Many years ago, I considered getting credentialed and becoming a teacher. Turns out getting an education degree doesn't really prepare you to teach. Classroom management is, at best, an afterthought.

Also I came to the conclusion that there wasn't enough money in it, and the hours are very long if you are conscientious. It's been much easier, and better pay per hour of effort, coasting along with marginal computer skills doing tech support.

And free time!!

I have an advanced degree in an unrelated field, and I'm male.

Yikes!

[VTEX]

I'm just going to leave this here.

Honestly, it's really kinda sad to read some of these comments - especially the over the top "reverse discrimination" ones. What's up with all of this anger and aggression over something this insignificant? Jeeze, put things in perspective. Women have to deal with a ton of discriminatory and sexist bullshit all the time - where's the anger and outrage then? I'm not advocating for affirmative action, but the question has to be asked: Why the disproportionate rage? When you answer that, maybe you will also find out why women aren't prevalent in tech.

Prosecuting Sexism

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Sexism one of America's most persistent crimes? Our government and media and schools have been telling us this constantly for forty years. So the White House and its corporate partners should be prosecuted for engaging in gender-supremacism. This regressive, anti-liberal chauvinism should be condemned by every segment of American society. Oh, wait, their daily Hate Crime was targeting little boys. That's OK then. Never mind. Not only is it OK to hate little boys and men in America, it's a fundamental part of the New Way Forward. Nice going folks!