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WA Bill Takes Aim at Boys' Dominance In Computer Classes
theodp writes Boys' over-representation in K-12 computer classes has perplexed educators for 30+ years. Now, following on the heels of Code.org's and Google's attempts to change the game with boys-don't-count gender-based CS teacher funding schemes, Washington State lawmakers have introduced House Bill 1813, legislation that requires schools seeking K-12 computer education funding to commit to preventing boys from ruling the computer class roost. Computer science and education grant recipients, HB 1813 explains, "must demonstrate engaged and committed leadership in support of introducing historically underrepresented students [including girls, low-income students, and minority students]" and "demonstrate a plan to engage historically underrepresented students with computer science." Calling it "a bold new bill that we hope more states will follow," corporate and tech billionaire-backed Code.org tweeted its support for the bill.
Forcing demographics is not organic and will never work and currently does not work. Just the same BS about having to have so many women, blacks, latinos in a given role, company, whatever. It's wrong. Let things self adjust. Nature works better without us tampering with how things work organically.
Boys and girls are different. Chicks don't dig computers. Period.
There is only one kind of systematic prejudice in today's institutions. And it is against white males. And if you happen to be heterosexual too, no one will target you for any favoritism.
We will truly evolve in our values when we finally return to egalitarianism. When we finally admit that you cannot push people ahead in line because of their race/sex/sexuality without simultaneously pushing someone else back in line because of theirs, we will be truly enlightened.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Maybe we should also take aim at the plummeting sales of Barbie dolls, and encourage more boys to buy them.
A surprisingly large number of liberal causes depend on the principle of equal treatment.
Liberals are for equal outcomes, not equal opportunities.
Conservatives are for equal treatment. For instance, a law against sleeping on the sidewalk should be enforced equally on both millionaires and homeless vagrants.
I see an awful lot in here about forcing educators to push students into these classes, but nothing about making these classes attractive to kids who would otherwise skip it.
Great idea. Let's take all the enthusiastic, optimistic, and insightful CS students and throw them out the window, then try to coax and cajole the uninterested into replacing them. I don't see how this plan could possibly fail.
Seriously, guys?
What happened to merit? What happened to "the heart wants what the heart wants"? What happened to free choice?
Why must there be more girls in CS to the point of excluding those *actually* interested in the subject itself? And why is this situation not repeated in welding, or mining? Why don't you want women to make up their own minds on what they want to do?
I see lots of women every day that somehow managed to pick a career and/or interest without anyone having to invest lots of money into convincing or cajoling them, so I'm pretty sure it can be done.
Seems like offering incentives to take the classes won't help if the people aren't interested in the first place. You've gotta make CS cool and hip. You need Disney starlets who program for real and have a gaggle of friends who all think it's so amazing. You need to equate programming with art, which honestly isn't far from the truth. To be honest though, this is a tough road to follow, since CS already has a strong association with utterly uncool turbo nerds.
I'm not sure how you target the poor inner city youth to get them interested.
I read the internet for the articles.
Sorry, but why do we need to make an argument for a gender blind program, again? Has someone slipped a coherent and convincing argument in favor of gender discrimination past me? One that invalidates all the staid and dependable refutations of the "logic" of discrimination?
Here's my argument against programs like this, and there are no red pills involved:
People who aren't interested in tech aren't going to suddenly start caring about it because society found a way to be paternalistic and manipulative enough to coax them into it, or because some pedagogic official somewhere told them to be. Did any official tell us to be interested in this stuff? Is that how we got here? My sense is that the truth is closer to the opposite: geekdom is a counterculture, i.e. a rejection of the very mainstream collective that's now using its disgusting, lamentable techniques to try and sell our valuable and important ways to the muggles en masse.
It's killing the goose that laid the golden egg. We have this beautiful, productive, vibrant culture of tech geeks driving the world forward, and we say that we want to expand and grow it. So what is our solution? Of course, not to walk to the mountain by adapting ourselves to this new way that according to the evidence offers these advantages... instead, we want to disassemble the mountain and ship individual grains of dirt to each person, whether they even want a mountain or not. This is not a recipe for a mighty monument, but a tragic iconoclasm.
I just did a career day at my sons middle school last week. I was the only programmer speaker. I did 3 30 minute sessions with about 40 kids per session. I'd say the ratio of boys to girls was 10:1. So what? Makes me sad if those boys interested in programming get weeded out to fill a female quota.
Well, they will have to turn eager boys away from classes in order to make room for not so eager girls. These classes are typically difficult to get into and overfull as it is. Thus, it discourages the eager boys that are turned away. The next step is to make the classes 'easier' because the uninterested girls think they are too hard and start failing and dropping out. This law, most definitely, is not what is needed. Finding ways to spark girls' interest? A bit more inline, and important.
It's a straw man argument intended to degrade anyone who identifies themselves as "Liberal".
There's no content or intelligence in it.
People don't seem to understand the necessary impact. They think, oh, we won't persecute boys; we'll just incentivize the special treatment of women. You get $100 per female seat and $10 per male seat, so you're encouraged to seat more women; we don't dock you for having too many boys in class.
Cue consideration that expanding the number of seats is expensive, while selecting for more women to fill the limited seats is not. The profit motive here is to push male participants away and lure female participants. Even worse, some may use propaganda to lure unqualified female participants: make the whole thing seem more attractive to girls, but don't actually change the curriculum to be more enjoyable for girls, so that it becomes an annoying struggle. Worse, but less likely, is the change of the curriculum to appeal to and interest girls, at the expense of actually being useful; we've taken long strides down the road of impressing parents and entertaining students with changes to the education system detrimental to actual education, but appealing to the public opinion as better marketing.
We will, in all likelihood, mishandle the translation of females into technical positions, drawing in students with no real interest in the topic but with starry-eyed expectations from the fancy posters and sweet words. Then we will learn not that we have approached the effort improperly, but that women are simply not suited for--perhaps not intelligent enough for--science and technology work. This stigma will not just affect education; instead, people will learn that women are directly inferior as engineers, by nature, and so will not hire competent female engineers any more.
This is not a prediction of the future any more than would be the answer to a physics question: I know what I am looking at, and I know what effect these things have. As a boulder rolls down a hill, so does misplaced effort generate misunderstood outcomes. I have seen these things before, I have seen them repeated over thousands of years, and I know what form the misunderstanding will take: it is always the fault of those in the system, and never the fault of those who designed the system.
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As I see it, the only way to fix this gender disparity is to fix the social problems that lead to stigmatizing boys to where they form their own subculture that eventually revolves niche aspects of computers, which in-turn creates a ready core of boys that realize in their high school years that they can make careers in computers because they're good at them, but because of the nature of that pre-existing subculture, does not appeal to girls.
But addressing the reasons that cause such self-segregation and the effects of it isn't easy.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Or, people in possession of high capacity magazines should be prosecuted according to the law whether they be a Serviceman driving through a jurisdiction with these ridiculous laws or a National Correspondent waving them around on his show.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
how is
boys-don't-count gender-based CS teacher funding
Unless I misunderstand this that means, the school will get less/no money more teaching boys. How can that do anything but discourage boys from attending. Encourage and Discourage are 2 sides of the same coin, if you go around saying we really want girls then boys will get the message that they are not wanted, which of course is true since each girl in computer class is worth more to the school. Or if there are limited places then boys will be refused entry in favor of girls.
I don't really see why we need every profession to have equal distribution of the sexes, anyway? Men and women are different, no matter how much the PC brigade want them to be the same. If a girl doesn't want to do computers why does society see the need to brainwash them into doing it.
Also in areas where men are underrepresented. It seems like the law forbids this type of behavior. (I know different country)
from http://www.stuff.co.nz/nationa....
He said despite male teachers being in a minority, scholarships were only available for women, disabled people and those from varying ethnic backgrounds.
The commission had said it would be unlawful to offer male-only scholarships.
I personally think the gender in-balance in teachers is much more important than the one in technology, teachers are major role models children's lives, and children need role models of both sexes, where who cares who wrote the latest app, or the latest network protocol.
This is going to come across as flamebait, but I really don't mean it that way. My guess is that social liberals are very empathetic to a particular stereotype of suffering: that of a girl, who through no fault of her own, was placed in a society that kept her from having as fulfilling a life as she could. They're greatly troubled by this, and are desperate to address the problem, thus alleviating their own sympathetic pain.
Granted; I see your point.
On reflection, the part that speaks to me is: "Conservatives are for equal treatment. For instance, a law against sleeping on the sidewalk should be enforced equally on both millionaires and homeless vagrants."
Thing is, that statement is just as much bullshit as the anti-liberal statement.
1. Sleeping on the sidewalk is a law that affects only 1 group. They make such laws knowing that the law will only or primarily affect the demographic they hate. Do millionaires sleep on the sidewalk? No. Passing a law that you know will only or primarily affect a certain demographic is discriminatory. The KKK could fuck over 2 of their hated groups by getting a law passed that says "curly hair is illegal." Such a law doesn't violate the constitution or civil rights laws at its face, so the conservative KKK says ". You have to look at who it hits primarily.
2. Entitlement programs. To me, giving a business a tax break is no different than giving an individual a tax break. Conservatives are all for tax breaks for their businesses & charitable donations. But give a poor person a meal and they throw you in jail.
"We will, in all likelihood, mishandle the translation of females into technical positions, drawing in students with no real interest in the topic but with starry-eyed expectations from the fancy posters and sweet words. Then we will learn not that we have approached the effort improperly, but that women are simply not suited for--perhaps not intelligent enough for--science and technology work. This stigma will not just affect education; instead, people will learn that women are directly inferior as engineers, by nature, and so will not hire competent female engineers any more. "
Chuckle.
I think the female gender is more intelligent than you give them credit for. Computer Sciences, Programming, Network Engineering, are all decent paying jobs I suppose, but far from the most interesting. ( Some are downright boring, monotonous, and mind numbing after a while. )
If the truth about many of these jobs became widely known, ( long hours, cubicle environments, you're a number to a company - not a human being, hunched over a keyboard staring at a monitor 10-12 hours a day ) you might even have a difficult time getting ANYONE to show interest in the field, gender notwithstanding.
Perhaps the female gender sees that all of the negatives far outweigh the positives and really don't want anything to do with it. Unless you walk, talk, eat, sleep, breathe and DREAM this stuff, it really is rather boring. Important work ? Absolutely. Just not very exciting.
Wrong. Non-strawman liberals are, in fact, for equal opportunities.
When you automatically consider the existence of unequal outcomes as a problem, and then use this now identified "problem" as a reason to try to manipulate things towards equal outcomes, you are not in fact supporting equal opportunities at all no matter how you try to word it.
You exist and in fact automatically believe there is a problem simply because there isnt equal outcomes, therefore the argument is not straw. The argument is in fact all about you, and that makes you so uncomfortable that you want to dismiss it. Too bad. Not dismissed.
"His name was James Damore."
Yes, because I'm sure there are lots of colleges and universities out there are telling girls that they can't be programmers, and throwing them out of the CS program the second they're discovered to possess vaginas. The administration probably threatens them away with a stick or something.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Same AC that did the career day. The kids could choose whatever they wanted. The girls that attended were more interested in graphic design. Only a few of them had an interest in programming. Girls were free to choose whatever career they wanted to learn more about. Girls just weren't interested in this case. That doesn't mean we have to slam the door on boys who have an interest in it and force it down the throats of girls who don't.
Did you ever think that women are too SMART to consider a Computer Science job? While the (mostly) guys in the field are pulling all-night marathon coding sessions to meet unreasonable shipping deadlines and worrying about their job getting outsourced overseas, many women are still going after cushy union teaching jobs.
Why? Because most teachers have a 35 hour work week, 12 weeks of paid vacation every year, and practically guaranteed job security and retirement benefits once they're tenured after a few years.
We're the morons here, people.
Yes, because I'm sure there are lots of colleges and universities out there are telling girls that they can't be programmers, and throwing them out of the CS program the second they're discovered to possess vaginas. The administration probably threatens them away with a stick or something.
You are absolutely correct in your sarcasm. Hormones and other chemicals in the body heavilly influence what someone finds interesting. I am a mechanical engineer and always had interests in machines, repairing things, and science. But if I smoke some weed the left side of my brain takes over and creative tasks become much more interesting- playing music, writing, etc. I had no interest whatsoever in playing an instrument until I started using marijuana at age 28. THC, a chemical, has changed the way I see those things and how much I enjoy them.
It could very well be that the chemicals Estrogen and Testosterone have an effect on which things a person likes and how much they enjoy them. If my estrogen/testosterone balance was tilted the other way, maybe I would find teaching small children stimulating and interesting. Or maybe if a women's estrogen/testosterone balance was shifted, they would find writing code fun.
Maybe estrogen and testosterone have nothing to do with the reasons why women aren't that into science and engineering. But maybe they do. There are shedloads of possible reasons besides "the culture" that haven't really been explored. Women are now 33% more likely than men to earn a bachelor degree. That's alarming. Women are getting degrees in literally everything else, including in medicine, advertising, and law. Those fields put up a lot of overt sexist resistance back in the day. Science/Engineering doesn't have that overt sexism (or it doesn't anymore), and I don't think that "subtle" sexism can be more powerful than the overt sexism that existed, and was soundly defeated, in medicine/law. There have been pushes for at least the last 10 years to improve the % of ladies in science and Engineering, and the numbers haven't really budged. I think that if women wanted to be in Science/Engineering, they would be.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Sexism, even with the stated goal of equalising a perceived imbalance, is still sexism. It is the same way with racism. Mandating discrimination, no matter how lofty their goals, breeds resentment. Using statements referring to "historically under-represented students" simply hides the intent.
They need to be very careful to encourage those who are 'historically under-represented' while not marginalising those who are 'historically over-represented'. It is not a kid's fault if they are born male or female, and neither gender should have a lesser education because of it.
Mandating changes to K12 funding rules is, unfortunately, not going to change society's pressures as a whole.
Along the same lines I can point out 2 good reasons boys are generally driven in that direction.
1. Boys are into video games - for the very same reason that big gaming is targeted at boys and that the majority of players are male. Those gamers are into computers and the possibility of coding future games, so they go into computer science. Girl gamers are starting to become a little more common, and their representation in computer science might increase organically if everyone just left it alone.
2. Boys like to build things - along the lines of Lego, blocks, and carpentry. Boys dominate "shop class", but I don't recall any big push to change that. OK, the shop class I had in high school did have a fair amount of girls in it, so maybe that's not a big concern. The building enjoyment flows into programming because the program that comes out at the end was "built" by you.
There are some toys aimed at getting girls into building things, so that's a good thing as well. I don't know that threatening funding is the best plan. That puts all of the pressure on the teacher or school to try to drive girls in that direction (and makes me think that down the road "unwillingly" isn't out of the question, or granting a passing grade for sub-par work just to keep the numbers up). Games that girls are interested in and getting girls into "building things" at an earlier age is where the attention needs to be. So that lies more in the parents, and asking parents to make their daughters good little cogs isn't likely to garner much traction...which is why nothing has worked so far.
I refuse to sign
There is only one kind of systematic prejudice in today's institutions. And it is against white males. And if you happen to be heterosexual too, no one will target you for any favoritism.
Oh, come on! Cry me a river.
Look at any movie in the west - the hero is a white heterosexual man 99% of the time. Look at most any culture and men are heroes and lead in every important aspect of society, super-models aside. Of course, in all these cultures there are also more dropouts on the male side, but that's how evolution wired the sexes as we know today.
Women get aided in MINT, come out of school an avarage of 2 or more gradelevels better than boys (every since) and yet it's still men who get the higher salary and end up in boss positions.
Why?
Because we (men), evolution and our culture wired us to not give a shit about grades and some dumb-ass teacher! Because we know better, don't we? But we *are* wired to seriously give a shit how much we get for our work. Especially so if we want to impress the ladies. A man is way likely would rather be a bum or at least a dropout than work under circumstances he considers below him. I know I am. He is also way more likely to grab a Kalashnikow and take what he thinks he deserves when pushed far enough. Examples all around. All the time.
Get it into your head: The most successful men don't even need a degree. It's white male college dropouts who've built the most powerful companies in the world.
Women end up having to weigh their desire to habe children against optimised career moves. In a classic society they are way less likely to completely drop out of society and also way less likely to rise to the top.
In my opinion any law that tries to curb those tendencies of gender inequality is welcome. That some of them are debatable, mostly because they are as ineffective as they are unfair, is obivous. But your statement is a blatant over-simpification and, to be honest, a tad whiney. If I may say so.
Get a grip, grow a pair and find a cute lady to have some awesome sex with - you sound like you could use some.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca