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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.
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.
Why not make a few of the classes a requirement, not an elective.
I suspect you may be able to entice more young women into tech, if you expose them too it more.
If EVERYONE in your grade has to take a few of the basic computer science classes, you may find that more women get interested in the subject. Women who wouldn't, on their own, think to take the class.
Maybe we should also take aim at the plummeting sales of Barbie dolls, and encourage more boys to buy them.
You could make a perfectly good argument about making a gender-blind program
That would be a good idea but not the case here. To be gender blind one would not even count the number of students in the different demographics and would not be able to see that there are any underrepresented demographics. The problem is how to encourage underrepresented demographics to participate without discouraging over represented demographics from participating.
Misandry is not the solution to misogyny; it is just a different problem.
Just a note; Google dictionary knows the spelling for misogyny but not misandry.
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.
I find outrageous the male dominance in the plumbing industry, most plumbers are males, and government should push more incentives so women can also succeed in the plumbing industry, i will also support a bill for more heterosexual male hairdressers, feminine sides can't understand my side cut!
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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The problem is how to encourage underrepresented demographics to participate without discouraging over represented demographics from participating
What if one of the causes of participation by the well represented ("over-represented", after all, implies a predetermined desirable level of representation) is the very fact of under-representation by other groups? i.e. what if geekdom is-or-was a "safe space" for an oppressed group?
It isn't an accident that the image of "computer nerds" from the 1980s was what it was, nor was it some grand plan of the patriarchy to enable their heirs to carry on the torch of Y chromosomal world dominance. It was because we were the people who couldn't get dates, who got bullied, who retreated into our imaginations and creativity because what we found outside was so ugly and off-putting and predatory to us. We're The Mentor, and these people are still trying to spoon feed us baby food.
And now that we've won, we've actually built the shining city on the hill that stands a good chance of no less than saving the whole world from darkness, here come the barbarians to demand their share. Well if you ask me, they can fuck right off back to their hellish world of head chopping, marketing, buying, and hating. We built this, and we don't have to share it with assholes.
The notion that boys and girls are "the same" is the one which utterly lacks evidence.
The onus of proof lies on those who would make such incredibly unsupportable statements.
I was raised in a family with two boys and two girls and we were all raised identically. There wasn't even a close contest between gender interests: It was stark and it happened before we were two, despite my feminist mother's desire to raise us equally.
Girls and boys are not the same. Never have been. Never will be.
BUT!
Some girls ARE like boys.
And some boys ARE like girls.
You know.. the whole venn diagram thing...
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.
What's hilarious is the number of women who will say things like "Women are better in tune with emotions" and "Women are more left brained" or "Women are more in touch with aesthetics than men" or "Women have a higher E.Q. than men do" or "Women are better at understanding other people", etc.
But the nanosecond in which a man says "Men and women are different", the entire female population of the planet (and the sheep-like "white knights") will flip out and demand an apology.
But girls are more social than boys. Math and CS are not particularly social activities. They generally require a fair amount of time spent noodling in isolation about fairly abstract ideas. That tends to favor boys. It isn't that most girls cannot do it, it is just that the endeavor is not social enough to keep most girls' interest.
Now if you were to find a way to make Math and CS more socially interactive, that might work. But don't expect to attract a lot of boys into that way of getting into Math and CS. And don't expect the two styles to co-exist in a single class.
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.
You say it isn't what is needed, but I think people are overestimating the point of the law.
This is numbers. The kind of people that support this kind of legislation only want to balance out the numbers of people. Reduce the number of boys and increase the number of girls; equal seats is equal opportunity. They don't care about improving CS education or the quality of the industry. The law isn't needed because of the thousands of CS-interested girls that aren't getting into classes because the boys are taking the seats; the law is "needed" because people look at the numbers and want a legal answer to the social problem. Who cares if boys who actually care about CS don't get to take the classes because girls who don't care get incentivized to take it instead? Nobody watches the demographics of disappointed high school boys,.
You're right that the problem is that those girls don't exist (or exist as a minority), and you're right that the law isn't solving that problem, but I don't think it was ever intended to. It'll make the numbers look better though, and to some people, that is progress.
"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.
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.
No one is inherently more intelligent about anything. The truth is boys go into computers because boys are interested in computers: experiments with small children under 2 years old have shown that small boys find interests more in trucks, and small girls prefer dolls. Small boys who do play with dolls in such experiments tend to make them fight; we call boys's dolls "action figures" for this reason. In both cases, the children select for what interests them inherently.
The selection criteria for a career is, similarly, based on what interests people. As G'Kar once said, all people do everything for precisely the same reason: It seemed like a good idea at the time. Some people select a career for money, for power, for working hours, for its attractiveness to women, its ease, its challenge, or its interest. Women, for example, may select a career for its monetary benefits, as a way to command their own independence; while men may seek a career for a perception about women being hot under the skirt for doctors, lawyers, and executives. Overwhelmingly, the decision is based in what is interesting.
The most obviously interesting career, the one selected for when no planning nor cunning nor foresight is applied, is the one which essentially amounts to playing with toys. Women like children, and select teaching jobs to interact with children; men like computers and machines, and become programmers and lube techs. Often this leads to hating your job and having your primary loves in life destroyed; nobody thinks that far in.
Ultimately, the women who get into computer science are largely there for the money, to assert their independence and their ability to challenge a male-dominated society; the small minority actually like computers. The men are, of course, only interested in tech. We see this pattern most clearly in casual conversation: outside the office, men talk about computers, about networking hardware, about software, about computer games they're writing at home; women mostly complain that their coworkers want to keep talking about work, instead of something interesting, and wish they could just talk about something else and enjoy their lunch break.
It hasn't occurred to most people that a pool of 100 men and 100 women produces 10 female programmers and 90 male programmers because women just aren't interested. Most people probably haven't considered a career choice as a multi-factor decision, but rather a matter of "what do you want to do?"; some are viewing it as a "what do you believe you're allowed to do?" problem. I wonder how long before the crisis of the male-dominated penis market will come up.
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I think Thunderfoot put it well: In a sexually dimorphic species, inequality in outcome is to be expected. The important aim shouldn't be equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity. No-one should feel pressured to persue or not persue a field because it violates their traditional gender role.
But, I digress. I eagerly await similar bills to end "boys' dominance" in fields like garbage disposal, oil rig maintenance, construction and homelessness.
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.
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
Considering the Democrats are a center-right party, I am not sure how anybody can call or be called a liberal for donating to their casues or candidates. If he donated to the Greens, then it would be fair to label him a liberal.
There is a major disconnect between European definitions of Left/Right vs US definitions of Left/Right that leads to much argument and misunderstanding.
European version of Left/Right is socialism/communism vs fascism.
In the US, Left/Right is 'more government' vs 'less government'. This actually has little to do with political party in the US, as both Parties have those who desire more government and those who desire less government.
Liberals in the US are a misnomer, as they are nothing like the "classic liberal" that many if not most people think of when "liberal" is mentioned, and are actually the Progressives from the early 1900s who, after having their ideology totally discredited, "rebranded" themselves as "liberals" so they could try again to push the same failed ideology.
The plan proposed is simply another flavor of "affirmative action" for females in a specific field, attempting to force the outcomes without addressing the natural & non-political reasons behind the differences or simply ignoring them for political convenience.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
First: Yes this is anecdotal, but it is my own experience with 'diversity' in the academic environment. It may not happen all the time or everywhere, but I don't believe it is uncommon either.
The summer before my senior year in college I acted as the boy's counselor for a career "summer camp" sponsored by the State of Michigan, aimed at high-school students. There were many different topics offered, but my school (U of M-Dearborn) was providing an engineering focused camp. As a counselor, I was involved in the selection process, which was run by the engineering admissions office. There were many more applicants than we had openings for students (approximately 30 openings), and the state had mandated a diversity goal (including geographic diversity). The result was a process that went like this:
1. Sort the applications. Place all white male applicants in pile 'B', retaining all female and non-white male applications in pile 'A.' (Actually, the gender sorting was retained.)
2. Review female applications and select the best to fill 50% of the openings.
3. Review non-white male applications and select the best to fill the remaining openings.
4. Plot geographic location of selected applicants' hometowns on the state map. Notice that no applications were selected from the Upper Peninsula. (U.P.)
5. Look for U.P. applicants in the A pile. Finding none, go get the 'B' pile (white males) and search for U.P. residents. (two found)
6. Replace bottom two selected males with the two U.P. residents.
7. Congratulate the team that they have done a wonderful job at promoting diversity.
I do not have a poker face and my disgust must have shown, because the Associate Dean of engineering approached me afterward and said "See, we got some white males in the end." What she didn't seem to understand was that what disturbed me wasn't the outcome (which was bad enough), but that if you were a white male applicant, your application wasn't even considered (except for the two Yoopers*, and they wouldn't have been if there had been any in the 'A' pile). Given the topic today, I suppose I should have been happy that they accepted any male applications at all.
*For those who don't know: Yooper = someone who hails from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (U - per). Conversely, the Yoopers call those of us from the Lower Peninsula "Trolls", because we live "below the bridge." (the Mackinac bridge which connects the two)
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
What I'd like to know is: why do we have such a lack of female pro-football players?
How about coal miners?
Heavy equipment operators?
In other words, why is CS such a big deal?