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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.
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.
That's easy. They just need to stop vaccinating the boys and it should even out.
/ducks
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.
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.
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.
I believe what he's saying is that boys are more likely (some studies have found boys are five or more times likely) to be autistic or suffer from some autism spectrum disorder . Among other characteristics related to this disorders is difficulty communicating with other people such as having problems being able to tell how another person feels based on facial expression. One theory is that people who are autistic or have autism spectrum disorders may prefer working with computers because it does not require as much social interaction. The computer is essentially devoid of emotion. There are no facial cues or body language, just output messages. That might make boys more inclined to be interested in computers.
Normally it isn't a zero-sum game. Anyone who wants to study can, but if a funding model is introduced that penalizes schools for having too many boys it's likely that you'll see some get excluded, either because there's now less funding available than before if there aren't enough girls in the class or because the school is not able to get enough girls in the class to qualify for funding.
Really, they should just make a basic computer course mandatory in one of the earlier grades. That way everyone will have exposure and if it turns out that girls still aren't interested then people need to start looking for other causes or perhaps it does lead to more interest from girls and it solves the problem in that way.
So... refusing someone who wants to learn (white boys) so that you can keep your percentages up... is seen as a win?
What twisted world are you in? How does reverse discrimination solve anything?