Slashdot Mirror
WA Pushes Back On Microsoft and Code.org's Call For Girls-First CS Education
theodp writes On Tuesday, the State of Washington heard public testimony on House Bill 1813 (video), which takes aim at boy's historical over-representation in K-12 computer classes. To allow them to catch flights, representatives of Microsoft and Microsoft-bankrolled Code.org were permitted to give their testimony before anyone else ("way too many young people, particularly our girls...simply don't have access to the courses at all," lamented Jane Broom, who manages Microsoft's philanthropic portfolio), so it's unclear whether they were headed to the airport when a representative of the WA State Superintendent of Public Instruction voiced the sole dissent against the Bill. "The Superintendent strongly believes in the need to improve our ability to teach STEM, to advance computer science, to make technology more available to all students," explained Chris Vance. "Our problem, and our concern, is with the use of the competitive grant program...just providing these opportunities to a small number of students...that's the whole basic problem...disparity of opportunity...if this is a real priority...fund it fully" (HB 1813, like the White House K-12 CS plan, counts on philanthropy to make up for tax shortfalls). Hey, parents of boys are likely to be happy to see another instance of educators striving to be more inclusive than tech when it comes to encouraging CS participation!
but you can't make her interested in code.
Stop trying to spend money to get girls to code. The ones that want to will. Spend that money on BOTH genders to promote CS.
Good-bye
In this day and age, basic computer skills should be a mandatory field of teaching. Right? As a side-effect, it solves this issue for every other minority aswell.
Assuming they don't have ergonomic mouses.
Or does K12 mean university level?
You can't offer education to a single gender intentionally without opening yourself up to discrimination lawsuits.
This push to get girls in tech should be aimed at the real problem which is the culture of female girls and females in general that don't take tech seriously in the first place.
They're not being excluded... walk amongst the nerds and ask them if they hate women... they don't. But the female of the species doesn't see tech as cool... unless there is a lot of money. And so they avoid it.
Really, the only reason people are pushing for girls in tech is because of the money. If tech didn't make big money they'd have no interest in it. There are a lot of things men do more then women that women have no interest in increasing their representation in because there is no money.
Which means this push for women in tech is mostly the same greedy shit we've come to expect from the usual suspects.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Girls have the same opportunity to sign up for these classes as boys do, they simply CHOOSE not to. Like it or not, girls and boys find different things interesting.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
"way too many young people, particularly our girls...simply don't have access to the courses at all," What happens after a generation of pushing STEM exclusively to women? Will there be programs for male-only STEM education? I doubt there will be. The access has always been equal. Interest, on the other hand, is not.
Devil's advocate view: From the point of a business, why spend money on CS?
H-1B workers are quite easy to get, and there is a tax credit for doing so.
Do these kids have laptop computers with Wi-Fi? Then they can start learning to code, no teachers necessary.
Some of the students from poor backgrounds might not have supportive home environments.. that's where affirmative action in the classroom can help.
It won't be long before deep learning systems are taught to code. Coding is a dead end. Teach kids fundamentals - math, science, writing.
With laptops available under $300 (cheaper than many smart phones!) there is essentially no barrier to learning to code.
If they don't have the desire to learn to code on their own they won't cut it in the work place, their resumes will be screened out on the first pass. Why bother?
Does anyone else think that when politicians are concerned about an issue that is has become old news and the opportunities are long gone?
And things change too. There are large amounts of layoffs in the oil industry now - many of them petroleum engineers. And if the oil analysts are correct, all those kids in school to become petroleum engineers are going to graduate with no job prospects - at the very least, the kids graduating this May are gonna have a real hard time. And it looks like it's going to last a few years.
Or notice how we don't hear anything about nursing shortages anymore, either.
We don't know what the future has in store and forsee this big push to teach programming and CS to create such a glut (see lawyers as a prime example) that a CS degree will mean working at a coffee shop - unless you have a 4.0 GPA from MIT or something.
(And they're quite convinced they're right)
They say the oaks are just too lofty
And they grab up all the light
But the oaks can't help their feelings
If they like the way they're made
And they wonder why the maples
Can't be happy in their shade
And of course the sad ending
So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights
'The oaks are just too greedy
We will make them give us light'
Now there's no more oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe and saw
--- Rush 1978
Remember, you can never make yourself better by having someone else chop the other person down. Very powerful song - still resonates today.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
IT'S 2015. A KID CAN TAKE HIS GRASS CUTTING MONEY AND BUY A RASPBERRY PI AND USE A FREE VGA MONITOR FROM HIS NEIGHBOR'S ATTIC COLLECTING DUST. I GOT ON AN STARTED A APPLE IIE. IT'S FUCKING 2015 - TECHNOLOGY IS JUST AS IF NOT MORE ACCESSIBLE THEN EVER BEFORE. SERIOUSLY CODE.ORG PLEASE GO AWAY. YOU'RE A BUNCH OF SOUL SUCKING LOBBYISTS. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. SO FUCKING TIRED OF THIS ENDLESS DRIVEL FROM CODE.ORG AND THIS ENDLESS LOOP OF BULLSHIT STORIES ON OPPORTUNITY INEQUALITY. CODE.ORG JUST GO AWAY. YOU LAID OFF 18,000 MICROSOFT. OH THE SOB STORY.
What we really need to address is the dearth of women in garbage collection, logging, and other menial and/or dangerous occupations. Then we can address the lack of male medical doctors being produced in America. Then we can look into the lack of male college graduates. Right?
This isn't about equality, or fairness. If it was then the same people should be trying to fix the problem with the male dropout rate between their Associates and Bachelors degrees that's created a fairly wide education gap in women's favor. The drop out rate gap started in 1996, and there is plenty of data to look at to show how, and possibly why it became existent. But no, because Women fled CS faster in the 80's then men did we have to waist our time on an issue that's much harder to understand, and without understanding is much harder to address.
Engineering, programming, medicine are known by everyone to be the career choices if one wants a marketable education.
You don't see Wall Street investment banks promoting themselves. They have people tripping over themselves trying to get there and make millions.
I laminate over the lack of boys in clothes design and modeling. I assume that congress will address this soon.
Girls-first or generally, I don't know if pushing a single field or skill ("coding") is the right idea. "Coding" is increasingly becoming stratified due to outsourcing of routine stuff. You have people working on the core guts of operating systems, VM platforms, etc. who are very high end and always in demand, but you also have a huge glut of mid- and low-level coders. These are the corporate IT developers doing Java or .NET CRUD-style applications, and it's becoming pretty clear that outsourcing is killing a lot of that work or making it less profitable. (The other elite-level coder is the serial consultant who flies in to correct the messes the outsourcers deliver, but that's another story.) There are also a whole other bunch of mid level "coders" writing phone apps or website pieces in various application or web frameworks.
I'd be more interested if there was a focus on developing core skills (logic, troubleshooting, and a comfort level with technology beyond end-user status) early on in school. People with this fundamental layer of knowledge are useful in many different fields, even non-technical ones. Pushing coding, nursing, or any other "hot, in demand" career path is going to lead to a glut of graduates who have a low skill level and limited prospects once the hot field is cold again. I do systems integration work, and I can't stand seeing "developers" who have absolutely no idea of how what they write runs in the real world. There are a finite number of both men and women who are suited for this field. Pushing more people into it rather than finding somewhere they fit better is a bad idea.
The problem is, education-wise, we tend to come back to chasing fads. I'm just barely old enough to remember in the late 80s when the Japanese were supposed to take over the world, and education systems were looking at how to apply their methods here. Then there was the finance boom, then the dotcom boom, then the real estate boom, then the second dotcom boom...who knows what's next?
Boys are systematically falling behind women across academia and they are obsessed with getting more women into one of the few areas where boys are still doing well. No equivalent zeal for the question of why boys are falling behind on most other subjects. If the roles were reversed with legislators assaulting the few academic strongholds where girls were still excelling, the center and left would be frothing at the mouth about the obviously misogynistic priorities of the government.
There should be absolutely no government concern for women in CS until boys are back up to parity with girls in public education and universities. None. Women already are starting to dominate Law, Medicine and other big former bastions of professional men. The idea that girls face any meaningful barriers to getting an education that leads to a career in a field with solid remuneration is a very sick joke.
Women, particularly feminist women, need to do some serious "privilege checking" on the education issue.
New UW Study: "College undergraduates who were not computer science majors (in order to focus on recruitment) entered a classroom in t(he computer science department at Stanford University, which was decorated in one of two ways (Cheryan et al., 2009). For half the participants, the room had objects that other undergraduates associated highly with computer science majorsâ"Star Trek posters, science fiction books, and stacked soda cans. For the other half of participants, the room contained objects that other undergraduates did not associate with computer science majorsâ"nature posters, neutral books, and water bottles. Women in the room that did not contain the stereotypical objects expressed significantly more interest in majoring in computer science than those in the room that did fit the stereotypes. For men, the environment did not affect their interest in computer science (Cheryan et al., 2009)."
Wow, I didn't know it was so easy to manipulate female students. No wonder society is so quick to remove all agency and responsibility from them.
These companies aren't really concerned about a lack of coding talent. They are concerned that pay is too high and will use any excuse to flood the market with people of these skills especially H1B visa holders and women who traditionally have been easy prey when it comes to pay disparity. Microsoft couldn't careless about your child. There plenty of women in my CS classes in college many of them thought they would be rich developing websites. I have a had 3 women co-workers that became school teachers so they could spend more time with their kids. There are many reasons for the disparity. Lack of opportunity isn't one of these.
A significant part of the brogrammer "culture" has been imported. The H1-B program has amplified the problem.
Girls don't have access to courses? WTF is keeping them from having access? An armed security guard?
The real kicker that's going to bake your noodle in 3 years time: After millions of dollars and at the expense of thousands of young boys, the demographics don't change (or perhaps they change but not in a direction you thought it would). What do you do then?
Let's face it - you've marketed this "thing" to girls at great cost in money and at great cost to society on the evidence-less assertion that all the girls need are more appealing marketing to find CS desirable. What the hell are you going to do come 2018 and the girls still aren't interested? More aggressive marketing? More exclusionary policies? More money? All three?
Or will you just give up? For a long while now I've been pointing out that those societies which are more oppressive towards women (Iran, India, etc) have more women in CS. That's right - in countries where women have no choice they are found in CS. In other countries, such as most western countries, where women are told from birth that they can do whatever they like they go ahead and do something other than CS.
That data point alone illustrates that the situation is more complex than you think, and simply spending money, excluding boys and general misandry might noe be enough to get girls to go into CS. All over the world, girls with no choice or say in the matter go into CS, and girls with choice and say in the matter choose something else.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
".. And then we will be friends."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ6cp2T76lY
-s
I don't see why there's so much hate and jealousy regarding this issue. If the company wants to spend their money on these initiatives, then that's their prerogative. The first thing people comment about every time this issue comes up is "reverse sexism" or the plethora of free information online. Does anyone ever consider how role models come into play? How many amazing female coders out there compared to men? Very few. People gravitate towards role models that inspire them as a child and I'm sure one of the inspirational factors is whether or not that role model looks like you. These programs make up for that by creating a safe and encouraging environment for them to learn about this field. If a girl takes a class and hates it and never wants to do it again. That's fine. At least she was given that opportunity. Why is this a problem?
The level of hubris, the unmitigated gal, the idea that some group should get to decide who should be involved in what type of activity.... Here we are, not that many decades out from a time when many races and females were discouraged from many activities. A time that many have devoted their lives (and some given their lives) to correct. And the first thing the group of Labradoodles that hold office want to do is go right back to it. Disgusting... maddening. They should be called out for their sexism and clear social engineering agenda. Not to offend but GET THE FUCK OUT OF OUR LIVES!! Go collect parking tickets or some shit...
Well, you didn't get your acceptance letter from Carnage Mellon University engineering program tossed in the trash without being told until later, didya? Happened to my wife.
I would bet that you've never ever been discouraged from tech one bit. But now you are an expert of how to behave when discouraged? Yeahno.
Maybe girls are just smart enough to not want to go into a field where the employers are so hell-bent on driving wages into the ground while stuffing their pockets.
Feminists seem intent on driving men and women apart and a lot of men and women are sick of these obnoxious harpies.
You probably should stop reading her mail.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Wow, I didn't know it was so easy to manipulate female students. No wonder society is so quick to remove all agency and responsibility from them.
Women are manipulated by the slightest change in their favorite makeup palette.
Men are manipulated in the slightest change in their fishing line.
Each group can be easily manipulated.
Society knows this, and markets towards it. Being a student is merely another label for consumer.
Actually I was. I had no role models and no encouragement. I was ignored. I was ostracized by my peers. In high school I was told I didn't have the math skills to continue in the honors math track. Not once, but twice. I insisted I was going to stay in that track. I had to take summer school to so. I was also moved from honors biology to regular because "I wasn't honors material". I ended up get a 93% after I was moved. There were universities to which I wasn't accepted. I was touched inappropriately by my professor when I tried to get help with a class I wasn't getting. I've failed classes. I've been told I couldn't take classes that I needed to graduate. But I didn't give up or quit. This is what I want to do and I'm good at it.
So you consider yourself sabotaged? Actively discouraged? Are you one of those who thinks a mere 10 hours a day of hard work is something special? Did you know beforehand what you wanted to be? If you have a single interesting path, you will fight tooth and nail to keep it open. If there are 10 interesting paths, you will not fight as hard to keep a single one from closing.
You might not realize this, but there is a societal myth of the ignored loner male turning into some brilliant computer guy. It's possible that did not influence you, but it is more likely that it did.
"I think of a man, and then I remove reason and accountability."
No, my parents weren't assholes. I saw every admission and rejection letter.
However, your story sounds fishy. Did she just never hear from CMU and not call them to find out what happened? Did her parents forge a rejection letter?
"Never been discouraged from tech one bit." You'd lose that bet. You shouldn't presume that anyone has an easy time in technology. It's hard and filled with constant discouragement from everyone, including teachers, and requires a "fuck you, I'm doing it anyways" attitude. From what I've seen, anything worth doing requires this attitude.
She was trying to get out of there fast. She went to the first place she could afford to work her way through and pay for on her own.
"Constant discouragement from everyone" sounds a little fishy to me. Were you ever told by a guidance councilor to not bother?
Wow, I didn't know it was so easy to manipulate female students.
No kidding.
Girls can't code!
With that one sentence some non-zero amount of young girls just abandoned their goals in computer science? Either this is true, and women are pathetic in the face of any adversity, or the people selling this narrative are far more patronizing towards women than any cartoonishly malevolent patriarchal conspiracy.
obviously we need a multimillion dollar program to convince the ladies to make up this shortfall.
We need 100% complete equality!
Anyone who wants to code, will learn to code. It's a self selecting group.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Were you ever told by a guidance councilor to not bother?
Yes. And told I would never amount to much and I shouldn't bother with school. To the point I had believed I would never go on with college after high school. After which, the only future I saw was in a private very expensive for-profit school (I honestly thought it was my only option because of said counselors). I took it as an opportunity loaded myself with debt and proved my counselor wrong among many others. Now I pay more in student loans then my mortgage... So, why should I have any more sympathy for her than any other high school reject that was discouraged?
Were you discouraged because of grades, or because of your gender?
She had _great_ grades in high school and was still discouraged. She did more than what was asked and worked solid and hard and did not let herself get distracted by drugs or booze.
I know as well as you do that there isn't a guaranteed correlation between grades and success. What correlation there is, however, is a whole lot less arbitrary than gender is.
While you were in high school getting discouraged, were you working your ass off for high school and working your ass off at a job only to go home and be expected to clean the house spotless every day? Did you pay that many dues? Did you have time to watch TV or drink or toke or anything like that?
Ahh so Discouraging men is good for them but not good for women. I hope the fall from your SJW horse doesn't hurt too much as I think you are saying that men can do something women cant. But don't take pride in it, it is still societies fault, amiright?
> What you are saying is that you can't help any individual or group without discriminating against anyone else
Yes, it is. Imagine, for example, that you only hire white people. You're not obligated to hire anyone, so you only "help" those who match your taste. I believe everyone would consider that an unacceptable prejudice?
While it's true that there may be allowable reasons to choose one person over another, like family affiliation, what they're saying is that someone's gender (or race) are not acceptable reasons to choose one person over another. Such actions are also, by the definition, sexually or racially prejudiced, respectively.
Would you care to explain why you think prejudice against someone based on these categories is acceptable? Because the main reason I have heard articulated is that the past actions of someone who shared the same melanin content or gender are an acceptable reason to discriminate against people with no affiliation with those who did something wrong in the past, other than the fact that both share similar biological traits.
> There are programmes targeting boys sports, for example, such as funding for a boys only football team.
It is very sexist of you to decide that these are "boys sports" when women are, in fact, free to participate. I find the fact that you are so brazenly biased to be very telling about what sort of person you are.
The message to boys: "Bring your daughter to college. Bring your daughter to work. Get more girls in STEM.... Boy, you useless P.O.S., if you can't throw a ball or knock somebody down on a ballfield, go smoke some dope and forget about being useful to society."
"Oh, and BTW we are only drafting BOYS not GIRLS the next time there's a big war."
Considering that men make up 46% of the population but 90% of those in prison or jail, why not just do a "Bring your son to jail, and you daughter to a CS class" and skip the wasteful steps in between??
The women aren't sick enough to call these women out. Really the ladies are dropping the ball in a big way. Part of accepting political responsibility is taking some responsibility.
Men police their radicals. We hunt them down and drive them out of the system or otherwise label them as the heretic unclean.
Women don't because culturally they're still in the same place they were before they got rights. When women didn't have political agency there was no need for them to police their own. Women were simply not permitted in politics or taken seriously in politics. Right or wrong they really couldn't do a whole lot.
Now that they have agency, it is incumbant on them to do the same thing men do which is police their own. Men can't shut down out of control women. We are as a gender culturally restrained from engaging women in an aggressive manner. Women however are not culturally restrained from going after either sex.
A relatively small number of women are feminists and very very few of them are the radical sort causing problems. Women need to make it clear that the radical feminists at the very least do not speak for all women. That is literally how the radical feminists represent themselves. And anyone that opposes them is labeled as a hater of women. Not only someone that disagrees but someone that is outright hateful and bigoted. And women in general permit this to happen by not confronting radical feminists.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I am not saying that women can work harder than men can.
I'm saying that the work men do is often given more merit.
I'm also saying that women are more actively discouraged from tech than men are, and men are more actively encouraged to get into tech. Why you would think 'good' in the same thought as 'discouraged' is a mystery to me.
Historically sons are praised for being clever and daughters for being pretty. That is an enormous societal pressure right there.
I'm also saying that women are more actively discouraged from tech than men are, and men are more actively encouraged to get into tech.
That is bullshit. Not one of the people I knew in my CS major was encouraged to do so. All of them were drawn to it. Some of them over objections from family that they should get into sports or medicine or law...
You are ignoring the fact that men ALSO face a lot of discouragement, often (going to say especially) from other men.
How many women got beat up on playgrounds for being a nerd?
Historically sons are praised for being clever and daughters for being pretty.
More twisted bullshit. Historically men were praised for being STRONG. Only men who had achieved something great in science were praised for being clever, mostly when young they were ignored (at best).
Women in the room that did not contain the stereotypical objects expressed significantly more interest i
Given my own experience with being a CS major, I can't think that anyone superficially motivated by posters (one way or the other) would have maintained interest long enough to graduate with a CS degree...
I don't understand why this study was done though. In real life none of my CS classes were in places with Star Trek posters or the like - they were in classrooms that when our class was not held, were used by other classes - so they were basically boring plain classrooms. So in theory that should mean more women in my CS graduating class, right? Yet there were only two.
All of my work was done on computers in labs similarly unadorned, just computers that you customized how you liked for your login.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
a collection of stories from slashdot probably isn't
Why not?
Slashdot is where you would get a very insider view of IT/Programming. They would know better than anyone if some programs existed that excelled at attracting women to programming or to CS degrees.
In my life I've worked with a number of women coders. To the point where I really didn't think there was that much of an issue about needing more women. But when earning my degree in CS, there were only two women in my whole graduating class that were in CS.
As I've been programming for decades now that gives me a very valuable view of the situation overall. One of the things to learn is, that women can easily learn to code well through paths that are not CS degrees - so perhaps people should lay off trying to encourage anyone to go into a major they will dislike, or forcing people into learning to code earlier than naturally interests them. I knew plenty of people in college unhappy with the major they chose that had to switch later, no need to add more...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While you were in high school getting discouraged, were you working your ass off for high school and working your ass off at a job only to go home and be expected to clean the house spotless every day? Did you pay that many dues? Did you have time to watch TV or drink or toke or anything like that?
Same AC. My grades were not great but I wasn't failing, as average as you can get (C still means average these days?). I always had a job and held 2 jobs as a senior (one reason my grades were not as good). So, yes I worked hard. Who cares? I didn't work as hard as she did, but so what?
The point is, I don't see how it is much different. Some adult figure tells some teenager some bullshit or does some bullshit. Why should I feel additional sympathy and how is that different from any other high school reject (whether that is someone actively discouraged by adults [parents included], an outcast to all cliques, socially awkward, closeted, abnormal, druggie, w/e)? She worked hard? Good for her. I am sorry that happened. It sucks when someone is a dick. I don't get sympathy as do most others because no one cares what crap life has given you. It only matters what you do. If you let a high school counselor stop you. Your problem for not sticking up for yourself. If your parents were dicks, I am sorry, but if that is your biggest complaint of your parents it doesn't sound that bad... you can't choose your parents and it could have been much worse. I would like to think that any healthy parent would want their offspring to succeed in anything they choose but obviously we don't' live in a perfect world. If she enjoyed STEM and wanted to do it then and she would be doing it now. Stick up for yourself and do what you want.
So far as I know, women can take CS courses if they so desire. They are not restrained or prevented from so doing. Similarly, men can enroll in nursing courses/degree programs, but not many do. So, perhaps we need an equal amount of money to be spent to convince men to become nurses?
Way to shift the goalposts.
Well, simply put, you can't do it. Now, go find something else to do.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Our culture has spent a long time nursing a stereotypical caricature of any "nerdy" interest as belonging to one kind of person. Gamers, programmers, scientists, etc have all been portrayed as neckbeard types with poor social skills. Scientists have begun to get away from that, and it's awesome. But programmers are conflated with hackers, and gamers along with forum-goers are lumped in with them as male basement-dwellers who never see sunlight.
While that whole gamergate nonsense was ongoing, I remember hearing about an editor for some publication who ranted about "nerds", pushing that stereotype as he did. The thing is, this was never an attack on nerds. It was always an attack on females.
By caricaturing these interests as the fodder of not only males but specifically unappealing males, females are steered away. It's that simple. Females grow up in a culture that teaches them that they're supposed to find a certain kind of male undesirable, so they consider that culture to be outside of their own. The only thing that has changed today is that enough women and girls have joined in with these interests that suddenly it's necessary to do away with the old bullshit.
So, how do we do that? By continuing to make it seem like males who are interested in these things are undesirable. Maybe now it's not because these interests confer an automatic nerd status that culture is to portray as undesirable but because these males have the audacity to have an interest or skill/talent set that takes opportunities away from our poor girls. So, it's still the same old bullshit and it will have the same effect. Part of the population will fall for it, but increasingly many will fail to pay attention to traditional media and its stereotypes while just being themselves.
If the goal is ACTUALLY to get more girls interested in computer science and to get more young women into related fields, then the ONLY way to do it is to stop repeating the same mistake the created the disproportion to begin with. See, this is a uniquely American thing. We combat our prejudices by perpetuating exactly the same prejudices, just with different wording. It won't work.
If we want girls interested in programming, then we need to teach all children. If we want young women interested, then we need to make opportunities for all young people. We need to get rid of this antiquated, cartoonish "Revenge of the Nerds" style stereotyping bullshit, and just let people be themselves. Only then will we see that change.
Nah, never mind me, let's just fix disproportionately represented genders in some fields by using gender discrimination for disproportionate opportunities in those fields. MAKES A LOT OF SENSE. You know, because we're Americans. We have to learn the simple less of, "Treat everybody with equal respect," over and over in absolutely every single variation it can possibly take. Because that idea just can't stick in our brains lulz. It would be a sign of the apocalypse if it did.