Slashdot Mirror
Google's Diversity Chief: Mamas Don't Let Their Baby Girls Grow Up To Be Coders
theodp writes: Explaining the reasons for its less-than-diverse tech workforce, Google fingered bad parenting for its lack of women techies. From the interview with Google Director of Diversity and Inclusion Nancy Lee: "Q. What explains the drop [since 1984] in women studying computer science? A. We commissioned original research that revealed it's primarily parents' encouragement, and perception and access. Parents don't see their young girls as wanting to pursue computer science and don't steer them in that direction. There's this perception that coding and computer science is ... a 'brogrammer' culture for boys, for games, for competition. There hasn't been enough emphasis on the power computing has in achieving social impact. That's what girls are interested in. They want to do things that matter." While scant on details, the Google study's charts appear to show that, overall, fathers encourage young women to study CS more than mothers. Google feels that reeducation is necessary. "Outreach programs," advises Google, "should include a parent education component, so that parents learn how to actively encourage their daughters."
No thanks, sounds pretty Marxist to me.
or it could be the influnce of testosterone during early development of the child. Harald Eia made an excellent documentary on that topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE
I thought this was true for all genders and species. I'm constantly pushing myself to be more logical and have more control over my emotions, but I'm nowhere near completely there. And some of that might also aid in social awkwardness.
For the record, in regards to the post, I didn't learn how to use Linux extensively through playing around with Gentoo or learn to program C and whatnot because my parents encouraged it. Having said that, my mother bought me an HTML book when I was young, and only after seeing that I was starting to make my own websites. Now I'm studying electrical engineering at school, and my parents never told me or suggested what I should do. It was entirely my choice driven by what I found to be my own interests. So having said that, why must we assume that women don't participate in STEM as much due to outside influences?
Anyway, someone said something about Feminist Friday... It's been what, 3 days?
There's good studies that there are as many male victims of battering as there are female. Males are less likely to get hurt when battered by a female, obviously, and are less likely to report battering, so there is far less need for a 'battered male' shelter. Just remember it's not because females are any less likely to resort to violence than males are.
The real takeaway from their research seemed to be the bit about promoting CS as a vehicle for social change / making a difference / getting noticed.
Out of curiosity, what is the goal of the after school program? Is it just to build neat things, or are their goals or competitions associated with it?
In your case, it's competing with the school play, which enables the girls to be the focus of an entire audience with much applause. It has weeks/months of buildup with ads in the school and community. It has a number of accessible topics that people who aren't in the play can take part in, and it has a hierarchy (their girls don't like hierarchy thing is pure hogwash) where different people can get "better" and "worse" parts in the play, as well as default exclusivity (not everyone can play the leading roles). It also enables them to communicate under the guise of a fictional character. Beyond this, it likely involves a bit of fundraising and some costume building/time sunk in by parents where they're forced to spend time with their daughters helping them prepare.
I bet if you set up the after school program to check off all those qualities, you'd get girls flocking to it and the play would become a distant second. Maybe have an end-of-year project that encorporates what they've been doing all year, and the resulting "performance" goes up on youtube? Have some "milestones" throughout the year that they can share with friends in the same way? Create some sort of plot arc that can grab their imaginations?
You may already be doing all this, but it's what has always made school plays popular with the girls.
Disgusting straight white cishet male shitlord here.
My parents, particularly my dad, discouraged me from pursuing any kind of work with computers. He wanted me to go into trades (blue collar, not Wall Street) like he did, specifically to follow in his footsteps and continue his one-man business as a painter. Then you've got the whole NEEERRRRD thing from the jocks in schools. In short, many males aren't particularly pushed into STEM either. They take it upon themselves, under their own agency, to pursue those goals. I wonder how so many boys who got bullied for their STEM related interests throughout their young lives managed to stick to their interests and goals. It must be the penis.
Except that women who enter STEM (to actually WORK in a field) are in the same boat. They see past any discouragement from their families/pees, and they ignore all the "I deserve a free-ride into the field" rhetoric from gender ideologues, and they put in the time and effort to become proficient with whatever it is they want to do. Granted, there's fewer of them than men ...BUT DON'T YOU EVEN TALK ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY THAT EACH GENDER MIGHT HAVE DIFFERENT CAREER PROCLIVITIES.
You have to be intelligent to code well, and it is a very specific form of intelligence that often comes with weakness in other areas. So is it genetics or nurture that is responsible for that particular gift/curse? I say it is genetics and that it is also probably x-linked therefore more males are affected by it in the same way they are far more likely to suffer from x-linked disorders too. Why had this not ever occurred to people before I do not know but if you can have an x-linked disability there is the same chance that you can have x-linked abilities that are exceptional. Why are autism spectrum disorders correlated with programming skills and with being male, because they are both x-linked!
For the record my oldest girl can code like a kid twice her age can, sure I encourage her because it is a form of literacy that scientists need but she will never be somebody else's "programming slave", she will use the skill as just one facet of her projects.
Can I claim credit where others have received blame from Nancy Lee? No, my kid is just very intelligent and that is as much or more her mother's fault and if you say otherwise you are being (how ironic!) sexist.
Exactly.... Personally, I don't see the problem with the concept that some jobs are predominantly of interest to one sex over the other? Isn't this exactly why we had predominantly females in nursing for decades? There simply weren't as many guys interested in doing that particular job (though obviously, *some* do, and that's fine too).
What I do see is some blow-back from the fact that with mostly guys making video games, the games have catered mostly to guys. You do have more females interested in actually playing games now, instead of just watching the guys do it. So yeah, there's some understandable irritation that the games are almost all "guy-centric". But most people who play video games don't have an interest in WRITING them, just like most people who drive cars don't want to become auto mechanics or work in the auto industry.
Ultimately though, markets always follow the money, so even if it takes a bunch of male programmers to do it, they'll build more titles that appeal to females if that's an untapped market. No social manipulation required here.
Nobody told this silly female: http://boingboing.net/2015/05/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
I hate to say this, but I would steer her away from computer science as well. Simply put, I saw too much sexual harassment during my undergraduate days to even harbour the thought that this is a safe environment for young women. If she's interested in coding, there are plenty of other career paths that allow for it. Most of the sciences offer a much safer environment for women, while offering the possibility to delve more deeply into computer science than many computer science programs. Ditto for mathematics.
(Full disclosure: I am neither female nor a parent; I'm a male who studies physics.)
There are too many links in the summary. The most relevant one is the google study, which has some interesting data and is fairly neutral. I don't think the study supports the flamebait headline, but instead paints a complicated picture. In particular, see the charts on page 5 of the study.
The story headline is in the same style as this interesting article titled "Papas, please let your babies grow up to be princesses". That article makes the case that interests in "girly" things are not mutually exclusive with interests in STEM fields. There are anecdotes in the above comments about girls being pressured by parents into STEM activities (like robotics clubs), and how it often doesn't work. Perhaps this is because some parents push STEM at the expense of "girly" things rather than simply encouraging STEM without taking a hostile stance towards "girly" things.
Just a thought.
You mean social engineering like this?
http://www.strengthvillain.com...
https://jonathanturley.files.w...
http://thetoydetectives.com/co...
https://alanabeeblog.files.wor...
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnne...
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem with this is that companies don't really pay that well for the labour, skills, experience, talent and education necessary to succeed in IT.
"IT" is a crap career no one should enter. Answering calls on the helpdesk? No thanks - well, better than starving, but so are a lot of things. But we were talking about software development
Why would girls want to sit in front of a computer for hours on end, sometimes, even evenings and work also on weekends in order to launch etc.?
Check out the hours lawyers work, or the oncall duties as a surgeon (or a vet - but dentists, that's the job!). It's not the hours that's the problem, it's the lack of dignity of the profession. When the field was doubling every few years, that meant most software developers were in their 20s, and management could get away with treating all of us like college students. My work environment is more like a dorm room or college lab than a professional office environment - that's what we need to push back against.
As far as pay, after your first 5 or so years in the field, jobs that pay well are there for the taking, though you may need to move to where the work is. If you're past your apprenticeship in the field and you're not making at least 1.5x the national median income, you're likely at a bottom-tier employer: shop around. While we may top out lower than the doctors and lawyers, they don't hit peak earning potential until later in life - a doctor or dentist is typically in his 40s before lifetime earnings net of school costs put him ahead of a plumber or other skilled tradesman.
Personally, I think many women are put off by the limited social interaction involved in the job, or at least that's my theory for why so many female software developers choose career advancement into management or product management over the dev tech track.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
software dev pays well, but compare the pay to those of the fields you compared it to. All of them make significantly more than software devs do. Friend of mine, his wife is a dentist, she's pulling in nearly 300k a year. Another friend has a brother that's a loan officer, holy crap does that guy get paid. Lawyers, holy shit. And all of those fields require similar levels of skill and expertise to software dev. By far and away, we're some of the worst paid for what we do.
India has Bollywood, yes, but Indians seem to have a much more realistic grasp of what career paths are actually feasible and which aren't. Of course, there's also a huge number of middle-class (for India) Indians, since their population is enormous. Finally, I've never heard of sports being a big thing in India. They have cricket of course, but I don't think it's like the sports-mania we have here in the US.
China, having an authoritarian government, probably does things to strongly discourage too many people from wasting their time on dead-end career paths like acting. Here in the US, it's easy to get student loans or even scholarships to go to college for theater. I knew a girl who did this not that long ago; she had a full-ride scholarship, and what did she blow it on? Theater. Did she get a job in theater? Nope; she moved towards make-up and costumes in her senior year thinking that would be a more realistic career path, graduated, and ended up working at a hotel in customer service. A complete waste of a degree. I wouldn't be surprised to find that China doesn't allow silliness like this with student loans or other public funding.
As for Africa, that's hard to say, because Africa has no industry at all to speak of. I can't imagine that software engineering has much prestige there because people probably can't think much beyond life in a mud hut. Even if you go to South Africa or one of the Arabic northern countries, there's not much industry there either, and not much employment for programmers.
software dev pays well, but compare the pay to those of the fields you compared it to. All of them make significantly more than software devs do. Friend of mine, his wife is a dentist, she's pulling in nearly 300k a year
Yes, dentists are well paid - eventually - but they start earning late, a few years after a software dev, they have a much larger school debt to pay off, and just like a software dev, the early years don't pay so well.
You can't just look at peak earning power, but at lifetime earnings at a given age, and it takes a long, long time for a dentist or doctor to pull ahead. BTW, you can certainly make $300k as a software dev at a big company - that's common for tech track paygrades equivalent to a second-level manager at the big names. Of course, there are far fewer such positions than there are dentists in America, and for someone capable of both I'd recommend dentistry, but the gap isn't as big as you might think.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
She is the daughter of a great MAN: Lord Byron, who we honor in Greece because
I honour him because he kept a bear in his room at university and ate a whole bunch of drugs (opium).
But, no matter how cool Byron was, his daughter still invented coding.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Coding jobs can be easily outsourced to wherever the going rate for labor is cheapest. Google's "coder shortage" seems completely imaginary. They're an advertising company whose greatest trick was convincing the world they are a software company.
I'm a Google engineer, and both of these statements are incorrect.
Taking the second one first, Google is not an advertising company. It's a software engineering company whose primary products are most effectively monetized via advertising. Or, sometimes I think it might be more accurate to say that Google is a data center company, since building, operating and utilizing enormous data centers at extreme efficiency is Google's true core competency. If and when Google gets serious about competing with Amazon in that space Amazon will have a tough time keeping up.
Google is moving fairly quickly away from advertising, diversifying into products which are sold directly. Note that nearly all of the speculative new projects that have come out of "Google X" are built around goods and services, more than the sort of low-value (on a per transaction basis) information services that are Google's current big products. No big winners have emerged from that effort, yet, but if one or more of them do "hit", you can expect to see it quickly replace advertising as the primary revenue driver. About 10% of Google's revenues these days come from non-advertising products. 10% seems small, but keep in mind that represents $5B annually, and is up from basically 0% just a few years ago. Non-ad revenues are growing faster than the ad revenues, so the percentage of Google revenue derived from advertising will continue falling even without a massive new business.
Further, culturally, Google never has been an advertising company. It's a thoroughly engineering-focused company, top to bottom.
The shortage of engineers is not imaginary. Google legitimately has a hard time finding enough software engineers of the caliber it seeks. Money isn't the issue; few people who receive an offer from Google reject it. In the context of this article, though, the big problem is that the engineers Google can find are overwhelmingly male, and either white or Asian. Mostly white. Studies done by many organizations, including studies done internally by Google, show that diverse teams are more creative and more productive. In addition, Google's culture is surprisingly idealistic, and people in the company consider it a legitimate problem that the company -- especially eng -- is not representative of the population as a whole.
I think part of that latter point derives from the fact that Google engineers are, if anything, too well-paid. Estimates I've seen put the "1%" line at about $400K annual income, and most senior Googlers -- including engineers, not just execs and managers -- are above that line. Getting paid that much tends to make decent people wonder if they should feel guilty at their luck and their privilege. At the same time, it's not like anyone is going to agitate to get paid less. So a better option is to say "Well, the real problem here isn't that I make too much, it's that not enough people have the opportunity to do the same". In particular, women and minorities.
That last paragraph is purely personal speculation, mind you. Laszlo Bock may not agree at all.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.