Learn-to-Code Program For 10,000 Low-Income Girls

theodp writes: In a press release Tuesday, the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) announced it was teaming with Lifetime Partner Apple and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on its Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Commitment to engage 10,000 girls in learning computing concepts. "Currently, just 25 states and the District of Columbia allow computer science to count as a math or science graduation requirement," explained the press release. "Because boys get more informal opportunities for computing experience outside of school, this lack of formal computing education especially affects girls and many youth of color." HUD, the press release added, has joined the Commitment to Action to help extend the program's reach in partnership with public housing authorities nationwide and provide computing access to the 485,000 girls residing in public housing. "In this Information Age, opportunity is just a click on a keyboard away. HUD is proud to partner with NCWIT to provide talented girls with the skills and experiences they need to reach new heights and to achieve their dreams in the 21st century global economy," said HUD Secretary Julian Castro, who coincidentally is eyed as a potential running mate for Hillary Clinton, whose daughter Chelsea is the Clinton Foundation's point-person on computer science. Last year, Chelsea Clinton gave a keynote speech at the NCWIT Summit and appeared with now-U.S. CTO Megan Smith to help launch Google's $50 million girls-only Made With Code initiative.

Comments

What about low-income boys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone deserves equal opportunity, right?

Re:What about low-income boys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. You're a boy. You are born guilty AND you obviously have it easy in the patriarchy! Ignore all those homeless white men, they're just there by choice.

Re:What about low-income boys?

[Penguinisto]

You haven't figured it out yet, have you? This has nothing to do with equality, period.

Re:What about low-income boys?

[hcs_$reboot]

Slashdot really needs a "Ironic" mod.

That would be a +1 or -1?

Re:What about low-income boys?

[Nidi62]

Everyone deserves equal opportunity, right?

Nope, low-income boys have to pin their hopes on basketball or football if they want a chance to escape poverty; unless they live in a rural area, in which case it's meth.

Re:What about low-income boys?

[Totenglocke]

TIL expecting to not be discriminated against because of your gender is "insanity".

Re:What about low-income boys?

[Totenglocke]

Yeah, no. This would be akin to you going to a soup kitchen in a poor black community and saying that no men are allowed inside because only low income women deserve free food.

Re:What about low-income boys?

[Totenglocke]

"Informal opportunities" meaning "boys actually want to learn about computers and try new things". Don't punish boys for having interests that are different from girls.

Re:What about low-income boys?

[kuzb]

Actually, the moment you say "it's for black people only", you've made it racist. If you feed anyone in the area that needs it, it becomes equal opportunity.

Re:What about low-income boys?

[xdor]

Okay, I'm like quad-triple posting this... but I really think I finally have this figured out:

The network of male overlords want to eliminate all their male competition: (e.g. like schools of fish or one of the main points of Dr. Strangelove [imdb.com]). Since the technocracy is rising, they can soon rely on robots for all the heavy lifting -- their only problem remaining is the maintaince and programming of the robots and systems they don't want to be bothered with -- so they still need some annoying technical people around. At the moment they're mostly male. :( Not good if you're trying to be the last man on earth!

Conclusion: if the goal is for the males that are now in power (or their great-grandsons who will be in power) to be the only males on the face of the planet: then for everything to keep going they must somehow inculcate females to code and eliminate the need for all (other) males entirely.

Low-income girls would be a nice controllable group to start with.

Re:What about low-income boys?

[penandpaper]

...the fact that boys have more informal opportunities to become interested in CS. That's all it is doing - allowing girls to try it out and spark an interest. Education is still done at school in a mixed environment, so there is no denying boys access to education.

informal opportunities? Could you list some examples of informal opportunities? Informal implies it is done on their own (or with help from parents). How is a boy (or his parents) cultivating interests now a data point for lack of opportunities to girls? Do girls not have access to the same internet as boys? Or games? Or technology to foster that informal experience? I like the idea of allowing children to spark their interest in CS, but limiting it to one gender to me seems wrong. Just like your soup kitchen example, it seems wrong to deny a poor white person to your soup kitchen.

So, the kid that spent time learning a computer has more opportunities than someone that didn't... Shocking.

You make an interesting argument though. If I give money to a charity for cats, am I discriminating against dogs? I only have a limited amount of cash. Should I divide my donation equally among all charities somehow?

You are changing the criteria and moving the goal post. Cats and dogs are biologically different and require different food diets to be health. That is fundamentally different than a soup kitchen for poor humans. However, sticking to your original example, If you make a soup kitchen and deny a poor person because of their race, that's racist. You may have limited cash, but your soup will be helpful to any hungry human regardless of race. Just like this program would be helpful to any child looking to learn about CS, not just girls.

Re:What about low-income boys?

[cayenne8]

Hmm...access limited ONLY by basis of sex or color.

Yep..sounds like discrimination to me!! I think I'd try to get a young white boy into the program, see if they reject him and say why...and then bring suit.

Sounds reasonable, no? If not..why not? How is this different than any action you see today of people being discriminated against?

Re:What about low-income boys?

[StikyPad]

The difference is that both genders have locker rooms. What if there were only locker rooms for girls, and boys just had to change anywhere they could? That's what this is.

No National Center for Men & Tech...?

[Viol8]

How come sexual discrimination seems to be a one way thing with the political classes? Can you imagine the fuss and uproar if someone dared suggest a National Center for Men & [insert vocation with not many men here]? I'm sick & tired of this hypocritical social engineering.

Re:No National Center for Men & Tech...?

[BVis]

You don't need to be turned away to be discouraged from entering the program. A department filled with hormonal 20-year-old brogrammers is not my idea of a nurturing setting for a young woman. Add that with the condescension from the faculty, the peer pressure, and limited job prospects after graduation (after all girls can't possibly be any good at programming) and you have a proportional shortage of women in the field.

Well they're getting closer to the truth

[MikeRT]

"Because boys get more informal opportunities for computing experience outside of school, this lack of formal computing education especially affects girls and many youth of color."

Inch by inch, the social justice warriors are getting closer to the truth that boys dominate these fields because of all of their informal experience. Why? Because boys tend to be more willing to go against peer pressure and do what interests them. Male nerds and geeks may resent peer pressure and bullying, but they'll stick to what they like. Never met a single boy who took the attitude that he couldn't pursue his hobbies because of peer pressure unless those hobbies were things you don't mention in polite society (and maybe even make the avante garde squeamish).

No, girls don't need "more pushing." It would be a problem if a family let the sons fire up an IDE, editor + interpreter, etc. and told the girls that that was forbidden for them. I can pretty much assure you, that in the vast majority of American households, even religious ones, that doesn't happen. What naturally happens is that the boys will say "this is cool" and try it out and the girl will make all sorts of excuses ranging from lack of interest, to what would her girlfriends think.

And no, boys by and large don't put pressure on girls to not share hobbies with them. I've never met a red-blooded male who thought a generally feminine female who shared most of his interests was a bad thing.

Re:Well they're getting closer to the truth

[oh_my_080980980]

" boys tend to be more willing to go against peer pressure and do what interests them."

LMOL - yeah that explains all those nerd with dates at the prom and giving football players swirlies....

Re:Well they're getting closer to the truth

[pecosdave]

It's the dream of every young (straight) geek guy to find a real geek girl to share their life with. Most of these guys secretly want a geek girl that's close to equal but just slightly better than them in certain areas so they have someone to push them and compete with.

These are the same guys wondering why women are so focused on fashion and reality TV, things which are not logical.

Each of these geek guys secretly wants to be asked by a pretty young thing real technical questions about what they do, not "how can you spend all of your time in front of a computer?" but "exactly what is this compiler you're talking about?"

I'm 37 years old, I've been a professional geek since I was 18, I have come across these geek girls. The place I came across the most of them was an ISP that attracted young people in general. Even in that place most of the females saw what they did as a job to make a few bucks, but roughly 5% were interested in doing what the slightly older guys did (which included me, one of the older people there at the age of 21).

I have become convinced from my own interactions that this just is not a female thing. I helped anyone who asked for help, I encouraged learning, self research and gave good long explanations that were fit for a classroom environment. The fact that I have seen women do well, succeed, and run with the men tells me they can. The fact only a few of them would take the initiative to do it when you had someone like me, and my other employees that I encouraged to help and to train any who asked - and did - yet only about 5% wanted to know more than the minimum causes me to wash my hands of it - stop trying to guilt trip me for being good at my job when there are proportionally way less women who can keep up.

Since that job I've worked with other women, other good women who I consider my level. I've also worked with quite a few affirmative action women who had my job title, usually got paid a little better than me, yet would crawl around in the sub floor to track cables because it was icky, wouldn't/couldn't move any equipment, wouldn't terminate fiber because they didn't like the epoxy, wouldn't put on the asbestos suit and run cable with the guys because it's hot and sweaty. Nope, most wanted to do the paperwork - which I didn't really mind, because I hate paperwork, but other than title and the official list of duties these women were not my direct peers. Even at the worst of these jobs there was usually one or two women would would run with the guys, but for each of them there was two or three that wouldn't. A man taking the same attitude towards work as those others wouldn't last more than a week or two before being let go.

I'm getting pretty tired of these guilt-tripping affirmative action programs. Instead of giving me more of that 5% or 1 in 3 depending on where I was I'm worried these programs might work and flood the workplace with the 95% or 2 in 3 that the natural dedicated geeks, yes, the men and the women who will run at their level will be expected to carry.

Re:Well they're getting closer to the truth

[fwarren]

I just don't understand. Here is my background.

Mom was a schizophrenic, my dad an alcoholic. We moved every year or so till I was 13. At that point we were stuck in a crummy motel in central California. This is in the early 80s. So when I was 16 I would walk into K-Mart and local appliance stores, and play around on the Commodore VIC 20's and later Commodore 64s. The local community college had a Commodore PET computer.

I had no money, no one to show me the ropes, not the best nor most stable education, parents that could not take care of themselves, so I had to watch over them and my 3 younger siblings. I taught myself Commodore Basic, then how to program in assembly. This consisted of writing a program on paper, looking up the opcodes, converting them from hex to decimal and then writing a loader that would POKE those values into memory and then do a SYS call to run the machine language program. From there I moved on to learn FORTH.

I will admit I am a male. But I had SO many disadvantages and yet I had a desire to learn how to program. Lets not forget wanting to learn how to do this classified me as a geek and meant I had to deal with lots of kids and peer pressure telling me there was something wrong with me on a fundamental level for engaging in such activities.

Exactly what is holding back any boy or girl in any halfway modern country from learning to program? "Boo Hoo, I would have to buck social norms to learn to program." Well it is not much of a dream or desire if that would stop you. "Boo Hoo, no one will teach me." There are thousands of hours of video on youtube, You can google out books on any programming language you want. If you don't like the teaching style of some video or book, try a different one.

The world in inherently "I don't give a damn". If you are a former heroin addict and you want to work in pharmacology, well you are going to have some hurdles to overcome. I can't tell you why any particular girl in junior high would decide they don't even want to know about computers. I can't tell you why a girl would decide against a career in programming. What I can tell you from pulling myself up in a world filled with welfare recipients who are just wanting a check is this. If you have to coddle and beg to get people into a program, and work hard at removing every barrier to their success, it hurts the drive and motivation for most people. Without it having some personal cost it has little value to them. Why work hard? If they don't do well, someone will step in and help them. If other things seem more important at the moment, walk away, the program will always welcome them back later with open arms.

TL;DR - If you are not willing to fight to become something because you want it, what outside program is really going to make a difference.

Re:Well they're getting closer to the truth

[Anonymous Coward]

What the f**k are you talking about?!

Everything he said was absolutely true. I am a consultant in the software development field, and have run across many women in the field at the dozens of companies that I have consulted with. Never once did I ever get the impression that the men in those environment had any issues with that, nor did I get the feeling of sexism at all. If anything there was an unusual level of respect for those women because they defied the social conventions from their childhood and took up a 'nerdy' career. Women don't need handouts to be encouraged to take up this career, what they need is their non-tech inclined peers to get over the BS social cliches. You find out how to explain something like that to a bunch of young, ignorant, and inexperienced high school kids and you will have solved at least half of the worlds problems right there.

Pay no mind to the fact that studies have shown that women are significantly more "right brained" than men. And generally prefer careers that appeal to a naturally more empathetic and compassionate personality. Obviously there are exceptions to that, but you can't simply re-program an entire gender to fulfill some female/minority social quota. It doesn't matter how many incentives you give to women, most simply just don't want to go into IT related fields. And for fucks sake stop blaming those of us in the field with your "sexism" excuse, the disgustingly arrogant, steaming pile of bull shit that it is.

Re:Well they're getting closer to the truth

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the same opportunities as everyone else. That's the whole point. No one is being denied any opportunities the OP had. In fact it is so much easier to get into development and have access to computers that it's almost unbelievable. It's easier to get into than almost any other career out there.

Also, try not to be such a dick. He wasn't looking for praise or denying anything to anyone. The fact that you think that kind of highlights what a moron you are. "Sounds to me like you had a lot of opportunity and resources available to you" but we need to make damn sure to provide even MORE to girls. Do you want praise for being a SJW? Why do you want to propagate gender discrimination?

Why did you view the comments?

[squiggleslash]

Hi, gentle reader.

You saw the summary on Slashdot's front page. You knew what the comments would be. Why did you go ahead anyway and click through?

Did you expect an adult discussion of gender issues on Slashdot? Did you expect an interesting back and forth discussion about whether this will help with various issues to do with women in tech, or if other issues need to be resolved that are of more import, or anything like that?

If so, did you miss the dozen or so other articles in the last year that dealt with similar articles, where the comments section was flooded by knuckleheads from /r/KotakuInAction? Where almost every comment that tried to discuss sexism was modded down out of view, and every comment disclaiming sexism exists or demanding Slashdot ban the subject from their front page modded up.

If ever there was a sign we need a different approach to Slashdot moderation, it would be this. I just don't know what that approach is. Slashdot's broteam is toxic, too effective at shouting down voices who want to discuss serious issues. How to deal with that in a way that doesn't have equally bad side effects is a discussion we need to have.

Stop it- they're not interested

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop trying to force CS on girls. I have eight computers in my house. My son and daughter both teens, have free reign with half of them. Guess who wants to edit skins on a computer for a game and who wants to watch Netflix and text their friends? Encourage kids who are interested, but stop this nonsense. Trying to make everyone a programmer is like trying to make everyone an athlete. It's not going to happen.

Why is it always "learn to code"

[NominalLoss]

Why not learn to wire a house or install plumbing? Why is every program trying to over-saturate IT? I believe the construction industry is a boys only club as well.

Re:Why is it always "learn to code"

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Why is it always "learn to code"? Why not learn to wire a house or install plumbing?

Because this whole thing is about deep-pocketed companies that employ a lot of mostly male coders avoiding class action lawsuits. Attorneys aren't particularly interested in chasing down all-male but independent electrician or plumbing crews when Google or Apple are ripe for the picking.

How do boys get more "informal opportunity"

[SuperKendall]

Because boys get more informal opportunities for computing experience outside of school,

What is that supposed to mean? Both boys and girls use technology equally outside of school as far as I can tell, in terms of access to technology or use of family laptops...

The only thing I can THINK the mean by this, by the very indirect wording, is that boys play more games. Specifically Minecraft. If that's so, say that,

But, I'm not sure Minecraft is truly a direct bridge to programming some seem to think it is... other games are actually a hinderance to learning to program, rather than a help - anything that absorbs time is to some degree taking away time you can learn to use to program.

Comments make me despair....

[sampson7]

Slashdot's commentaries on gender issues in tech read more like an Onion parody than reasoned discussion. The investment of new dollars in STEM education for poor girls is a wonderful thing. (Frankly, the investment of *any* dollars into education for low income kids is marvelous). The desire among so many here is to just analogize from your own experience and ask "I did it, so why can't X"? It's hard to describe the number of problems with that line of reasoning. But here are a couple of thoughts that maybe can elevate the discussion.

First, there is massive confirmation bias going on. The fact that the system selects people that look like you (and, frankly me) to be successful is not evidence that the system is fair for everyone. Every time some successful person says, "well, I scored well on X test,and look at how successful I am," I just want to shake them until they realize that correlation (i.e.,only people scoring well on X test get into Y job) does NOT imply causation (I am successful at Y job, therefore X test is important.) Because if the entire pool of people at Y job is comprised of good test takers, then only good test takers will become successful.

Second, the fact that you yourself (or someone you know) achieved success against overwhelming odds (whether it be poverty, lack of opportunity, gender, race, whatever) does not mean that there are no barriers to entry into STEM. How many disadvantaged people need to be turned away for every amazing overachiever before we decide that maybe the system is broken?

Third, how can everyone on a site that claims to be nerds completely ignore the scientific evidence of how internalized gender stereotypes affect the decision of women to go into STEM? Why is it that women do worse on standardized tests when you remind them of their gender? There are really fascinating issues going on here that get completely ignored in the Slashdot group think. Frankly, I can't tell if it's just the trolls winning, or if Slashdot's blind spot really is a metaphor for what goes on in tech generally.