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Girls-Only Computer Camps Formed At Behest of Top Google, Facebook Execs

Posted by samzenpus on from the girls-only dept.

theodp writes: Reporting on Google exec Susan Wojcicki's appearance at DreamForce, Inc.'s Tess Townsend writes: "The YouTube CEO said her daughter had stated point-blank that she did not like computers, so Wojcicki enrolled her in a computer camp. The camp made her daughter dislike tech even more. Wojcicki reported her daughter came back saying, 'Everyone in the class was a boy and nobody was like me and now I hate computers even more.' So, mom called the camp and spoke to the CEO, asking that the camp be made more welcoming to girls" (video). Fortune reported last July that it was the urging of Wojcicki and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg that prompted iD Tech Camps — which Wojcicki's and Sandberg's kids had attended — to spin off a girls-only chain of tech camps called Alexa Cafe, which was trialed in the Bay Area in 2014 and expanded to nine locations in 2015. Earlier this month, Fortune noted that Wojcicki's daughter attended the $949-a-week Alexa Cafe summer camp at Palo Alto High, which was coincidentally hosted in the multi-million dollar Media Center (video) that was built thanks to the efforts of Wojcicki's mother Esther (a long-time Paly journalism teacher) and partially furnished and equipped by sister Anne (23andMe CEO) and ex-brother-in-law Sergey Brin's charitable foundation.

19 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. $949/week? by goose-incarnated · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Suddenly this push for segregation makes sense - "Fools and their money..."

    --
    I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
    1. Re: $949/week? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My son wouldn't be interested anyway. He's at the all male nursing camp.

      Not that he's interested in nursing, but as long as we're willing to force kids to do things they hate, why not start with my kid? It's just his life and all.

    2. Re: $949/week? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What about all of the transgender children?
      They need attend a computer camp and be isolated from all other gender identities too! So they can be ready for the real world. Which by law is also segregated right?
      Why won't someone please think of the children?

    3. Re: $949/week? by buddyglass · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I force my kids to do things they hate every day. Go to bed, brush their teeth, take a bath, not stick their arms out the car window, buckle their seat belt, etc. No, I don't think "learning to program" is as important as those, just to head off that obvious response. My point is only that, generally speaking, "making your kids do things they hate" is an integral part of being a parent.

  2. And.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Somehow, I'm betting she still doesn't like computers.

    1. Re:And.. by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Somehow, I'm betting she still doesn't like computers.

      Some rich parents have this attitude, that if their children don't do well in school, there must be a problem with the school. They can't accept that their children just don't do well in math, biology, Latin, or whatever.

      It seems here that the parents are trying to push their daughter into something where she has no interest at all. How about if they ask their daughter:

      "We would like to send you to a summer camp where you can learn something. Where would you like to go . . . ?"

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    2. Re:And.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You don't get to be CEO by accepting reality. If you don't think you can mold the world as you want it to be, you're not even going to become middle management. Luckily for the offspring, there's enough money to make up for their parent's delusions.

    3. Re:And.. by Xest · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Some rich parents have this attitude, that if their children don't do well in school, there must be a problem with the school. They can't accept that their children just don't do well in math, biology, Latin, or whatever. "

      I'm not sure it's necessarily wrong though. My parents aren't rich, but I didn't do well in math at school. I did however end up getting a first class honours degree in maths all the same though.

      The problem is that there was a massive disconnect between how the school taught and how I learnt. Throwing a textbook at me and telling me to solve 40 meaningless problems achieved nothing and I learnt nothing. When I eventually sat down in my own time however and wanted to figure out how to build me a 3D engine, suddenly all the calculus and stuff had a purpose, it meant something, it could achieve something.

      I'm not saying schools should teach 3D engine programming, but the point is that schools do very often get it wrong, they do an incredibly bad job of teaching for lots of kids. Mindless repetition of meaningless equation solving works well for kids who are capable of doing boring, repetitive tasks without asking, but some kids have a thirst for understanding and explanation, they want to know that what they're doing has some meaning, what it's for, where they'd use it. Statistics is an obvious one - teach boring stats for the sake of teaching boring stats and you'll have a problem getting through to many kids. Create a scenario whereby they're running a business selling shirts, and they need to figure out what sizes are going to optimise profit letting them know how much the overhead penalty is for creating additional sizes, and give them a bunch of data on measurements of people and you'll teach them not just the stats, but about business, about problem solving, and optionally even about team working.

      So I do agree with what you're saying, but I think we should also be careful not to give bad schools and bad teachers (which for subjects like Maths is the vast majority of them in my experience) a get out clause for their incompetence. I did well in maths in spite of my teachers at school, not because of them. It was only at university where the teachers really seemed to get how to teach, and even that wasn't a universal truth.

    4. Re:And.. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually I read TFA. I see you didn't which is why you are confused.

      Wojcickiâ(TM)s daughter at first had a negative experience, and it took some elbow grease on Wojcickiâ(TM)s part to get her to stop turning her nose up at computers.

      Once she sorted out the thing that gave her daughter a negative experience (being the only girl in a class full of boys who were not nice to her) she seems to have been fine with computers.

      Her mother identified an area where her daughter was weak. Her daughter most likely didn't like computers because she had had similar negative experiences at school. She arranged for a class for girls, and with the barriers removed her daughter changed her attitude towards programming.

      Why is this so hard to understand?

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Segregation not the answer by beaverdownunder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not convinced segregation is the answer here -- if girls aren't "getting it" then a lot of the boys won't be "getting it" either...

    Besides, my junior high school computer science class 25 years ago was one-third girls and everybody learned Pascal just fine =P

    1. Re:Segregation not the answer by penandpaper · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Segregation is the answer.

      No, it isn't. In the real world men and women have to work and compete together. How far into adulthood are you willing to coddle these children? We have safe spaces in college, we should expand that. It is totally normal for an adult to run from their problems and revert to a child-like state hugging a stuffed animals to cope with all the potential rapists/murderers/men and scary ideas, right?

      Company's should be segregated too because safe spaces. How else can these employees work when there are different ideas in the same work environment?

      It doesn't disadvantage boys...

      Tell me more about all those male-only scholarships.

      ...it merely helps girls get past some issues they face

      Because girls are too weak to overcome those "issues" without segregation? Good job modern feminism; arguing like the KKK because women are weak.

  4. I swear... by EmeraldBot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We're reverting back to the the 1800's again, this is barbaric. Would it be acceptable if a pair of white parents said that a bakery wasn't unwelcoming towards whites and therefore proceeded to buile one with a big "Whites Only" sign on the front? No, it wouldn't be permissible in today's soxiety, yet this atrocity is. Or is it perhaps okay because the two camps are "seperate but equal"?

    --
    "Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
    1. Re:I swear... by EmeraldBot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The hilarious part is that the mother is so completely clueless to her daughter's feelings and she can't possibly comprehend that her daughter might simply not like working with computers. What if she instead insisted her daughter became a fashion model, and upon being told that she really wanted to be a scientist, would this story support her if she denied her daughter and insisted the fashion model camp be more approachable? There's a basic incompatibility here, her daughter doesn't want to become a programmer, and her mother is laughably misguided if she can't recognize this is not going to work out. The seriously sad part is thqt this lady's an executive, which means she's supposed to be able to make long term strategic decisions; if she can't even see something as basic as this, I'd bet that's one pretty lousy executive.

      --
      "Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
    2. Re:I swear... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Here is a hint.. this has nothing to do with her daughter and everything to do with her mother.

      Clearly her mom doesn't care what the daughter wants to do, she just wants to get her name in the paper with a "positive role model" spin, which she did.

    3. Re:I swear... by spire3661 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Association of Black Students isn't racist for only allowing black people to join."

      YES IT IS. If you form groups based on race and exclude others, its RACIST. Now the degree of harm that racism causes varies, but its ABSOLUTELY racism to exclude others based on race alone and its wrong. What is the point of forming a Black Students association? Why would it exclude people? Why would you make a group with its sole intent of being exclusionary?

      --
      Good-bye
  5. like boys and sports by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is the equivalent of fathers that insist that their boys play a sport. Sometimes the kid really isn't interested in computers.

  6. Re:Wow! by goose-incarnated · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow! The only reason this is happening is because we've managed to fuck things up badly enough over the last two decades that we effectively have boys only computer camps currently. Do you go full "Dan's Brown's Body" for girls schools as well or do you reserve such an extreme reaction for computer camps?

    Why single out computer camps? I'll feel the same repugnance if the girl in question was forced to go to fashion camp. We've spent the better part of the last 30 years convincing girls that they can do anything they want to, and now you expect us to applaud this behaviour?

    --
    I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
  7. Re:Wow! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... boys-only computer camps currently.

    It seems you're saying that education has been structured to disadvantage girls. As a student who saw schools in the 1980s demand feminized curricula, I disagree. The prevalence of women in universities and middle-class jobs show that the modern curriculum aids girls. In fact, the evidence over the last decade is that modern school curricula severely punishes boys.

    If you arguing the workplace is structured to disadvantage girls, you may be correct. But schoolgirls aren't in the workplace so that can't be why they hate computing. As pointed out in earlier slashdot threads, computing is an anti-social skill, which in a large part comes from students spending an overwhelming number of hours in solitary self-education to gain computing skills. In professions driven by group learning, such as teaching, nursing and medicine, women form the majority of the workforce. That would indicate what changes need to be made to computing skills classes.

  8. Re:And...? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    (Note, though, that I don't push either into tech, and neither shows interest in it.)

    Yeah, I guess so. Sending your kids to a cult brainwashing school to believe in invisible space monkeys is about as far from science and tech as you can get. Some would say that teaching children those kinds of lies about the world is not just a failure as a parent, but also child abuse.