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Facebook Launches Initiative To Attract More Minorities and Women To Coding (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has launched TechPrep, a new initiative to attract more minorities and women into coding. The project draws a very strong analogy between the learning of computer coding skills and the learning of spoken languages, a field which is important to people whose first language is not English, and which engages with the popular understanding that women are better at learning languages. TechPrep is seeking to engage with parents and guardians to get its target audience into coding earlier in life.
How about hiring more people over 40 as well.
Hooray smash the patriarchy!
Why not just get people who are actually interested in coding to participate? Why do they have to be women or minorities? That seems rather bigoted.
Another notable finding was that men were five times more likely than women to say that they knew a lot about computer programming.
Holy shit, really? Men are more likely to claim they know a lot about anything.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
It doesn't matter what shape their genitals are.
I reckon these initiatives are close to outnumbering the people in the target groups. They'll have to start moonlighting to keep up with the supply.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yep. Women and minorities work for lower pay.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
People who think computer languages are anything like natural languages know nothing about either.
You can be sure anytime employees want more people in a field it means they want to reduce labor costs.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
seeks to analogise coding skills with language skills to make the subject of computer science less forbidding and opaque
Good luck with that. Programming is about logic, not language.
Programming languages exist because natural languages are ambiguous. This is why the whole legal profession exists.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
So if woman are better at languages then there are differences (surprise) between the sexes. If you open that door, maybe men are better at programming.
Chris Mesterharm
It's any racial group that's in the minority in a given population--except Asians of course, because they just learn, work hard, and refuse to play victims.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
All those things you mentioned as "geek culture" are the new mainstream. Look at the news media: Today is back to the future day? Star Wars merchandising permeating EVERY media outlet? Your logic has failed. My "geek" friends no longer wish to identify with "geek culture" and have since kept all of their inherent "geekiness" under wraps because it has become a giant pain in the ass, and the most obnoxious thing any "geek" can experience is having people talking to them about common interests. To be a geek is to be socially inept, and as such this new found corporate fascination with all things "geek" has created a cultural paradox. Much like how the word "hipster" is regularly used today to describe the exact opposite of what a hipster is.
What I learned today: It's okay to say women are better at language, but clearly men can't be better at programming.
Let's see what passes the PC compliance test:
"Women are better at learning spoken languages" - PASS
"Therefore men are not as good as woman at learning spoken languages" - Eyebrow inperceptively raised, but PASS
"Men are better [on average] than women at computer programming" - RED ALERT RED ALERT RED ALERT !!!
Do geeks very laid more now? Do they get hassled less? Do women swoon and men feel small at the sound of a Star Wars quote from a neckbeard? The mainstream may have appropriated geek things but little has changed for the average geek. Just watch Big Bang Theory for an example of how geeks are viewed.
Impossible. University of Washington Assistant Professor of Social Justice Sapna Cheryan has made her career demonstrating that first of all, women don't like geek culture, and second, that's why there aren't so many women in tech, and third, if we just stomped on the geeks, made them dress like normal people and put away their toys, we'd have parity between men and women in tech.