Maybe I just live in developer bubble and don't know any better, but I've never seen a movement like "Girls do Plumbing!", "Black girls construction bootcamp" or "Mining for equality!".
Now, this is not to contend whether these programs are good or bad. I have my own opinions. However, I will strongly say that the contention that computer science is unique in this regard is factually incorrect. Programs exist across a broad selection of fields.
My statement is unclear, but the "udacity/anyone can be a computer whiz!" "koding with karlie" vibe that is pushed is very different than anything else in the world.
Software is unique in that it IS something that anyone with the minimum amount of the right talents can learn to do well on their own -- that's just the nature of the internet and how software is distributed/documented. It ISN'T, however, something that just anyone will be good at. Not everyone is suited for the type of information gathering and thinking that it requires.
I would never delude myself into believing that I have the correct talents to be an accountant, a lawyer, or an artist. Why is this type of attitude normal in software?
It obviously makes business sense for companies like udacity to sell the idea that it's easy to gain a textbook understanding of it, but the culture surrounding it tries to take it much further than that. Companies are expected to force their demographics instead of sharpie-ing over the names on every job application and just choosing whoever the fuck is most qualified for the job. If the interviewer is legitimately sexist or racist, you have some much deeper set problems that aren't going to be solved by ordering them to hire certain demographics.
You could even argue that women have an upper hand by being scarce!
And then you have bullshit evidence like "companies that hire diversely are more successful", when in reality this is a classic correlation/causation fallacy where the largest and most successful companies can afford the extra hiring hours and turnover of hiring the wrong candidates.
And for what it's worth, I suspect that if most people were willing to put in the time and effort to learn how to create art, you'd find that many more people can create reasonable art than you would otherwise believe, because we've talked ourselves into a model of artistic talent that seems to hold that it's a binary switch, rather than something like any other skillset, where some people are more talented, but where almost anyone can develop some ability in it if they put in time and effort. I'm not a naturally talented basketball player, but I can run and play defense and hit a reasonable jumper in a pickup game, because I've spent a lot of time over several years learning how to play and then playing a bunch of games.
I think people greatly underestimate what software developers actually do. To most of non-computer related folk we are just monkeys who bash keystrokes.
I'm not saying we do some rocket science, however in this profession a lot of online research is required to even do a simple things, and to most of people it is annoying to do so they give up.
I'm full-stack developer for about 10 years but still have to google MSSQL connection string or how to center stuff vertically in css.
Or you could look at the documentation. People did simple and complex things with computers for decades before google existed.
On the STEM front, a quick search immediately pulls organizations like National Girls Collaborative Project:
Girl Scouts:
https://www.girlscouts.org/en/about-girl-scouts/girl-scouts-...
Girlstart:
and Girls Inc.:
http://www.girlsinc.org/news/editorials/inspiring-girls-expl...
that provide either focus or programs for outreach in STEM more broadly than computer science. Now, I don't know the exact numbers for whether programs for pushing for women in CS are greater in number than STEM. That would be interesting to know precisely. Mostly, my contention is that, yes, there are organizations that are attempting to encourage young women to entering STEM fields beyond software.
Now, at a city level where I live, I have noticed anecdotally that there's been a push for software based businesses from the local government. Though it's difficult to know for sure, my opinion of this push toward software as opposed to engineering is because the apparent investment in creating a new software company is lower than the investment in creating an engineering company. Engineering tends to be a more regulated field and often requires more expensive equipment. As such, I believe the city is interested in businesses that could have a large economic impact for a relatively low amount of investment. Now, is this so easy? No and I believe my city government's actions are somewhat misguided. That said, I doubt that where I live is unique. I do believe there's a national push for software based businesses because the apparent investment is low and the payoff is high. Along with that will be programs to encourage underrepresented people to enter the field and these programs will be visible. But, again, I contend they're not unique.
A, I only care about the demographics when it's convenient (i.e., the career is prestigious)
or B, "yeah well I support men in nursing and women in construction too!", despite there not being a similar effort in the known universe to force demographics in these fields.
It's weird that the politically correct opinion seems to be that it can't be accepted that a natural gravitation towards certain professions or acts based on gender is real.
That's not saying that those fields are perfect but, say, a female/Hispanic/etc. accountant, paralegal, etc. won't be the only person fitting that description at most meetings. Skilled trades often have skewed gender, ethnicity, etc. ratios but they also don't get anything like as much attention so most of us are unaware of the problem or efforts to improve things.
Computer Science is a focus for these efforts because it's a high-status, high-pay career that has exceptionally poor gender/race balance. Much like Wall Street and corporate america in general:
Technology is also unique in that between the different over-represented minority cultures, people with poor social adjustment and tolerance for "boys will be boys" creates an actively hostile culture for women.
> I think it is also the only career which people try to inject diversity just for the sake of it.
Well when you think about the reach of software in the modern world, it can influence anyone. Whereas diversity in plumbing might not be important, having different points of view on a programming team can mean the difference between having your product take off, or fail.
My cynicism says that diversity is a result of baizou, not any actual accounting of some magic spread where different and useful ranges of thought are spread in equal proportion mapping to a species of bureaucratic classification of diversity as noted in sex and skin color and nationality.
All teams have different points of view. This has nothing to with "diversity" or gender. If there's a female or two on the team, great, but don't force it, and her opinion has no more value than the opinion of her male colleague.
Forced diversity (of what? be specific, ethnicity? skin color? religion?) is not a requirement for multiple points of view.
Yes, that's quite likely. Diversity is important in this field, as in any other, for a number of reasons. The two most important are that is the brings diversity of thought, which should always be welcome in a supposedly fact-based intellectual field, and that it is a signal that we as a society value ourselves and our peers well enough to not treat anybody as second class citizens.
You're promoting a form of corporate doublethink where filling out bubbles of sex and race is automatically analogous with some platonic ideal where every single variant of human being had this amazing differential that'd waiting to be exploited.
But instead it seems a very cynical game where the superficiality of diversity conquers honest evaluation of needs and ability.
A cynical understanding of human nature and society serves a person far better than the opposite.
People want to do less work than more work. For people involved in acquiring, placing, and managing human resources, an easy way to signal "work"/"useful work" is by parroting the line of superficial diversity.
That's my experience at least. I win far more bets by assuming the worst of intentions than the best in these hiring games.
In the military you see a big push for "diversity", especially in relation to sex, where all sorts of carrots are trotted out just to have a platonic makeup of sees in the armed forces. Nevermind that one of those sexes has an ace in the hole called "pregnancy" which the mil. Bureaucracy will bend to accommodate.
Nevermind the disastrous effects on morale and confidence in command this brings to some poor bastard from Nebraska who goes through all sorts of shit. If he gets a girlfriend, or God forbid a wife, he faces the risk of absolute cuckery on that side. If he messes around with whores and the command is looking for a scapegoat, they'll bring him up for ucmj charges. Meanwhile if his girlfriend/wife messes around with boys on the base, she has no repercussion for her actions.
"Wait, what about the pregnant female soldiers?"
Easy office job and easy promotion because higher-ups would rather have eye candy over a more disposable resource (competent males).
What gets me is the total denial of this facet of human nature by those who push "diversity".
Could you share the reasons you have for believing that?
Are there any proofs of this assertion?
We try to add diversity, but it feels so manufactured. Society has evolved the games and roles we play. It will evolve further down the line as well. What is considered acceptable for men, women, westerners, easterners, low-income, high-income will all be noticeably different in 100 years.
Culture adjusts with time, and we see that in our current society, women often takes roles they feel more fulfilled with rather than those which might earn them the most money.
I guess you could make the argument that they're falling into traditional family roles with men being the bread winners, but I've seen many single women on their own peruse the same ends.
Maybe we should all find ways to do what we love instead of being like the guy in the Futurama poster with "You gotta do what you gotta do."
Let me give some examples to see if I can build a picture. On the technology end of things, I used to go to the conference SEG, which a lot of deals for technology are made on the side. I've not been for the last 4-5 years, but they used to be really aggressive about their use of booth babes. For example, I remember one year where there was a vendor where I could get my shoes shined by a group of women wearing bikinis, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats while having the sales person talk to me about whatever widget they were selling. Similarly, a former coworker used to hire what were called "technical models" who were pretty women that could talk shop that they'd used to drive sales. Now, is this unique to oil? Nope. However, I felt they were pretty aggressive about it.
As far as oil rig work, that's interesting for a couple of reasons. One, roughnecking is one of the only fields left that pays extremely good money for limited amount of education. Two, most of the managers that I met did a certain amount of time working on rigs to cut their teeth and they very much viewed it as a rite of passage into upper management. I mention these two things because it turns out rig work is important both for providing wealth to those with little education as well as a path to upper management. Now, as a women, is this an inviting environment? Well, let's see; there are very few women doing it right now, so it's likely you'd be one of the only ones at the operation. Further, depending on the assignment, you could literally be trapped either in the middle of the desert or on an offshore rig with literally no where to go in case there was a conflict with the other personnel. Alternatively, you could take an assignment in a place like Saudi where you have to completely cover yourself and not drive whenever you're off compound. That sucks and every woman who enters the field knows that it sucks.
That said, would oil management be excited if a bunch of women wanted to do rig work? Absolutely. Each of the companies that I've worked with absolutely had outreach programs to attract women. However, it's hard because overall it's an extremely hostile environment. Further, it has a long term affect because the current oil culture encourages a certain amount of rig work to cut your teeth for management and if women aren't getting that then they're at a disadvantage for those positions as well.
What to do? Honestly, I don't know. Personally, I think there's a chicken and the egg problem. If there was magically a big cohort of women who wanted to get on a rig, I think many of the problems I mentioned above would be moderated. Though, certainly, disadvantages while working in the Middle East persist. However, it's unlikely that such a cohort will magically appear. Till then, part of the point of outreach programs is to create small, incremental improvement until these problems fix themselves.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4vcxd0/alm...
My sister is also a mechanical engineer she worked on remote mine sites for a while and then at a power plant. She took a few years off to have children and now has no desire to get back to that kind of lifestyle. She works for the government now.
This kind of ignorance brings up the major social issue of technology, something similar to the "Smug Lisp Weenie" issue.
Many young people are idealistic and want to get into a field that will change the world for the better, and going into a field where the status quo for success is how well you can implement math for a faceless entity is not very appealing for many folks, regardless of their ability to do so.
You might be able to memorize hundreds of kernel functions or visualize abstract data types, but is what you're building actually solving the problems of your community or your society? Does your job tickle your brain enough that you don't care if you're building auto emission cheats? Is this kind of thinking truly "intelligence" when the ocean is acidifying and urban lifestyles are shortening our telomeres?
Do you really think that the type of person that is suited for connecting extremely disparate information is at all common? Sure, anyone can hop into a job at an established company with established tools and documentation and write glue code, but to me that is very different than the type of person that genuinely has a talent for software.
Being able to memorize bullshit or excel in academia means nothing.
Software is about the only career I can think of where there are movements created to inject social status into it so that people get into it who are only interested so long as it comes with social status/trendiness.
The major also doesn't fix the thought process. You either have it or you don't.