Women: Learn to Program This Summer

Re:Women: Learn to Program This Summer by tracker1 on Friday March 22, 2019 @03:56PM (#19466285)

As to #2, is it bias when the candidate pool is self-selecting? I mean, generally we're talking about an industry where a self-starter can learn, get their foot in the door and build a career. Every actual study I've seen actually indicates bias in favor of women. The fact that the candidate pool is so unbalanced to me seems to indicate an issue in education or no issue at all (self-selecting), not corporate hiring.

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Re:Women: Learn to Program This Summer by UncleMeat on Friday March 22, 2019 @07:02PM (#19467758)

But not everybody is a self starter. We also have a ton of people who were nudged in this direction and men get those nudges far more often. I certainly didn't learn software totally independent of other structures. Both my parents were software engineers. I had toys (marketed at boys) that encouraged creativity with computers. I had teachers who encouraged me to work in software. Etc etc.

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Re:Women: Learn to Program This Summer by tracker1 on Friday March 22, 2019 @08:08PM (#19468108)

But those nudges are LONG before the hiring process, which as I mention seems to be biased in favor of women in the field. Education and other bits take a different approach.

Media changes:

* Don't show techs/ops and programmers as interchangeable in practice * Don't make techs or programmers look uncool * Show more diverse techs and programmers in roles * Don't dumb down smart female characters (some seasons of Arrow) * Don't turn smart female tech characters out of tech (Daisy on Agents of Shield)

Education Changes:

I'm not sure here, between K-12 vs >12, as I really think better normalization in media would go a long way. I also think actual gaming with broader appeal is helping a lot too.

I do find it interesting that given college women outnumber men by almost 2:1 that the majority of STEM and more specifically CS graduates are men. I think that colleges really need to look at their own practices here more and that cuts both ways. I find a lot of modern progressive feminist extremism to be far different than any classic goal of equal opportunity which is disenfranchising.

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Re:Women: Learn to Program This Summer by sbov on Friday March 22, 2019 @10:40PM (#19468720)

I was searching for this and it seems like Harvey Mudd has had some pretty good success in increasing the percentage of women CS graduates: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-harvey-mudd-tec...

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Re:Women: Learn to Program This Summer by tracker1 on Friday March 22, 2019 @08:13PM (#19468135)

A bit more on operations, management, development and deeper technology. I think a clearer understanding of the different roles that people play in development of technology systems is important. Men and women typically have different personality leanings (that broadly overlap), and understanding different roles and their focus would allow for people to understand and better choose towards their own interests.

In media, a lot of the time all the roles in IT/Development are interchangeable and muddled and there's almost no insight into where one role might end and another might begin.

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Re:Women: Learn to Program This Summer by cimmanom on Friday March 22, 2019 @07:35PM (#19467951)

As well as nudges (often subconscious ones) away from it that are more frequent for girls/women.

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