The Etsy scholarships are an experiment to see if we can have a batch that's 50% women. If Etsy put half of the grant money towards men, it'd do less to help that goal. If this constitutes saying "to hell with them" to men who can't afford Hacker School, then we've been doing that from the start.

why not organically filter the scholarship candidates based on female-oriented areas of study?

This would break Hacker School. We don't accept people based on a specific area of study, nor do we let companies influence the projects students work on. We simply accept people who love programming and want to become better hackers in the fullest sense of the term.

That should be self evident.

The only other possible explanation is that men are somehow inherently better suited for Hacker School, and I think we can all agree that that's sexist, and incorrect.

You might want to differentiate here on timescale: "Well, those men were systematically given their advantages a long time ago based on their gender, there are no time-proximal gender advantages." But it doesn't matter. There is no statute of limitations on sexism.

Plus, some of the gender-based advantages are proximal... like whether their marketing is written in a way that makes men want to apply, but women not want to... which was almost certainly the case, and I think still is.

So, given that there's already overwhelming, gender-based support for men, offering gender-based support for women seems like it's only leveling the playing field.

Do you think it's possible that rather than having negative, sexist motives for offering scholarships, they are simply going out of their way to be _supportive_ to minorities in the field?

EDIT: MaxGabriel pointed out this article claims more women in a group improves performance [not equal numbers]. Thanks for the correction.

HBR: But gender does play a role?

Malone: It's a preliminary finding--and not a conventional one. The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But so far, the data show, the more women, the better.

Woolley: We have early evidence that performance may flatten out at the extreme end--that there should be a little gender diversity rather than all women.

Let me make sure I'm clear: I love the idea of female engineers being given incentives to enter a male-dominated field. There are a myriad of great benefits to everyone involved. The trouble is, the methods they are using are previous-level.

Seriously, a group of hackers can't figure out a more elegant process? They are literally saying "If you are a girl and ask us for money we will give it to you". That's absurd. Lets see them set up a special fund or something for female-friendly fields rather than just throwing money at women outright.

I stand by my assertion that their methods are amateurish but their intents are good. I'd like to see the people who designed this program at least speak to the topic; what else they tried, why it didn't get approved, why it didn't work, et cetera. I just want to hold other engineers to rigor and examine their methods, especially when I find the goal noble but the methods sophomoric.

We never said that. This is what we said:

We're not going to lower the bar for female applicants. It frustrates us a little that we feel the need to say that, and we think it underlines the sexism (intentional and not) that so pervades the programming world.

But we want to say that now, so people don't have to waste time asking or debating the point. Women will be judged on the exact same scale as men. We think to do otherwise would be insulting and counterproductive. We care a lot about getting more women into Hacker School, but we won't do it at the expense of the quality of the batch.

It's called affirmative action, and some of the most highly regarded institutions in America have employed it for decades. I'm not making an appeal to authority in defense of affirmative action, I'm simply suggesting that there is nothing appalling, novel, or 'amateurish' about the practice.

Unless you're suggesting they 'hide' the discrimination. In which case, I don't support that position at all. Not only does that prevent discussions like the one we're having right now, it also just seems pathetic to not stand for what you believe in.

> filter the scholarship candidates based on female-oriented areas of study

Yes, girls must play only with dolls, because only you (man) should play with the cool stuff.