It's the difficulty of keeping yourself motivated and do what you need to do. Making a commitment, such as joining a class or education, is massively helpful.

> I would argue that maybe those women don't have the intrinsic motivation to do so and trying to force it upon them may be a gross waste of time and resources.

It may come as a shock but most people don't work with their ultimate passion. And often even if you start working with your passion you'll have to deal with the ugly sides and you might lose the passion. Sometimes a job is just a job.

No?

Stuff like pointers, for loops, threads, interface design, data structures, idempotency, source control, working on a linux command line, etc. all present reasonably challenging roadblocks for a burgeoning developer, and I think many of us benefited from having someone around to help walk us through this the first time.

Depends on how much you think anything else sucks. Compared to physical labor you're not breaking your back over things.

Compared to other jobs you get paid relatively ok (EU centric view).

Compared to some jobs the hours aren't that crazy: hey McKinsey folk! How are you doing? :D

Really, it isn't that simple. It depends.

It helps if you like it, but a job is a job and if you can perform it, then why do you need to like it?

Moreover, did you ever read about the overjustification effect [0]? Long story short, if you like something, you might dislike it after you get paid for it.

Also, if you love programming you might be biased in always solving a problem in a technical way. You'd become that guy from the LEGO movie that always screams "SPACESHIP!" [2]

Full disclosure: I like programming and sometimes can force myself into loving it [1]. The consequences of loving programming: no social life, no normal diet, sleep rhythm is off. I'm basically just doing one thing as much as possible: programming.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

[1] As a mettamage I have some control over my psyche and I can quite often, but not always, force myself to like or even love things that I initially hate ;-)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TYJyCCO8Dc

To your second point, not all software jobs are as solitary and asocial as you seem to believe. Pairing, project planning, application product design, are all things that are done with other people. In fact, I am a software engineer and have more than a few days at work where I don't even touch my computer, yet still get a lot of work done.

The archetype of the solitary, 100% self-learned hacker as a representative of all, or even most of tech workers has been outgrown by the industry. Even the use of the term "hand-holding" as I've seen it used is a gatekeeper mentality IMO that needs to stop, or at least be toned back significantly. People that don't pull their weight certainly exist, but everyone learns and contributes in their own way.

Oh that's easy just send a cURL request with header Accept: application/json ..... OK what's cURL, what's a header? So for us that have been in the game it is easier to "learn to code" another language as there are parallels everywhere and you have that baseline knowledge of how things generally work. Just try to explain something that you feel is "relatively straightforward" to a person not exposed to tech... I made the same mistake and thought it was straightforward, it is not as you are making many assumptions about knowledge. I am at the point where I am familiar with a lot of stuff and can Google things I don't know but what if you had no idea what even to search for? That is where instruction helps.

I don't understand why handholding is bad and why it should be used as an argument against women coding. When men do it, it's called mentoring.

I find these kind of "initiatives" quite condescending.

Isn't this true for content covered by the vast majority of all secondary and college courses?

I would love to learn to code. It's the reason I originally joined HN closing in on a decade ago. (Proof: my first post, the day I joined: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713015)

But I have found that one barrier to me getting anywhere is a lack of ability to ask questions and get meaningful answers. Men often have male friends that they can shoot the breeze with and casually mention some coding thing and get some kind of reply from one or more people.

And my experience is that men don't talk to me that way. I don't have any buddies I can shoot the breeze with who will go "Oh, yeah, that thing is a known issue and you need to do yadda." Men shooting the breeze with me are inevitably hitting on me, even if they are married.

I've been here a long time. People here mostly don't hit me up via private email and things like that to just chat about a thing. When I have explicitly said "You can email me to discuss that further." I never get emails to discuss that further. Instead, I get inquiries into when I next plan to vacation in their part of the world and suggestions that I would enjoy visiting their lovely country (and, hint, hint, they would love to have coffee with me should I happen to casually drop by their country on vacay, because that's clearly how desperately poor women who can't pay their damn bills spend their time, globe trotting to hook up with random internet strangers who apparently thought "Wow, a woman speaking to me. She must be looking for sex!").

I've occasionally had brief stints of being able to have casual conversations in a chat environment with a guy who happened to be an IT guy. I found it enormously, incredibly, mind-blowingly useful and valuable to get those casual comments of "Oh, are you doing X? Cuz, you know, X don't work. Did you think of yadda?" But most of the time, I simply don't have access to that kind of conversation.

Nearly a decade of hanging on HN has failed to magically give me such access. Anytime I comment on how frustrated I am about such things, I am inevitably pissed all over by people acting like I am making shit up -- because, yes, clearly, this is how you welcome women into the bro coders club, by pissing on them at every available opportunity.

I still would like to learn to code. I spend a lot of time online. I think men vastly underestimate how much support they have access to. A small comment here and there by someone knowledgeable can save you hours and hours and hours of time by pointing you in the right direction. As a woman, I mostly can't get access to those types of comments. Men are too busy trying to figure out how to ask for my phone number.

I really don't know how to adequately describe the ginormous Wall of China style deafening silence that faces me and that helps keep me poor, unable to figure out coding and a zillion other things that drive me crazy.

To be clear, I'm not posting this to just whine about my pathetic life. That's inevitably the interpretation most people make of such comments by me. It's frankly just another means to shut me out, dismiss me and invalidate my points.

I'm posting it to try to elucidate the fact that guys have more access to support than they seem to appreciate. I can't join a chat or slack channel and count on getting help because I posted a question. I can count on being dismissed, sexually harassed and treated like an unwelcome intruder.

And that's a giant barrier that men mostly don't seem to face. Men can talk to other men casually and get loads of useful information that is simply not accessible to me. If it were, I think I would already be a coder with several published projects.

Edit:

There are multiple people replying here to

A. Tell me "It's simple! Just don't tell people you are a girl!"

B. Generally be dismissive, as if I don't have a real problem and otherwise act like I don't have a point.

To people here actually interested in solving the problem space here: Please note how shitty it is for all the replies to me to be dismissive, not listen, etc. Please note how such replies are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I'm not planning to engage such replies. They are not useful and they tend to not even be made in good faith.

The short version of why I don't hide my gender online: I am trying to make business connections. I cannot hide my gender in person.

If I have to hide my gender to try to connect and then I arrange an in person meet-up and they are shocked and appalled to learn I'm actually a woman and I never told them that, this is not going to go good places for my career by any stretch of the imagination. They will feel lied to, betrayed and like I'm not trustworthy. No, they won't want to work with me if I can't so much as admit to the simple fact of my gender.

I also cannot even get paid if I do work online and need to hide my full name so as to hide my gender. You can only hide your gender successfully if you are basically posting anonymously and not trying to make real world, meaningful connections.

Geez. How is that not blindingly obvious on the face of it?

Why would you assume that a programming course amounts to "hand holding" just because a single gender is involved?

For that matter, why would you assume the women taking this course are unmotivated?

If this exact same program allowed men and women, would you still be casting the same aspersions only on the women, or would you also be implying that trying to "force" the men to program is a waste of time and resources?

http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/why-i-started-the-summer...

Here's a test: ask yourself how much intellectual curiosity there is in your comment or your motivation for posting. If you don't find much, please hold off until you do. Intellectual curiosity is the reason this site exists [1], and it's a fragile factor nowadays amid the rage and hysteria online. Keep HN curious.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Incredible, thanks for putting your money where your values are @jl.

As for the numerous comments in this post around reverse sexism / reverse discrimination:

1. This is a private individual giving personal capital to other private individuals, supporting a personal cause. It is hard to both claim principles of free market and rally against this.

2. Private companies making hiring decisions are correcting for an indefinite history of bias. That doesn't mean they're hiring unqualified individuals, simply that they're making sure they put in measure to correct for biases and can identify individuals with the great qualifications that in the past would have been past up due to arbitrary euphemisms for gender / racial bias like 'bad culture fit'.

3. None of this is to say that you personally are not experiencing a challenging time or are not subject to bias in any way. None of this should diminish your personal challenges in the work environment. That should be addressed. This particular individual (@jl) and this particular company (Lambda School) are just not addressing that particular cause at this moment. And that should be ok.

Programs like this really work.

How can we simultaneously be an industry built on free an open source software and yet try to put up walls around our industry when efforts are made to make it more accessible to others?

The barriers to programming are being lowered and this is an excellent thing. More diverse companies, different types of people to bounce ideas on, new perspectives. This is what our industry needs more than ever, and yet so many feel a threat veiled by concerns of affirmative action and 'reverse discrimination'.

We need to acknowledge the barriers that have existed in our industry but may be blind to you personally because you never had to deal with it. For one, access to a PC for a long time was restricted to those with low incomes. My mother saved her income tax refund for two years to buy our first PC, the one I learned to program on. The schools I attended didn't have a computer lab until my junior year of high school. It's a great thing that programming is being spread to those who did not have access before. If software is eating the world everyone had better become familiar.

One friend recently complained to me that all the AA enthusiasts just want to talk about feminism and women in the workplace, and not about actually writing code. She was incensed because she was invited to a 'Girls Code' meetup, where women would learn about algorithms by modelling their own menstrual cycles[0]. She was (understandably) frustrated, saying that her interests extend beyond what comes out of her genitals.

This is anecdotal, sure, but amongst my social circle, this seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

I sense a bazillion downvotes coming my way. You may think these opinions I am passing along are incredibly incorrect, but they are the opinions of women.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/jFLU0C8

EDIT: It took no time at all for the downvotes to arrive, as expected. There is no such thing as the sisterhood. Feminists will immediately cast out any woman who doesn't hold the "right" opinions.

Now we see a YC co-founder giving 40 women $9000 to learn to program.

Where does it end? I was really sad that while I personally can survive in this environment (if I abandon my ideals of not being judged by my genetics), many good men who are passionate about their work are being pressured from all sides.

I honestly don’t see how any of this is legal but it’s such a taboo to talk about that fixing the problem seems impossible without a major shift back to valuing skills above demographics.

If STEM women found Coding as interesting as they did Medicine (which is arguably more competitive and prestigious), we wouldn't have any shortage of women writing code. There is nothing wrong with either way, just let people do what they like to do.

Except, it's not the same cause at all, it's just the same blame. Watch:

Not enough women in tech: "men, it's your fault, stop being so crude and competitive. Change your working style to suit and attract women. Stop making crude jokes and having arguments."

Not enough men in nursing: "men, it's your fault, stop being such cowards who think a social job is not manly. Don't listen to your friends if they mock you, it's toxic masculinity."

What would actually be equality is if the first was paired with:

"Women nurses, stop being so catty and learn to be more stoic to attract men in the workplace. Change your habits and social style to be more factual and problem oriented."

Or the second paired with:

"Women in tech, stop listening to your girlfriends who think tech is not glamorous and cute. Value your own self worth and improve your self sufficiency. Don't be a mean girl."

The fact that this very simple gender swap is treated as invalid demonstrates how intellectually bankrupt the diversity movement is. Their justifications only come after the fact, after they've already decided who qualifies for sympathy and victimhood, and who doesn't.

Despite all this concern about subtle implicit bias, about societal pressure and messages invisibly reinforced by society... Somehow gender studies experts have still not noticed that some of the most implicitly gendered terms are expectations that only men are meant to live up to: to not be a coward and not be a creep.

If a woman values her own comfort and safety over self sacrificing? That does not make her a coward. If a woman expects to be welcomed and to be able to join a social interaction a priori? Not entitlement, not creepy.

50 years of gender studies, and society is only more willing to entertain such pandering and double standards at the expense of men.

H L Mencken was right: men are stupid because they actually think concepts like honor and duty are real, instead of just a stick used to shame them into submission.

No thank you. "Historically marginalized" and "traditionally underrepresented" is a giant excuse built upon the soft bigotry of low expectations. The only people consistently marginalized have been the poor, and I've never seen more spoiled, clueless, unaware adults than at "diverse" tech events.

Makes me think of Eleanor Roosevelt. She started by focusing on a group. But there were a lot of problems in her times and she recognized that, and she went on to tackle so many things like anti-poverty and unemployed youth.

I wonder if Jessica Livingston will do something similar, since it's written in the FAQ: "Since neither I nor Lambda School have tried this before, I wanted to reduce the number of variables. If it works this summer, we may expand it next summer."

However, I also worry about the motives behind the program. A huge part of feminism is a push towards gender equality[1]. Discriminating against half of the population while aiming for equality is an odd way to behave.

I know the blog post did not mention gender equality as a goal, but I just completely fail to see how discrimination like this will lead to anything but increased inter-gender conflict and the persistence of stereotypes in the field.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act

1) Who is it being offered to? Clearly, women in college. The majority of people in college are privileged (in this country, anyway) so you're offering free money to potentially privileged people. Is it possible to prioritize women who need the money over ones that could pay for it?

2) If I offered $9,000 in training for welding to someone in college, they might take that too. It's well known that the things people study in college and careers they prepare for often don't always result in what they do for the rest of their working life. Is it possible to prioritize individuals who demonstrate a consistent/continued interest in being in the industry, rather than random students looking for a free ride?

3) Where is this being marketed? To insiders who already are in a position to want to be in the industry and find a place there? Or underprivileged and minority communities that might need more of a hand to find out about such opportunities before they can work towards them?

Basically, I think it's a nice idea, but I think it can be tuned to optimize doing the most good with some minor tweaks.

In my career and life, I've been fortunate to have a lot of great opportunities - some that I sought out and some that fell into my lap. I've tried to pay it forward when I can and I am sure that these women will too given the chance.

The impact of these 40 scholarships could be 40 more technical cofounders or mentors or inventors - and that is a great thing for the community. I hope that 1+ of these ladies offer me a great opportunity or create an amazing product that I love :D

And yet it makes me and many others angry, not for what it is, but because of the social context in which it occurs. There's an all too common attitude these days that success for white people, men, and above all white men is something to oppose.[1,2] That cruelty toward men is acceptable.[3] That "it's impossible to be racist toward whites or sexist toward men". That sitting comfortably is "manspreading" and masculinity is toxic.

The world is divided in part because of efforts like this. Is more division really something to celebrate?

1: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-unbearable-male-privilege-...

2: https://www.thedailybeast.com/to-bernie-sanders-beto-orourke...

3: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/business/media/sarah-jeon...

What stops people from getting into programming, however, is a bit more difficult to determine, but there does seem to be patterns. Less women and blacks compared to asians and whites.

Oddly enough, trying to figure out the causes of these differences intersects a broad range of fields from evolution to sexual discrimination to access to resources.

And because there's so much uncertainty, the explanation quickly turns into politics.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/women-only-tech-scholarships-m...

I am targeting visual programming with Scratch 3

I'll offer my services to Lambda School and/or YC for free if that means I can extent this offer to EU people, provided that my living expenses are covered. I'm in between jobs so I have the perfect schedule for it.

I'm from the EU.

On the one hand, women have obviously been disadvantaged in many ways, for many years, which is wrong. The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed. No one should be discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender.

On the other hand, a for-profit company deciding to offer free services to individual women, who may or may not be disadvantaged, simply because they're women, doesn't sit well with me either. Frankly, it seems likely that anyone who applies to lambda school (either gender), probably lean towards the more advantaged end than the less advantaged end. So it seems likely this is going to result in women with plenty of advantages already, receiving $9000 worth of education for free, while explicitly denying this opportunity to men, and continuing to disadvantage members of both groups.

So, I guess my question is, why is this morally OK? If this was targeted specifically to disadvantaged people, or disadvantaged women, or if it was a non-profit, it seems like this would be an easier call for me.

Most companies seem to focus on improving ratio of women in their company itself, by targeting say female CS undergrads, which doesn't help increase the ratio of women in tech(as these women have already made the choice to be in tech). To be clear, this approach makes perfect sense from the company's perspective, but it ain't helping the greater cause.

Hint for picking a random image when clicking on the image: The currently shown image should be excluded from the list of images to draw from. This prevents the problem that sometimes clicks appear to do nothing, although in reality the same image was randomly picked again.

The courses and self teaching went a long way. I started at a crappy digital design agency and now work at a company many people have heard of!

Good luck to your girlfriend! I'm inspired by her.

She can send a oneliner PR to get her site included on https//fullname.dev if she wants, and if she hasn't yet started using GutHub this would be a good learning opportunity for it.

Talk about relatable. 10 years in and I still feel this way.

Do you or your girlfriend have any advice for her? A good tutorial or course or book that's been really helpful to your girlfriend and can help mine ship something soon?

Haha what a fun website.

I don't take any issue with boot camps that are exclusive to women, but I can definitely see how people are worried that it reinforces the general atttide that "white/Asian men in tech = bad, women & URM in tech = good"

Barriers aren't just being lowered. The're also being erected for some types of people.

1. no degree is required, not even a high school diploma

2. a Windows laptop can be had for $100 at a pawn shop

3. an incredible amount of programming tutorials exist for free on the internet, including a complete CS degree course from MIT

4. a business license can be had by just filing a bit of paperwork with the state

5. operating a business on the internet means nobody needs to know what sex/religion/age/whatever you are

6. programming tools and SDKs are available for free

7. you can work from home

How much more can one ask for?

You want "the other side" to acknowledge the barriers existed in our industry, and yet do not want to acknowledge that reverse discrimination directly hurt people. Being rejected for the identity you are born with hurt on a very personal and primal way.

Then we have cases like my own perspective. I have seen this kind of gender initiative for about 30 years now here in Sweden. Gender segregation in this industry has in the 30 last year gotten worse. I know for example a woman who took a "women only programming course" in the 90s, and she is now the single person left still in the programming profession out of every single person that graduated (she got a job before she graduated but that might be beyond the point). Study after study report the same where if a person belong to the minority gender in the work place, the risk that they will switch work place to one where they are majority is significant every single year. If I recall right it actually increase for each year, in particular after they graduate. Regardless if Men or women are the minority in the study, the result is similar.

The only effective measure I have seen to prevent this pattern is mentorship programs. I have not ready any in-depth explanation why they tend to work, through I strongly suspect it addresses some of the core issues behind gender segregation. An observation I made is that you can offer mentorship to both majority and minority segments of a group and the minority will more likely join and participate, which still focus the effort on the minority but does not exclude if any individuals in the majority have a similar need for the service. Obviously not everyone of that identify as belonging to the majority is identical and individuals have different needs.

All the top comments I see are supportive and encouraging. Maybe there were some negative removed comments, but overall this thread doesn't seem to demonstrate gatekeeping and discrimination.

Also, who is putting up walls? Be specific please. I too come from a low income "unprivileged" family and got my first computer in high school.

And the tech industry has always been diverse. It has been the most diverse and the most meritocratic industry for a long time. It's the industry where minorities and immigrants like Jerry Yang and Sergei Brin can thrive unlike more establish industries like news, media, oil, finance, transportation, etc.

Why are you painting a false image of what the tech industry is like? There are no barriers to programming. It is the most available and meritocratic and fair industries around.

Also, your entire comment had no relevance to the article. You just went on a stereotypical virtue signaling rant.

Also, do you really want diversity, or do you want a "diverse" group of people who all think like you?

I just can't handle the hypocrisy. All over HN, you support H1-B visas and claim the tech industry's success is due to diversity provided by H1-B visas. And elsewhere, you claim the tech industry is not diverse and the problem with the tech industry is the lack of diversity.

Which is it? You can't have it both ways just to suit your agenda. Be consistent.

Insane reasoning looking back, but hey 17 year olds are often principled nutcases. I can definitely imagine doing what you describe re compsci if I was a 17 year old girl in 2019. Hope any principled girls (in my biased opinion the brightest/best people in the end) we lose from information tech go into something else useful, kind of a sad thought.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

1. We only accept applicstions from candidate from non-traditional backgrounds if they're diverse. Diverse is defined as any of the following: women, black, Hispanic, or native American - maybe also veterans but I'm not sure. Non-traditional background means coming from a coding boot camp, or majoring in a non-computing related field. I think after 3 years industry experience candidates are considered traditional even if they came from one of those two.*

2. Diverse candidates get two attempts to pass the technical phone interview, non diverse get one.*

That said, when it comes to the hiring decision we don't discriminate. No disrespect for those candidates considered diverse, just take what you get. And I'm Cuban myself (but not visibly Latino) so I may have benefitted from that part of my identity myself.

Untimely I think the lower representation of Black and Hispanic people in tech roles is reflective of education rates. I suspect that were incomes and education more equal that would make representation in tech more equal. There also geography. Not many tech companies in the south where most black people live.

As for women thats a more difficult situation. I think that there's strong evidence to back up the claim that women may not choose to enter tech on their own volition. I think the solution to that is to emphasize the value of fields other than tech. Being coder at Google doesn't make a person any more valuable than a lawyer, marketer, salesperson, etc. Sure they may make more money, but that's the product of the labor market. And not to mention the average lawyer probably makes more than the average coder.

I've anecdotally seen a growing portion of coding boot camp that are exclusive to certain demographics. I wonder how much of that is due to policies like these. Especially for boot camps that only charge if the graduates get jobs in tech, I can see how it would be disadvantageous to admit white and Asian men.

* Edit: I just checked and these policies also apply to people with referrals. So one could justify this by saying we treat diverse candidates as though they have a referral.

If you are interested in the program, it seems like you could identify yourself as female and apply. Especially if there's no in-person interview.

Cynically, if enough [biological males who identify as] men elect to identify as women for this application, the selection team will have some very difficult decisions to make.

I left not too long after that.

I am appreciative of every opportunity I have been given and will continue to take advantage of any opportunity afforded to me, even if it is on the base of my gender. If an investor wants to help a certain group of people, I will value that they are providing opportunities even though I may disagree with the idea of providing opportunities based on immutable characteristics.

It is illegal to discriminate for jobs on the basis of sex in the US (as per the Civil Rights Act of 1964). If you believe yourself to be the victim of discrimination, then submit a complaint the the EEOC [1] who will investigate.

That being said, a large gap between the number men and women (or whites and blacks, etc) working at companies exist can be considered evidence of systematic discrimination. Increasing the pool of unrepresented applicants is a great way to ensure that a diverse pool of qualified candidates get interviews, thus reduce the likelihood that a company appears to be practicing discrimination during hiring.

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm

Society is worse off for having barriers that prevent anyone who wants to code from being able to do so. That includes the inefficiencies of the job industry not placing you into a productive coding role faster. But it also includes the lower salaries, lack of support/representation, belittling, and near-universal campaign of horrible harassment that every woman I've talked to in the field has experienced.

Everyone in the field of software development struggles, and I don't want to take away from that. We should be making life easier for everyone. But doing so involves recognizing problems specifically and succinctly, and building solutions that fit those problems. One of society's many problems is that women in tech have to contend with a nightmarish swirl of negative distractions that I've never had to think about as a white man. In the face of such a problem, giving resources to the effected population makes total sense, and it's a good thing that more organizations/companies are doing so. Even more than that, it brings us closer to meritocratic equality.

Let me help you, fellow Mexican:

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2017-title29-vol4/xm...

The reason it's legal is because there are laws that explicitly allow this for certain underrepresented or disadvantaged groups.

Espero que esto aclare tus dudas.

However some people I have met from southern Asia coming from a farming family background likely have had much worse conditions growing up. But they get lumped into the Asian mass where you must truly excel to get noticed.

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...

Do you have any statistical evidence that proves white men are being discriminated against?

[1] http://fortune.com/2019/01/28/funding-female-founders-2018/

I cite as evidence the fact that women in med schools have not, in fact, always been well represented and that the same kind of rhetoric about their "interests" was used to exclude them from medicine as recently as our parents' generation.

So... given a choice between "tech is fundamentally different from medicine and chicks don't like it" and "tech is behind medicine's adoption curve with resepect to gender inclusion", I'm taking the later as the obvious hypothesis.

I don't think there is any problem (shortage) of women in tech, but this is a substantial deficit of women in startup tech. There could be many reasons for this, but I suspect this is due to the personalities needed at an early stage startup and some degree of narcissism or self-interest that many developers (particularly women developers) find less appealing.

The only thing that really has to be noticed in order to see the problem here is that almost all of the women writing blog posts about how women should go into STEM did not themselves go into STEM. Yesterday I saw a video about an organization trying to get women to go into STEM. All of the women involved in the program had degree in _____ studies, communications, etc.

It's OK to be extremely cynical about this.

That said, I don't have a problem with women working whatever job they want. Just don't expect me to play along with the self-esteem parade and grievance bureaucracy that tends to come along for the ride.

But I guess I'll just get down voted too.

I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-coders. You need sales, marketing, accounting, management, HR, legal - and even the IT guys often truck along fine with little to no coding skills.

If you need code written to perform your task that usually just means the UI of your application isn't powerful enough. So get a coder to add that feature to the UI. You don't need to become a coder yourself.

Here's why we really need "more coders" all the time:

- the web frontend is getting reinvented every year

- the latest trends in infrastructure design ("terascale micro-micro-micro-services as a service") need attention

- the latest devices and platform SDKs need to be dealt with

- the insane amount of technical debt accumulated through all this churn needs to be paid off

Which is all fine only as long as the money keeps rolling in.

Coding at 100 IQ level will be automated away very soon the same way anyone can have a facebook account without knowing HTML.

Is there any evidence that this is happening, though? I've never seen anybody, even anecdotally claim "I'm a woman (who is qualified) and I've been unable to find employment". Mostly what I see is people trying to work backwards and say, "if group X makes up Y% of the population and only Z% of programmers, that in itself must be evidence of discrimination".

I can tell you why. In part, it's explicit sexism and goal keeping from men, sure. But a far bigger reason there are less women in tech?

Step into any engineering course at a 4 year university. Come back and tell me how many women where in your class. Get the picture?

Of COURSE there are less women in engineering jobs. They are less women in engineering classes! So while there are definitely sexism problems, far BIGGER issues exist with reforming gender roles CULTURALLY.

Women should be encouraged from a young age to pursue science if it interests them. They should not be given artificial leg ups to help balance a problem which will never go away without addressing the root cause.

Because it’s a for profit organization it makes total sense for them. It has marginal cost but acts as huge marketing factor.

Now, it may turn out that you might want to evaluate an aggregate measure of disadvantage per person, so you can sort people by level-of-disadvantage and apply that first. But that method may be brittle; if you choose the relative weighting of various forms of disadvantage wrong, then you're applying your benefit in a way that deviates from the "true" perfect-information order anyway.

One way of resolving this is to say "we're not going to attempt to apply this benefit in a perfectly Rawlsian order; we're just going to pick a main effect to attack and, while doing less good than a perfect-information solution, will still almost certainly do more good than harm.".

It's a partial solution to a small part of a big problem.

> If this was targeted specifically to disadvantaged people

You already accepted women have been disadvantaged though.

1. Software Engineering has become more social over time. The idea of the loner software developer has sort of vanished as open offices become the norm and the collaborative nature of software engineering grows.

2. Women majors in computer science has dropped like a rock over the past few decades [1]

These two points seem to refute your explanations, considering software development at one time had a signiciant amount of developers that were women. If women were somehow biologically uninclined to be software engineers, the statistics don't seem to follow this train of thought.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

If money and the like were of no concern I might consider pursuing photography over coding. However, just because I love that a little more, doesn't necessarily mean I'm not interested in code.

There are absolutely people who will pursue things they have little to no interest in, but there are also people who will pick one over another because one is just a little bit better for whatever reason. How about we don't discount that people can have multiple passions?

The gender-equality paradox does not just apply to Scandinavian countries, but reproduces pretty much around the world: female participation in engineering etc. is inversely proportional to HDI.

In fact, it even reproduces over time! I think we can all agree that, for example, the US is more egalitarian now than it was in the past. Yet female participation in CS has actually dropped since the 60s or 70s.

> we don't know what a "natural" allocation by gender in STEM might look like

This is both true and, maybe somewhat surprisingly, irrelevant. The reason is that the GEP is not about the absolute levels, but about the sign of the change. To be more precise:

If your hypothesis is that "societal forces/sexism/oppression are the main causes for lack of female representation", then you would expect higher levels of participation in societies that are generally more egalitarian and more free than in societies that are generally less egalitarian or not free, regardless of the absolute levels.

So your theory demands that there is a positive correlation between HDI and STEM participation.

If there were no correlation, that would probably already disprove that hypothesis.

However, it is worse than that, much worse, because the correlation is actually negative. I have to admit that this stunned me, as it apparently stunned the researchers working in the field, because it is such an unexpected and hugely significant result.

And once again, absolute levels are completely irrelevant here, it's just pretty clear that when you remove oppression, you get more gender-segregated workplaces at least when it comes to the empathising/systematising divide.

> The argument that where we're at now is where we should be

Who "should" be deciding where we "should" be? To me, it should be the people who decide what they want to do. If many more women than men now decide to go into veterinary medicine (used to be the other way around), who are we to second-guess them? If many more women than men prefer to go into early childhood education, who is to say that this is "wrong"?

That's the part I really don't understand, quite frankly.