Google: Teach Girls Coding, Get $2,500; Teach Boys, Get $0 673
theodp (442580) writes "'Public school teachers,' reads the headline at Khan Academy (KA), 'introduce your students to coding and earn $1000 or more for your classroom!' Read the fine print, however, and you'll see that the Google-bankrolled offer is likely to ensure that girls, not boys, are going to be their Computer Science teachers' pets. 'Google wants public high school students, especially girls, to discover the magic of coding,' KA explains to teachers. 'You'll receive a $100 DonorsChoose.org gift code for every female student who completes the [JS 101: Drawing & Animation] course. When 4 or more female students complete it, we'll email you an additional $500 gift code as a thank-you for helping your students learn to code.' While 'one teacher cannot have more than 20 of the $100 gift codes activated on their DonorsChoose.org projects,' adds KA, 'if the teacher has more than 20 female students complete the curriculum, s/he will still be sent gift codes, and the teacher can use the additional gift codes on another teacher's DonorsChoose.org project.' So, is girls-are-golden-boys-are-worthless funding for teachers' projects incongruent with Khan Academy's other initiatives, such as its exclusive partnership with CollegeBoard to eliminate inequality among students studying for the SAT?"
Sex discrimination. (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this not sex discrimination? Or does the US not have such laws against discriminating based on gender?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
this is google's money, not government money
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't worry, the powers that be have covered that unique case. Apparently, discrimination can only legally happen if it's against a "protected class" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class). So if you are a white straight male, or in some cases a male period, you are not a "protected class" and therefore discrimination cannot happen.
Disgusting.
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:5, Funny)
So if you are a white straight male, or in some cases a male period, you are not a "protected class"
Think of the male periods!
Re: (Score:2)
I am Jack's outraged period.
Think of me, think of me fondly ...
When we've said goodbye
Remember me once in a while
Please promise me, you'll try
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:5, Informative)
You misunderstand the concept of a "protected class."
Employment law indicates that discrimination or harassment based on protected classifications is illegal. A protected classification is something like "gender," but not "being a woman." So if you discriminate against someone because she's a woman, that's illegal because you're discriminating based on a protected class (gender); and if you discriminate against someone because he's a man, that's ALSO illegal because you yet again are discriminating based on a protected class (gender).
Same thing about race, national origin, and a few other classifications (military service, in a few states sexual orientation, etc).
That doesn't mean, however, that you can't have a charity that focuses on one gender or race, or an organization focused on one gender (e.g. girl scouts or boy scouts); it also doesn't mean that an entity seeking to donate money must donate money equally to all genders -- protected classifications are an area in employment law, not every facet of life.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That's mostly true but not 100% of the time. Age is a protected class, for example, but only for 40+. You can happily discriminate against people for being too young.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:4, Informative)
Um, what the hell are you talking about? I've done work with a Boy Scout troop for over a decade and it has been the way it is for some time.
A Boy Scout Troop is all males under the age of 18, no females. A Venture Crew, which can be related to a troop under their same sponsoring organization, have males and females up to 21. Adult leaders can be both male and female so as to avoid discriminating against say single parent households where the child only has his mother (arguably this is even more beneficial to these groups, "arguably"). There is no "pitched a fit" and now girls can be in the actual troop. Girls can only be in Venture Crews which are related to a Scout Troop, but managed differently, follow different activity guidelines normally (though some overlap, such as Philmont), and have completely different progression paths and requirements.
Seriously not trying to be a prick here, but please don't post things when you only have misleading information.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, don't I know it. The government pulls out all the stops to help these so-called "threatened" and "endangered" species when they couldn't give two craps about the problems of a regular stiff like me. It's fascism, I tell ya.
--A concerned pigeon
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Tell that to the Girl Scouts. Or the Boy Scouts for that matter. Mens rooms, ladies rooms. I don't know how history will judge us, but currently society is quite comfortable treating men and women separately.
Re: (Score:2)
The key difference is between between separate treatment and unequal treatment.
Re: (Score:3)
Separate but equal was discredited a long time ago. Anyone who has ever seen the line for a mens vs a ladies room can immediately see that the situation is not equal. Boy scouts and girl scouts are not equal. Accepted norms of dress and appearance are not equal.
Re: (Score:3)
If I chose to go to a strip club, I would feel appropriate tipping the (female) dancers but not the (male) bouncers with my privately owned dollars.
At the same time, I had to foot every dollar for college because I was neither a minority, female, the son of impoverished parents, nor Christian and thus ineligible for the private scholarships. And despite being at the very top of the class, I wasn't eligible for the government ones either.
I'm not even sure which side I'm arguing for.
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:5, Funny)
If I chose to go to a strip club, I would feel appropriate tipping the (female) dancers but not the (male) bouncers with my privately owned dollars.
No, man, you have to get a random dance from either a dude or a lady. And they have to be a random age and weight. No discrimination allowed :)
Hooters (Score:4, Interesting)
The key difference is between between separate treatment and unequal treatment.
The male waiters with man-boobs at Hooters definitely get unequal treatment.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
There is a quantifiable distinction between an employer (someone offering compensation in exchange for labor in any number of quid pro quo arrangements), a public accommodation (like public drinking fountains, public schools, etc) and a private group like a yoga studio or country club. This article should clear things up for you: http://blogs.findlaw.com/tarni... [findlaw.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Sexual discrimination is not legal ...
Nonsense. Laws against discrimination are narrowly written, to protect specific classes of people, in specific circumstances. There is no general law against all discrimination.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, the protected class in these laws is gender, not women, meaning "Sexual discrimination is not legal"
Nope. Gender discrimination is illegal in hiring, firing, pay, and promotions, none of which apply here. This might be illegal if the gender of the teacher was considered, instead of the gender of the students. If you really believe there is a law against gender discrimination in the private provision of classroom incentives, then please provide a specific reference.
Re: (Score:3)
Try, just TRY to offer any kind of job in a discriminatory way biased towards men. Yes, as a private company.
Equal opportunity laws already reach such an insane level around here that jobs that can only be done by a certain gender still have to be offered "gender neutral". Dare to show openly that you'd rather hire a man than a woman and be prepared to be sued into oblivion.
Re: (Score:2)
Funny, I've worked in a bunch of different jobs since the 1980s, the stats ran like this:
Factory intern: lots of women, all in assembly. Repair techs were all ex-Navy and all male. Managers were all male. Out of 500 employees, there was one token male assembler and one token female manager.
Grocery stocker: all stockmen were male, all baggers were male, all managers and department heads were male, all cashiers and the office girl were female, except for one flamer... this is a major chain with hundreds of
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know what country you hail from, but it seems to be the US. And if it is, yes, this doesn't look too good. It seems gender roles still seem to be very firmly entrenched where you are.
I can't help but notice around here (Europe), the traditional roles started to break up a while ago. Most project managers I had to deal with lately were female, as was the PM-head. Many department heads in the company I worked with lately (a national, pretty big logistics corporation) were female. Their interface devel
Re: (Score:2)
Given that men are barely 1/3 of college graduates I'm strongly doubting his story, unless he's dealing with people solidly in previous generations.
Re: (Score:3)
Male hairdressers are an interesting example of a cultural norm that seemed superficially to be the result of men "simply not being interested" but turns out to be just societal expectations or pressure. For example the majority of hairdressers in Japan are male. In the UK it is probably 50:50, with plenty of barbers out there.
The same is true of engineering and IT. It's not that one gender is simply less interested, and people saying that will look pretty foolish in 30 years time. Actually they look foolis
Re: (Score:3)
Something I've encountered recently is an age discrimination / bias, working in a University town with a couple of firms heavily staffed with recent grads, there's a disconnect between the 25 year old idea of "proper work/life balance" and the 35+ year old perception of that concept.
It's not really so much age based, but as you say, when the kids are born, and then again when the kids enter school. My solution was to move out of the scrappy-graduate-company town and start working more with people my own ag
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even hardcore feminists start to disagree with "positive discrimination", i.e. preference of women to men when hiring. Because it defeats the goal of equality and equal treatment.
As long as it remains, the misogynists will have the argument that the woman only got her position because she's the "quote female", the woman that had to be hired to fulfill some kind of bullshit law. She can be successful, she can be not only good at her job, she can be better than any man in the role, yet still she's going to be the "quota woman".
If you want equality, start at being equal. Slap every HR idiot with the book of law if he doesn't hire you because you're a woman, but don't insist in getting a "woman quota". You're hurting the struggle for equal rights more than the HR idiot ever could.
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as it remains, the misogynists will have the argument that
The misogynists will always have an argument because they're working from an unshakable personal assumption that they are superior because of their gender. There's really no point pandering to them since they'll just writch to another argument.
You're hurting the struggle for equal rights more than the HR idiot ever could.
Except, well, no. I wish I could find the citation for this, but my google-fu is weak today.
There was quite recently a big study done across academia on the relative qualifications (which in academis includes things nicely numeric like number of citations and number of publications in journals with a certain impact factor etc) which seemed to do all the right things controlling for the different gender ratios in different subjects etc.
End result: the US with it's huge positive discrimination drive has the situation where men and women appear to compete opn an equal footing.
For Europe which does not, women on aberage required substantially better records for the same job compared to men.
So while what you say would be 100% true if there wasn't massive discrimination, there is unfortunately, massive discrimination.
Re: (Score:3)
The solution to unfair discrimination is not more unfair discrimination.
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution to unfair discrimination is not more unfair discrimination.
Really/ Because in the example provided it worked, and in fact was not unfair. The results were that men and women were awarded jobes on an equal footing.
Given that afterwards, men and women were ranked the same according to achievements, please enlighten me as to how this was unfair?
Re: (Score:3)
You're confusing a metric of equality with the existence of sexism and sexual discrimination. Dictating that you must hire 50% men and 50% women is sexual discrimination by definition, but it will do an excellent job of evening out the metrics. However, it seems quite probable that you've increased sexist thinking: some of the men who didn't get the job because they're men will have lowered opinions of women. The women who did get the job because they're women will know that sexual discrimination played
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:4, Interesting)
I found a related study linked below, and it goes hand in hand with the other common sexist/racist position you see floating around this thread: confusing descriptive statements with prescriptive statements. It's an age-old pattern that goes like this:
1. discourage minority from participating in an activity.
2. look around and point out descriptively: "Gee, minority x isn't good at this activity!"
3. make prescriptive statement: "Therefore, minority x isn't good at this activity!" which in fact, discourages minority x from the activity, thereby repeating step 1. It's sort of like how if your parent or teacher told you you sucked at something, you'd be less likely to perform well at it because you'd be convinced you were a failure. Except in this case, it's applied against an entire group.
This certainly worked with racism, but it applies equally to sexism.
This is why women perform equally with men in mathematics in parts of the world where gender discrimination doesn't exist like it does here (http://news.sciencemag.org/math/2014/03/both-genders-think-women-are-bad-basic-math?utm_content=buffer6bc17&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer). But in this thread, looking around, some guys are claiming that women aren't good at math. As proof of this, they reinforce the old tropes that women aren't as good at math. They thereby discourage women from math/comp sci, then take the lack of women in the field as 'evidence' of what it is that 'women' really want, when women as a whole never had a fair shot to begin with.
They may say that 'leveling the playing field' is hurting the cause, but really, I see no evidence of this at all. The cause is moving forward because society as a whole has seen through the little ruse, and that's why change is happening. Tackling workplace problems facing men is not contradictory (and is often complimentary) to the cause of eliminating sexism, it's too bad they conflate the two issues.
Re: (Score:2)
Discrimination by sex is allowed in more circumstances than race, religion, disability, etc.
Discrimination by age is even more permissible, but still forbidden in some circumstances.
For particulars, consult a lawyer familiar with the case law, and hope he's not lying to you to push his own personal agenda.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Wish I had mod points. Some people can't handle a world that is shades of grey.
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:5, Insightful)
Men are 70-90% of the homeless and well over 90% of workplace deaths and suicides but barely 1/3 of college graduates. Not only ARE we in a situation where men are unable to follow a career in these fields, we're in a situation where men are unable to follow a career in virtually EVERY field or in many cases even *continue to live*.
I'd say we've got a pretty big freaking problem.
Re: (Score:3)
Women are 99% of the prostitutes. Women are overwhelmingly the victims of domestic abuse. They are far more likely to be disadvantaged in their careers by lower pay for the same work as men or fear that they might decide to quit and have a family at any time between the ages of 18 and 35.
There are gender related problems for both sexes, and we should have more organizations working to address men's problems. That doesn't detract from or lessen the severity of the issues women face, or mean we should ignore
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:4, Interesting)
Women are 99% of the prostitutes.
A) provide scientific data to support your statistics. B) As the customers of prostitutes are overwhelmingly straight males, a major imbalance of this sort should not be surprising. You may as well say that 99% of the men who go to gay night clubs are gay or bisexual.
Women are overwhelmingly the victims of domestic abuse
Or, at least the ones to report it. Domestic abuse of men is like the rape of men. There is such a huge stigma attached to it that men won't report it. And, even when men do report it, there is a good chance they will be forced to leave their home even if the men are the victim. Most of the laws are written so that the police must make the man leave.
They are far more likely to be disadvantaged in their careers by lower pay for the same work as men
Except there has been quite a bit of debunking of this by women. Recently on Planet Money, a female assistant professor from UT Austin was talking about who women ask for raises and bonuses much less than men. A few years ago, a female economist wrote a paper saying how, when choosing a job, women as a group use a different set of criteria than men.
Men, as a group, will overwhelmingly go after the better paying job even if it the job requires nights and/or weekends, extensive travel, dirty work, working for a company they don't like or agree with, or in other ways giving up personal comfort and/or satisfaction.
On the other hand, women, as a group, rate personal satisfaction and personal comfort at a higher level than men. Women will choose a job that pays less if it provides more personal satisfaction such as working at a favored non-profit rather than at a for-profit company. Women will choose a job lower paying job over a higher paying job if the lower paying job doesn't require onerous working conditions such as 50+ percent travel or having to work long or odd hours.
or fear that they might decide to quit and have a family at any time between the ages of 18 and 35.
In a way, you are proving my previous point with this. Many women choose to stay home for a year or more to have and raise children, which necessitates the men continuing to work and possibly working more hours to make up for the loss of income. Now, some women don't choose to stay home to raise the kids and work while pregnant. That is where the Family Leave Act come in. Look it up some time.
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why women apparently feel unable or unwilling to following a career in the computing fields.
Just look at the comments here in this "enlightened place."
Assholes abound.
--
BMO
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:4, Insightful)
BMO was rather obviously trying to answer the implied question (that needs to be solved if the issues are to be addressed) "Why (are) women apparently (...) unable or unwilling to following a career in the computing fields".
Winner winner chicken dinner.
I'm as guilty of it as most, I'd guess.
As am I, but I have been making an effort to be less so, sometimes.
There is much said about how the IT and computing fields are meritocracies. Recent articles even here have put the lie to that.
--
BMO
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this not sex discrimination? Or does the US not have such laws against discriminating based on gender?
It does, but it only works if the perceived discrimination is against a woman. Just like the US race discrimination laws only work for certain races and have been found by the courts as not applying to others.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's been a mantra of the Victim Lobby (ie the Left) since the 1960s that racism, sexism, etc are not absolute values, they're vectors, as such '-isms' can only come from a position of power.
So if a white man fires a black man, that could be (and probably is, according to dogma) racism.
If a black man fires a white man, that cannot be racism because the black man is not contextually, culturally, or historically empowered; anything he does to the white man is so far outweighed by the evils done to him, it's a
Re: (Score:3)
This is the same sex discrimination as a scholarship aimed at single mothers or getting women into STEM fields. There is a lack of women in STEM fields. Offering incentives to get people to work in areas out of their comfort zone or to get people to teach others so they can enter an area out of their comfort zone should not be discouraged.
That would be like offering free housing to police in a slum area to bring attention to problems in the inner city.
If we were offering incentives to women to become nurs
Re: (Score:3)
According to modern rules, it's impossible to discriminate against a white male, since we all grew up in such wealth a privilege and all. So when a black student from an affluent background goes up against a poor white student from a trailer park, obviously we need to give a hand up to the disadvantaged black student.
Re:Sex discrimination. (Score:4, Informative)
You appear confused. A few points that may help you.
No one is offering excuses for anything.
The ones who might suffer here are high school boys. Not "menz" and not CS graduates. So your scorn is addressing an irrelevant target.
Google, the ones offering this discriminatory money, are very much part of the nasty, unpleasant industry you speak of.
Discrimination of girls is bad and unethical (Score:5, Funny)
So lets have some discrimination of boys to fix it!
Makes perfect sense.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey just as long as you are considered part of the Majority you are perfectly fine to be discriminated against.
However I think the real issue isn't as much of lack to trying to teach women how to code. But their particular interest in coding isn't there.
Women who major in computer science face pressure from other women.
Why do you want to go to Computer Science only guys do that?
Do you want to major in a degree where it is full of dorks?
Well I a majoring in a degree where I can directly help people. What ar
seriously though ... (Score:2)
i find it interesting what you write here because this (the pressure from other women, behavior from other males) is not what I have experienced in the european countries where I have been at all. The problem there mostly is that women (statistically) just are not interested in the topic, just as they are not interested in e.g. electrotechnics.
Now we could argue endlessly why that would be: is it in the genes? is it the upbringing? is it how these fields are portrayed in culture? I don't know, but the fact
Re:Discrimination of girls is bad and unethical (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the problem is seeing sick people in the hospital and thinking the doctors are making people sick. Correlation is not causation. Girls have equal opportunity and are making the choice not to be in CS and IT, that doesn't mean there's sexism or any reason to try to fix it. I mean, we don't have a shortage of STEM workers. [washingtonpost.com]
Hell, even the girls that DO like to code are looking at Silicon Valley, where you're considered dead at the family raising age of 40, and making far better decisions about the future than the silly guys who will do what they like to do whether it's very profitable or smart in the long term sense -- Just look at the Mathematicians and Scientists who scrap and fight for funding, they're not doing it for the money... You can code for a hobby and make games or something, but have a real job elsewhere that's got more stability than churn.
So what's the deal? If they know men and women are different, [wikipedia.org] and that cross-culturally more egalitarian societies have even larger sex differences (probably because people are more free to do what they like doing), then they know no amount of teaching girls to code is going to fix the "gender gap" in the shitty STEM fields. So what's up with all the claims of anti-women discrimination when there isn't any evidence of that at all in the west? Ah, well they can leverage false guilt and shame and say, "We tried as hard as we can! We have a shortage of female workers in STEM! Title IX! Let us have more (lower paid) H1B employees and to correct the SEXIST M:F ratio!" You don't want to be called a SEXIST even if we have absolutely zero evidence of that, do you?! Ugh.
Yeah, that's exactly what's going on. To be perfectly clear: We can accept that our gender differences will produce trends in the workplace without limiting individuals to only following the trends, and without or shaming them if they do so. However, all this inequality nonsense is rubbish. Equal Opportunity won't produce equal ratios of M:F because males and females are different! [youtube.com] Look, it's not sexist that there are so few male romance novelists, right? Guys just don't want to do that job nearly as much as women do. Where's the research that shows the percentage of girls vs guys that actually enjoy STEM work (not just those that think they'll enjoy it as a prestigious high status position, then bail, like 80% of female participants from my gamedev group, when they realize how much time and social life they'll be sacrificing for thankless work mostly no one will appreciate)? I mean, you'd think that before shouting "SEXISM" they'd at least want to know for sure that it's not just women opting to take a different career path (like therapy, psychiatry, teaching or other female dominated fields), Right?!
Wrong. Where's the outrage that there aren't enough male teachers, therapists, romance novelists, or more female coal miners, brick layers, waste management technicians, etc? Isn't that "sexist"? These Social Justice Warrior campaigns are just self selecting data and refusing to test the null hypothesis so they can leverage false victimhood to suit their political and economic agendas just like they've been doing so for at least the past three decades. [youtube.com] You can expect as much from these fucking sexist and racist bigots, always. Not satisfied with making College into a social justice indoctrination camp [youtube.com] they're bringing the totalitarian Orwellian bullshit to the lower grade levels; The better to brain wash your kids with, my dear.
Next thing you know they'll want
can somebody vote this up please? (Score:2)
this sums up the facts rather well, thank you.
Girls are discouraged from entering the field (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the problem is seeing sick people in the hospital and thinking the doctors are making people sick. Correlation is not causation. Girls have equal opportunity and are making the choice not to be in CS and IT, that doesn't mean there's sexism or any reason to try to fix it.
There's overt sexism and there's subtle sexism.
My son is about to enter high school and where I live we have a number of choices. The high schools try to attract students and most of them have an open house at some point during the year for current 7th and 8th graders. One of these schools set up tables in their gym for all of their extra-curricular activities. Along with all the sports and things like the chess club and drama club was the robotics club.
I was talking to one of the parents of a girl in my son's class afterward. Even though their daughter wanted to talk to the people at the robotics club table, she refused to do so, - until all the boys from her class had left the open house. The topic of the conversation changed before I got a clear answer as to why she was worried about the boys seeing her, but clearly she was. The fact is that as a society we subtly and sometimes not so subtly encourage and discourage girls and boys from engaging in certain activities based on gender. This can be a real problem if it leaves men or women out of lucrative fields or causes worker shortages. And this is what's happening.
And the thing is that it's gotten worse. Back in the late 80's when I got my degree about 30% of CS students were women. Now it's about 12%. The last time I tried to hire a developer I had zero women applicants.
Re:Discrimination of girls is bad and unethical (Score:5, Interesting)
So a program that would pay basketball programs for having more white players would be okay? How about one for straight male fashion designers?
Sorry but this is discrimination in the form of incentives. I would rather see money spent on putting good tech teachers and technology in low performing schools so you help everyone in an area to have greater opportunities. I agree that teachers need to provide the same opportunities to everyone but putting a bounty on one group will by it's very nature cause that group to get preferential treatment.
I often wonder if the the cultural issues are more the women not going into tech at an early age vs men. Hopefully people like Jerry Ellsworth and Marissa Mayer cand help turn that around.
Re:Discrimination of girls is bad and unethical (Score:5, Insightful)
If the teacher can only hope to get paid if he teaches girls, it pretty much means boys are disallowed from participating.
Tell you what: Try to start a contest like that with the stakes reversed. I.e. get paid for boys and get jack for girls. Then watch the shitstorm.
Re: (Score:3)
Some people think this is OK. Sort of like "you got yours, now I get mine". However, sexism is still sexism. Any group that isn't fighting ALL sexism are hypocrites.
Also it ends up being counterproductive. If there are enough programs like this then schools will push girls that don't have the same ability or interest through them just to get the money. Then people will notice that "women coming into IT don't do so well" (unofficially of course) and that will end up being the initial assumption even for women who were interested, able, and would have taken that career without any cajoling.
It would be inequal to provide equal rewards (Score:4, Insightful)
If the reward were equally spread amongst boys and girls, girls would simply continue to fall behind in such areas. There is already an inequality in schools in that subject. Schools also get special grant money for minorities and the disabled who attend their institution. This is no different.
Re:It would be inequal to provide equal rewards (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It would be inequal to provide equal rewards (Score:4, Insightful)
As a white male, my standardized test scores were not quite enough to qualify for certain scholarships, special programs, etc.
A black male classmate of mine, with lower test scores, did qualify for all kinds of stuff based on those test scores plus his race...
I prefer it being "spelled out in black and white" minority race, disadvantaged sex, poverty background, whatever, as long as the rules are written and followed.
So much of life is decided based on unwritten, subjective decision making that so often boils down to these factors, but is unspoken, and can also hide nepotism, and worse.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would girls continue to fall behind? The teachers have a limited number of students, and an even more limited number of students who want to code, if it was equal, then in most cases it should still bring the students up, especially since there is an unlimited number of codes.
Grant money for the disabled is to help care for their special needs. There is no grant that go directly to schools for minorities, however there is for the poor, which is used to offset the cost of their free lunch.
Re: (Score:2)
I know why the $$$ incentive (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you're talking about marriage, I suppose you didn't read this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02... [nytimes.com]
(And the headline is not following Betteridge's law)
clearly google wants women developers (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
*Rivenaleem puts on his flame-resistant clothing*
I just saw it as compensation for having to teach girls anything.
*hides*
If ur not coding because you like it . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you are not going to be very productive anyway.
If you have to bribe people to code, they clearly do not enjoy coding.
Equality? How about sports? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
In school sports the boy's sports programs are granted a lot more money, even with Title 9. Do you think Ole Miss or Ohio State are as generous as the girls programs (including admissions) as they are with boys football? If benefactors want to pay girls more to learn programming then it is wonderful?
Are you saying that colleges put more money into the sports programs of male tennis, swimming, track and field than they do for the women? Or are you confusing the cost of a football program with these other costs? Before claiming discrimination in college sports, one needs to look at the net cost of those various programs, not the total costs. While I have no doubt that there is still an imbalance, it isn't as great as it would appear on the surface.
As far as benefactors wanting to pay girls more to lear
an additional $500 gift code (Score:2)
we'll email you an additional $500 gift code
What's a "gift code"? Is that some new term for virus?
Premise for a movie (Score:5, Funny)
A geeky guy suddenly find himself out of a jahb - victim of downsizing, outsourcing, H1B1-jeebies etc etc - and thinks up a plan to take advantage of this new program by dressing up as a woman and teaching inner-city girls all about the ins-and-outs of programming, and in the process learns a little bit about something called life.
"He taught them how to code, but they taught him how to live."
From the producers of Mrs Doubtfire and I Spit on Your Grave, this summer Paramount Pictures brings you a feel-good, down-on-your-luck, rags-to-riches, local-boy-make-good, shaggy-dog, fish-out-of-water, girl-meets-boy, boy-turns-into-girl story.
Michael Cera in Class Act.
Re: (Score:2)
I really can't help but feel that you cast Michael Cera perfectly in this role.
Don't be evil? (Score:3, Interesting)
I was always taught that discrimination was evil. Maybe Google has a different definition.
Politically correct sexism (Score:5, Insightful)
This is so flagrantly sexist that it's absurd. But luckily for Google, it's the politically correct form of sexism. It's been decreed that programming being male dominated is bad, and thus taking sexist action to fix it is okay.
This of course totally ignores that university education as a whole has become majority female, and many professions are becoming majority female that didn't used to be. That by and large we're doing a lousy job of educating boys is not considered a problem, so making that problem worse by trying to exclude them from one of the areas they still do well in is considered okay.
Sure, it's total BS. But it's PC BS, and that's good enough, right?
Re: (Score:2)
This is so flagrantly sexist that it's absurd. But luckily for Google, it's the politically correct form of sexism. It's been decreed that programming being male dominated is bad, and thus taking sexist action to fix it is okay.
Google is a private, non-government run company. They are fully within their right to offer incentives for more girls to get into computer science. Or blacks. Or native americans. Or Jews. Or whites. Or whoever they think needs help.
Stop focusing on false flag, and rather on the government's croney capitalism that allows Google to dodge taxes and eliminate competition. "Don't be Evil" has truely become the most ironic slogan of all time.
Girls are less capable and you're not doing enough (Score:2)
That's what this kind of initiative says. The implication is that it's the teacher's faults boys are doing better than girls at programming and they need to deliberately do more to even the odds. Is the female graduation rate lower because they're dumber and need more help from teachers? Are the teachers actively discriminating against girls? Or is the disparity because there are less girls interested in this field for entirely different and varying reasons? A doctor that asks the patient detailed ques
Ah, how nice (Score:2, Insightful)
The hypocrisy of feminism and so-called 'affirmative action' is once again in full sunlight for all to see. Nice to know that google is funding the use of relevant discriminators to decide who is worthy for khan's program. Oh, wait..
Please, don't bother replying with the whole 'check your privilege' thing, because it's women (and the other protected castes) who have the privilege today. This is because left wing doctrine insists on a default assumption that one group as a whole is oppressed and the other,
Who's reallly at fault (Score:2)
Who is really at fault here for gender bias/discrimination, Google or Khan Academy (KA)? Is this a Google program that KA applied for or is it an internal program of KA that they applied to Google for grant funding?
KA is in control of their curriculum and teachers, couldn't they simply tell the teachers to encourage more girls to enter the field? Why are they having to give teachers financial incentives to do so? OTOH, if this is all Google's doing, what do they have against boys? If a class has 20 seat
Conditional Public Education Funding (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the problem can be more generally stated: Private interests should not be permitted to make conditional donations to public education. The RIAA should not be allowed to pay for copyright enforcement education, Coca Cola should not be allowed to pay to have exclusive vending machine rights, and Microsoft should not be allowed to pay on condition of an MS Office mandate. The mere fact that we can all agree that more women in STEM would be a good thing does not make it right for a private interest to exert influence on the public education system.
If Google believes corporations should give more for public education funding, it should be lobbying for increased corporate taxation, and better regulation of offshore-based tax fraud. If they want to be seen as individually generous, they should make unconditional grants. Allowing them to buy control of public services is a path to ruin.
title ix issue (Score:5, Informative)
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
Poor comments (Score:3)
An attempt to reverse trends keeping women out (Score:3)
Here's what I know. When I completed my computer science degree in the late 80's over 30% of the graduates were women. Now it's about 12%. Why? What has changed? Why was it so low in the first place? The first software developer I ever hired (this was back in the 90's) was a woman. The last time I tried to hire a developer I had zero women applicants. Not one.
Here is something else I found interesting. My son is in the 8th grade and for the last year or so we've being going to high school open houses to help select a high school. One of them had tables set up in the gym where you could talk to coaches and other people involved in their extra-curricular activities like sports, chess club, and robotics. I was talking to the parents of one of the girls in his class recently and found out that their daughter wanted to visit the robotics club table but refused to do so until all the boys from her class had left. She didn't want them to see her there. Again - why? I didn't get a clear answer from the parents before I had to leave but apparently even girls who have interests in these fields are at some level being discouraged from pursuing them.
And as a parent of a daughter I can see that there are cultural norms pushing them towards certain types of activities and discouraging them others. It happens with boys too. I even catch myself doing it. I have to consciously remember to do things that will help spark my daughter's interest in science where with my son I just seem to do it automatically. And it's not because my son is any more interested than my daughter.
they have been doing it in math (Score:3)
schools have been focusing on girls and math for the better part of 50 years. so this makes perfect sense, you encourage teachers to teach programming to the students that get the most attention from their math teachers.
Jesus Motherfucking Christ ... (Score:3)
You people will get your nose bent out of shape at any goddamn thing, won't you?
Gender shouldn't matter when it comes to writing code, period. Turns out, it does in some ways that are not good for the industry as a whole. We're missing about half the insight that the inconvenient gender (aka "women") could bring to the table if the tech industry wasn't a sweaty jock party.
So, Google is trying to do something about it. Might be the *wrong* thing (I don't think so, but I'm not omnipotent) but at least THEY ARE TRYING TO DO *SOMETHING*, which is a lot more than I see any of you other meatsacks doing. You can either start being part of the solution, or just go to Hell.
If it gets more women coding, then more power to them.
If it gets more women in tech, more power to them.
If it will shut up your goddamn special snowflake whining, full power to them.
Please (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, it's amazing how so many posts here completely forget about ... well about all of humany history. Yes, it is discriminatory to give girl coders a bonus. You know what else was discriminatory? Giving freed slaves 40 acres and a mule; it was absolutely unfair to say "white men, no mule for you!", but we did it anyway. How terribly unfair.
Just because something is discriminatory doesn't make it bad, and if you live in a fantasyland where you think history just goes out the window, and everyone is equal now so we should all just be treated exactly the same ... well then you live in a fantasy land. Come to the real world.
Now, that being said, there are often less discriminatory ways to fix past social injustices. Take affirmitive action: you can do it by race and be controversial, or you can do it by social class. If (say) African-Americans really are doing worse in society (as they are), they will be over-represented in the poorest social classes, and so a social-class based affirmitive action system would have the effect of benefiting (poor) African-Americans, without explicitly singling them out.
But it's not like Google can say "if you're a kid (of either gender), and you can see in to the future that you're not going to become a programmer, we'll give you $100". So in this case singling out girls is absolutely the right way to go, unless you think it's a good thing to have a highly desirable profession like programming VASTLY dominated by men.
Re: (Score:3)
Which is funny in a sad kind of way, because it leads to programs like this one. It's the circle of life, fueled by the angst of misogynists*.
There's a lot to criticize about the implementation of this program, but dipshits like the one we're talking about make it clear why some facets of the program have an appeal.
*Referring to the asshole we're referring to and his "women are tricky" as the misogynist.
Re: (Score:3)
It teaches that women are weaker, less capable, and less useful unless given something that man aren't (effectively punishing the male students for no good reason other than they were born male.)
Of course, try starting an official "United Caucasion College Fund"....
This country is so full of $#!+ with it's claims of "equailty" and non-discrimination....
Why is that a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
> There is a problem with the number of girls who go into technical fields such as coding and engineering and that problem needs to be solved.
Why?
I know five nurses, all woman. Two of them earn over $100K a year. Very few men work as nurses. Is that a problem that needs to be solved?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
know five nurses, all woman. Two of them earn over $100K a year. Very few men work as nurses. Is that a problem that needs to be solved?
Yes. Why do people keep asking this?
But it's probably best discussed on a healthcare related forum. Slashdot is a tech one so we concentrate on problems in the tech industry, because that's what we know and what we see.
You can ask about primary school teachers too if you wish. The answer is the same: yes.
But I'm never going to do anything about either of those because I ha
Re:Why is that a problem? (Score:5, Funny)
Unless you visit your local shaman for healthcare, there is probably quite a bit of technology involved.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless you visit your local shaman for healthcare, there is probably quite a bit of technology involved.
I'm not really sure what your point is. Everyone has tech these days, but that doesn't mean they work in the tech industry. Just like posting reviews of the latest game console or whatever doesn't make you into a hacker.
Re:I'd say your extrapolation of 'people you know' (Score:5, Informative)
0 in 5 is statistically about right, considering 6.6% of nurses in the US are men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
However penalizing boys
Absence of an incentive is not really a "penalty". They aren't excluding boys in any way, simply adding a little something extra for people who actually get girls to participate.
Re: (Score:2)
'scuse me, I might be from a different corner of the planet where we don't dump a metric ton of fabric on our females until you can't see them anymore, but unless you happen to be from such a place, how the hell were boys favored to the exclusion of girls by any institution when it came to programming?
If anything, the problem is parents/relatives/peer groups trying to press girls into traditional female roles, telling them that they can't do that or that they should busy themselves with more "girly" things.
Re: (Score:3)
Or... you know... hire the best person for the job, not set a goal of having a 50/50 distribution?
Humans are not marbles, we are all unique, all have our strengths and weaknesses, and different ways of thinking.
Hire the right person for the job in hand, don't hire people based on some magical need to have a particular distribution. I really don't get this desire...
Re: (Score:2)
No, seriously, why would anyone do anything else if the goal is gender parity in the industry?
Let's take gender out of the equation. Say you have a jar full of ten million marbles. 95% are green, 5% are yellow. 10000 marbles are added to the jar every year. Your goal is to make the jar 50% green, 50% yellow, and you can't take any marbles out of the jar. Changing the distribution of marbles added each year to 50/50 will never make the entire jar 50/50. The only way to solve the problem without removing existing marbles from the jar is to raise the distribution of marbles added to more than 50% yellow. Clearly the most effective solution problem is to only add yellow marbles to the jar at all.
Back in the real world: you either need to fire men who don't deserve it, hire equal numbers of men and women and wait a generation or two for enough people to retire, or try to hire more women than men. Because math.
You could paint the green marbles yellow - oh wait keep those scissors away from me!
Re: (Score:2)
The answer to "why" is that your scenario presupposes that a 50/50 distribution of green and yellow marbles is a valid, just and reasonable goal. If only 10000 marbles want to be added to the jar every year and 95% of them are green, then I question that validity, justness and reasonableness.
Re: (Score:2)
Affirmative Action [wikipedia.org] is one of many useful tools in equalising people where inequality exists. It's not always appropriate, but here it seems like it'd be beneficial (provided they can't game the system). Encouraging the participation of females in computer science is a good thing; having females choose another profession purely because they believe CS is a 'male thing' is sad.
The SAT comparison is beyond moronic, and I assume the poster is aware of that. Stop trying to create drama out of nothing - leave that to the professional media outlets, because you'll never beat them at their game.
Are girls not being allowed to take computer science courses? No, as such that means affirmative action doesn't apply. While it might be laudable to encourage more girls to enter the field, active discrimination in the attempt should not be tolerated. What if, Google only paid if boys took the courses, under the guise to get more students to take computer science classes? Would you feel the same?
According to major tech firms, there is a shortage of qualified computer science graduates. Why wouldn't Google
Re: (Score:2)
Poe's law strikes again it seems.
I really, really can't tell if this is satirist or a wingnut.