[rorymarinich]

> Why does it matter how many women are in tech? If we're all equal then it doesn't.

This is an argument that's popped up in a dozen varieties over the last century of slowly bringing equality to a bunch of different groups. An extreme example would be the "separate but equal" line that promoted racial segregation in America; if there is no codified barrier, the argument goes, then there must be no barrier at all! Right?

The problem is that scripted barriers are not the only barriers that exist. Social barriers are much more prominent and damaging. If the culture around technology has been built in a way that encourages a certain type of usually-male character and discourages anybody else, and I would argue that this is the case, then even if everybody's invited they're not necessarily going to show up.

This isn't a tech-only problem, mind you. The acting world is famous for its cliquishness; certain sports and school sports teams also have a certain exclusive attitude. It's not that you can't participate equally in theory; it's that the prospect of participating at all is so unpleasant to certain kinds of people that they choose not to of their own volition.

The programming world is remarkably and unfortunately geared towards only certain sorts of minds. It's very late at night so I hope you'll excuse me if I'm not defining just what sorts of minds those are, but I know that I find programming a hostile and unapproachable subject in general. There's nobody out there teaching it or explaining it in a way that appeals to me. The programming courses I've taken in college failed to spark my interest entirely. So it's not just that women aren't in tech; there are a lot of sorts of people who simply aren't represented, and so the entire field misses out.

This doesn't matter if your only goal is to maintain the status quo of programming — but I think that's a remarkably shallow ambition. The more people we have programming, the more diverse and creative we'll find programming becomes. Everybody benefits from such diversity, because each potential new approach to programming will yield discoveries that bounce back to benefit people in each field. Fact is that programming is still an incredibly new industry; we haven't begun to see the extent of what it can do for society. And our progress will be limited to the sorts of people who are able to develop a passion for programming. If we don't strive to invite and encourage new sorts of people to join the fold, we're hurting ourselves as well as those others.

You're technically right that everybody's equal in tech. But in practice there's a severe discrepancy in gender, and that discrepancy will only naturally balance itself out very slowly. If we make an effort to push towards real equality we can speed up the process immensely, and it's also a nice thing to do, so I don't see much of a reason not to do it.

[bioh42_2]

The programming world is remarkably and unfortunately geared towards only certain sorts of minds.

Could that be because it is in fact an extreme brain activity that only a small percentage of people is capable of doing?

And since men are over-represented in the extremes of society, both in good and in bad, they are over-represented in programming?

[rorymarinich]

> Could that be because it is in fact an extreme brain activity that only a small percentage of people is capable of doing?

Nope. The ideas behind programming are extremely basic. The rules, so to speak, that dictate how programming works are simplistic. And the actual method of creating programs — essentially, breaking down a single task into lots of little pieces — is a method of problem-solving that's existed for a long, long time.

The problem is more that the people who teach programming go at it in a very unfriendly, non-intuitive way for the majority of the population. Programmers aren't user-friendly. This isn't inherent to the nature of the task. I've handed a lot of people who literally knew nothing about how to program things like Game Maker, RMXP, and _why the lucky stiff's TryRuby, and it's impressive how quickly they both learn how programming works and begin making things with what they've learned.

"Extreme brain activity"? Hardly. I mean, let's not kid ourselves, programming's simple enough that lots of programmers get started when they're eight years old.

[hackinthebochs]

While I do believe anyone can learn programing, thats not really the issue at hand. The question is how fast do most people take to it? I think programming is one of those things that only a certain type of person will take to it reasonably fast. This is important because there's a cost/benefit analysis people do when it comes to what's worth studying.

Abstract thinking, then using those abstractions to build new abstractions is a hard task. Programming at its basic level is simple. But its complexity grows exponentially to the point where managing complexity is the totality of programming. This is what people can't seem to do, even on a trivial level.

>The problem is more that the people who teach programming go at it in a very unfriendly, non-intuitive way for the majority of the population. Programmers aren't user-friendly.

They teach programming by asking you to program. Unfortunately this is impossible for some 60% of the people who take a programming course. We have yet to come up with a better way.

[rorymarinich]

> While I do believe anyone can learn programing, thats not really the issue at hand. The question is how fast do most people take to it? I think programming is one of those things that only a certain type of person will take to it reasonably fast. This is important because there's a cost/benefit analysis people do when it comes to what's worth studying.

I can agree with that statement, to some extent. The composer Brian Eno once said of prodigies: "The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities." Programming fits the "discontinuous possibilities" mold very well.

The question is whether or not you want to keep teaching programming in a way that only clicks with those more prodigious people, or if you want to come up with approaches that let in people who may not have the same instant intuition. And, just as in classical music, if you encourage only the people who have a certain sort of aptitude, you're also encouraging people who will only ever approach programming in one certain way, and the result is that the medium as a whole suffers from lack of diversity.

> They teach programming by asking you to program. Unfortunately this is impossible for some 60% of the people who take a programming course. We have yet to come up with a better way.

It's not that they ask people to program that's problematic. (I'd like to see a citation for that 60%, as well; it sounds fishy.) I've taken several programming classes at several levels and I don't think anybody who gets what they're doing finds programming difficult.

The challenge, rather, and this is not only a challenge that comes up in programming courses, is figuring out how to make people get it. You need to develop a manner of teaching that makes all these actions somehow intuitive; why is it that we program in this particular way? What does each word mean? Why's each language constructed in its particular pattern, and how does that affect coding?

Teaching programming without putting serious thought into creating a comfortable abstraction for students is not really teaching programming at all. It's like teaching a creative writing class without simultaneously teaching literature (and, sadly, many creative writing classes are guilty of this). You can pretend that writing is an obscure, difficult art that only a select few minds can master. But I'm a skilled poet and I teach poetry to middle schoolers and I think it's safe to say that the reason most people can't write a good poem is that they don't understand the reason why they're writing a poem in the first place.

I had a teacher, in a high school Java class, who was actually very good at teaching this; I didn't recognize how good he was at the time. He took a class composed mostly of people who knew literally nothing about anything code-related, and in a year turned them without fail into programmers capable of making competent programs. No student dropped out or switched the class; he worked with what he had and didn't fail a single one of us.

The guy-to-girl ratio was pretty close to 1:1, for what it's worth. We had a surprisingly diverse class. And it was really surprising who ended up really showing a knack for coding and who didn't. Frequently the really good coders struggled for longer than the rest of us did, but when they hit upon how to get something done their approach was a lot better than the rest of the class's.

(And by the way, I'd like to mention that this is the best discussion of gender equality that I've ever read on Hacker News, and that I'm in a way really proud that we're having this conversation right here. Cheers to everybody on both sides for keeping this a relatively civil conversation; this is not an easy subject to discuss politely.)

[roel_v]

Sweet troll, you had me for a couple of posts, your last two paragraphs gave you away in this one though. Ah where are the days when subtle trolling like this was the norm rather than the exception, when people would sneak a GNAA reference into a (usually Slashdot) discussion and didn't get spotted until hours later...