[kamaal]

>>Our solution was to simply make a small set of our classes for girls only.

Your solution will make the problem worse. Because nothing will really change in the way boys work, and you will see the same late night, whole night, full weekend culture among them.

Girl's classes will see a far little attendance totally detached from culture in the other part of world. Soon the rewards will dry out and move towards crazy work culture and attendance in girls classes will decline.

[primitivesuave]

I think you missed the description of my organization - we're not doing professional development. We're training kids on how to better access technology, and quite frankly people on HN don't really understand what our atmosphere is like. Girls and the parents of girls really appreciate our all-girls classes and events, they have excellent attendance and the girls really come together as a community.

I honestly couldn't care less about idealistic principles when the all-girls classes have been working great for us and have boosted the number of enrolled female students.

[kamaal]

I can understand purely from an academic perspective- attending classes, passing tests, completing assignments. But again this model breaks down in the real world.

One must really treat engineering as a practice and not as a degree. More like law and medicine.

Throughout India, girls outscore boys in nearly every exam. Somehow that doesn't last at workplaces.

[tomp]

I disagree, not just on this issue, but in general. I think academic education should be more the learning and less training - teach creativity, abstract thinking, curiosity, thinking out-of-the-box, ... The student's then become faster learners of the more mundane things, because they have a better mental abstraction framework, and can learn the things that are required on the job starting to work on the job!

[kamaal]

Yet, despite doing all that we don't see it going well in practice.

The problem is stuffing things in the brain isn't a great use of one's time especially when years of doing that can be replaced by Google query.