[nicholasjbs]

The linked book (Unlocking the Clubhouse[1]) is based off a multi-year study of Carnegie Mellon CS majors. They found it was common for the male CS majors to describe themselves as "in love" with programming but much less common for female CS majors to do so.

(That's obviously greatly simplified, but that's the gist of it.)

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/unlocking-clubhouse

[ritchiea]

It would be even better if this was about more than gender. I am not one of the gender inequity deniers in this industry and I don't see anything wrong with valuing a better gender balance in the industry, in fact I think it's a good thing.

But love is such a loaded, unclear term. Why is it not good enough for someone to enjoy programming and have an intellectual curiosity about programming? To me that sounds like perfectly reasonable criteria to identify people who are a good fit for 3 months focused on programming. But you're basically saying that if it weren't for this gender inequity it would be totally reasonable to continue searching for a love of programming. It's hard enough for me to say I love my family and yet it was thought of as a good requirement to expect people to love programming to be qualified to participate in 3 months of programming in a community environment?

[nicholasjbs]

As the post mentions, we stopped using the word "love" for both reasons -- gender was part of but not the entire reason we switched.

In fact, the alum we quote as an example of the trouble with the word love is male:

We used to say applicants must "love" programming, but we've learned that was a mistake. While it sounds good, it doesn't actually describe what we care about, and it was dissuading qualified people from applying.

In fact, many of our best students have said they almost didn't apply because they worried they didn't love programming enough. Hacker School alum David Peter expressed this fear perfectly:

  One of the questions in the interview was, "Do you love programming?"
  I said   yes, because I loved it more than most people I knew.
  But was it love? I enjoyed writing and drawing equally, if not more.
  After Hacker School, I'm revisiting these hobbies. Programming wasn't my first love."*

[sown]

> Why is it not good enough for someone to enjoy programming and have an intellectual curiosity about programming?

For me, it's not so much programming, but the power it gives me. The capabilities that programming gives me. I can sure talk about static vs dynamic typing, but I'm going back again to things like power.

Programming the same thing over and over again sounds kind of boring, but making something new sounds grand!

[AndyKelley]

That doesn't imply that "love" is a gendered word, it implies that males use the word more.

[schoen]

Following up on something I said further down in this thread, I think the OP meant to use "gendered" in a gender studies sense and not in a linguistic sense. I don't fully understand the meaning of "gendered" in the gender studies sense, but I think the OP meant something like "systematically associated with gender in some way".

I think the intended meaning is basically that there are cultural differences around whether people tend to express their enthusiasm for programming as "love" or not, and so Hacker School now doubts this term is the best indicator of whether a prospective participant has the kind of enthusiasm they're looking for.

It's true that "gendered word" has a totally separate meaning in linguistics, where it refers to the phenomenon where a noun attracts or requires agreement according to a class that the noun is in. In many languages these words need not refer to animate beings' gender at all, and in some languages the noun classes are totally abstract and unrelated to masculinity or femininity, although there's some disagreement about this terminology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_classes#Noun_classes_vers...

Anyway, I suggest reading the OP as saying "cultural differences, often along gender lines, in whether people commonly describe their relationship with programming as love".

[sthatipamala]

I wouldn't call the word itself gendered. The problem is it appeals disproportionately to men (for a variety of cultural reasons described in the study).

It's not in Hacker School's interest to skew their appeal toward certain groups of people for no reason.

[peterwwillis]

Personally i'm much more concerned with why "i love programming" appeals more to one gender than another, and would prefer to see the cause of the problem tackled first. Abandoning the wording removes any need to have a conversation about things like gender-leaning language in the first place, further burying the issue.

[sthatipamala]

It's a worthwhile question. The referenced study ("Unlocking the Clubhouse") explores part of the issue and is a very interesting read. Take a look!

Unfortunately, the lead time for solving the root cause is at least 1 generation. We will have to use stopgap solutions until then.

[dragonwriter]

It suggests (but certainly does not, as described, certainly establish) that the associating the term with a particular kind of affection for a vocation may be tied to gender, and therefore that suggesting that identifying with the use of that term in that relation as a qualification for a program like Hacker School may be an unintentional gender filter.

Interestingly, I'd never thought about that previously but as soon as I saw a reference to it I realized that I'd much less frequently seen women use the term in that context (with regard to vocational activities) compared to men, so, while I don't know that different word usage by gender is really the issue, I see that it certainly could be, and that it makes sense to avoid that usage in the context Hacker School was using it.

[Torgo]

I am not surprised at all a study found that less women say they "love" programming. In my career I have worked with many women, and none of them would I consider less than well-rounded as a person. But I have met many, many males who are heavily skewed toward the "hacking is life" mindset. Nevertheless, the two best programmers I have ever known are women, and they did not identify as "hackers."

Hacking is a culture, not a job description, and in my experience, singleminded dedication to programming is not an indicator of ability. So I guess the real problem with "Hacker School" is that it's a programming school not a hacker school. A hacker (programming) school could never say anything like "you don't have to love programming" because being a hacker is pretty much defined by loving it.

[hdevalence]

You don't get to define what the word "hacker" means, though.

[mantrax3]

I know women, programmers, who are in love with programming. Hell they're more in love with programming even maybe than I am. We have wonderful arguments about SOLID, and CQRS and event-sourcing and queues, and pipes, and job servers.

Loving your job isn't exclusive to men.

Anti-sexism is reaching a different type of extreme, where certainly we should be hiring women who don't love their job, just so we're not sexist?

I know where to draw the line. And I'm drawing it before that.

[steveklabnik]

Until you can demonstrate empiric data like the book can, I think I'll stick with the book, rather than an anecdote from a day-old account.

[aliakbarkhan]

What you're saying is essentially that women should be discriminated against simply because they don't use the same phrasing as you. You're arrogantly demanding that they change the way they see the world simply because you don't like it. A person who doesn't say they "love" their job can still be as dedicated and passionate about it as you are -- they just put it in different terms. If a particular group of people is more likely to use different terms, then to discriminate against their terminology is to discriminate against that group. I'm sorry you can't stand that other people don't "love" their job, but why is it any of your business? If they do the job well and are comfortable doing it, then there is no reason to discriminate against them.

[dragonwriter]

> I know women, programmers, who are in love with programming. Hell they're more in love with programming even maybe than I am.

Two things: 1) "I know people" is anecdote, it doesn't say anything about broad social trend. 2) The issue isn't whether women are as likely to share the feeling men call "love" toward programming, its whether women who have that feeling are as likely to call it "love".