
Stop telling women they just need to know how to code - quant
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2014/01/03/stop-telling-women-code/
======
yummyfajitas
The collectivist/individualist conflict in this article is odd. On the one
hand, she seems to be opposed to collective responsibility:

 _Men supporting the notion that their female significant other can contribute
as an equal partner financially or be the bread-winner of the
household....leaving the choice of taking care of elderly parents up to
women._

Ok, sounds good. No one owes anyone anything, you can do as you like with your
life. No social obligations.

 _Having supportive social and economic practices for those who do chose to
have children and take care of aging family members, which will need to be
reinforced by some body such as companies or governments._

Wait what? So non-mothers owe mothers "support", socially and economically?

I'd love to know the philosophical underpinnings of this odd combination of
individualism and collectivism. I do hope it's something more interesting than
simply "the universe should make my chosen lifestyle easier!"

(Incidentally, it's incoherent articles like this one which have convinced me
that more people should learn philosophy. I describe it as incoherent simply
because it has a gaping philosophical hole, and no attempt whatsoever is made
to explain it.)

~~~
pessimizer
As we are usually all children, workers, and aging family members at some
point, but the responsibility of childbirth, child-rearing, and elder care
are, due to biology and historical discrimination, largely and/or completely
borne by a subset of half of the population, the justification seems pretty
obvious on its face.

Just because it includes collective reasoning and is not libertarian doesn't
make it self-contradicting.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
Subsidies to mothers are _already_ massive.

For example: Free k-12 school. That's a $3-10k/year subsidy right there
(taxpayers spend $11,073 on this $3k-$10k subsidy - what a deal!).

Another example: Many states require paid maternity leave (is this Federal
now?). That's a pretty massive subsidy!

Another example: We do have super high rates of child support in the
Anglosphere, you know. Look to France & others for more sane approaches to
this subject and more sane rates. (France & sane? I'm serious!).

Where does this all end? What level of subsidization is sufficient?

I bet someone even responds to me with a 'for the children' comment. You
watch.

~~~
rayiner
This is one of the most absurd comments I've ever read.

How is free K-12 a subsidy to _mothers_? If anything, public education is a
huge subsidy to _employers_.

Also, child support mandates in the U.S. are not high and in many cases don't
come close to covering half the costs of child rearing.

Say the father makes $45,000/year (far above the national median individual
income). His net income is Illinois is around $2,700 per month. His child
support obligation is $540/month. That's $6,500 per year, or about half the
annual average cost of raising a child in the urban midwest according to this
calculator: [http://money.cnn.com/interactive/pf/cost-of-
children/?iid=EL](http://money.cnn.com/interactive/pf/cost-of-
children/?iid=EL).

That level is already a huge subsidy from the mother to the father. The mother
and father pay half the expenses of raising the child, but on top of that the
mother takes on all of the domestic work necessary to raise the kid, and also
shoulders the full career hit that comes from having childcare
responsibilities. As someone who has tried to outsource a lot of domestic
childcare duties, let me say that the market value of the domestic labor
provided solely by the mother in this example far outweighs the _total income_
of the median male.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
Reality check: Outside of the Anglosphere, child support often tops out around
a few hundred dollars/month. The _average_ support level in France is
~$160/mo.

How do those poor French mothers survive?

>If anything, public education is a huge subsidy to employers.

If left to their own devices, I doubt employers would choose to spend
$11k/yr/pupil on fingerpainting and remedial math.

~~~
rayiner
Nobody has ever given a shit about what the French think. A child is the
product of a father and a mother. When parents don't stay together, the only
logical way to divide the burden of raising a child is to allocate 50% of the
monetary expenses and 50% of the labor to each parent. Anything that allocates
less than this to fathers is a huge subsidy from women to men.

As for employers, finger-painting is pre-K, which isn't universally free in
the states. Starting in Kindergarten, education starts with basic literacy.
The production of a literate and numerate workforce is a huge subsidy to
employers. The crack about remedial math actually undermines your position:
its remedial math that creates the huge population of people who have enough
basic numeracy to operate a cash register, thus driving the cost of cashiers
down to almost nothing. Also, the high supply of literate and numerate labor
drives down the wages of each marginal employee, allowing employers to capture
a higher percentage of the value generated by the employee. If an employer
makes $25 per hour off of someone he pays $10, and public education makes that
person employable, then right there the employer benefits mord from education
than the employee. Finally, remember that in the states education is funded by
property taxes, which are largely paid for by families and not businesses. So
families pay most of that $11k per year, not businesses.

And leaving aside the benefit to employers, why do you call K12 a subsidy to
mothers, rather than both fathers and mothers equally?

~~~
alexeisadeski3
The crack was about it costing $11k/yr, not that remedial math is bad.

------
gavanwoolery
My mom became a doctor in the late 60s, when there was still a good deal of
real sexism towards women (she was the only woman doctor at the college) - she
had her lab work sabotaged among other things. (Before becoming a doctor, she
started majoring in computer science, of all things.)

So why did women start becoming doctors? Is it because we went out of our way
to create special programs, incentives, interest, and reverse discrimination
for them?

No.

Women became doctors because they wanted to, and now sexism is at a point
where it is kind of pathetic to not become a doctor because you are afraid of
any sexist reactions you might encounter. I'd say the same applies for
computer science. Women will come into the discipline over time (especially
since now there are more software engineers than there are farmers in the US),
no need artificially manipulate the evolution of the job market.

~~~
rayiner
That's actually not true. The medical profession went to great lengths to
create special programs for women. Medical schools went to great lengths to
equalize the number of men and women in their incoming classes. Medical
schools were in fact some of the pioneers in affirmative action (the seminal
Supreme Court Decision Regents of University of California v. Bakke involved a
medical school).

~~~
gavanwoolery
True, but you'd have to personally interview each women to determine their
motivations for entering medicine (causation can be attributed to many things,
including the general decline of sexism). Personally, my mom, even though she
had a somewhat tough time, is very anti-reverse discrimination (which probably
rubbed off on me). She views reverse discrimination as treating women like
they are too weak to succeed on their own. Equality is treating people as
equals.

~~~
harryh
So basically rayiner pointed out that you had a fairly huge factual
misunderstanding of the world. You're going to acknowledge that mistake but
continue to cling to your viewpoint about the value of affirmative action
anyways based solely on the feelings of your mother?

That's interesting.

~~~
gavanwoolery
To clarify, I am saying "true" to the fact that colleges have plenty of
reverse discrimination programs. I stand by my statement that these programs
were not necessarily responsible for getting women into medicine. In fact, I'm
pretty sure you can go ask any women why she got into medicine, and her
response probably won't be "well, the colleges were giving awesome
scholarships to women at the time." It will more likely be "I wanted to get
into a field where I could help people" or some such thing. In fact, you will
rarely find people who chose their profession based on how much sexism was
present. Rather (odd as it is!) people tend to choose the profession they are
interested in pursuing, or one that has a good salary.

------
LanceH
Reaching out and providing scholarships and generally giving a leg up is not
how this gap will be closed.

It has never been about teaching women to code, except at the bare minimum "I
can get a job at a giant company where I'll write 2000 lines of code in a
year."

It's about right clicking with your mouse to see if there are any other
options available. Googling for your answer before you ask someone else.
Asking questions on stackoverflow. Hacking and reading at night to figure out
something that may or may not be for work. Recompiling the source code to make
it bend to your will.

There is a price to be paid, and it doesn't have to do with money. As was said
thousands of years ago, "There is no royal road to Geometry." It is the same
today. All these solutions that don't involve paying that price are destined
to fail. College age is too late. Middle school may be the last opportunity
for any real percentage of women to be affected. It's not about completing
classes.

~~~
erichocean
_I can get a job at a giant company where I 'll write 2000 lines of code in a
year._

Wait, what? 2000 lines of code _per year_? Having never worked in a "giant"
company, is that typical? I do that in about 10 days at a normal pace, and can
do it in five if I'm really pushing it to meet a deadline or whatever.

Anyway, I thought 4K LOC/month was pretty standard for programmers of all
stripes, or ~50K LOC/year. Is it really just 2K?

/shocked

~~~
ceejayoz
Some of the best coders I've seen probably have negative LOC/month counts.

~~~
ubernostrum
I am a huge fan of deleting code. And I've landed commits that killed
thousands of lines in one go, so I'm pretty sure I'm in the negative.

------
einhverfr
There are a lot of other things too. We live in what I call the "economic
order of fake-gender-neutrality" where women get ahead by foregoing having
families. This means that a certain kind of woman is going to be interested in
taking high-risk long-hours work like being a tech founder. Not someone like
my grandmother who was a tenured astrophysicist while raising four children.

I know this is probably not going to go over well on HN given the connections
to VC's but a major part of the problem is that "tech founders" means
businesses caught in the VC exit strategy. But I think a lot of the really
disruptive businesses of tomorrow are going to be lifestyle businesses, and if
you want to attract women to coding, I think that lifestyle businesses are a
better deal for most people. The potential payoffs are lower, it is true, but
the freedom is higher, and the security is better in many cases. And with a
lifestyle business, the freedom to have a family, and to integrate family and
work time, makes the challenges that face child-rearing men and women (but
they affect women at a younger age) easier to handle.

I think that as one starts to show that these lifestyle businesses are really
viable in technology, that we will see women come (and truth be told, probably
become the majority of coders in open source software).

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_We live in what I call the "economic order of fake-gender-neutrality" where
women get ahead by foregoing having families._

I wouldn't really call this a women's issue, so much as a universal issue for
people of all backgrounds.

Having a family simply requires a drastic lifestyle shift no matter what
(well, if you intend on being a decent spouse and/or parent, at least), as
well as certain sacrifices to one's career.

I like the proposal of lifestyle technology businesses, though I'm not
entirely sure how they would work. Unless you're self-sufficient, in which
case it's never been a problem.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
We run something which could be considered a lifestyle tech business. Several
of our staff, including women, have had kids and come back to work with us.
One of our developers is in fact coming back from 6 months paternity leave
this month.

~~~
einhverfr
BTW, I am referring to lifestyle business specifically as one _not_ tied to
the VC exit strategy. I.e. a business is a lifestyle business as long as you
are neither trying to be an acquisition target nor trying to build up to go
public.

The point is that you don't have the same kinds of relentless pressure in that
environment that you do in a vc-backed start-up. Those are different
environments. If you are running one, great. I wish you the best of luck.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
Thanks and yes. We have no exit strategy nor would we be able to go public, as
we are non-profit foundation. Fast growing and doing good in the world is a
good place to be.

------
rokhayakebe
Pando just published an article on a super-model who also writes and releases
her own iPhone apps, codes also in python. I guess you could also say she is a
software engineer who dabbles in modeling.

[http://pando.com/2014/01/02/from-coding-to-the-catwalk-
this-...](http://pando.com/2014/01/02/from-coding-to-the-catwalk-this-high-
fashion-model-has-a-secret-double-life/)

------
smtddr
I just want to point out that this story has been shot down off the front
page, and 2nd page, in less than 20 minutes. HN really can't handle having the
spotlight revealing its thoughts on gender & race. My browser history was the
only reason I could even find this link again.

You know what someone should make in 2014? A website scrapes/mirrors HN, but
only the topics about gender and race that get "disappeared"(made
undiscoverable) from HN in under 20mins.

~~~
crazygringo
I'm glad I'm not the only one that notices -- this is the second time I've
seen this happen, on a gender/race thread. The previous one was related to
blackgirlscode.com.

I don't know if there's a certain group of people flagging these types of
articles for whatever reason, or if pg/admins actively want to avoid this kind
of social discussion (maybe it's too 'controversial' or tends to degenerate
too easily?) or something else.

But you're exactly right -- a gender/race article suddenly jumps from the #10
spot, to third-page, effectively completely killing discussion. It does feel
an awful lot like censorship, and it seems unfortunate.

And because of it, pretty much nobody except you will probably ever see this
comment. Oh well.

~~~
smtddr
I already collect links on race, I might start collecting the gender-related
stories as well.

    
    
      1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6885123 - Homeless coder starts app
      2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6365495 - Africans genetically more corrupt?
      3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6448409 - Rick Ross's history
      4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6857739 - Nelson Mandela dies
      5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6035263 - (Most obvious)Resume with black vs white name
      6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6902563 - racist+sexist mindset in Harvard
      7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6907915 - Homeless coder finishes app
      8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6975732 - BlackGirlsCode event
    

Maybe I'll be the one to start a site that publishes these links and caches
the comments(because I suspect HN will start making the links 404).

------
jeswin
The author mentions child care, shared responsibility, financial support,
parents etc. But all these things matter after it might already be too late to
get into coding. The fundamental issue that needs to be addressed is the one
PG made last week: "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls
interested in computers."*

Instead of having a discussion on what is probably the single most important
factor affecting gender inequality in tech, PG was forced to defend. For these
reasons, gender discussions have become somewhat pointless. There is no place
for candidness. Everyone is trying to be politically correct and to say things
that people want to hear.

*Most of the arguments against this seemed to rely on exceptions, random examples and personal experience, and not on stats.

------
kordless
> will produce a Mark Zuckerberg, who will go on to build a billion-dollar
> company in roughly seven years

The entire premise to this article is based on a misled expectation. The
expectation is that there _should_ be a billion dollar startup founded by a
woman. Who set that expectation and why is it reasonable?

I'm a man, and I don't aspire to build a billion dollar company. I aspire to
be insanely happy, and love what I do for a living. And travel a bit. Given
we're entering a new age of humanity, shouldn't we be spending clock cycles on
figuring out how to be happier, instead of just wanting more stuff?

BTW, 'more stuff' is not inclusive of 'fair and equal treatment'. We all
deserve to be treated equally.

------
gmjoe
> Meanwhile, it is still socially acceptable for men to focus wholeheartedly
> on their career.

Right, but so maybe the goal _shouldn 't_ be that women should be able to do
the same... what if it could instead _stop_ being socially acceptable for men
to focus wholeheartedly on their career?

Think of all the men who wish they'd spent more time with their kinds, instead
of at the office. More time with their wives. Think of all the divorces caused
by the long hours and stress of management and C-suite jobs. Even if men
_want_ to spend more time with their families, it's often just not socially
acceptable, within the culture of their company/industry. Men who take full
advantage of "maternity" leave aren't exactly looked at as promotion material,
all too often. And think of how much of life they miss out on.

We hold up Steve Jobs as a model of shining corporate success. But it's become
public knowledge that he wasn't exactly so shining when it came to being a
good dad.

Maybe it's not just necessarily the mindset around women that needs to change
-- maybe it's the mindset around men.

------
Ryoku
I was waiting to find an article clearly speaking about this; which I think is
the elephant in the room when it comes to female tech founders. The issue, as
it points out, is not being able to hack; or being able to learn, etc. Society
has been proven over and over that females can do just as good as males. The
issue, I think, is purely social. Most people still see women with through a
veil of prejudices, and this will only change with time as more women venture
into that part of the industry.

Founding is barely about learning how to code. It's more about human
relationships and networking. And as long as the image of a female
entrepreneur keeps been looked down at, this problem will keep rising. May be
it's not as easy to see in USA but I've seen it clearly in my country (Mexico)
in small-medium businesses conventions and with clients.

------
NAFV_P
_We can encourage women to participate and welcome them with open arms, but
that won 't undo the thousands of years of ongoing cross-cultural practices
that reinforce a woman's primary role as a nurturer (and I am not just talking
about nurturing children)._

The bit in brackets is referring to compiler bootstrapping.

------
cheshire137
> you cannot just cram more transistors onto a chip in order to double it is
> speed

------
Dewie
> Please bear with me as I draw an analogy using history. In 1865 the U.S.
> government abolished slavery. [...], and it wasn't until 2008 that we
> elected our first African American president. Doing the math it took 143
> years before African American were supposedly on equal political footing!

By this logic, I guess white women are (politically) disadvantaged compared to
black (men) today?

~~~
frenchy
Would you challenge that? I'm a bit out of my league here, but it seems like
there are proportionally more black men in politics than white women.
("Disadvantaged" is a poor word for these stats; however, because it implies
that white women are interested in being in politics, but these stats don't
confirm/deny that.)

~~~
Dewie
> Would you challenge that?

It was a question.

