
Google Invests $50M in “Made With Code” Program to Get Girls Excited About CS - mikeevans
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/22/google-invests-50-million-in-made-with-code-program-to-get-girls-excited-about-cs/
======
cowbell
Why is there such a clamor to get girls to code? I never hear anyone say "We
need more female lumberjacks|roofers|trash collectors|pilots" despite those
being male dominated professions as well.

~~~
adrianN
Similarly there is no drive to get more men into early childhood education or
nursing.

~~~
itafroma
> Similarly there is no drive to get more men into early childhood education
> or nursing.

This is an oft-repeated canard in these discussions, but it's patently and
demonstratively not true: getting men interested in nursing and ECE has been a
large focus of those fields for years. Even a quick Google search would
produce tons of information on various initiatives, studies, and scholarly
articles, but here's a small sampling:

[http://aamn.org/](http://aamn.org/)

[http://web.jhu.edu/jhnmagazine/summer2009/features/men_in_nu...](http://web.jhu.edu/jhnmagazine/summer2009/features/men_in_nursing.html)

[https://www.discovernursing.com/men-in-
nursing](https://www.discovernursing.com/men-in-nursing)

[http://folk.uio.no/olegmo/Men%20in%20Nursing/Evans%20J%20199...](http://folk.uio.no/olegmo/Men%20in%20Nursing/Evans%20J%201997.pdf)

[http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/12710806](http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/12710806)

[http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ618681](http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ618681)

[http://www.meninchildcare.co.uk/index.htm](http://www.meninchildcare.co.uk/index.htm)

[http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/61263553/male-
pre...](http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/61263553/male-preservice-
teachers-discouragement-from-teaching)

[http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1012564610349](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1012564610349)

~~~
wyager
Perhaps adrianN has this sentiment because there is never, ever, any mention
of these agencies on hacker news or other news outlets that I frequent.

These organizations may exist, but no one seems to care about them. Perhaps
adrianN really meant to ask why this was the case.

~~~
Anechoic
A google search shows a bunch of related articles in the NY Times, Boston
Globe, and CNN (for example,
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/business/increasingly-
men-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/business/increasingly-men-seek-
success-in-jobs-dominated-by-women.html?pagewanted=all)
[http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2008/11/1...](http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2008/11/18/hunt_is_on_for_more_men_to_lead_classrooms/?page=full)
[http://newsroom.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/21/duncan-black-
male-t...](http://newsroom.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/21/duncan-black-male-
teachers-needed-2/) \- this is not an exhaustive listing or an exhaustive
search).

Plenty is written about it, but it's likely that people not focused on those
subjects don't notice it.

------
tree_of_item
They actually neutered the Blockly environment here. Try _not_ following the
instructions at
[https://www.madewithcode.com/project/bracelet](https://www.madewithcode.com/project/bracelet)

You can't! It tells you to use a diameter of "18"; if you try to make it "6",
the environment will forcefully change it.

Is this even programming? You can't do anything here but click the buttons it
tells you to. Half the fun of programming is doing oddball things your
environment and its designers didn't expect. Some people call this "hacking",
but it doesn't look like Google expects girls to want to hack.

Yeah, maybe "it's just a tutorial", but since when do tutorials acutally stop
you from going off the rails and experimenting?

------
krstck
Pretty tired of hearing women who aren't programmers or in tech telling
_other_ women that they need to program.

~~~
magicalist
There are many women involved in Girls Who Code who are programmers. If you go
to the site, www.madewithcode.com, the women highlighted are engineers.

Moreover, no one here is telling anyone that they _need_ to code.

~~~
KRuchan
The public face for Girls Who Code is Reshma Saujani (law / politics
background). As krstck pointed out, the public faces here are Mindy Kaling,
Chelsea Clinton. While there are engineers involved behind the curtains in
each of these programs, I don't like the fact that the ones who stand to gain
the most (publicity, credibility, funding, access to resources and powerful
contacts) are people who don't have anything to do with tech themselves except
flying around the country giving talks about how everyone should code (Reshma
Saujani, I am looking at you). I am being bitter here, but I would hope to
live in a world where real engineers are the women in the limelight for the
kids to look up to.

~~~
magicalist
I totally agree with you that the people that kids can look up to in these
programs should actually be engineers. I think there is a danger of forgetting
the power of spokespeople and the ability for people who aren't engineers to
help lead these organizations. I agree they shouldn't be held up as role
models themselves, though, at least in this area.

Honestly, though, my experience with Girls Who Code (and why I mentioned it)
has been entirely local, where the women up front have all been engineers or
close enough. This is the first time I've actually heard of Reshma Saujani
(or, if it's not, she wasn't notable enough to stick in my memory).

------
auganov
They seem so blindly focused on that one metric of girls majoring/working in
CS. So much that they have no shame about exploiting sexist stereotypes in
their message, strategy, branding even all the way down to web design. I'd
love to improve that metric as much as anyone. But it would be so so so much
better to do it by working on the fundamentals rather than by manipulating
people into CS using the very warfare that keeps them out.

~~~
GuiA
I've seen cynical commenters on HN/proggit/etc. write that the reason why
companies like Google are so intent on getting more female programmers, and
more programmers in general, is that it'd allow for engineer wages to go down
over the next decade or two due to the basic laws of supply/demand.

Not sure I fully buy into it- but it's not a crazy argument either, especially
given the recent accusations of collusion to keep salaries low between major
tech players.

~~~
jophde
I don't see the programmer market ever getting flooded. I think it's sort of
like writing. Pretty much everyone is taught how to write but not a lot of
people can do it well let alone well enough to get paid for it.

~~~
ok_craig
Writing and programming are basically just thinking, manifested as words or
code. Most people either don't enjoy thinking, or are bad at it. I think this
has and will be true for a very long time.

~~~
vdaniuk
>Most people either don't enjoy thinking, or are bad at it.

Elaborate on the definitions and prove that with a scientific study. The
arrogance here is outrageous.

~~~
jophde
It's not arrogance. It's knowing the difference in skill it takes to work on
an app compared for to working on a platform or the difference between
cranking out stories for the Huffington Post and writing an editorial for the
New York Times. It simply takes an enormous amount of time to reach the master
level of a craft. I don't think the drive to reach that level can taught. A
person just needs to be obsessed. Most people don't like computers enough to
stare at one at least 8 hours a day for 10 years and read programming books on
the side. Likewise, most people don't want to spend all day writing. I think
the percentage of people who do will remain constant.

I see the salary of high end programmers only going up.

------
vezzy-fnord
My main problem with this has always been that it's treating the symptom,
rather than the root cause. The idea is that if you throw enough money, you
can magically cause radical paradigm shifts in how the professional interests
of the genders and sexes.

This might be so, in the short term. You'll likely have a nice boost in
numbers, which I'm sure will look really good. But you should really be
striving for long-lasting and meaningful change. You want girls to actually be
passionate about programming as a craft, and not just create more disposable
cogs who can churn out high-level instructions.

I'm sure a lot of employers would salivate at the latter prospect, but it's
not something we should be encouraging. Even the incessant use of the word
"code" and the mystical cult of personality that is being erected around this
abstract concept is cause for concern. I don't think having more women coders
is enough, we need more women hackers to get something more meaningful.

And when you start looking for that, you'll quickly find that the issue goes
deeper than something flashy campaigns and cash can just swiftly solve. It's
societal. Once you pin down the causes, you shouldn't just hurry to turn the
tides, either. You should analyze the cost and benefit of doing so.

~~~
nfoz
I expect a short-term boost in the number of girls in CS will lead to a long-
term boost. But I guess that's the sort of thing a sociologist might study?

~~~
jmromer
Perhaps. I think it'd be beneficial to have more women in CS, but there are
ways to go about effecting that kind of positive social change that also
corrupt or blunt social feedback mechanisms in such a way that vulnerable
people will be led to pursue ends which aren't in the cards for them, or which
are suboptimal for them. Effectively, such schemes transfer wealth to the
vulnerable from the even more vulnerable. That should give people pause, I
think.

------
pflanze
I wanted to compare the amount of investment with the GSoC[1] program. The
GSoC home page[2] says it supported over 7,500 students; since each
student/mentor pair(?) receives $5500, that makes about $41m, with overhead
probably about the same amount as the "Made With Code" program, although GSoC
ran 3 times longer with that amount than is planned for this new program.

Either Google thinks this topic is somewhat more important, or could benefit
more from the money, or the effort can be concentrated into fewer years, or
Google has a bit more money now than it had when it started GSoC. Or anything
else (I haven't even read what they are planning to do exactly.)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_summer_of_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_summer_of_code)
[2] [https://developers.google.com/open-
source/soc/?csw=1](https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/?csw=1)

------
crazypyro
Previous
discussion:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921360)

------
brandonmenc
My girlfriend, who is an iOS and OS X programmer, described this as "highly
offensive."

The program-some-jewelry-without-typing did not go over well with her.

------
utopkara
Disgusting title! An exhibit to why the program is needed. It is not for
getting girls excited, it is for getting idiots like the reporter (Jordan
Crook) understand that coding is not a men's thing.

------
sk2code
Instead of teaching someone to code the better approach would be to give basic
STEM education. What would a coding class do if the basics of Maths and
Science are not clear.

------
TheMagicHorsey
I don't understand the focus on making women want to code. Maybe women just
like different career choices then men. Does it really make sense to spend
$50M on marketing to convince women to code?

~~~
oh_sigh
Google seems to think so. IIRC, 20% of their software engineering staff are
women. This is probably because 20% of the software engineers in America are
women. If google could help push that number up to near parity, then they will
have hundreds of thousands of new potential applicants to help create skynet
2.0.

~~~
aianus
Not unless the class sizes get that much larger at the top schools. In reality
they'd just be displacing the weaker male students at admission time.

Edit: Downvoted for a tautology? This site is going the way of reddit.

------
throwaway0x78
This move makes me very reluctant to work at google. Would my future career be
limited, because women are favored in promotions and internal recruitment? I
mean this show what google's values are, and which methods they think are
acceptable.

It would feel much safer and future proof to work for a more meritocratic
competitor.

~~~
cgranade
"This move makes me very reluctant to work at google."

If removing barriers to getting good people interested in what you supposedly
love makes you "reluctant," I think that says far more about you than about
Google.

"Would my future career be limited, because women are favored in promotions
and internal recruitment?"

No, but you might not be as favored over women as you are now. Men in CS,
we're playing the game on easy mode
([http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-
th...](http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-
difficulty-setting-there-is/)).

~~~
throwaway0x78
Proof by analogy? Not a single piece of evidence? Really?

~~~
cgranade
No, not proof by analogy, but explanation by analogy. As Scalzi says in his
follow-up, providing proof of endemic sexism is about as necessary by now as
providing evidence that gravity exists when tripping over one's shoelaces. The
evidence by now is clear enough that to demand evidence in every discussion is
a distraction tactic, and not actually useful. Finding evidence is, because of
the sheer breadth and extent of the problem, as difficult as using your
favorite search engine to look up income stats, harassment at the workplace,
unfair hiring practices, etc., such that demanding evidence is pretty much
asking someone else to do your work for them.

(I should note that Scalzi did link to another post with more facts, over at
[http://www.jimchines.com/2012/05/facts-are-
cool/](http://www.jimchines.com/2012/05/facts-are-cool/), if you still demand
that someone else go search for things online for you.)

~~~
throwaway0x78
>[B]lack males receive [prison] sentences that are approximately 10% longer I
don't see how this is related to programming but yes it is correct. The effect
is even larger for men/women, so that men recieve much longer sentences for
the same thing than a woman would.

>The ratio of women’s and men’s median annual earnings was 77.0 This is mostly
but not fully explained by choice of career. Women in the cities of US
actually earn more than men.

I don't feel like responding to more, since they are unrelated to the topic at
hand, proving discrimination in the workplace keeping women out of
programming.

>providing proof of endemic sexism

It depends on what you define as sexism to be sure. If you define sexism as
telling a woman she looks beautiful, or showing pretty women in your
presentation, then yes of course you will find things like that.

>demand evidence in every discussion is a distraction tacti

Yeah, I guess it disctracts from reading poorly thought out analogies...

>income stats

Correlation does not prove causation.

>if you still demand that someone else go search for things online for you.

Wow are being really hostile. I have made no such demands. But if you try to
"prove" your point by doing analogies or by linking to irrelevant stats like
incarceration of black males, I will call you out.

