

It’s Not “Too Late” for Female Hackers - kirtijthorat
https://medium.com/hackers-and-hacking/f7efb084e8a

======
11thEarlOfMar
I am particularly interested in nailing this discussion down. I have two teen
aged daughters. They attend a super-competitive public high school. Students
are actually shunned if they are not academic. The peer pressure to excel in
math and science is really surprising.

One daughter is known as 'nerd goddess' and wears that nickname as a badge of
honor. She plans on becoming an English teacher. The other is the one to beat
in her honors geometry class. She wants to study business in college.

They both participated in 'Hour of Code' last week.
[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/12/apple-...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/12/apple-microsoft-obama-urge-kids-to-spend-an-hour-coding-
this-week/)

I silently hoped that at least one of them would come home and say, 'Hey, dad,
this coding thing you've been doing your whole career is pretty cool. Let's
write an app!'

What I got was 'meh' and more 'meh'.

So am I supposed to chide them that if they don't get on the compiler they are
going to miss their chance to found a YC startup? Really?

~~~
kirtijthorat
You may want to look at the "Hackbright Academy" which runs a quarterly
engineering fellowship in San Francisco. This is a 12-week accelerated
software development program designed to help women become awesome programmers
- See more at:
[http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/](http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/)

I also recommend reading the following two sites:
[http://gracehopper.org/](http://gracehopper.org/) and
[http://www.girlswhocode.com/](http://www.girlswhocode.com/)

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
Thanks, but you may have missed my point.

They have known of my profession their whole lives. I talk to them about what
I do all the time. And they are under a great deal of peer pressure at school
to go into science the same way that I did.

Parents and friends are the most influential people for teens, yet they have
no interest. And I don't think it is proper parenting for me to push them into
something they have no interest in.

~~~
merrua
Thats fair that you do not want to push them. However if she likes english
teaching. Maybe she would be interesting in the problems of lingustics
computing or educational computing. Half the time people learn to program to
do stuff with it.

They can learn regex expressions to search through 1,000,000 lines of primary
sources for several different spellings of a word, or they can sit back and
think of a different way to teach a classroom of kids maths.

If she likes english, find out why english teachers are learning programming
(cos they are) or which area she is interested in and what tools they are
using.

------
sbt
If I ran a venture firm, I would approach founders like a scout looks for
talent for the NBA. People who start basketball in college and try for the NBA
are clearly at a disadvantage. If a scout reported this correlation to Sports
Center, it would hardly be considered controversial. Why is it that a hacker
scout somehow becomes a target of the political correctness mafia? Playing in
the NBA is hard, being a tech entrepreneur is hard. Fortunately, there are
other ways of making a living than starting the next Facebook or playing in
the NBA.

~~~
memracom
You won't find someone playing NBA basketball in their 50's. But you certainly
do find highly skilled software developers in their 50's, and much older as
well. Intellectual skills are not tied to age in the same way as physical
skills.

Yes, women who start in the field in college will be behind men who started in
grade school in some ways, but not in others. However, women will catch up by
their late 20's if they have the guts and determination to stick with it,
because most of the men will have problems with ego that cause them to either
stop learning and stick with the bit that they already know, or shift into a
showoff mode where they become all talk and no action.

I find that once people get into their 30's it is hard to tell how good they
are at software development if they are actually working at it professionally.
You need to spend a considerable time with them to be able to rank them
because for every weakness that you can detect there will also be strengths.
This is why I think that women can catch up to men even though they started a
bit late.

~~~
sbt
This is probably true for software development, but less true for
entrepreneurship. Once you pass 30, other factors start kicking in for the
latter, particularly for women.

------
kirtijthorat
Also read the article "How To Fix the Gender Gap in Technology" at:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/gender_gap_in_technology_and_silicon_valley_.html)

