
Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues - nomadlogic
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-harvey-mudd-tech-women-adv-snap-story.html
======
mjfl
While they have the best intentions, these kinds of initiatives can backfire
badly. 2 years ago, I was partnered on a project with a woman who did not how
to code a single line of C++ in a senior-level computer science course.
Whenever I would arrange for us to work together in lab, she would call in
sick. This happened about 3 or 4 times. I told this to my professor, who was a
HUGE social justice guy, and after investigating our version-controlled
project he found that I had written 98% of the lines. I got an A on the
project, she got a B, so she still passed, but the whole time I'm wondering:
_is this really helping her_? Is it really going to help her in her long term
career to push her through the classes without learning anything to push a
statistic that the college can later brag about. Of the couple girls I know
who graduated in my class, one works at Google, but none of the rest of them
are working in a remotely computer science job. I think the proportion
corresponds to the ratio of girls who would naturally take computer science
(the one that works at google now and perhaps a few who just preferred other
things) vs. the people that were pushed through (the rest).

This also causes problems for the whole school as well: I learned through a
friend that a google recruiter was talking about how students from my school
often have great resumes and then fall apart during technical interview
questions. So I think it is plausible that these kinds of initiatives hurt
EVERYONE from the school in question.

This is all anecdotes, but I'm convinced this is a real problem, causing REAL
harm, all for the college to look better in social justice statistics. This is
why I'm writing about it instead of just shrugging my shoulders.

~~~
pomoma_grad
I went to Pomona College, which is next to Harvey Mudd, with cross-enrollment
and some shared CS classes.

I think the experience you are describing is not applicable here, because
Pomona and Harvey Mudd are both highly selective schools. Nobody who can't
code is graduating with a CS major. Mudd in particular is pretty hardcore.
When I worked with other students in CS classes at Mudd, I was always
impressed by their intelligence and work ethic, that goes for any gender.

My graduating class of CS majors had more women than men, and both men and
women are developers at top companies, getting PhD's from top programs, etc.

~~~
rokosbasilisk
Doesnt everybody mostly think this about their school ? No one wants to be
known for graduating from the school that pumps out frauds.

Thats why alot of companies prefers ivy leagues, mit, other top schools etc.

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noobermin
I recently talked to a friend (who, yes is female) who took a required
programming course. She is an English major, but she found python fun and
she's planning to take another course on it next year.

While everyone here is discussing SJ vs not SJ[0], I think this article is
another data point in my belief that a _liberal_ arts education, or one that
requires a number of pre-requisites across fields, is so beneficial. Being
well rounded and schools requiring general ed's across the spectrum helps
people discover interest in things they never thought they would be interested
in.

I am on my way to a Physics Ph.D., but next to my undergraduate QM courses, I
am most thankful for my undergraduate's German classes, philosophy, and a
history course about the US Presidents (this one required us to read primary
sources, letters, unedited tape transcripts, tedious for someone who had other
commitments like studying for the Physics GRE, but it was super enlightening).
At the time, I railed against general ed requirements and I considered them as
a waste of my time, but they do well to expose you to more of the world and
round you out as an educated person.

[0]"not SJ" is the only term I could come up with.

~~~
Eridrus
I'm glad this article mentions improving the compulsory classes, in my
experience the compulsory classes were the worst because people couldn't not
take them if they sucked.

I'm still bitter about the bullshit requirements my uni thrust on me. The
patronizing "we know better than you" schtick gets old real fast.

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karmicthreat
So How did they get to 55%. Are they just refusing to admit more than a
certain number of men? Or is the a more organic shift through staffing and
support changes?

~~~
lmkg
That was stated in the article: Organic shift through curriculum redesign and
change in teaching methods. Staffing probably also played a part, although
that wasn't mentioned in the article beyond Klawe.

Note that students at Harvey Mudd are not admitted to any particular major or
program, they are admitted to the college in general and don't declare a major
until Sophomore year. An increase from 10% to 55% is at least partially a
result of more female students taking interest in the subject, not a result of
admissions. Matriculation of female students to the college as a whole also
rose over the past decade, but that went from ~35% to ~50%, so it accounts for
less than half of the change in CS.

(Disclosure: Harvey Mudd alumn, class of 2008)

~~~
ng12
Can you elaborate on the change in teaching methods? I don't understand how
CS101 could be gendered in a way that Math or Physics isn't.

~~~
mkeeter
(Mudd alumni, class of 2011)

One big thing is splitting the intro CS course into different sections based
in previous experience. Folks with a ton of experience end up one section, and
those who are new to the subject in another.

The two sections cover the same material, but with different lecture styles,
and people don't end up discouraged because their labmates cruise through
exercises that they find challenging.

This isn't explicitly gendered, but pre-college exposure to CS and programming
could well be correlated with gender...

The course website is here, and shows the Gold / Black sections:
[https://www.cs.hmc.edu/twiki/bin/view/CS5](https://www.cs.hmc.edu/twiki/bin/view/CS5)

------
kartD
Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182080)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6531251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6531251)

------
BigChiefSmokem
I wouldn't want my daughter working in technology for the same reasons I
wouldn't want her to be a professional boxer or a coal miner. I'm a pretty
tough guy, I've hunted and fished out of necessity and have had to deal with
the hard consequences of a childhood lived in poverty and despair. Drug
addiction, jail, recovery, I've had my fair share of time in life's gutter.
Scumbags like Trump don't phase me, as I understand it's just on par when
dealing with the phony tough.

But with all the thick skin even I have been blown away at the ruthlessness
and lack of empathy our industry mandates in a person for them to achieve the
upper echelons, much like other male-dominated industries and endeavors.

If there are women out there ready, passionate, ambitious, and intellectually
up to the task of really ushering in the future then all the power and over
9000 blessings to them. But if they or anyone else expect me to treat them any
differently than my all-male, all-star engineering and design teams then
they'd be sadly disappointed. The truth is I'd hire a paraplegic transgender
janitor with no high school education if they were able to somehow prove to me
they could run with the all-stars or at the very least support us in our
cause. Race or gender is really never a factor for a _true_ leader looking to
build an all-star team.

My advice to my daughter, if it was true in her heart, would be never to join
them - but to instead run over them like an old greasy tank. Don't even need a
degree in Computer Science to do that.

~~~
braveo
oh horsecrap, stop with the theatrics.

You've been a drug addict who's gone to jail and had a hard time, but even
you've never seen anything as horrible as white class workers presumably
looking down on other white class workers?

Is there anyone who actually buys that?

~~~
drspacemonkey
As soon as I got to the "over 9000", I knew it was 4chan nonsense. I stopped
going to reddit to get away from that crap.

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zackmorris
Wow so many negative comments on this thread.

I hope that any stereotypically white/male whatever technology professionals
reading this remember back to the scorn and ridicule that many of us faced in
our formative years due to our interest in technology. Many women, minorities,
etc have had similar interests to yours but had few or no peers who shared
them. You may have overcome hurdles but now imagine doing it alone or worse
never knowing that it was even a possibility for you.

Programs like this are designed to make up for the numerous biases in our
culture that stand in the way of equality. I think it speaks to the fragility
of your egos that you find the idea of giving someone else an opportunity
threatening. Especially when it costs you essentially nothing to be
supportive.

I think one of the very worst sins is to rise to a position of power and use
it against others who haven't had the advantages you've enjoyed. This is one
of the thousand reasons I am deeply troubled by our near term political
futures. A feeling which is more exacerbated every day by level of vitriol
projected by people with the "I've got mine" mentality. Yes I've struggled,
but I work to make things better so that others can avoid going what I went
through. It sure beats maintaining a status quo that makes us pay our dues in
futility.

~~~
rokosbasilisk
It sure feels like you are arguing a strawman here.

From reading the comments, its seems alot of people want to help but have
legitimate, well reasoned and valid concerns.

~~~
zackmorris
You make a good point.

I guess what I'm arguing is that the forces against equality are so large that
it would take a great deal to shift things into balance in anything short of
decades. I feel that taking an opposing or even neutral stance against active
measures is a vote of support for inequality.

If anyone is going to take a stand, I would think it would be people who have
experienced being ostracized. But reading some of these comments has been an
eye opener because they use seeds of truth to support what is unavoidably a
position of ignorance.

That trend is appearing all over the media right now and it's a very dark
think IMHO.

I admit that it may be the effect of controversy generating conversation that
pushes the comments to the top but it makes me uncomfortable that even Hacker
News isn't immune to such things.

------
garysieling
For the people who are interested in this topic, Google has a training video
that talks through some interesting psychology research that ties to hiring /
performance reviews -

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjFTHTgEVU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjFTHTgEVU)

I haven't been able to locate many similar good talks, so if anyone can point
me to speakers / talks I'd appreciate it.

------
ng12
> She expected the class to be full of guys who loved video games and grew up
> obsessing over how they were made. There were plenty of those guys but, to
> her surprise, she found the class fascinating.

So many of these articles seem incredibly sexist to me -- they all boil down
to "women are too ignorant to realize that computers are fun".

~~~
virmundi
What if that's where we're at right now? Ignorance is correctible. It's not
bad if corrected (they could be part of the lucky 10,000 [1]). Perhaps woman
are under a false perspective that the material is boring. With time, and
experience, this might change.

1 - [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

~~~
ng12
Hypothetically, if you really believe the majority of women eschew computer
science out of ignorance, why do you believe we should correct it? Here's how
I think about it: if I invited a male acquaintance to go to a ballroom dancing
class and his response was "no way, dancing is for pansies" \-- should my
reaction be to try to make the lessons a more comfortable environment for him?
Absolutely not. If anyone were to avoid learning to program because they
believed the field is full of sweaty nerds frankly I'm of the opinion that
it's their loss.

~~~
virmundi
The article was a little hand-wavey on the details about comfort. But to you
hypothetical. Say that instead you tell him (assuming a straight guy), that
it's great way to meet women and, oddly enough, get exercise. That might
convince him to attend at least one. After auditing, he might like it.

The field has an old rep. Some of it's earned. It's changing now. People are
operating from old information. Correcting this information, by means of
targeting marketing, might be a good thing.

Now I do see benefit for keeping the view around if it means less workers and
therefore a higher wage for me, :).

------
RodericDay
Every diversity-related topic makes me wish that HN discussions weren't
branched/fanned out.

The problem isn't politics. The problem is that the exact same argument
replicates itself and occurs about a dozen times in different leaves, and it
becomes extremely tedious to pore through it multiple times.

Maybe branching comment forums are a good idea for certain topics, but topics
that require an in-depth back-and-forth like this one, are much better served
by a single chronological pipeline.

------
LunaSea
So you're suggesting sexism as a solution.

~~~
geofft
I suppose the argument you're making is that, if society is treating one sex
differently on the basis of sex, _ending that different treatment_ also counts
as treating them differently on the basis of sex, and leaving that different
treatment in place does not. For instance, if men can vote and women can't,
giving every woman a vote and not giving every man a second vote would be a
sexist change.

If so, yes, I am in favor of that sort of sexism.

~~~
LunaSea
No. You failed to prove that society is indeed making it more difficult for
women to join computer science education and jobs.

~~~
FT_intern
That's my main gripe. Treating people differently based on gender is simply
wrong. The default should always be to treat people the same.

If you are going to commit sexism with the purpose of "reversing the
patriarchy", you first have to prove and quantify the effects of the
"patriarchy". Only then can you justify using sexism. Otherwise, you are
committing a definite wrong, sexism, to reverse the possibility of sexism,
which is something that could possibly (but hasn't been proven) to be wrong.

I have the same viewpoint about affirmative action in general. The default,
preferred state is an absence of racial/gender based discrimiation, aka
affirmative action, unless an imbalance is properly proven. Affirmative action
is something that not only needs to be justified once but also continually and
repeatedly justified throughout time. Simply disproving arguments for
affirmative action should be enough to stop it.

~~~
geofft
But that's a losing strategy, in a game-theoretic sense, if your goal is to
end sexism/discrimination/bias.

It is fine if your goal is upholding a moral code where _you personally_
actively committing an act of discrimination is unacceptable, but even
unintentionally; you personally passively upholding discrimination is fine;
and other people actively committing discrimination and you failing to stop
them is not a thing you're super morally culpable for. That's certainly not my
moral code, and I think even among the crowds that believe in intrinsically
evil actions regardless of context (e.g., Catholic moral theology), they
wouldn't agree that passively upholding evil or failing to stop others from
doing active evil is fine (e.g., "I have greatly sinned ... in what I have
done, and in what I have failed to do"). If we're making a deontological
argument, we should nail down what we think about passive wrong or allowing a
wrong to continue, and if we're making a consequentialist argument, we're not
worried about intrinsic wrongs along the way to a right.

It's a losing strategy because everyone who actively supports sexism, racism,
and other forms of discrimination have plausible reasons why their
discrimination is justifiable. Even the white-nationalist types these days
hesitate to say that the white race is _superior_ ; they just say they want
protections for the white race in white countries (whatever those are). And
most of the discrimination in today's society doesn't come from people who are
nowhere near as overt as white nationalists. The colleges say, "Oh, we're just
trusting these test scores." The standardized test companies say, "Oh, we're
just trusting past performance at college." And if anyone had previously
introduced bias into the system, they've now successfully _laundered_ the
bias; there's a feedback system that keeps whatever biases were present when
it was created, and you can quite genuinely say, "Oh, I'm just following this
system, which on paper should be a perfectly objective system" and there's no
proof that you're actively and intentionally discriminating. But you're
upholding discrimination, all the same.

If you want to see this sort of bias-laundering in practice, my favorite
recent example is the voting laws in North Carolina that were recently struck
down by their Supreme Court:

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-n...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-
north-carolina-voter-id-law-20160902-story.html)

Every restriction, on the face of it, was defensible. Voter ID in the abstract
is a good idea. Eliminating certain parts of early voting seems fine. But the
courts looked at the emails behind this law, where legislators asked which
particular voting mechanisms were used by specific demographic groups, and
eliminated those mechanisms "with almost surgical precision". You couldn't
prove from the text of the law that there was any intention at bias, which was
the entire point; it wasn't supposed to look like a discriminatory law.

We don't have the benefit of seeing those discussions most of the time. So
waiting until we have a proof of a wrong to fix that wrong is a losing
strategy, one that is easily exploited by people who want to discriminate, and
one that people who want to discriminate have _demonstrated_ their willingness
to exploit.

------
dominotw
We already have a very accurate system of privilege in 'parental wealth'. It
has always puzzled me why people refuse to use this instead of relying of
race/sex ect .

wtf. why is this downvoted?

~~~
FT_intern
My theory is that affirmative action gives colleges an excuse to bump up rich,
"underprivileged" minorities over poor, "privileged" races so they don't have
to give as much financial aid

~~~
Apocryphon
That's certainly a valid suspicion, given the mercenary nature of university
management these days, but is it actually borne by facts?

~~~
existencebox
This question nerd sniped me quite hard, and I'm unfortunately having trouble
answering it. I figured a first step would be to look at aid as a portion of
cost of attendance over time, tracked against affirmative action endeavors.
The problem I'm having is finding consistent measures of both aid and COA, let
alone over time. If anyone knows a data source that proffers this I'd be quite
curious.

