Thoughts on the day...
So it would seem that there is a huge push to get girls/women/ladies/female persons into STEM and programming specifically. There are people working on "scholarships" or "free tickets to cons" and such for them as underrepresented class of persons. I am wondering the actual specific reasons? Is it because we have an actual shortage of programming persons? Or because this class of persons desires to be in programming, but is somehow being shut out? There doesn't necessarily seem to be lack for this class of persons in other STEM fields. Could it also be due to the fact that this class of persons is traditionally paid less than their boy/man/dude/male person counterpart performing the same job as an attempt to lower the cost to businesses employing such? I am curious of the pushes that are being done, because I never trust the motivation given for anything that affects so many aspects of something.
Without turning this into an essay, I want to raise a few more questions?
Does the industry gain anything in the field from diversity itself? Does a programming team benefit from having a person of a specific gender, race, religion, national origin <insert the rest of the eoe protected classes> from the fact that they are in fact a member of that class.
Should the industry and its players change itself, (customs, culture, mores, language, and so on) to allow for such integration, or would the marriage of such new culture to an existing culture naturally change it organically?
Is this done in other industries where they are made up lacking a certain class of person and strong encouragement, support etc. is made to interest, entice, or otherwise bring members of that lacking class into it?
@Absinthe There is a desire here to get more girls in to STEM what I think really works is the right role model., Sadly this is lacking in quite a few sectors. People want to be social media influencers rather than doctors or nurses, careworkers are branded low skilled, so is it any wonder. Doctors are nurses are so highly valued in the UK they are not even given full PPE during the current crisis.
Children keeping tags on the current crisis are going to pick up on all of this.
@zleap I am not asking how to further this cause. I am asking what the underlying motivation for it is?
Valued or not, we have no lack of both female and male persons going into medical and other service fields. As well, such with the engineering fields, biology, math and so on. Are there particular reasons that females have not been in the programming field in similar numbers as males, and is the push intended to benefit the females by dragging them into a field they otherwise had little interest in or is it intended to somehow benefit the field by something a person possessing different genitalia brings to the field by virtue of such?
I doubt that there is anything about a penis that helps someone write better C/C++ code.
Likewise what is the reason to "market" girls into a field such as this?
Don't get me wrong, I am not against it, per se. I am just looking for the motivation. Maybe I need to get my tinfoil hat out, but something just isn't quite lining up.
In my mind when you say, "Hey we don't have enough girls programming, we need to get some more girls programming!" It makes me ask "What is the right number of girls? What aren't/can't we do that we could if only more of our programmers were girls?" or "Might we be better off with all girls!"
Are there actual brain differences that make one gender better suited for one job or another such as solving math equations or grinding out long boring code to brute force some painful data processing problem? Should we have more boys working in daycare centers taking care of babies? Or any of the other 12 female dominated fields.
@Absinthe Some of my local schools have very few men working in them, if you couple that with any single parents who are female, you are left with very little in the way of positive role models who are in the same world as the rest of us, sure a footballer is a role model, but they live in a world very few can break into.
@zleap Men generally are not working in the lower grades. Pre- Kindergarten and Early elementary education tend to be the fields dominated by women. With breakdown of nuclear families in general we are having more matrilocal society in general. Not sure what we get from that, other than more boys raised by mostly women. Perhaps that has something to do with the increase in transgirls and other gender dismorphic issues. But that is yet a different topic. Just mentioning it will no doubt bring me some hate both from those pro as well as con.
I do understand history enough that I know how initially the toy industry made computers a 'boy' thing. But if we look historically we have some female pioneers in the computer industry. Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper are the only two names that come to mind, and I bet most people would be hard pressed to come up with them.But if you look at who they were, they were well educated mathematicians first, to whom computers were just a tool to magnify their own abilities.
Maybe the industry itself is just so diluted by young boys thinking they stepped into the big money with a tiny degree who are lacking the discipline, and regimented processes that are the actual problem. And bringing in girls at the same level may not help that. Just make it worse, by focusing on unrelated social issues.
@zleap I love her story, and the language for which she is namesake. Babbage probably gets most of the credit for whatever her actual contributions to his "difference engine" were. But again, that is still pre-computer-science. Pre-FORTRAN Pre-LISP ... pre-programmer.
@Absinthe Women in Tech Podcast http://podcast.womenintechshow.com/ Hope this helps / is of interest.
@Absinthe Ada Lovelace