Well... if you're getting a grant to help group X (which is in need), and you're not helping group Y (that is also in need), that should be all right (one organization probably can't do everything). But there maybe ought to be someone else getting a grant to help group Y.
There's no St. Jude's Non-Cancer Cancer Research because that would be fucking stupid. Similarly, there is no "coding for white guys". Well, there is, we just call that the entire industry.
I don't want "coding for white guys", if I could decide, I'd want for example "coding for people who work manual labor jobs living in rural America" (I live in Poland so it's not directly about me).
It seems you're also making a false assumption that since "white guys" make the majority of the industry that means all kinds of "white guys" are properly represented there.
But I don't see colors or genders like that.
Is this one of those “what about white guys?” complaints, or am I misreading? Because the implied qualification for “subset of people” is “underrepresented”. Any political/cultural undertones are on you.
> In the US, this also applies to Republican voters. What about them?
Nobody cares about them. If you want to make a "coding for republicans", then go for it. Nobody is stopping you. You can't pretend people are stopping you so then you can turn around and act like a victim. That's not normal person behavior.
> conservative views? They're also pretty underrepresented in the tech industry
First off, not they're not. Second off - nobody is censoring conservative views.
They ARE censoring obvious racism, sometimes pedophilia, sometimes misogyny. Because those all suck. And when that happens, some conservatives cry. Which doesn't say what you think it says. That does not reflect well on you or the broader ideology.
At the end of the day, if I speak like Hilary Clinton at work, it's perfectly normal. If I speak like Trump and talk about "human garbage" and various brown people eating cats and dogs, I'm probably getting fired and potentially a referral to a psychiatrist.
That's the difference. Not the ideology, the words.
What is your evidence for this: "... because of structural problems that push them out, be that systemic misogyny in our educational systems ..." , "the toxicity present in the industry that pushes them out ... "?
They presumably didn’t write an entire literature survey in an HN comment because the CS pipeline problem has been written about so much in the past that it’s reasonable to assume basic familiarity:
I mean there's reams of women in tech or academia who talk about this shit. "I left my PhD program because I was constantly belittled and harassed by my advisor and labmates" "I left my position for a different company because I kept getting passed over for promotion after I had kids" "I switched majors from CS in college because most of my classmates were men who made me uncomfortable" "I was bullied in high school by boys because they thought I didn't get accepted into school based on merit". These are all stories I've heard and there are many of them. Go ask some women in your workplace and I'd bet money they've heard stories like this from other women they know or have experienced it themselves. I'm a man and I'm tired of hearing the contrarian denials regarding these problems from my peers in the industry. Maybe every woman I know in the industry experiencing sexism at some point in their education or career is too anecdotal for you I guess.
I'm sure there's studies in labor and education stats to show some quantitative evidence of this stuff but I'm not going to waste my time proving the obvious to you.
I don't think it's our responsibility to educate you about a phenomenon that has been discussed, analyzed, and written about extensively over the past couple decades. If you haven't seen evidence of this, then you've been living under a rock.
Outreach programs like “girls who code” and encouraging underrepresented groups to get involved are absolutely not against the law. Explicit discriminatory practices in hiring practices would be.
Yes, they are literally against the law, your knowledge of the law is probably a few years out of date, and I think you should spend more time reading the statutes themselves, this has already been litigated up to the supreme court.
> Nothing contained in this subchapter shall be interpreted to require any employer, employment agency, labor organization, or joint labor-management committee subject to this subchapter to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex, or national origin employed by any employer, referred or classified for employment by any employment agency or labor organization, admitted to membership or classified by any labor organization, or admitted to, or employed in, any apprenticeship or other training program, in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of such race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in any community, State, section, or other area, or in the available work force in any community, State, section, or other area.
Which is to say, affirmative action or diversity programs.
29 C.F.R. § 1608.1–1608.1(c) says:
> Voluntary affirmative action to improve opportunities for minorities and women must be encouraged and protected in order to carry out the Congressional intent embodied in title VII.[4] Affirmative action under these principles means those actions appropriate to overcome the effects of past or present practices, policies, or other barriers to equal employment opportunity. Such voluntary affirmative action cannot be measured by the standard of whether it would have been required had there been litigation, for this standard would undermine the legislative purpose of first encouraging voluntary action without litigation.
34 C.F.R. § 106.3(b) says:
> a recipient may take affirmative action to overcome the effects of conditions which resulted in limited participation therein by persons of a particular sex.
The decision in United Steelworkers v. Weber states:
> Title VII's prohibition in §§ 703(a) and (d) against racial discrimination does not condemn all private, voluntary, race-conscious affirmative action plans. ... Albemarle Paper Co. v. Moody, 422 U. S. 405, 422 U. S. 418, cannot be interpreted as an absolute prohibition against all private, voluntary, race-conscious affirmative action efforts to hasten the elimination of such vestiges.
The decision in Johnson v. Transportation Agency similarly states that Santa Clara County Transportation Agency did not violate Title VII by promoting a less-qualified woman.
The decision in Cohen v. Brown University upheld the use of affirmative action to equalize opportunity.
The law _literally_ contemplates this. As you said, "you need to literally look it up sometime."
STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 2023
Held: Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pp. 6–40.
"(b) Proposed by Congress and ratified by the States in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no State shall “deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” Proponents of the Equal Protection Clause described its “foundation[al] principle” as “not permit[ing] any distinctions of law based on race or color.” Any “law which operates upon one man,” they maintained, should “operate equally upon all.” Accordingly, as this Court’s early decisions interpreting the Equal Protection Clause explained, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed “that the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States.”
...
"Respondents suggest that the end of race-based admissions programs will occur once meaningful representation and diversity are achieved on college campuses. Such measures of success amount to little more than comparing the racial breakdown of the incoming class and comparing it to some other metric, such as the racial makeup of the previous incoming class or the population in general, to see whether some proportional goal has been reached. The problem with this approach is well established: “[O]utright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.”
AMERICAN ALLIANCE FOR EQUAL RIGHTS, versus FEARLESS FUND MANAGEMENT, LLC, 2023
To be sure, the line between “pure speech” that arguably entails discriminatory sentiments, see 303 Creative, 600 U.S. at 587, and the very act of discrimination itself may at times be hard to draw. And to be sure, Fearless characterizes its contest as reflecting its “commitment” to the “[b]lack women-owned” business community. The fact remains, though, that Fearless simply—and flatly— refuses to entertain applications from business owners who aren’t “black females.” Official Rules at 3. If that refusal were deemed sufficiently “expressive” to warrant protection under the Free Speech Clause, then so would be every act of race discrimination,
...
"Moreover, and more specifically, each lost opportunity to enter Fearless’s contest works an irreparable injury because it prevents the Alliance’s members from competing at all—not just for the $20,000 cash prize but also for Fearless’s ongoing mentorship and the ensuing business opportunities that a contest victory might provide. "
The organization refused applications from anyone who wasn’t a black female, again different then an outreach group. I am sure if a male applied to “Girls who code” was denied and was able to establish this did harm to him he could have a case. As far as I know that has not happened so the group and others like it are perfectly legal.
Which law are you referring to? If you are referring to Presidential statements, they have to be followed by an actual regulation or else they are just a press release.
The ask for the former is to have competitive spaces that are designated specifically for female athletes. This of course implies that all male athletes must be excluded, regardless of their identity claims.
The rationale is the same for both: to provide opportunities for women and girls in an otherwise male-dominated space. Neither should be controversial.
You slipped in "based on sex" for an intentional reason that I'd like you to share with the class. Say, is your opinion of the "sex is an immutable characteristic and fixed at birth and therefore trans people are invalid and should..."? Or maybe I'm just reading into your wording a little too much.
You're talking to a trans woman by the way. Just thought I should throw that out there just in case you want to hurl some insults at me while you're at it too :)
In humans and other mammals the immutability of sex is a fact, not an opinion. We are not a species of sequential hermaphrodites.
The cultural artefact of people identifying themselvee as the opposite gender is a different type of concept to this. It's more of a sociological or psychological phenomenon.
