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The Diversity Pipeline


zelticgar

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1 hour ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

How a thread about increasing the participation of women and minorities in certain male-dominated fields ended up on a frolic and detour about chess, I can't quite figure out, but whatever.  But back to the topic at hand.  Hypothesis:  There are probably women and minorities who have native talent and develop-able skill-sets that would be useful to, and improve the performance of, companies in various historical male dominated industries, but are not entering and remaining in (just as important) these industries for social, rather than performance reasons.  Hypothesis 2:  It is in companies' best interest to devote resources to identifying and retaining that talent, because currently it is being underutilized in the economy.  Hypothesis 3:  Merely increasing the number of women/minorities at the school and entry levels (e.g., the pipeline) does not and will not by itself cultivate and retain that talent (going back to an industry I know well and that people in this thread have used as a poster child for pipeline success, law school numbers have been close to 50/50 for 15-20 years or more; unsurprisingly to me at least, there has not been a correlative improvement in the number of law firm partners (track is 8-10 years).  Hypothesis 4:  There is some data that suggest that when a critical mass of women is reached in an industry, men flee it and pay goes down.  Hypothesis 5:  As a corollary to something that Isk said above, thinking of this issue as a binary "men v. women" issue (e.g., some kind of zero sum game) leads to unhelpful discussions about native IQs and interests as a gender in particularly type of work; this is not a helpful way to approach widening a talent pool, particularly when you are lumping over 50% of the population into a single category.  DISCUSS. 

 

I was pondering the attrition issue you mentioned in Hypo 1 above. It is interesting to me that when you review the graduate numbers for CS there was a long stretch where the male/female grad ratio was closer to 70/30 (1980 to about 2003). Historically tech firms have a hard time breaking the low 20% range. I don't think it will improve much as the percent of enrolled females continues to stay flat at 18%. 

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There was an interview on npr about a guy who did a 3 month programming boot camp after stalling in his career and how it worked out for him and others (it did well, surprising to me), and one of the things he pointed out was that even in this thing designed for people in low paying or unsatisfying careers and no experience at all, it was still 90% men. 

A woman who did well was formerly a waitress with no college at all. 

I'm really struggling to understand how biology would affect that. 

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12 hours ago, Kalbear said:

There was an interview on npr about a guy who did a 3 month programming boot camp after stalling in his career and how it worked out for him and others (it did well, surprising to me), and one of the things he pointed out was that even in this thing designed for people in low paying or unsatisfying careers and no experience at all, it was still 90% men. 

A woman who did well was formerly a waitress with no college at all. 

I'm really struggling to understand how biology would affect that. 

We have a corporate program that is similar to a boot camp, 4 months tech training, 6 months practical work and then eventually a full time job offer if they perform well. The goal is to hire a diverse set of people to round out the class. We actually recruit from the the local bootcamps in the area and have found that they are a great channel for diverse talent. I suspect that the example on NPR is probably more of an exception than a rule. Most of the larger tech firms that partner with bootcamps would likely stipulate that there needs to be a diversity impact in order to work with them. 

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Another data point, this one from everyone's favorite field:

https://theconversation.com/300-000-women-are-missing-from-economics-84152

Quote

Economics is an overwhelmingly male field; and the problem is not going away. Less than a third of economics students today are women. A pervasive myth about the missing women students in economics – about 300,000 of them in the US alone by our rough count – is that the problem is their poor maths skills. You know: economics is too maths focused, and women are maths-phobic, right? That must be the problem.

Wrong.

In the US, today, the share of women graduating in mathematics and statistics is higher than in economics. It is not mathematics that’s the problem.

A more likely and more uncomfortable culprit – sexism in economics – has been called out in an audacious undergraduate dissertation written by Alice Wu of the University of California, Berkeley. She used computational linguistic methods to compare how male and female economists were described on Economics Job Market Rumors, an online forum popular with economics graduate students, especially those hoping to land their first job.

In hundreds of thousands of postings, comments related to women commonly use abusive or sexist language. We won’t repeat the actual words that Wu found to be statistically most frequently associated with female names. Words associated with men (excepting “homosexual”) were most likely neutral or positive (“adviser”, “goals” and the like). In contrast to the comments on women economists, male body parts were not deemed worthy of mention.

That is very classy of them. I'm not though! Most predicitive words for women are: hotter, hot, attractive, gorgeous, pregnant, beautiful, tits, bang, lesbian, horny. For men? Homesexual, homo, philosopher, keen, motivated, fieckers, slides, nordic, filling, textbook.

Yay, modern economics once again apparently sad insult to spreadsheets,

Quote

Results show that a Female=1 pos ton average contains 43% significantly less academic or professional terms, and 192% more terms about personal information or physical attributes. (Wu, 2017.)

(Also, nordic? What?)

 

 

More interesting, I think, is that they also take the 'Interdisiciplinary Women' approach, which HE has been arguing up thread, where women with intellectual inclinations tend to be broader in their skillset or potential skillset on average than intellectually inclined men, and so less drawn to rather dull, highly technical fields:

Quote

 

We know that women who do study economics tend to be interested in psychology and the other social sciences, while men who come to economics might have instead studied engineering or business ...

We have asked students – male and female – around the world at the start of their first class in economics to answer the question: “What issues should economics address?” The most frequently mentioned topics (as the word cloud shows) are inequality and environmental sustainability. Yet these are barely touched on in the standard economics introduction course, where practical applications are more likely to come from shopping or how many widgets a firm should produce.

We think that this approach will appeal to many students – but disproportionately women – who are not engaged by the usual EC 101 training in simple algorithmic thinking using “toy” models to solve problems that often seem trivial.

 

 

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16 hours ago, Lily Valley said:

This right here reinforces Zabz's point.  What is the reason you think that the mathematics tasks that would have been associated knit / crochet are "low bar"?  Fifth grade is when advanced students start doing matrix math.  Matrices and arrays are the foundations of all linear operators and much of computer science data manipulation. Specific to computer science would be to use the different types of stitches to define different types of variables. Crochet and knitting would be a great hands on tool for introducing a very frustrating mathematical concept.  You may not have meant it, but I see your reaction as another example of "girl stuff" being seen as less valuable.  

Because they wouldn't be performing operations on matrices, only learning the basic concept of a two-dimensional data structure.  For a 2-3 month capstone project that is setting the bar way too low.   That's a ten minute concept that needs to be followed by months of exploring operators to see why it can be so powerful and flexible.  We're already frustrated that the core math curriculum this year is arithmetic on whole numbers, decimals, fractions and negatives.  The stretch curriculum is percentages and basic probability.  In 5th grade!  Our son had mastered that core curriculum by third grade.  His first two weeks of 5th grade have been spent on recognizing decimal placement, FFS.  This is a private school full of kids of parents with advanced degrees.  

Every single year we have been frustrated by the low bar set in math, unrelated to girl or boy math.  There is an obsession with removing fear of math and the result is removing the expectations for math. 

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1 hour ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Because they wouldn't be performing operations on matrices, only learning the basic concept of a two-dimensional data structure.  For a 2-3 month capstone project that is setting the bar way too low.   That's a ten minute concept that needs to be followed by months of exploring operators to see why it can be so powerful and flexible.  We're already frustrated that the core math curriculum this year is arithmetic on whole numbers, decimals, fractions and negatives.  The stretch curriculum is percentages and basic probability.  In 5th grade!  Our son had mastered that core curriculum by third grade.  His first two weeks of 5th grade have been spent on recognizing decimal placement, FFS.  This is a private school full of kids of parents with advanced degrees.  

Every single year we have been frustrated by the low bar set in math, unrelated to girl or boy math.  There is an obsession with removing fear of math and the result is removing the expectations for math. 

IP - Have you baselined your curriculum expectations with what exists in some of the core math learning sites such as Khan Academy?  I use a couple of these sites with my kids and have found that in general, when I do topic searches the learning subjects mostly align with the grade years as designated on Khan Academy. It is not always perfectly aligned but most of the time it is close. I could imaging you would have a pretty strong argument to have the school review curriculum if you can show how off their topics are in relation to the baselines. 

I 100% agree with you about schools lowering the bar. I have not isolated to Math specifically but I find in general that the schools are teaching to the lowest common denominator and the higher achieving kids are not challenged because the focus and resources are so heavily skewed to the students on the learn disability track. Should be room for both but I find more often than not the sacrifices are made at the advanced end of the scale. 

 

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In this gendered argument about chess skills, has anyone who believes the female side of things is innately less skilled watched Queen of Katwe?  This is bio pic of a young African girl who is an international chess champion.  Not only does she have the material social obstacles of poverty and class to deal with, but the cultural ones of race and gender.

For those who believe that somehow women are biologically programmed not to be good at strategic - spatial games such as chess, how do you explain the Williams sisters?

Additionally, teaching at a world class university that has students from all over the world -- when it comes to anything basic such as math, writing, etc. -- the US educated students are way behind those from other nations.  Our educations system, what and how we teach, is less and less about learning, while focusing increasingly on privilege -- which then means that the students honestly don't think they should be required to actually do work (unlike, for instance the anxiety ridden Asian students).

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1 hour ago, zelticgar said:

IP - Have you baselined your curriculum expectations with what exists in some of the core math learning sites such as Khan Academy?  I use a couple of these sites with my kids and have found that in general, when I do topic searches the learning subjects mostly align with the grade years as designated on Khan Academy. It is not always perfectly aligned but most of the time it is close. I could imaging you would have a pretty string argument to have the school review curriculum if you can show how off their topics are in relation to the baselines. 

I 100% agree with you about schools lowering the bar. I have not isolated to Math specifically but I find in general that the schools are teaching to the lowest common denominator and the higher achieving kids are not challenged because the focus and resources are so heavily skewed to the students on the learn disability track. Should be room for both but I find more often than not the sacrifices are made at the advanced end of the scale. 

 

Good suggestion Zelt.  Ever since second grade I've been challenging the school about their curriculum that's more about kids enjoying school (and becoming SJWs) than age-appropriate cognitive challenge and knowledge.  Because of this frustration, we just decided to look at an alternative school that does its middle-school intake at 6th grade.  Our son would need to sit the ISEE test for his application.  We just downloaded the ISEE practice test at the weekend to get him familiar with it before his test date in a couple of weeks.  If he only knew the math he had learned in school, he would seriously struggle on the ISEE test.  Fortunately, we do extra math with him at home too (my wife and I are both math grads). 

If the ISEE is a broad testing standard for middle school and high school applications, then our son's current match curriculum is failing him badly.  $30k a year for kids to feel good about themselves without learning anything!!

 

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1 hour ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Because they wouldn't be performing operations on matrices, only learning the basic concept of a two-dimensional data structure.  For a 2-3 month capstone project that is setting the bar way too low.   That's a ten minute concept that needs to be followed by months of exploring operators to see why it can be so powerful and flexible.  We're already frustrated that the core math curriculum this year is arithmetic on whole numbers, decimals, fractions and negatives.  The stretch curriculum is percentages and basic probability.  In 5th grade!  Our son had mastered that core curriculum by third grade.  His first two weeks of 5th grade have been spent on recognizing decimal placement, FFS.  This is a private school full of kids of parents with advanced degrees.  

Every single year we have been frustrated by the low bar set in math, unrelated to girl or boy math.  There is an obsession with removing fear of math and the result is removing the expectations for math. 

Which could easily be done with exercises that ACCOMPANY A KNIT / CROCHET PROJECT.  Since this project didn't happen, why do you assume the instructor didn't plan for it?  I'm glad your child has advanced math skills, talk to the school about placing him in a higher grade math class if that is the case.  His ability and lack of interest in knit / crochet and using a visual and tactile aid to learn about 2 dimensional mathematics does not mean that it is not a good idea and that no child would find it worthwhile.  I do not know the details of what YOUR CHILD'S PARTICULAR INSTRUCTOR had planned, but the fact that as a scientist, educator and ladyperson it only took me 5 minutes to think of a whole age-appropriate and fun project that incorporated mathematics, computer science and (OMG-EW-GIRL-STUFF IT MUST BE SIMPLISTIC AND TOO EASY) knit and crochet tells me it might have been really cool.

Your dismissive attitude about knit /crochet (which I am guessing you have never done yourself) is ABSOLUTELY a piece of anecdotal evidence to be added to this thread's Hypothesis 1:

@Mlle. Zabzie "Hypothesis:  There are probably women and minorities who have native talent and develop-able skill-sets that would be useful to, and improve the performance of, companies in various historical male dominated industries, but are not entering and remaining in (just as important) these industries for social, rather than performance reasons."

Behold exhibit A.

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3 minutes ago, Lily Valley said:

Which could easily be done with exercises that ACCOMPANY A KNIT / CROCHET PROJECT.  Since this project didn't happen, why do you assume the instructor didn't plan for it?  I'm glad your child has advanced math skills, talk to the school about placing him in a higher grade math class if that is the case.  His ability and lack of interest in knit / crochet and using a visual and tactile aid to learn about 2 dimensional mathematics does not mean that it is not a good idea and that no child would find it worthwhile.  I do not know the details of what YOUR CHILD'S PARTICULAR INSTRUCTOR had planned, but the fact that as a scientist, educator and ladyperson it only took me 5 minutes to think of a whole age-appropriate and fun project that incorporated mathematics, computer science and (OMG-EW-GIRL-STUFF IT MUST BE SIMPLISTIC AND TOO EASY) knit and crochet tells me it might have been really cool.

Your dismissive attitude about knit /crochet (which I am guessing you have never done yourself) is ABSOLUTELY a piece of anecdotal evidence to be added to this thread's Hypothesis 1:

@Mlle. Zabzie "Hypothesis:  There are probably women and minorities who have native talent and develop-able skill-sets that would be useful to, and improve the performance of, companies in various historical male dominated industries, but are not entering and remaining in (just as important) these industries for social, rather than performance reasons."

Behold exhibit A.

My problem with the 2-3 months on this project is that most of the time spent will be on the physical action of knitting, drawing patterns, aggregating individual contributions.  In the same amount of time focused on actual math, they could achieve vastly more conceptual and cognitive progression in math. 

If they were doing a "boy" version of the same project, e.g. rendering visual designs onto discrete dot-plots with numeric color codes in two dimensional arrays, I would still be frustrated.  The only way this would be a good use of 2-3 months is if they learn to use functions to program the dot-plots, e.g. equations of lines, curves and geometric shapes, rather than just visually translating to discrete points.

It's not the gendered aspect, it's the wasted time to apply the project in a "fun" environment with only very simple mathematical grounding. 

I am a math grad and unfortunately familiar with this school's approach to learning (for example, fourth grade projects still required dioramas where 90% of the time on each project was spent manipulating cardboard and glue rather than actually learning anything) -- so I feel qualified to have an opinion. 

Something can be a bad idea independent of gender. 

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20 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

My problem with the 2-3 months on this project is that most of the time spent will be on the physical action of knitting, drawing patterns, aggregating individual contributions.  In the same amount of time focused on actual math, they could achieve vastly more conceptual and cognitive progression in math. 

If they were doing a "boy" version of the same project, e.g. rendering visual designs onto discrete dot-plots with numeric color codes in two dimensional arrays, I would still be frustrated.  The only way this would be a good use of 2-3 months is if they learn to use functions to program the dot-plots, e.g. equations of lines, curves and geometric shapes, rather than just visually translating to discrete points.

It's not the gendered aspect, it's the wasted time to apply the project in a "fun" environment with only very simple mathematical grounding. 

I am a math grad and unfortunately familiar with this school's approach to learning (for example, fourth grade projects still required dioramas where 90% of the time on each project was spent manipulating cardboard and glue rather than actually learning anything) -- so I feel qualified to have an opinion. 

Something can be a bad idea independent of gender. 

I understand that your problem is with regards to this PARTICULAR curriculum.  Do you understand why your comments might be completely infuriating due to the topic we are discussing?  Have you considered your audience?   

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42 minutes ago, Lily Valley said:

 

@Mlle. Zabzie "Hypothesis:  There are probably women and minorities who have native talent and develop-able skill-sets that would be useful to, and improve the performance of, companies in various historical male dominated industries, but are not entering and remaining in (just as important) these industries for social, rather than performance reasons."

Behold exhibit A.

Yeah - I understand why "pipeline" is important - you can't retain people you don't have.  But it's so stupidly reductive to look at graduation rates, look at retention rates and when they don't match up, simply shrug and from a comfy armchair pronounce that it must be the fault of the underepresented group in question, because mumble mumble pseudoscience, mumble mumble cave people, mumble mumble they prefer it anyhow.  

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24 minutes ago, Lew Theobald said:

Spouting nonsense is easy, especially when it is nonsense that everyone wants to believe for ideological reasons.  But refuting nonsense is hard work.

:lmao:Irony.

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Interesting discussion regarding Chess but I'd like to move this back to the general diversity pipeline challenge around STEM, CompSci in particular.

I'd like to use a real world scenario and get some opinions. We are currently in the process of recruiting our next class of interns. We receive a huge amount of applicants (in the thousands) and typically we hire 150 to 200. We have the ability to specifically target diverse candidates using a number of methods. We generally take the philosophy that we want to effect the first part of the funnel - the presentation of the resume to the hiring manager. After that point we want to take everyone through the same interview process and hire the best candidate. We would generally target submitting somewhere around 8 to 10 candidates per opening. 

Given that HR can effect the beginning of the funnel pretty significantly, what is the opinion around how to best handle that first part of the funnel? What is considered fair? Some might argue a percentage matching the current grad rates is fair (2 females,  8 males for example), others may argue that taking steps to provide a more diverse candidate pool than what exists in the enrollment rates is fair. Say for example the decision was made that we will make efforts to provide half the candidates as diverse (5 females, 5 males). Is that considered reasonable? 

I've focused on gender in my example but tweaks can be made around ethnicity as well. Interested to hear peoples thoughts? 

 

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53 minutes ago, Lew Theobald said:

If you really wanted to ensure you were not discriminating on the basis of gender, and you don't trust yourself because of all your secret, hidden, unconscious misogyny (or misandry); then you should do the following:  Take all the resumes.  Redact them so that all evidence of gender is eliminated, and give them to another qualified employee to pick out the best applicants.

 But of course, non-discrimination is not the goal.  "Diversity" is.

Herein lies the issue. If we did that, the end result would likely mirror the population that is currently in school. Society seems to think that is not the answer. 

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11 minutes ago, zelticgar said:

Herein lies the issue. If we did that, the end result would likely mirror the population that is currently in school. Society seems to think that is not the answer. 

Society or your bosses? Keep in mind that "society" voted in our current President in part as a reaction to, among other things, discriminatory attitudes such as the one in your post.

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4 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Society or your bosses? Keep in mind that "society" voted in our current President in part as a reaction to, among other things, discriminatory attitudes such as the one in your post.

sorry, I'm not sure what this means? 

 

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26 minutes ago, zelticgar said:

sorry, I'm not sure what this means?

It means that you are openly considering ways to discriminate against a subset of the population based on immutable physical characteristics such as gender and ethnicity which have nothing to do with the job in question and this subset is not happy about it.

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32 minutes ago, Lew Theobald said:

I don't know what "society" thinks.  But hiring quotas based upon race and gender are actually illegal in most contexts, violating Title VII, when interpreted under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

So what does society think?  I imagine there's a good portion of public who fully support race-based, gender-based discrimination in hiring, provided that the "right" groups benefit.  Another group opposes it in both theory and practice.  A third group opposes discrimination in theory, but but unknowingly supports it in practice, since if hiring is not "representative" they will take this as evidence that you are discriminating (even if you are not).

This places companies in a no-win situation.  If they just hire the best applicant that comes to them, the majority of the population will (in some cases) take this as evidence that they are discriminating.  They will be targeted by lawsuits.  Or, they can make a conscious effort to meet a diversity quota, which will look good in the eyes of most of the public.  Problem is, they may actually be engaged in gender-based discrimination or race-based discrimination when they do this, rejecting the dreaded white male in favor of less-qualified applicants, and making them vulnerable to lawsuit under Article VII.

How to solve this dilemma?  One possible solution is to train the hiring manager -- the guy who meets with the applicant and makes the decision -- to be totally gender blind and color blind.  No discrimination!  Just take the best applicant!  And since the (innocent) hiring manager is the one who is met by and known to the applicant, he is the employee most likely to be called as a witness in a discrimination lawsuit.

 

That about sums it up. The other challenge in the scenario I talked about - for entry level hires the concept of "best candidate" is not so clear. Almost all the applicants are of equal skill and really just need a chance to get some real world practical experience. 

I see all three points in this problem and I mostly come back to the same solution. The solution needs to come from education. Holding Corporations responsible for solving this issue is a dangerous proposition for exactly the reasons I talked about in earlier posts. There is enough demand for tech skills that you can grow the population by encouraging more people to study CS or other STEM areas. 

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Honestly I think it's just good business at the end of the day, especially when you're dealing with the public. In California, you're going to need people who speak Spanish. If you do business in San Francisco, you're going to need some folks who speak Cantonese. Etc, etc. Why not appeal to as wide a demographic as you can?

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