Kenyan girls who code: Mentors spur African tech innovations | Hacker News Reader

Kenyan girls who code: Mentors spur African tech innovations

bbc.com

73 pointskafkaesq19 comments

I want to remind everyone of the article we had some time ago about men failing out of society in the west because they are too lazy and play video games all they. Then predictable we get another article and then another about changing society to better fit women.

The outcome for men is determined by their choices (= they are subjects, actors). The outcome for women is determined by how society acts towards them (=they are passive objects). That dualism is objectifying of women.

the women in this article we are commenting on (both the mentors and the students) have agency, and this is clearly conveyed by the article.

in many societies - traditional and modern - we observe structural discrimination against women. so "outcomes" for women are more heavily constrained by society than "outcomes" for men. if i look up the definition of "objectification" i find one aspect of it as "denial of autonomy – treating the person as lacking in autonomy or self-determination". so it might be a stretch to say that society objectifies women according to this definition, but i'd certainly agree that society tends to restrict/limit the autonomy / self-determination of women more than it does men.

under that interpretation i roughly agree with your statement of "that dualism is objectifying of women", in the sense of that being a crudely accurate description of the reality of what society does, and i'd go further and claim that is not acceptable, and something we should endeavour to change, by changing society: "affirmative action", "positive discrimination", etc.

was this the point you were trying to make, or were you trying to argue the opposite conclusion?

edit: would it make any difference if it were women who were driving the changes to society that would benefit them and other women? would that be acceptable or would that be a case of women objectifying themselves and denying their own agency by taking action?

It would be interesting, and great, if in this culture women did the math. Women used to have the role of doing calculations in the U.S. (and elsewhere in the West), back in the 30s and 40s before computers.

As an example of how gender roles can vary, I was in the Himalayas and in the local culture, the women did the physical labor. They carried our (heavy) bags where we stayed, and I regularly saw them carrying massive loads of firewood, on their backs, bent double, up and down mountain trails. I'm not sure what the men did; I only saw them playing cards and drinking (tea?).

Are there similar programs for engineering? I'd imagine many of the challenges in the developing world require technological innovations that involve engineering challenges, not just mobile apps.

There's this http://imgur.com/a/livAB . They go around schools and get kids to work on simple electronics projects. Just started and only concentrating on primary schools, but I think they plan to expand to high schools(and thus engineering & programming) if they get funding.

Often a talk about better startups coming from a genuine need that started with someone's aggravation about an unnecessary problem. I think people getting robbed during unnecessary queues is an unusual and great example. From a security background, I'm not sure that this would eliminate the problem as crooks might adapt or focus more. It was a really, good attempt. I could see it taking off just from increased convenience and reduced risk of opportunistic robberies. Too bad that team didn't win.

One of the big selling points for mpesa - the mobile money service in Kenya - is that it allows transferring money made in the city back to family in the countryside without risking robbery on the travel home. (And makes the transfer much faster, too.) Reducing queues to prevent robbery is a great motivation for building and using the app.

This is excellent.. with more people here (Kenya) getting internet at home due to falling prices and affordable wifi hotspots cropping up in various locations, I'm sure the next few years are going to be very interesting for tech in Kenya.

We have spent years trying to get gender equality in the West and now as colonials we expect it just to happen in country X.

How about we start by getting a ecosystem of coders first as 'we' did then specialise on working on gender and other equalities.

I know it doesn't make people feel good but it worked for us.

While we're at it, we should introduce some diversity to Kenya, black people are overrepresented there at almost all jobs.

Getting gender parity in programming happened before a large programming ecosystem was established; more money and structure in the CS education system led to inequality.

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