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Comment by eveningcoffee | Hacker News Reader

When I first saw a first computer I knew that I want to know more about these mysterious machines. I still remember the joy and happiness on a day of the first snow when I realized what the double for cycle does. I think I was 13 then. I also remember the passion in reading the only accessible book about object oriented programming in C++.

My passion became my profession and therefore it is hard for me to relate with this dance around the diversity.

People should do what they feel passionate about regardless of their gender (or skin color or other nonsense there is possible to come up with). Everything else is a moot point.

It still does not follow that we should not make something more accessible for anyone, or that we should tolerate a discrimination. But if people do not share the passion then for me it does not matter what special body parts they have or have not, there is no place in my heart for them.

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People will tell you that believing that it's possible that interest in tech is correlated with gender. However I would point out "Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers"[0] which gives evidence that a different field (law) is a meritocracy and women's relatively poor outcomes in terms of promotion, are caused by their relatively lower focus on their careers.

[0] www.econ.upf.edu/~rferrer/files/PAPER.pdf

The question is, is this lower focus caused by their natural disabilities compared to the men.

If yes, then as society we may consider to compensate for this by some measure such that they could be able to focus.

For example make can take up more responsibilities for the child care or we can arrange this more collectively if this is found to be the cause.

> It still does not follow that we should not make something more accessible for anyone, or that we should tolerate a discrimination.

To me, not making the effort to make this industry more accessible for those who are underrepresented is itself discrimination, even if a mild, unconscious form. Your story of passion naturally leading to a fulfilling career is wonderful, and I want that for anyone. I don't think the onus of fostering passion is only on the family, but it comes in large part from societies expectations of gender roles. That is why I believe we can't have enough efforts to make tech more accessible, even if those efforts seem contrived.

Well, there are plenty of jobs that mostly men are wanting to do and jobs that mostly women are wanting to do.

In some cases raising the pay would do the trick, in other cases improving the work conditions would do the trick. Neither of these does not seem to be applicable here.

I do not think that we should make something more accessible (at the expense of the other) for someone just because of some reason they are just under presented at the moment. CS industry should be accessible for everyone.

For two above solutions everyone would win potentially. What would be the solution for the CS industry with the similar outcome?

> People should do what they feel passionate about regardless of their gender (or skin color or other nonsense there is possible to come up with). Everything else is a moot point.

Yes. This is why I believe children should be raised in a gender-neutral way. It helps in steering clear of premature expectations.

And I am afraid that it is quite hard to do alone within a single family if for example some of opinions are programmed in the school.

Setting premature expectations seems orthogonal to me than gender neutrality. As in, it can be as well a product of being in a successful lawyer/engineer/politicians family than gender by itself and generally more a result of parent projections than gender determinism.

edit: see also this comment about Ada parents https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12683739

What are you referring to when you say "double for cycle?"

for i=1,10 do for j=1,10 do print(i,j) end end

but in BASIC at that time.

Thank you. That is what I thought you were referring to but I hadn't heard it referred to in that way, so I thought it might be some wonderful thing I hadn't even heard of ;)

I'm confused... do you think that people of different genders and skin colors are less likely to share your passion? If not, then what's the point of this post?

The point was that if there isn't any yellow transgender Martian wanting to work in Microsoft then ratio of them working in Microsoft is nonsensible.

But if they exists and are not working in Microsoft then they must exists somewhere else in large numbers. This also does not appear to be the case.

So perhaps it would be then smarter to move closer to the source and hope that this would help somehow.

I know that Musk is working hard on this, so perhaps the others could meantime figure out how to make more children passionate about CS and tech sector in general (that is regardless of their gender)?

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