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General Motors has announced a new partnership with education nonprofit Girls Who Code that's intended to encourage more young women to pursue STEM subjects. The auto manufacturer will offer up a $250,000 grant to help fund after-school STEM clubs in schools, universities, and community centers.
"Becoming an engineer paved the way for my career," said GM CEO Mary Barra in a statement posted to the company's website. "It's one of the reasons I am passionate about promoting STEM education to students everywhere. Partnering with Girls Who Code is one more step in GM's commitment to inspiring and growing diverse future leaders."
[...] GM and Girls Who Code are pursuing this collaboration is [sic] response to the decreasing proportion of women in jobs related to computing, even as the field continues to grow. In 1995, 37 percent of the computing workforce was comprised of women, but today that has shrunk to 24 percent.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by http on Wednesday January 11 2017, @07:52PM
Your definition sucks horseballs. It's correct as far as it goes, but it's like calling a rabbit hole "that dark place over thar."
Gilrs have an extremely different experience in education than boys do. Your notion, "exclude a women for being a woman and untold wrath will descend on you" is trite, sophomoric, and wrong. Girls are asked to participate less often, regularly shut down when attempting to participate on their own initiative, and belittled even when their knowledge is superior to that of boys. They are systematicly excluded and most often nobody bats an eye.
Why is it so fucking hard for people to understand "systemic"? Oh, right. It's not hard, they'd just rather not admit that they are part of the problem.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @08:17PM
The reality you describe is completely counter to my lifelong experience, especially in education; throughout my schooling, it was very clear that the teachers (the vast majority of which were female) treated the boys as second-class citizens, and spent most of their time engaging with the "better" behaved (read: boring as fuck) girls.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @10:56PM
Red Pillars of Masculinity are getting the shaft again, so to speak. So sad, poor puppies! Did you realize that a large part of experience is determined by the experiencer? You if you are a sexist misogynist jerk, you will experience a lot of sexist misandrist discrimination against yourself because you are a second class citizen. Or, you are a jerk, still a boy, and you ought to grow a pair and be a real man who supports affirmative action, even at the cost of your own self interest, because that is what real men do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @08:44PM
that's why a high percentage of the US' males are going to jail or shitty jobs if they're lucky while females go to college? you're the one who's not paying attention.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:09PM
"They are systematicly excluded and most often nobody bats an eye." - In Saudi Arabia maybe.
Seriously I am not sure what planet you're from or if you even believe what you're saying.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Informative) by http on Wednesday January 11 2017, @10:06PM
I'm from a planet where I remember a few things. http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/prejudice/women/ [pbs.org] sums up the research in a nutshell.
Dale Spender, an Australian linguist, noticed that in groups, men think women participated equally if they spoke 15% of the time, and believe that women dominiated the discussion if they dared speak as much as 30% of the time. In all fairness, Spender's methodology has been questioned, but later researchers got more visibly rigorous and came up with similar results. Or Allyson Jule, Canadian, showing that in elementary classrooms, girls are silenced collectively, but boys are silenced individually. Or, well, ... you know what? I'm not a linguistics major, for one, and I'm not doing all your research for you, for two. But here's a free head start: Gender Issues in the College Classroom [columbia.edu]
It's a common trope around here that you can't make someone see truth when their livelyhood depends on denying it. As corallary, most men are unwilling to observe systematic discrimination against women, because they unfairly benefit from it being invisible to the casual observer. Me included.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @10:18PM
Now, that is very interesting. Perhaps it takes an individualist to push his way to the top of industry; maybe that's why society becomes ever more oppressively collectivist whenever women step (or, rather, are placed) into positions of power.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Arik on Thursday January 12 2017, @02:49AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by http on Thursday January 12 2017, @06:32AM
The forms of the discrimination (oppression, you call it) are only one axis of the problem. The other axis of the problem, the one that makes it into a huge fuckng deal, is that for girls in school, discrimination is everywhere, every day, multiple times per day, from day one. One mosquito? No big deal. Ten thousand mosquitos? Big deal. Living in a swamp? Bigger deal. Your attempt to minimize the problem with the irrelevant "but other people have it worse" is just... juvenile. And I'm moderately curious as to what you believe the "more formidable" problems boys face are. Fun fact: I agree with you that boys face particular problems in school, but we might disagree on both why and the extent.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @02:02PM
Haha. Yeah, the group punishments were so discriminatory against girls. All the boys had to keep their heads on their desks because a couple boys in the back of the classroom were being disruptive. The girls get treated as individuals. The policy that let girls wander the halls during indoor recess and use the gym if they wanted but kept boys in their homeroom were so oppressive of women. When I started a computer club and then got railroaded on trumped up evidence and gaslighted, that was so discriminatory to girls. Years later when a girl made front page news because she started the district's first computer club, that was so discriminatory to girls.
Your genitals better be mutilated nice and tight for women's sexual pleasure. You better be circumcised so you don't transmit your HPV boy cooties to women, you rapist. We need to mutilate you as an infant too so that your 3 year old rapist ass feels nothing but excruciating pain. That will teach you. No, we can't immunize girls against HPV, because that would be sexualizing them. KNOW YOUR ROLE YOU SEX OBJECT.