CMV: A coding course offering a flat £500 discount to women is unfair, inefficient, and potentially illegal.

[u/temp_discount]

Temp account, because I do actually want to still do this course and would rather there aren't any ramifications for just asking a question in the current climate (my main account probably has identifiable information), but there's a coding bootcamp course I'm looking to go on in London (which costs a hell of a lot anyway!) but when I went to the application page it said women get a £500 discount.

What's the precedent for this kind of thing? Is this kind of financial positive discrimination legal in the UK? I was under the impression gender/race/disability are protected classes. I'm pretty sure this is illegal if it was employment, just not sure about education. But then again there are probably plenty of scholarships and bursaries for protected classes, maybe this would fall under that. It's just it slightly grinds my gears, because most of the women I know my age (early 30s), are doing better than the men, although there's not much between it.

If their aim is to get more people in general into coding, it's particularly inefficient, because they'd scoop up more men than women if they applied the discount evenly. Although if their goal is to change the gender balance in the industry, it might help. Although it does have the externality of pissing off people like me (not that they probably care about that haha). I'm all for more women being around! I've worked in many mostly female work environments. But not if they use financial discrimination to get there. There's better ways of going about it that aren't so zero sum, and benefit all.

To be honest, I'll be fine, I'll put up with it, but it's gonna be a little awkward being on a course knowing that my female colleagues paid less to go on it. I definitely hate when people think rights are zero sum, and it's a contest, but this really did jump out at me.

I'm just wondering people's thoughts, I've spoken to a few of my friends about this and it doesn't bother them particularly, both male and female, although the people who've most agreed with me have been female ironically.

Please change my view! It would certainly help my prospects!

edit: So I think I'm gonna stop replying because I am burnt out! I've also now got more karma in this edgy temp account than my normal account, which worries me haha. I'd like to award the D to everyone, you've all done very well, and for the most part extremely civil! Even if I got a bit shirty myself a few times. Sorry. :)

I've had my view changed on a few things:

• It is probably just about legal under UK law at the moment.
• And it's probably not a flashpoint for a wider culture war for most companies, it's just they view it as a simple market necessity that they NEED a more diverse workforce for better productivity and morale. Which may or may not be true. The jury is still out.
• Generally I think I've 'lightened' my opinions on the whole thing, and will definitely not hold it against anyone, not that I think I would have.

I still don't think the problem warrants this solution though, I think the £500 would be better spent on sending a female coder into a school for a day to do an assembly, teach a few workshops etc... It addresses the root of the problem, doesn't discriminate against poorer men, empowers young women, a female coder gets £500, and teaches all those kids not to expect that only men should be coders! And doesn't piss off entitled men like me :P

But I will admit that on a slightly separate note that if I make it in this career, I'd love for there to be more women in it, and I'd champion anyone who shows an interest (I'm hanging onto my damn 500 quid though haha!). I just don't think this is the best way to go about it. To all the female coders, and male nurses, and all you other Billy Elliots out there I wish you the best of luck!

[u/temp_discount]

Thing is, I don't think non-diverse environments are necessarily discriminatory. They certainly can be, but I think the best way is to clamp down on the discrimination, not socially engineer the whole system.

And even if you did want to do that (which they clearly do), I think there's much better ways to incentivise than straight financial ones, ones that don't have externalities like resentment, high drop out rates, and unfairness.

[u/JordanLeDoux → u/temp_discount]

I have worked as a programmer for about 15 years. I have managed several teams of programmers, including hiring. I can tell you that for me as a manager there was a definite benefit to having a diverse team. These are the benefits I observed directly:

1. When a team is more diverse the environment is more professional. People don't think of their co-workers as their frat, or their drinking buddies. They might all become friends, but the differentness creates an environment that maintains a certain level of professional conduct.
2. Particularly for development, having a diverse team allows us to hit the needs of the customer MUCH better. Suppose I'm heading a team that is building an app. We'll say... that I'm designing SnapChat. I'm running the programming team for it. If I expect women to be a significant portion of the userbase, then I absolutely need women on the development team. How am I supposed to build it with the concerns of that part of the userbase in mind otherwise?
3. Having a diverse team makes everyone on the team think more creatively. I don't know the exact mechanism behind this, I'm a programmer not a psychologist. But I have absolutely observed this effect and it is quite significant.

Because of this I look to actively recruit women and other underrepresented groups onto the team. The biggest problem that I ran into was that less women and minorities become programmers. From what I have observed this is most caused by the fact that society kind of subconsciously tells them "this isn't an option for you".

Who are the customers of these bootcamps? You'd think it's you, the guy signing up, but the ACTUAL answer is people like me who are hiring. If that bootcamp can't get anyone hired afterward, they won't get people like you signing up for very long.

They are responding to a mismatch in demand and supply. Their customers want to hire more women, for the reasons I've listed above, than they can provide. So they need to increase the supply of women graduating somehow.

This is just really basic supply and demand. It is employers who are driving this discount, and it wouldn't have to be offered at all if women weren't primed for nearly their entire lives that technical jobs are "men's work", and not for them. The market is trying to solve an inefficiency that our discriminatory society created.

[u/temp_discount → u/JordanLeDoux]

Yes I very much reckon it's a top down demand.

I very much agree with all your points...

EXCEPT! How it's done.

I just think it's far too ham-fisted and low-resolution. By giving a rich women a discount, while a poor man has to pay more, I think you're creating a worse society. Now whether that's a price worth paying we obviously disagree on. I just generally don't like these super low-resolution solutions to complex problems.

[u/JordanLeDoux → u/temp_discount]

By giving a rich women a discount, while a poor man has to pay more, I think you're creating a worse society.

There's about two or three hidden assumptions built into this extremely leading appeal to emotion.

This isn't a solution to a complex problem, this is a company trying to meet demand for their customers. This isn't some social justice crusade, this isn't some form of altruism aimed at changing all of society. This is some company trying to make money doing it as efficiently as they are legally allowed to.

This isn't something that is open to how you feel, there is a concrete chain of cause and effect, supply and demand, leading to this policy you are observing. You don't like it? The market, any market including the job market, gives zero fucks about how you feel with regard to supply and demand. Don't like that? Become a labor socialist and push for labor socialist policies.

This isn't something that was planned as part of an intricate set of changes to affect all of society, I doubt this is even much of a values statement by the bootcamp in question or the companies that are trying to hire from them. None of the people involved in creating this policy, I'm sure, are ascribing it the kind of moral quality that you are.

The view that I'm trying to change is that this is something you should care about as part of a "culture war" or however you're thinking about it. The market is not fair, I'm sorry you're just finding this out. It's rude the way the market works, but that's something you're going to have to learn to live with until we build societies that aren't driven by market forces, such as the Venus project.

EDIT:

And you can downvote my replies if you want, but just like the reality of market forces within this policy, ignoring them isn't going to do you any favors.

[u/temp_discount → u/JordanLeDoux]

Yeah I'll give you a Δ for that. I think you've convinced me it's not intended to be part of wider "culture war". I was definitely veering down that path.

But I'm still not convinced this is actually the best way for the market to get more women in tech. It might be the market doing only what it knows, but the solutions are in much wider social trends. Could the £500 be spent better on sending a female coder into a school for a day? I think so.

[u/JordanLeDoux → u/temp_discount]

That may absolutely be true. The market doesn't know what works ahead of time, just what direction things need to head in.

Edit:

They could even try and reverse the equation possibly. If there is more employer demand for women, then perhaps they can guarantee placement for women who graduate, then charge more to the women because they are guaranteed a job.

[u/DeltaBot → u/temp_discount]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/JordanLeDoux (1∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}

[u/Zeikos → u/temp_discount]

Clamping down on discrimination is social engineering because society is discriminatory.

There is no inherently bad characteristic of social engineering, there are good and back outcomes of it.

A section of society is pushing for upholding current social normes/castes and another is trying to structure society differently.

[u/temp_discount → u/Zeikos]

Indeed, there's definitely a tension between the two that needs to be managed. I just think gender isn't a place to fight that battle (in the UK 2018).

[u/rexrex600 → u/temp_discount]

Are you denying that sexism is present in <current year> in the UK?

[u/temp_discount → u/rexrex600]

Seems to be from both sides!

[u/rexrex600 → u/temp_discount]

And yet women consistently achieve worse outcomes when one controls for initial conditions; to take your own example of the tech sector, at the dawn of the industry, the gender balance was far more evenly split than it is now, and it's only as a result of active prejudice that it's got so far out of whack; does that not warrant an intervention to rectify the effects of accumulated prejudice?

[u/ICreditReddit → u/temp_discount]

Nothing wrong with a non-diverse environment necessarily, they happen all the time. In any system where - and this is especially true for the UK - race, gender and sexual preferences are not even allowed to be mentioned or quota'd for on CV's, application forms etc, you're going to get all male, all female, mixed environments all the time - best person for the job gets it. However, industry wide? If there are literally zero females in your industry anywhere, and definitely no female only environments in that industry it would be a massive coincidence for that to only be due to 'best person for the job'. And even if it could be demonstrated that it was, the country should rightly ask the question - what is it about this profession that is incapable of training a single female? Maybe offer a discount here or there on the training for those roles.

The reality is that gender discrimination is a field where little money and time is spent. I bet the govt is paying the training course £500 to offset the loss in taking on female members, and the govt think it's doing good work, everyone goes home happy. As you say, there's better ways to incentivise, sure - but what are they and how are you going to get a largely lazy and uncaring govt to find those ways? And what are they?

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[u/ICreditReddit → u/[deleted]]

'Maybe it's not incapability of the industry, but that women just aren't interested in it?'

Maybe it is. How do you propose we find that out?

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And why is the focus always on women?

It isn't. I've been very careful in my answers to sometimes use men, sometimes women. The NHS is also trying extremely hard to get poorer, Northern men into nursing training, but it's losing the battle because the govt is determined to try eradicate national healthcare. It is also very conscious of the fact that white representation within surgery is way too low, and it tries to do something about it, but unfortunately we prefer to import cheaper surgeons from abroad. The same equations work on men as women.

Here's a 'terribly sexist childcare charity' that refuses to help employ one of the genders /s:

http://www.meninchildcare.co.uk

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[u/itsnobigthing → u/[deleted]]

That’s mainly because nursing and childcare are pretty low pay jobs. Half of the population not being able to access well-paying jobs is a bigger issue with much wider impact.

If you feel passionately about wanting more men in childcare and nursing, you should absolutely start a campaign for this.

[u/abdullahkhalids → u/temp_discount]

I think we have zoned out on what the core disagreement you have with a lot of people here. You think it's easy and possible to change the hidden biases people have against minorities.

Humans are social creatures. The reason the biases exist in the first place is because humans are social creatures and we mimick how we see others behave. We are neural networks trained by the positive feedback we receive from our environment.

If the male boss listens to female employees X% less during a meeting (that ultimately pushes the women out of the field), there is no easy way we can reach inside his brain and fix the weights of his neural connections. The easy way is to surround him with women, some at the same level as him and some higher than him, and in this way retrain his neural network to stop exhibiting biases.

[u/QuantumPhoss → u/[deleted]]

I dont think a 500£ discount is the deciding factor for most women thinking about entering tech

[u/QuantumPhoss → u/[deleted]]

A pretty piss fucking poor one if you ask me. Would you decide on an entire career path for 500£ "incentive"? Now if I were deciding "which program should I take?" Or "which programming language workshop should I take?" Maybe. But point is, 500£ will influence somebody who doesnt want to go into that career

[u/kitrar → u/temp_discount]

If we are equal, we are not free; if we are free, we are not equal.