Google Is Offering Free Coding Lessons To Women and Minorities 376
redletterdave writes: According to a blog post from Gregg Pollack, CEO of the Code School, Google is paying for three free months for any women and minorities interested in tech to expand their skills. The offer is part of Google's $50 million "Made With Code" initiative, which aims to help close the gender gap in tech. While Google is also offering the same vouchers to the women in attendance at its annual I/O developers conference this week, the search giant has released an online application that's available to women everywhere. Google says its available vouchers for women number in the "thousands."
Re:Raising Interest (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe you grew up in an environment where no one said "you don't want to program, boys don't do that sort of thing".
And I didn't start programming because I wanted to write a program that did something specific, I started programming because I wanted to know how computers work. The same sort of thinking that caused me to take my toys apart to see what made them work, open up watches and make them never work again, and so on. Boys do that and parents may frown a bit, but often when girls do that (or did at my age) then parents are much quicker to step in and direct them to other activities that were approved for girls.
How many boys growing up were told "don't study so much, or you'll never find a good wife" or "girls don't like bookish boys"?
Re:Need doublethink training (Score:2, Interesting)
I see tons of people making this point, and I get it, but seriously, who claimed it isn't sexism and racism? Did Google say it wasn't sexism and racism? It's a form of affirmative action, it is sexism and racism. No one claimed all sexism and racism is categorically bad, you just seem to be assuming it.
Now if you wanted to argue that all sexism and racism is bad, and that since this is a form of that, it is bad, go right ahead.
Unbalanced employment pool at Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Programmers over 45 years old.
Funny, they aren't getting free classes. I guess youth privilege is still golden.