Google sponsors over $150k of grants for female programmers

What about men who have financial need?<p>This isn&#x27;t an academic question. The tech industry is one of the very few left where large numbers of men from diverse backgrounds are doing well. For many who are struggling, it&#x27;s the best shot they have. Men receive less financial aid for college and graduate with more debt... if they graduate. Women now outnumber men 3 to 2 in current graduating classes in the US. Far more men than women suffer poverty and homelessness. Amazingly, it&#x27;s common for shelters to refuse single men.<p>Does Hacker School and its sponsor&#x27;s &quot;need based&quot; help truly discriminate against the very group—poor, non-degreed men—that society treats so callously?<p>The last thing I want to see is women being dismissed or shut out of opportunities purely out of chauvinist ignorance, but when it comes to poverty and need it&#x27;s almost like our society has empathy only for women and children. Recognizing this doesn&#x27;t mean becoming blind to the glass ceiling that women often hit at the high-end of the career ladder. Both are problems. This really is an issue where two wrongs don&#x27;t make a right.<p>Disclaimer: I earned well under $10k living in SF last year and faced some of this pain personally. I overcame the obstacles in my path and am now in a great situation... but I can&#x27;t help but feel for those I know who aren&#x27;t.

Nice to see a simple story of encouragement. My peer group is fortunately pretty diverse in terms of culture and country of origin, but it misses out on a realistic distribution of sex, which I think is important as well.<p>As a “white male programmer”, I’ve always been uncomfortable with an imbalanced group; now, being in a relationship with a female programmer, I’m exposed to a lot more of the actual iniquities.<p>We should consider this as a high-priority bug in our industry.

We need more women in the industry but I am not sure this is the way to do it. It is specifically for those &quot;who cannot afford to live without an income during Hacker School.&quot; What does this mean exactly?<p>To me it sounds like getting those who are poor or not well off into programming. I like that idea as much as getting more women into programming. What I don&#x27;t understand is why this would be limited to women only.<p>I have never been a fan of positive discrimination. Wouldn&#x27;t it be better to advertise more to women to try to get more applicants this way? Perhaps go into local schools to rustle up a more diverse selection of people to be the next generation of programmers. Perhaps use the money to give away raspberry pi systems to the underprilliaged kids to inspire them to get going young?<p>It is nice of Google and it seems like a decent inititive. I do feel though that the money could be used in a far more effective way.

Consider this, what if the title was &quot;Google sponsors over $150k of grants for male programmers&quot; ?

Google also give significantly more (+$2000) to female winners in Google Cloud Developer Challange 2013. <a href="https://www.google.com/events/gcdc2013/about.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;events&#x2F;gcdc2013&#x2F;about.html</a>

This looks like a great program that hits the right audience - people who know how to code, and will surely end up programming professionally when they&#x27;re done. Unlike the many bootcamps popping up that make minority kids write toy apps and hope they&#x27;ll take up computer science later. A good use of Google&#x27;s money.<p>Also, that guy has a very strange last name.

As a chick thinking about a career change towards programming, I find this very interesting...

Wow. Congrats! This is huge.

Keep it classy guys.

Wow, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars could pay a female programmer&#x27;s salary for an entire year!<p>This sends a strong signal to the rest of Silicon Valley: there&#x27;s no such thing as a Google Glass ceiling.

Sounds pretty sexist to me

Come on guys. Google is doing the right thing here which is funding what they think is right.<p>Will they achieve the result they seek? Not likely.<p>Will they feel good doing this? Definitely.

I find this sexist, it discriminates against men. If it would be the other way around we would see an endless stream of blogposts on HN complaining about how sexist Google is. This right here is a good example of the damage the hypocrite feminists are doing to the industry.<p>Programming should not be about how you were born, it should be about skills and merit.

And since lady engineers usually get paid less, that money will go a long way!