Etsy grants for women hackers
Joyce Park stashed this in Code
Stashed in: Women, @jguynn, New York, Etsy
I wish Etsy were more committed to this than they seem to be.
1. "Our goal is to bring 20 women to New York to participate."
But they're doing so with $5000 grants? Does $5000 even cover a month's worth of food and housing in New York?
2. "Etsy’s initiative will also boost the Hacker School’s female participation. Since it launched in July 2011, it has had only one woman take part in its three-month hack sessions. A prerequisite to attend Hacker School: must love programming."
Other prerequisites include desire to eat ramen noodles and tolerance for being co-located with smelly boys with poor hygiene. I don't think of those qualities as attractive to women.
Sorry, Etsy, it's hard to see these grants as a good incentive program.
Am I missing something?
I got excited when I first saw this, but then I read that it's actually for men/women who are already programmers. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great to train people to be even better programmers (man or woman) but from my experience knowing developers, they have more job offers than they know what to do with so I'm not sure they'd really care about a 5k incentive to spend the summer learning to be better coders.
Agreed, it's a shame there aren't more programs for women BEGINNING to learn to program.
The learning curve at the start is the steepest, and it's unfortunately way too easy to get discouraged.
How Etsy grew their number of female engineers by almost 500% in a year:
Natasha The Robot wrote about Etsy's Hacker Grants program:
My point is that if you really want to make this program about women, make it about women and give them all the resources to make sure they succeed. As soon as you put men into the mix, the program is no longer focused on women succeeding, but more on them competing with the men.
Read more: http://natashatherobot.com/problem-etsy-women-hacker-grants/
2:08 PM Apr 12 2012