>3. None of this is to say that you personally are not experiencing a challenging time or are not subject to bias in any way. None of this should diminish your personal challenges in the work environment. That should be addressed. This particular individual (@jl) and this particular company (Lambda School) are just not addressing that particular cause at this moment. And that should be ok.
I think you summed up perfectly what causes people to have knee-jerk reactions against correcting biases.
Just because one effort doesn't address all issues at once, doesn't mean its futile.
Progress isn't instantaneous. It takes many attempts over long periods of time to move the needle. I'm not sure why people feel the need to criticize any and all attempts at doing so.
This is an excellent comment. As it stands only the already privileged will be accepted into the program which I find to be disgusting. At least the financial status of applicants should be taken into account.
Isn't it obvious? Poor people. The politically favored are women but by opening this to all women you only help women who are already privileged not poor women living in ghettos or from other poor backgrounds
I’m not sure I follow or maybe you have a step in your head that I can’t see.
@jl is literally giving money for living expenses for women to do this program. How does that help a rich or middle class woman more than a poor woman interested in the program? If anything, I’d expect the impact of $9K to be far greater for the last than the first (and presumably able to be treated as a tax-free gift or even if not, taxed at a low rate). If that’s the case, it seems more enabling, not less.
Providing money to attend this kind of program is awesome, but there are many people who, despite having expenses paid, still could not afford to take advantage of this kind of program. The more financially stable you are, the more likely you would be able to drop your life for x weeks to take advantage of this kind of program.
Its not that what she is doing is "helping rich people more", but it will still favour them.
There are so many initiatives out there supporting poor people. True, this one does not. But it seems a bit far-fetched to conclude from this one example that the poor are not supported at all.
Only 4% of Stanford students come from the bottom 20% of family incomes, while 66% come from the top 20%. That's 15 times as many students from wealthy families as poor families.[1]
The numbers are similar at other top schools, and feed into everything beyond, including startups.
I'm not sure how Stanford's economic disparity supports that there are no programs to assist people who are economically disadvantaged. Harvard, Stanford, and Yale offer free tuition for students with family income below 65,000 a year, Princeton for below 54,000, and Cornell, Brown, Columbia and Duke for families with income below 60,000.
There's no data in the article about the income level of the students applying. Are there 15 times as many wealthy applicants? Disparity is often contextualized in terms of systems of oppression and discrimination. Individual behavior, influenced by the effect being poor has psychologically, is likely to contribute to the difference in economic diversity.
I also see balancing out the disadvantages of children, teenagers, and young adults from poor families as way more important than balancing out the disadvantages of well-off women. I totally agree that we have a long road ahead of us in this respect, as the Stanford numbers clearly show.
Still, your claim that nobody cares about the poor is not justified. Also, there are many just causes, and we can work on all of them in parallel.
I didn't make the claim that nobody cares about the poor, that was a response to my comment and I added some relevant information.
The groups I was talking about, the ones that "nobody cares about" might not come to mind immediately, precisely because one rarely hears about them, but there are so many examples of disadvantaged people who are never the beneficiaries of such efforts.
For example: numerous physical traits other than sex or skin color. Invisible minorities like eastern Europeans or middle eastern Christians. People who grew up in rural areas.
It's probably absurd to expect to define categories and provide special help to every group that could be defined. Instead, people should be judged as individuals, each of whom has faced a variety of obstacles and benefited from a variety of privileges, and whose potential can only be evaluated by considering the whole person, not a few checkboxes.
I think you summed up perfectly what causes people to have knee-jerk reactions against correcting biases.
Just because one effort doesn't address all issues at once, doesn't mean its futile.
Progress isn't instantaneous. It takes many attempts over long periods of time to move the needle. I'm not sure why people feel the need to criticize any and all attempts at doing so.