I will do that as soon as you explain how treating female coders as if they were freaks, segregating them in their own class, decreases the problem of integration of more female coders in tech.

Perhaps the issue of "feeling alien to the community" would be improved by, you know, not alienating females from the community, with sexist behavior such as this.

I would never consider a female coder to be any different from a male one. I am merely giving anecdotal evidence that female students of the 11 - 17 age group learn significantly better when they are amongst their peers. My decision to make a few of our classes into girls-only ones was to allow the girls who felt uncomfortable in a male-dominated setting to still have an opportunity to learn in a setting they found comfortable. My underlying motivation was not to segregate them, but to give them another option - we still have girls attending our regular classes, and this is hardly the issue that some of the commenters here are making it out to be.

>I would never consider a female coder to be any different from a male one

You literally segregated males from females in your coding class. That is considering them to be different.

>female students of the 11 - 17 age group learn significantly better when they are amongst their peers.

So male students aren't peers of female students? Really?

I'm pretty sure you're not being purposefully malicious, but jeeze... Your philosophy is kinda broken, you don't really seem to realize the (incredibly sexist) assumptions you're making, and that's going to lead to reinforcing a gender divide, not solving any problems.

I understand that from an idealistic perspective what I'm doing can be regarded as malicious or sexist, but I'd like to point out two very important things: 1. there is no requirement for girls to only attend the all-girls classes. 2. this is not my philosophy, this is a data-driven decision that has nothing to do with my perception of the abilities of males or females. The all-girls classes were a result of us seeing a significant drop in the percentage of girls enrolled in a programming class.

It was a management decision that many of the parents in our community appreciated, and quite frankly I'm a bit shocked by how quickly people on HN jump to the conclusion that I'm some kind of misogynist.

@DanBC There is not that much evidence and I do not see best education system in the world moving to gender educated classes. There is one experiment on few kids with all kinds of special conditions.

Plus, there are some proves that girls perform worst when reminded of all "incapable woman" stereotypes.

You are ignoring all the evidence that young females learn better in single sex classes.

By keeping mixed sex classes you are already putting females at a disadvantage.

You're obviously a man, but you seem to think yourself the arbiter of what is or is not sexist against women. Why is this?

You make it sound like there were boys running around them in circles every class all class long. But its a good discussion, hope one of you comes with a less dramatic solution.

"Hey, female coder, you can choose to be in a co-ed class or a female-only one, your choice" is hardly treating them as freaks. You're completely misrepresenting the original commentor.

imho, I think we should target less popular and possibly more important situations (all relative, I know) such as helping people in 3rd world nations to get better access to IT & education.