Good afternoon, Sofia Kurta is not my name, but in the photo, it is indeed me in my younger years. I was a participant in many olympiads during my childhood, and later I was a volunteer at some olympiads, for example, EGOI.
So, let's get to the essence of the differences between men and women in the field of programming from my experience. Fortunately, in my country, there are already positive trends regarding this: you can regularly see wise and smart girls at IOI, and the top prize spots are often filled by women. This is obviously progress compared to the sexist past years. But if you take a closer look, the peak for the ratio of the female part of the team to the male is about half, while for men, it is normal to fill the whole team. This is terrible.
Here's where I see the root of the problem — what is the situation with this share of girls at previous stages? You can barely find them there. The problem here is already in the system itself and in the approach of teachers who push boys to olympiads, who somehow manage the school math program, because how could they send a girl there — this was exactly my case during school years. That season, the boy took the second-to-last place at the district level, and there was also a "wonderful" subjective evaluation of the code by the school teacher, because of which I didn’t make it further. I can't help but express my complaints to parents with outdated views who, until you show them a diploma as proof that you are capable of something, will keep convincing you that this is not for you and you should leave it to the boys — awful.
Of course, it's not just about the results. I was very "lucky" to be the only girl or one of the few girls at many olympiads, which gave me the opportunity to feel all the attention from the big programmers and teachers with coaches. "What is such a beautiful girl doing here?" — a favorite question. But I will be solving the problems! Surely, after that, I won’t be talking with you. Why don't they ask such questions to any of the boys, when at any olympiad there are obvious passengers? And these handouts, when they give you a prize at the programming camp just because you are of a different build, is also one of my favorite situations, as if I need your praise for something.
So smoothly, or maybe not, we approach another painful topic. Will many of you consider a woman equal, even if she has the same results, the same rating on Codeforces? Of course, the majority of you are an adequate society. But I’ve come across individuals who wouldn’t talk to me because I am a woman and should be weaker, while talking calmly with others, even weaker ones — strange.
I would like to highlight the arrogance from some men towards women's olympiads. As if it's an olympiad for the disabled, and any of them would take the first absolute prizes there. There was a case during my volunteering at EGOI when a girl won a medal, was happy, and then after talking with her "friends," she began to say that it was nothing yet, and she would have to prove something at other olympiads. What good did they do with this? Did they take away her moment of happiness and pride? Yes. Don’t you dare belittle the significance of women's olympiads, it looks very disgusting.
Conclusion: the school system and parents' views are still outdated, with which it is impossible to build equal conditions. Despite this, there are prospects in the next generation, where the share of blind sexists is quite small.
Thank you for your attention, respect the !weaker, equal gender.
The whole point of having a special olympiad for a specific sex sounds a bit odd to me, for physical sports, I can understand, that there is a need to have separate competitions for men and women.
Maybe olympiads type of competitions do not need to have sex-specific competitions. This itself makes the other gender look weak.
Having competitions to encourage young women can be considered a special case, or else I don't see a reason to have different competitions.
Suppose there weren't gender-specific olympiads. Let's take a look at some supposedly gender-neutral olympiad.
Say, for whatever reason, 90% of participants are men, 10% are women. Statistically, women are going to get worse top results (the averages might be the same, but who cares about averages in sports?), so the society believes women are not worth investing in, so they aren't trained, so the cycle continues.
Woman-only competitions exist precisely to encourage women to train -- and, on the flip side, for the trainers to take women seriously.
I agree with your point. You are not getting my point.
In mental sports, like Olympiads. I am saying, that if a female is ranking first in female sports, but is performing badly in gender-neutral sports because of multiple reasons.
This is why people just assume that she is not good enough to compete against males. This is why, from the outside, it looks like one gender is superior and the other is not. I don't know how this assumption started, but this is how the current generation feels probably
There can be other types of unfairness than just physical (for example, parents/teachers pushing boys more to prepare harder for technical Olympiads than girls), so it is an Olympiad for those who have relatively similar background. Of course, it seems impossible to get rid of all types of unfairness, but gender-specific Olympiads at least get rid of one very obvious type of unfairness. Its broad idea is similar to the idea of the weight classes for Judo/Wrestling/MMA.
Sad to see that you feel this way. Unfortunately, the argument of why there are less females than males in olympiad is way more nuanced than just "sexism". I won't comment on what those are, there are enough resources available on the internet if you are willing to read them. But most of those overlap with why there is a women's section in say chess, for example. On a lighter note, No, women aren't weaker. The vast majority of them just are smart enough to do better and more meaningful things with their life than stare at a computer screen for hours trying to solve abstract mathematical problems.
The vast majority of them just are smart enough to do better and more meaningful things with their life than stare at a computer screen for hours trying to solve abstract mathematical problems.
Says someone who could not enjoy solving math problems and finding every loophole to complain about it
I completely agree with other parts of your arguments though
I did my fair share of solving math problems, did math, informatics olympiads and stuff. But you don't care because how can a "newbie" be reasonable, right? Stop judging people based on their cf colours. And even if you do, at least look at the account once before shitting on them online.
Yeah, my points are still valid even if I remove that ratism thing. From your last sentence, reading it as-is, I can only read the following:
I'm not the one intended to start a fight here. People like you are too easily aggroviated.
Anyways, I won't comment on this thread further. Peace.
You can't just say "I won't comment on what those are" without any links and assume you won the argument.
The reason for this effect, and the same effect in Chess, is precisely sexism. No one takes women seriously, so no one invests in women, so women don't achieve good enough results (and when they do, they're accused of not being women, cue Olympics).
What sends me spiraling is that this fear and feelings of supremacy are internalized by women. It's xenophobia all around, there just isn't another explanation for, say, FIDE banning trans women from participating in female chess. It's people in control exercising said control in unfair ways all around.
There isn't an argument here.
123gjweq2 komments?
'Unfortunately, the argument of why there are less females than males in olympiad is way more nuanced than just "sexism"'
Maybe it's just that, the amount of males participating in the qualifications round is more, and hence more male talents qualify for the selections. Maybe the females participating in the qualifications round are just not that good to take on the competition with those particular talented males who qualified.
Why do you see that only males qualify? See that many males are not qualifying also and neither are the females.
Why are females not participating? I don't know. Maybe because of taboo, maybe they are not interested,
And for the case, the op is saying, I think it's just an issue at her place, maybe. So she will have to deal with it herself, just like we all deal with our own challenges. Like I am not good enough in CP, so I am dealing with it by practicing daily.
Interest is a big part of it. And I won't elaborate further because I am not interested in online arguments, because someone is bound to take it personally for some reason — this is the unfortunate reality about the nature of these discussions. I am both too old and too tired for that kind of stuff. If someone has an open mind, they can look into it for themselves.
You are right. The solution though is not expecting "the next generation" in the school system, but advocating for more open contests without any restrictions on age\gender\number of tries and so on. Ideally pushing your company to organize competitions, if your company can afford that.
Government\state affiliated or international competitions are generally extremely bad because of the tons of restrictions they have anyway, unlikely that they'll ever be fixed.
But if you take a closer look, the peak for the ratio of the female part of the team to the male is about half, while for men, it is normal to fill the whole team. This is terrible.
In China, we choose the people who ranked 1, 2, 3 and 4 in team selection contests. Does this change anything about that ratio?
Do you need teacher permission to participate in oi in Ukraine?
you don't have to worry for too long, in 10 or 15 years barely any male will be around competing, at least in the western world, as the female enrollment in the colleges will be around 80 to 90% compared to the 60-65% we have nowadays, it doesn't take a scientist to see the trend so.
also you will have a way easier time earning a say, 7 figure job than any men who complains about you or girl competitions in the comments so.
UPD: it's lovely to see clueless men in this chat who are ignoring the new reality that everything is woman focused, i'm afraid for you
Yes, it is too woman-focused that we will have to bring equality for men's agenda and all the BS that the other sex is doing. In the case of my country even big companies like Google and Walmart are showing favoritism over talent, especially in campus hiring
What are you talking about? Is there any proof or at least facts that support your " as the female enrollment in the colleges will be around 80 to 90% compared to the 60-65% we have nowadays "?
the new reality that everything is woman focused
It's widely recognized that women are being attacked so they are fighting for it, and that s why they are getting focused on. Female exclusive contests exist to encourage girls to learn CP, so the dream of both genders competing in one competition with same training resources could come true ASAP.
Thank you for sharing this. According to my theory, the reason why people may tend to have such prejudices must come from their belief that "Intelligence" is intrinsic, and the same people probably also believe that not only are people born dumb or born smart, but also that the chances of a girl born smart is quite low compared to that of boys. Either this or the belief that girls arent capable of hard work.
This obviously doesnt sit right with me. In most cases whether you excel or not is mostly dependent on your upbringing, regardless of the gender. Anyone can achieve anything, you just have to adjust your risk apetite and capacity for hardwork!
wth did i just read "gender specific mental competitions" ???
same
☣️☣️☣️
Problem-solving skills are not limited by race, gender, ethnics, or anything of such, and I'm sorry that you experienced unfair treatments, that is wrong. However, the fact that you're just hating on people for paying special attention to a girl attending a competitive programming competition makes no sense, if you're the minority, obviously, you'll always stand out, it's unlikely they have any malicious intentions either, why judge them blindly?
I'm not sure I get your critique. Do you think adults hitting on children is okay? Even if it wasn't adults but other teens, do you think that kind of commentary shouldn't be judged?
I don't know if others shares the same view as me, but in no way do I think that is a sexual harrassment, but rather a compliment. Obviously people are gonna be impressed, and you'll stand out, if you participate in a male-dominated field as female
I don't think they were hitting on her. It seems to me more like a nice version of "wtf have you forgot here?"
Maybe it's their own low self-esteem showing itself? There are stereotypes about programmers too, they are also harmful and also internalized.. Maybe they were genuinely surprised that a nice and pretty girl really wanted to join them, the "socially awkward, lone & ugly males"?
Thanks for speaking up. I'm sorry you had to go through these experiences.
I'm also sorry and angry that so many other commenters aren't taking this seriously or are trying to invalidate your experiences. Guess that's what privilege does to people. You deserve better.
I don't have much to add, all I can do is corroborate this story. I've seen similar attitudes on all levels, starting from my informatics school teacher and up to the top Moscow and Russia coaches. None of them seem to get why their behavior is unacceptable and wouldn't listen. Other participants were the bastion of toxicity, though; I must confess that forced me to internalize some of their behaviors for a while.
I really hope younger generations won't have to go through this, but I don't really know how to help that. What I do know, though, is that spreading the awareness is a step in the right direction. Thanks for doing that.
If there were significant gendered differences in cognitive function pertaining to cp, would you still advocate for there being absolutely no differences (conscious or subconscious) in attitude/behavior towards both genders?
Are you asking this question in good faith?
Yes, it's relevant to this:
Then I would expect absolutely no differences in attitude.
Behavior-wise, I wouldn't tolerate differences either. Even if, statistically speaking, girls scored 50% worse than boys on average, there would still be "smart" girls and "stupid" boys. So the difference in behavior would have to be based on the actual skill level of the person in question and not their gender. (And even then, I condone no disrespect, the only difference in behavior I would consider faithful is the training material and target goals.)
This is obviously where the incompatibility lies.
Most people (consciously and subconsciously) behave so as to optimize expected benefit from their actions. If they believe a certain group of people to be generally different from another group on a certain metric, their behavior reflects that.
Most people are also not so ideologically inclined as to consciously correct for these optimizing tendencies. You cannot expect everyone to put in effort to align with you.
But What if the beliefs of people are wrong? For example, lets say women were discriminated in the past and this is the actual reason for them not being as good as men and now people look at women not being as good as men and come to the false conclusion that they are not good because of biological disadvantages and therefore they treat women differently which actually causes women to perform worse than men which in turn further makes these men believe they were correct in their assumptions and then they further continue to mistreat women. So, this cycle would continue. Don't you see the problem with that?
My point is we can hold people responsible for believing and acting upon false beliefs which will harm other groups of people even though it is natural for them to have arrived at those beliefs despite having had no malicious intent.
Firstly, let me reiterate that we're talking hypotheticals here. Very likely, this assumption is totally false, so there is no inherent need to exercise this further.
With this disclaimer out of the way: not all people being good is not news to me.
We've had slavery in the past. We now believe it's a bad thing and teach people that it's a bad thing. We haven't solved this problem completely, but there's progress.
Women's rights were non-existent not too long ago and are still under scrutiny. Still, there's progress.
I'm sure you know many more examples. We have partially overcome these troubles, with the help of blunt force. We had unions protect worker rights. We had communists overthrowing governments. The Nazi regime fell. Stonewall was a riot.
What I'm saying is, people only caring about themselves and lacking morals is not a new issue. It's been solved before, and I'm sure this problem will be solved too, quite possibly with similar forceful (but hopefully not physical) methods.
I can only accept "You cannot expect everyone to put in effort to align with you" insofar as "you can't expect" only means "that won't happen by itself", not "it's okay". This sort of egoistical search for benefit is not something that should be tolerated, nor an excuse.
We're going around in circles. The problem is that you believe your morality has an objective basis and wish for everyone to adhere to your prescribed course of action. When they do not do so, you express dismay and fantasize about correcting for this undesirable behavior through "forceful (but hopefully not physical) methods". Consider not being an idealogue, it's healthier.
I hate seeing blogs and comments with a similar sentiment here because objective morality doesn't exist and discussing such ideological matters (which inherently make moral judgements) is inappropriate on a forum for a particularly objective field.
It's the opposite. I don't think there's an objective basis.
All morality is subjective, all goals are subjective, so you might as well argue destroying the planet is fine if it creates value for the stakeholders, or that killing people is fine if the killer enjoys it.
Yes, I am an ideologist, I have a sense of right and wrong. Yes, it's true that I a) hold beliefs that have absolutely no objective basis, b) want other people to follow these beliefs.
The reason for that is that I want me and my friends to feel safe. Not being an ideologist is not healthier, the government wants to kill me for being myself, I don't see how ignoring that is healthy. Not worrying about tabs and spaces is fine, not worrying about people's lives getting ruined is terrible.
I don't get the argument that such discussions shouldn't belong to Codeforces. We've got a self-proclaimed girl programmer saying her experience in programming competitions was ruined by sexism. How is that not on-topic? How is "I could do more but people stopped me for no reason" subjective?
I won't respond to the first half of your comment as there is nothing more for me to say. You admit to being a subjectivist and rational discourse isn't possible when someone subscribes to an ideology built on irrational premises.
Because discussions should be about algorithms and math, not competitive programmers.
Merely asserting this is not subjective (although it is inappropriate). Describing a prescriptive course of action as a response is subjective.
And why is that true? Is that not just your opinion?
Fundamentally, yes.
Although my belief is lent some pragmatic credence by the fact that there are many other places to talk about this stuff.
It doesn't seem to me like there's many places to discuss issues at CP competitions or e.g. train camps in particular. They get ignored if you talk directly to the people because they don't feel responsibility, and ignored at larger spaces because no one knows what CP is there. CF's a middle ground.
Man, what do you believe? All you've done in this thread is try to shut down discussion by bringing the focus away from concrete examples of discrimination that can be analyzed, and towards some vague conversation about moral nihilism.
Don't try to claim the neutral voice of reason — if you were just concerned about site discussions going off-topic or objective morality, you did not need to make a series of combative replies to a root level comment expressing solidarity with other people who have been unfairly treated, and in fact could have communicated your point much more effectively otherwise.
If you're going to participate in a debate, stop weaseling around and defend your position. I do think you have a case to be made in certain scenarios, even if I may disagree. If not, leave everyone else to have their discussion in peace.
I hope I'm wrong, but I feel like you're probably just going to accuse me of being closed minded or having some ulterior motive and move on. Whatever, either way I just wanted to get this out lol.
I apologize for derailing your very important thread
By differences in attitude, do you mean on average because of performance differences or even on an individual level? Because it is quite clear that there are plenty of women who are better than men at competitive programming as of right now even if what you say about cognitive differences is true. So, my question is why can't we treat people as humans(maybe treat people according to their cp skill level if appropriate in some cases) irrespective of their gender?
If I may ask, what exactly is acceptable male behaviour according to you? I understand that the question may sound silly, but if there exists a problem (and apparently there does) in male to female attitude today, what is the end goal, precisely?
In short (because I Ctrl-R'ed the page accidentally and lost my comment): women want to be treated just like men. That's it, don't single us out.
Don't congratulate women for being women, just like you don't congratulate men for being men. Congratulate them only on something under their control. Don't go "you're so smart as a woman", just say "you're so smart". "I like your hair style", not "I like your height".
Don't make offensive jokes. Don't joke about sleeping with your students, or students hitting on you, or their sexuality.
Don't be creepy. Know the felling when someone's uncomfortably close to you, but not close enough you can call them out? That. As an adult, keep it 100% professional; and if you have a crush and matching ages, just DM her "Hey, I just wanted to say I like you. I'm always captivated by your speech, your work is always excellent, and I'm amazed by your skills. Do you maybe want to go for a walk together and chat?".
Don't mansplain. I know the word is quite charged, but the gist of it is that if you wouldn't explain something to a man because you'd assume he knew it already, don't do that to a woman either. Just don't, they'll ask if they don't understand.
Don't let the gender affect your view on the person, e.g. their knowledge and skills. I've had men go "oh, that's a woman, so she's dumber than me, and she wrote something I don't understand, so that must be total nonsense". Just... avoid that, please.
Thanks for the response. The following are my personal takes on your points:
I agree.
This is a subjective issue. What is extremely offensive to someone may not be offensive to someone else. There isn't an objective metric of "how offensive" something is, it highly varies on individual to individual, their experiences, personalities and backgrounds.
However, about joking about sleeping with students, I absolutely agree that it is something extremely, to say the least, unprofessional. I believe that there should exist a guideline on what is permitted and not permitted in a teacher-student relation, which is a professional one. We cannot limit what people think (and in my opinion it is a bad idea to even try to do so, regardless of how horrific those "thoughts" may be) but we can, and in my opinion, should, have strict, written guidelines as to what are valid / invalid actions between teachers and students. (Also, given that we are talking about students who are mostly children, isn't sleeping with students just outright illegal?)
Again, this is something very subjective. Also, this might be controversial, but finding someone "creepy" depends on who it is too. The same actions which are done by someone who is say hollywood-level good looking can be considered as "charm" while the same actions done by someone who is obese, socially awkward, and with a neckbeard, can be considered as "creepy".
Also, on a lateral note, this is the mid 2020s, it has been a while since women entered the "professional workforce", and yet we as humans are struggling to exactly point out what is appropriate and what is inappropriate behavior in the workplace. Different companies have different policies, and many are just outrageously misandristic, while on the flip side, some are extremely misogynistic.
Also a thought experiment: Imagine you are a young adult male, who is extremely socially awkward, has zero social skills because you spent maybe a big chunk of your life so far specializing in something like maths or programming or whatever, and are now want to move on to leading a more "normal" life. Perhaps you aren't even "good" at what you tried to do for years. You now want to lead a more "normal" life, have a girlfriend, maybe plan on getting married, whatever. The days of you getting married to the beautiful daughter of the farmer next door, who you grew up and are friends with, are long, long gone. Any traditional routes of finding a potential life partner is completely closed. So you decide that you want to approach them the "modern" way, meeting at a bar, parties, events (read: onsite programming / math competitions), etc. But since you are not "charming" by any stretch of the imagination, you try to imitate what you have seen your local "charming" guy do. But the moment you approach a lady, she gets "creeped out" by you because of how you look. What do you do then? Suffer and die alone? Nobody wants to even listen to you because you are ugly, and anything you do even remotely resembling "social activities" is perceived as creepy by others. What do you do then?
While I do agree that the word "mansplain" is charged and more misused than used, I agree with your point.
Understandable. But don't stuff like looks, ethnicity, etc. fall into that category too?
Anyway, I mostly agree with your sentiment, but as unalive pointed out, there is nothing called "objective morality". And trying to enforce your morality on others is just as bad as someone else enforcing their concept of morality onto you.
Someday we can dream of a reality where there are a set of established universal human values, but as of now, that seems practically impossible, and also dangerous. (Again reverting back to the fact that objective morality simply does not exist).
Coming back to the original topic of the blog: I do agree and sympathize with OP's sentiment, I do see how as a female programmer, seeing so few fellow female programmers can be disheartening or discouraging. But I do not agree that it is just "sexism". At least not all of it.
There is a vast difference between what males and females want to do with their lives. Trying to reach the epitome of the programming universe just isn't what the majority of females want, in my opinion. It does have to do with the biological construct of males wanting to deal with "thing" and women wanting to deal with "people" oriented professions. In general, the major reason why there are so few females in programming and similar fields, is just interest. However, that is in no way an exhaustive explanation. I am no psychologist, or social researcher, so I won't try to explain it in more detail, just in case I butcher stuff. But yeah, if someone does want to look it up, there are enough resources on the internet by qualified experts explaining this issue in way more detail.
In my opinion, however, what we as a society should aim for is equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome.
As a modern society, we must strive to ensure that if a girl wants to be a programmer, and is talented and hardworking enough, she should be given the opportunities and should be encouraged to do so. If she wants to be a musician, let her do so. If she wants to be a stay-at-home mother, let her do so. In the pursuit of equalizing a 50-50 ratio in say programming, we must take care not to reverse the progress that has already been made by society. Trying to force a girl to become a programmer is just as bad as trying to say force her to get married and have kids or something, in my opinion.
If we do allow freedom of choice in what to do with their lives, most females would not take up programming just out of the sheer reason that it isn't really of interest to them. Even those who might want to take it up initially because of the lucrative job opportunities related to it, many of them lose interest in the task of "programming" soon. (Btw I feel that is true to some extent for many males too, though I might be wrong in both cases. However I think the number of "how do i get a job using cp" blogs and cheaters on cf is an observation that supports my claim). "Interest" is the key word here, though of course, not an exhaustive one.
And if there does exist barriers that are preventing women who want to be programmers from reaching their full potential, I believe that we as a society should unitedly work towards eliminating them. In my opinion we as a society have reached a big part of reaching the end goal, and I'm afraid that we may never reach the end goal, because again, the "end goal" here has many subjective parameters. But we can do our best to establishing and fixing the objective aspects of it at least.
TL;DR: There is none. This is a nuanced topic, as I mentioned in my previous comment.
Are you against women-specific olympiads?
In an ideal world, yes. In the present world, it helps balance stuff out.
i find it contradictory that you are against praising women for being women, while also being for women-only olympiads. i believe we should have as many open olympiads as possible while also encouraging women to participate. i dont think women-only olympiads are a long term solution.
Neither do I, I thought I was clear about that.
But I’ve come across individuals who wouldn’t talk to me because I am a woman and should be weaker, while talking calmly with others, even weaker ones — strange.
If we remember that we're talking about members of the cp community, there is a good chance they were just scared to talk to a woman.
I think supportive parents are the most important, because the Polgars must have experienced all the rest but won anyway.
The Polgars are literally the only exception. Also, we should not forget that their father was literally a psychologist. If there are a few more Polgars in the future, then I think we can conclude that environment is the only barrier in cognitive competitions between men and women.
As of now, there hasn't been another Polgar. Will there be any more Polgars in the future? Only time will tell.
Many girl gold medalists in IMO, all are exceptions?
No, I don't think even an IMO gold medalist can be considered equivalent to the achievements of the Polgar sisters (especially Judith Polgar) in chess. I think an IMO gold medalist level is comparable to say a female GM in chess (not WGM) Whereas the equivalent of a Polgar in CP can be, imo, say a top-10 LGM in cf. Which I think we are yet to see.
Maybe because there haven't been a few more fathers and mothers like Polgars?
I recall that Polgar already decided to turn the daughters into chess geniuses from the beginning. My guess is that teaching children things starting from a very very young age already has a huge advantage (like starting at 5y vs 10y). The vast, vast majority (99%+?) of parents do not seem to do that and instead want their kids to fool around and explore while young. The exception to this is the college admissions grind from parents in the United States, but even then it's just generalized to "do whatever it takes to get in" and not "I am going to raise my child to be a genius in field X from day 1".
I believe that a huge portion of what kids become is determined by what their parents tell them from a very young age, and if the parents don't think they're cut out for technical stuff, it's over before it even began.
Polgar wrote a book on how he raised the geniuses. I skimmed parts of it and liked what I saw. https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/genius.pdf
It is very much possible that that is the case.
However, training one's child to be a genius in some domain does come with its pros and cons, and although most parents can't afford or are ignorant in such matters, I wouldn't be surprised if some parents consciously choose to not do so.
As a follow up: It's so, so important what the parents think. It matters so much more than all the others.
If parents think their daughter isn't fit for the hard sciences? It's over. Thanks for playing, better luck next life. It doesn't matter how many EGOIs you make or diversity initiatives or affirmative action programs there are if you never even reached the starting line. (Polgar doesn't believe in them either.)
Of course this applies to everyone, you hear it with men as well: "oh, I was never any good at math..." (source of claim: parents' disapproval after having a bad teacher in middle school) -> you never will be...
In the meanwhile, average Italian article: "Make your children bored". :cry:
Agree, I would add to the list not being poor and being in good health (both you and your family). In my opinion, these factors weigh more than gender.
I believe that Competitive Programming tends to attract more socially inept people (myself included) than other subjects. While that ineptitude can turn into ignorant remarks (I'm sorry OP that people still behave like that, openly or passively), I think that most of the time this handicap manifests as hazzlek said.
Also, ratism can go both ways)) The smarter other boys/girls were, the more afraid/reserved I was to interact with them, especially if I didn't know them beforehand.
Personal experience: I handed out diplomas at the NOI one year ago, only four girls out of about 90 people (two generations). I don't really know why. It's possible that what OP describes is much more widespread than in my bubble.
There's a women only contest named ICPC Algo Queen, which was introduced last year in 2023, it was initiated in India but it was open for all countries.
I highly suggest you to check it out. here's the link to the original blog about it.
It hasn't taken place yet this year and it was first of its kind last year so not really sure if it will take place this year too but there's a forum in this blog which discusses about ICPC Algo Queen 2024 so fingers crossed.
From what I read "Stories of a programmer" is definitely the more appropriate title for this blog.
well girls are you you not so no should you speak like dog they much need help and he said in statement of it then if not help to them no atacking you donot do that girls I wish all good grades in conpetitions every whree so get upvotes me!!!!!!
For things to get better in the next generation, we need to make this generation recognise the issue. So that in the future, when we have our own children or work as teachers, we won't discourage girls from math-related subjects. For this reason, posts like this are important. That's why I want to state my support and thank you for writing the post. And, as we see from the comments, the fight for equal rights is far from over.
Completely agree.
Hello Sofia. Your story is very sad and it has broken my heart. I would like to apologise to you on behalf of all men. I understand what you feel because I was bullied in high school too because i was a nerd and now i have severe depression. I hope you don't end up like me. If you struggle with negative attitude from others, maybe you should switch to something more socially acceptable and mayble get married and raise beautiful children. Thank you for bad english. Sorry for being autistic.
I think you will like Taiwan's "fighting Coding Girls Camp". There are many "fair resources" only for women, and "fairness and justice" including free food and accommodation. There is no selection process like the OI selection camp. Only those who submit a form and have a "progress chromosome" can enjoy this state benefit. And did you know? The summer camp time alone is only two days less than the Taiwan training camp in one stage! It’s awesome, right? But this is still not enough progress! Let me think of any other "fair measures" that could be added...
Not entirely sure, but author's main concern was the attitude towards girls in cp, not making more privileges for them.
Forgive if I am not understanding. If we have female only competitions, how will women train for being against men to win in the all-gender competitions?
Thanks for this blog! What can men do to fix the gender gap in competitive programming? In my local competitive programming scene, almost everyone is male (most are asian males) and even though there are no barriers to entry, almost every new person is male (and asian). I can see why thats very scary to people who aren't in that community (I've had similar experiences in communities outside competitive programming) and I would like to change it, but I'm not sure how I can. If you have any tips I would really appreciate it!
I guess there's also another part of this question, which is whether it's condescending to actively try to recruit girls. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that as well.
Not directly answering since I'm male, but I have been only non-asian in several contest/stem-related situations so I think about this sometimes.
I think you are involved in some contest hosting(?), for that type of stuff I think you could try things like reaching out to teachers in schools or even somehow parent groups that normally don't send participants and hope one of them will tell their students. This takes more effort and to be in situation most people aren't in tho.
Easier to implement in everyone's life I think is just to tell people around you that you talk to
hopefully you talk to at least one non-asian or non-maleabout stuff like competitive programming and directly encourage them to try it out. Sometimes kinda hard to balance not being annoying/weird abt it ig, but just if you happen to bring up "I do competitive programming" you can say briefly what it is and "you should try out, I'm serious, I think you'll actually like. you can ask me for more advice if you want".These type of changes happen most by slowly spreading influence locally and hoping it propagates I think, so realistically for most people best you can do is encourage people around you.
Many people here don't seem to understand butterfly effect ideas — little differences in behavior results in big outcome differences. Even in cases when women aren't directly told not to pursue stem or similar, I've seen happen to people around me that repeated small input towards what is important to spend time on between genders causes the great difference in population interested in various areas. This is not exclusive to women of course, but gender is probably the largest division for how much this plays out as far as stem encouragement.
I don't think providing gender-dependent opportunities is the final solution, but it is the most pragmatic way to raise initial action. I hope generally more people can encourage their peers and share resources regardless of who they are.
First, your blog is very well written and describes what is still the present day situations in many parts of the world, and although steps have been made in that direction, with competitions such as EGOI and EGMO, as many other people wrote in the comments, there is still a lot of work to be done and the solution is unfortunately not easy to find, as you can see from the following things I will mention.
While it makes sense to first encourage people here to be the pioneers towards making sure girls who join this field (or STEM in general) are treated the same as everyone else, I think we have to look one step back and realize that most of us didn't have someone in their family who could encourage us no matter what (for the record, if I were a girl, I would have probably received way less encouragement or even mocking from people around me based on what I've seen around me during my early years in school). As you pointed, bullying is less of a problem nowadays but I believe vicious remarks are still there, which indirectly affect women in STEM.
A really important thing is that parents have a huge influence on a child's upbringing like some other comments here mentioned so if we can encourage actions which empower EVERYONE (not just one group or the other, like I see a lot of people in my circles do), girls will benefit as well from this. This reminds me of how I had the chance to spend a few days at IOI in 2023 and I remember hearing some discussions during a conference about whether EGOI is enough to narrow the gap and one conclusion which was shared by some of the participants was that by the time girls get to know about competitive programming, most of the damage (in the context of this blog) was already done, and after having made some research, I agree with this point. (As some evidence, over the years, while the numbers improved compared to the past, there are still only roughly 25 to 30% of girls who attend the Romanian Olympiad in the lower grades, number which goes down to around 10-15% for higher grades, which is more or less the standard across the board at these competitions.)
Another thing I remarked is that once a girl ends up in a position where she can perform well at contests, a lot of people (especially from the older generations) have a weird obsession around the idea that she is some sort of a wonder woman and if she fails, then she deserves being bullied and harassed for that (I have seen this with my eyes as I briefly worked with a girl from my school many years ago who asked for my help in preparation for the Informatics Olympiad, and instead of getting encouragement like guys would (she narrowly missed the threshold for the next stage), she ended up being bullied by her teacher out of computer science altogether).
Now, while I can keep going with stories around how harder it really is for a girl to perform compared to a boy when it comes to STEM competitions, I believe the solutions have to be more or less global and the perspective has to reflect the realities everyone faces in terms of any field in general.
In short, as far as encouraging really young students to pursue anything they are good at regardless of societal norms, I believe a collective effort has to be made in that regard, effort which is not limited just to this community (I, for a fact, believe that our effect can be at most marginal and I will explain what we can do in the next paragraph).
In terms of what people here can do, I believe a big part of the solution comes down to respecting your peers and their efforts towards pursuing this field we love, as long as they are in this for legitimately improving their skills. I think that once we learn to not see lower skilled people as lesser people and in general to respect everyone, the effect will be the same as far as doing our part to help girls here have an easier time around, without the fear that they will be judged just because they are girls.
The reason why respect is so important is because while none of us is perfect and we all did mistakes at some point, myself included, we can slowly turn the page and avoid throwing the vitriol caused by various agendas which are meant to divide us rather than unite us in our goals. After all, I believe most people agree with you if you ask them whether women should be treated better than they are, but if the narratives are spinned in a certain way, you would lose a lot of the support.
Last but not least, personally I think that recruiting girls just for the sake of having more girls around here isn't exactly more productive without first preparing a friendlier environment for everyone (again, a lot of people here also come to express their frustrations with various real life situations and while life isn't perfect for anyone, there is no point in hating someone just because they happen to be part of a group you hate).
As a conclusion (and more like a TL; DR;), we need to first prepare our environments for a broader reach of our field (which I don't think we are ready yet) and then more people (and consequentially, more girls) will be interested in joining and pursuing our passion.
Stefdasca is an Asshole and is the problem himself
I didn't read anything he said, because I don't care what he has to say about this topic (or any topic in general).
Here is what he said after berr's 2nd place at EGOI (There are more worse things, but I apologize that I can't find all of it). He is literally the perfect example of the problem being cited in this blog. You can see the screenshots below. Please downvote him to hell.
On a related note, due to this guy's behaviour, a large portion of the AC community left AC and made a new server.
I do believe that overhyping girls in programming competitions is just as bad as bullying them when they don't do well in contests (it's one of the points I explained here earlier).
I have to admit that I was wrong in terms of some of my remarks regarding berr's EGOI performance and I want to apologize to her (and everyone else who felt offended by my remarks, which were solely based on my experience with how people view girls in other programming competitions).
But besides that, I stand with most of my remarks in general when it comes to how are girls treated by many people when they try to do well (for some context, I believe there is a lot of non genuine support when a girl does well rather than when other people from the same community do well and sometimes I prefer saying things as they are, even though I might be wrong in the end).
Lol you and TwentyOneHundredOrBust always have excuse attacking people. Sometimes it's "moral obligation", sometimes it's "saving codeforces". You only pretend to apologize when it backlashes.
You two are the worst kind of people in this community and have no business judging others.
It is sad to see this. Another example is Umnik. Even though he did not comment directly against girls, he said 1800 is not a good rating(mediocre) despite 1800 most likely being in the 90th percentile or above if you look at the statistics of codeforces users, which in my opinion is quite offensive and discouraging to plenty of people who have worked hard to achieve that. I don't understand the point of belittling someone's accomplishments instead of encouraging them. It doesn't mean you need to lie but going out of your way to say X rating/accomplishment is bad etc when all of this is subjective sounds bad to me.
I think Um_nik's opinion should not be unheard. Of course, when a person is legendary grandmaster, they will surely think 1800 is bad. It is like how the rich in our society think that poor people are not worthy of their place, that they are vile beings. I do not think that is wrong.
This comment is super funny considering the stefdasca lore.
I don't care about statistics (especially an overrated and naive statistics where you take every user into account of codeforces) but Um_nik isn't wrong, 1800 rating is mediocre and without accepting that there is no room for excellence.My max rating is 1656 and and I accept that's mediocre and 1800 is also mediocre
Like I said what is considered a "good" rating is subjective and one can't flat out claim that their opinion is the only correct one. 1800 is top 75 in your country and top 450 in mine and it is perfectly reasonable for someone to consider as it as a "good" rating. Also, there is no reason to believe that if someone considers their current rating to be "good", then they can't improve their rating by a lot and achieve "excellence". That maybe a way you look at things but that doesn't mean everyone else should/will look at it the same way. For instance, someone can believe their current rating is good but still far below their maximum potential and therefore continue to work hard and improve.
Maybe my initial comment was missing context. It is perfectly fine for Umnik or anyone else to consider 1800 rating to not be good. However, Umnik responded to the below comment with his "1800- mediocre" comment which is what I consider to be pathetic.
""" Please understand that the definition of fun is different for different people. If, for some people, fun means getting a good rank and having a good rating -- then regardless of what you say AI IS ruining competitive programming for them.
And if you think their definition of fun should match yours, then I don't know what to say"""
Do you know greedy algorithm?
I find your blog to be a case of double standards. There are the two classic views:
You can't have both at the same time.
That said, I think that the movement for EGOI is great. It is a high standards competition that has, from what I've seen and from what I've heard, already had a signficant impact.
This is not a good example of sexism. In Codeforces competitions, gender doesn't matter (view 1). Here everyone is equal.
However, suppose a company were to recruit people based on diversity quotas, like for example Google. This creates a doubt of whether the person qualified because of skills, or because of the diversity quotas (view 2).
I take issue with your representation of their position.
Double standards — yes, those two views are obviously contradictory when taken at face value, but that would be absurd and I don't believe that's what's being said here.
Bad example of sexism — I'm not sure how that interpretation follows from the quote you cited. The question doesn't dispute the objectivity of Codeforces rating, but rather individuals' subjective judgement of it. Someone with internal biases might be more inclined to chalk up a female competitor's rating to "lucky contests" and the like. The next two sentences of that paragraph describe examples of people putting their preconceived notions ahead of a fairly objective and completely equal, as you described, metric, which seems to support this.
I do agree with your views on diversity quotas. To add to the concerns you've mentioned, I think they also devalue the accomplishments of those who didn't need them to succeed in the first place. And, when it comes to fixed-sum situations like hiring, discriminatory practices (regardless of whether they're for the greater good) breed conflict that I think outweigh the benefits in the long term.
However, note that unless you consider EGOI itself a form of diversity quota, which I wouldn't in anything but an extremely abstract sense as it's a separate event, the blog doesn't even allude to them anywhere. I'm not sure why this was listed as a criticism.
I feel like since this post has brought up a bunch of conversations about identity politics, it's becoming the target of a lot of unwarranted heat from people that have gripes with ideas that the poster has not shown to hold. Reading it from a clean slate, it's really just a collection of personal anecdotes with a couple of extremely baseline and fairly uncontroversial points.
I don't completely agree with "everyone is equal" (gender does not matter) on CF. I think that to prove this some girl have to reach top 10, but this goes back to what blog mentions that they don't get much support and stuff. I think that we will never know, until everyone can perform without any inconveniences.
Support.
Other than this, you have said what I wanted to say, thanks.
Here is some statistics that might surprise you. Out of the 15 gold winners in EGOI2024, only 4 competed in IOI2024. Out of those, half got IOI gold.
And what is your point? I want you to say it directly, without "I'm just citing some statistics, everyone can make their own conclusions". Because right now my conclusion is that you haven't read the blog and you think that women are inherently worse at CP than men, but if I start arguing with that I would put words in your mouth. Words you technically didn't say, you just cited some statistics.
That's not what I'm trying to say at all. Seems to me that there are a lot of talented contestants from EGOI that never got to participate in the IOI finals. For example both 2nd and 3rd place in EGOI2024 didn't go to IOI2024, even though they beat two people that would later get gold at IOI2024. I can only speculate as to why.
Well, this is one of the reasons why we have the EGOI...
There is no need to speculate, simply there are lots of female competitive programmers who don't have the chance to exercise their skills on a large stage because of the sex disparity in informatics (EGOI 2nd place for example would have done great in OI but the USA team was very very strong this year).
Ideally this will also lead to a more 50-50 split in future years.