> "We take this approach specifically because we don't do any affirmative action or bias our admissions process in favor of specific groups."
You're giving grants to women specifically because they are women. That's a bias. You're favoring a specific group. What about the men who haven't applied because they can't afford it and aren't women? You should be giving grants to underprivileged people regardless of sex. But that wouldn't get you or the companies sponsoring the grants nice press release, now would it?
1) We judge male and female applicants on exactly the same scale. We in no way lower the bar for women or any other group. Nor do we give women or any other group a leg up when making admissions decisions.
2) We offer grants to women who need financial assistance. By offering these grants, we do bias the pool of applicants, because we (hopefully) increase the number of women who choose to apply.
3) We have put a tremendous amount of time, energy, thought, and effort over the past few years into making Hacker School free for everyone, and we continue to work very hard to continue making this possible. We effectively give all our students a $10-15k scholarship by not charging any tuition.
Our great crime appears to be the fact that we have not yet found a way to additionally give money to everyone who can't afford to come to Hacker School.
I really like this approach to the gender imbalance problem: grow the pool, don't lower the bar. I think this is the way to go, and I hope that more tech organizations will think of it this way.
You're giving grants to women specifically because they are women. That's a bias. You're favoring a specific group. What about the men who haven't applied because they can't afford it and aren't women? You should be giving grants to underprivileged people regardless of sex. But that wouldn't get you or the companies sponsoring the grants nice press release, now would it?