Why don't you group humans into 'suffered lots of disadvantage', 'suffered a medium amount', 'suffered none'.
First, how does one directly measure disadvantage suffered? It's not a trivial thing to do. Hacker School doesn't have a lot of resources. Measuring race/gender/etc. is easy and correlates strongly with disadvantage. It's also a hard measure to "game" or fake.
Second, race/gender/etc. problems are (as pointed out) systemic in our society and in programmer culture specifically. That is to say, there are cultural habits, assumptions, attitudes, institutions, etc. which disadvantage people for no other reason than being nonwhite/nonmale. One thing that is enormously helpful in fixing these kinds of problems is simply having more nonwhite/nonmale people in the culture.
Helping a person who was disadvantaged by a mere quirk of fate helps only them. Helping someone disadvantaged by their race or sex helps them and helps everyone like them, in the long run. It reduces stereotype threat; it wears away at unfortunate cultural assumptions and attitudes; it provides positive role models; etc. etc.
Third, and most speculatively, I think these are the kind of problems that an organization like HS is particularly well-positioned to tackle. I believe that (e.g.) simple poverty and other forms of "brute disadvantage" are serious problems in our society (and indeed there still are some lingering class prejudices against poor people, so it's not an entirely "brute" disadvantage either). But I don't think that HS is likely to substantially help these problems by, say, merely offering grants to poor people. Poverty is too big, too general a problem to solve that way. But racism and sexism in programmer culture is a problem where HS actually has a shot at making a (small) difference.
Comments
First, how does one directly measure disadvantage suffered? It's not a trivial thing to do. Hacker School doesn't have a lot of resources. Measuring race/gender/etc. is easy and correlates strongly with disadvantage. It's also a hard measure to "game" or fake.
Second, race/gender/etc. problems are (as pointed out) systemic in our society and in programmer culture specifically. That is to say, there are cultural habits, assumptions, attitudes, institutions, etc. which disadvantage people for no other reason than being nonwhite/nonmale. One thing that is enormously helpful in fixing these kinds of problems is simply having more nonwhite/nonmale people in the culture.
Helping a person who was disadvantaged by a mere quirk of fate helps only them. Helping someone disadvantaged by their race or sex helps them and helps everyone like them, in the long run. It reduces stereotype threat; it wears away at unfortunate cultural assumptions and attitudes; it provides positive role models; etc. etc.
Third, and most speculatively, I think these are the kind of problems that an organization like HS is particularly well-positioned to tackle. I believe that (e.g.) simple poverty and other forms of "brute disadvantage" are serious problems in our society (and indeed there still are some lingering class prejudices against poor people, so it's not an entirely "brute" disadvantage either). But I don't think that HS is likely to substantially help these problems by, say, merely offering grants to poor people. Poverty is too big, too general a problem to solve that way. But racism and sexism in programmer culture is a problem where HS actually has a shot at making a (small) difference.