8 ms·

Diversity in Technology and Open Source

41 points by Spiritus 9y ago

b6 9y ago
Nobody opposes diversity of experience, perspective, skill, etc. It really is helpful to have people with different use cases testing and developing the software. But "diversity" is being used to mean diversity of gender, ethnicity, etc., as if it matters, as if it is a reliable proxy for those other things like experience and perspective and skill, when it's not. When I was starting to program and talk to people on the net, nobody cared about my age or ethnicity or gender. I was just a name and an area code and some skills. The compiler certainly did not care about my ethnicity or gender. It was perfectly fair to me. I will not go out of my way to try to rope people into my projects because they have different color skin. If people show up to help, I welcome them. I don't particularly care about their genetic code. I don't have any preconception about what the graphs of the ethnicities and genders of contributors would look like. Who cares? We are not our bodies and I won't help build a future where body attributes are considered an important part of identity.
- fapjacks 9y ago
  This is one of the most well-spoken comments I've ever read on HN.
- atomi 9y ago
  > as if it matters In terms of programming, where the domain is very specific, I somewhat agree that it doesn't matter. But in a more general sense, since it's life experiences that culminate into who a person is, their perspective will be based on their identity. And it will vary in unexpected ways. If you're a large company in a diverse market like the American market or a global market, you don't want to appear tone deaf in terms of your marketing and your products. So it's important to get differing perspectives before that new launch.
  - wyager 9y ago
    > So it's important to get differing perspectives before that new launch. Sure, which is why your marketing team has to be familiar with regional cultures and customs. It doesn't mean you need to account for every target cultural group on your IT support staff.
    - atomi 9y ago
      Well yeah, you've successfully paraphrased my point. As always, context matters.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    I definitely appreciated the Unicode example in this article. It's a nice, clear case where having more diversity (in this case, someone who regularly uses a non-ASCII language) on a team can increase value rapidly. Having someone around who says "hey, this system won't handle my name right, that's super annoying" can add value to the project for a few billion people. Obviously team diversity isn't the only way to achieve that gain, but it's a good one that's often lacking.
- tptacek 9y ago
  This comment doesn't say anything. Except in very rare cases, people aren't premising their arguments against "diversity" on overt animosity for women and people of color. All you're doing is restating the fundamental dispute: "is it acceptable to continue the practices that have led to an industry disproportionately lacking women and people of color?" The "yes" argument obviously says compilers don't care about gender or skin color. The "no" argument says that arguments in favor of inequitable staffing are a form of the Just World Fallacy. You need to do better than just restate those arguments to add something new.
  - b6 9y ago
    There's no need to add something new. I'm just resisting the rise of these new more insidious forms of racism and sexism.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      That's not so much an argument as it is a tired play on words, an attempt to define away the debate. Your opponents in this debate do not believe that working to correct overt exclusion of women and people of color from the industry is a form of racism or sexism. Meanwhile, everyone agrees that such overt exclusion, if it exists, is racist or sexist. So you can argue about whether that exclusion exists, but you can't shut down the argument by claiming that it's somehow racist/sexist against white men.
      - lobster2 9y ago
        By trying to 'correct overt exclusion of women and people of color from the industry'you will basically treat those people preferential over the prevailing population (i.e. white, asian and jewish men). What's not racist and sexist about that?
      - wyager 9y ago
        > overt exclusion Low turnout does not imply someone is being excluded. Different groups of people tend to have different interests. > everyone agrees that such overt exclusion, if it exists, is racist or sexist. > So you can argue about whether that exclusion exists, but you can't shut down the argument by claiming that it's somehow racist/sexist against white men. I don't even know what kind of fallacy this is, but it's definitely out there. "If this hypothetical thing we made up does exist, that would make your argument wrong, so you can't use that argument." Whatever pie-in-the-sky claims you want to make, the direct, practical, and real-world effect of these policies is subverting meritocracy and discriminating against groups of people who are political targets (white and Asian men). It is absolutely both racist and sexist in any sane, non-doublespeak sense of the words.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  > But "diversity" is being used to mean diversity of gender, ethnicity, etc., as if it matters, as if it is a reliable proxy for those other things like experience and perspective and skill, when it's not. Yes, b6. It is. Your personal experience is of course unique. While your experience may have familiar notes with many people, it's fundamentally different from someone who grew up as a young girl. Your fears and the options presented to you are going to be different. Identical people come to similar conclusions. Folks who have raised this idea of "diversity of thought" think that it adequately addresses this idea that diversity is a value add for software by saying, "Well it's all about thought." But those initial conditions our minds are so sensitive to are not easily ignored. You cannot have it both ways in this. Either you simply don't care about diversity (which is a value decision I am not denying your ability to make), or you do and physical indicators that shape how society treats people are a high quality signal of diversity. You cannot rationally suggest both that diversity is important but that people's traits and backgrounds aren't. People try to turn this into a value proposition here (as it seems like you may be doing) are taking half the situation into account. For a value proposition, you're looking at your project's upside. For example, a product primarily aimed uniquely at women would probably be best served by a qualified woman. But even in this, bias creeps in (the famous study results suggesting men are so acclimated to dominating the conversation that when women talk for half the time, men perceive it as oppressive). In this specific scenario, women have reported being hired and then simply not given the power to do their jobs, or not being present in larger orgs with sufficient numbers to create the impact they were hired to create. But the diversity movement is also trying to reduce the downside for individuals who often find themselves on the brunt end of unfair standards, inappropriate behavior and discriminatory teammates. You may talk all day about how "my compiler doesn't care" but this is you looking down at your desk quietly as folks all over the industry go through terrible and unfair treatment. Your compiler doesn't care about that, but you should. You suggest that changing this status quo would actually be a more subtle form of racism or sexism. This is true, insofar as the top article accidentally falls into a paternalistic role and offers open source housekeeping roles to women as a token offering, thinking this is an incentive. In terms of damaging the fortunes of white men at the expense of offering other people, the truth is that correcting for gender and racial bias in our industry will bring us closer to a meritocracy and offer more potential for talent to emerge than the current state of affairs.
a_imho 9y ago
I don't agree with the implied correlation of user friendliness and diversity, let alone the supposed causation. The Gimp example seems a forced attempt to support Armin's agenda. Disclaimer: I don't know how diverse the Gimp developer base is as opposed to a user friendly competing product.
- HelloNurse 9y ago
  Let's focus on GIMP, it's a good example. We know that none, or not enough, of the important GIMP developers who made the important UI decisions had particularly good taste for UI, resulting in mediocre choices. But how can we distinguish lack of diversity due to social and economical factors filtering the pool of potential contributors, perfectly fair self-selection of a project committee of people who simply think alike, and random unintentional lack of skill? Would investigating the issue accomplish anything besides aggravating GIMP contributors? Moreover, useful plans should be about concrete attempts to improve GIMP by contributing patches and convincing the maintainers to make changes; attempting to make the GIMP team more diverse in the hope that it performs better is pure wishful thinking.
alexfi 9y ago
I think IT and especially open source is one area, where your gender, background, sexual orientation doesn't matter. The most open source projects I'm using or working on, are made by people I don't know how they look. The only thing that matters is the ability of writing good code. The author is in that point right, that there are more male programmers than female. But to solve this problem you have to start way earlier, with getting the interest to tech things of a child (regardless of gender) in school or even earlier.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Major open source projects are disproportionately managed and staffed by people with full-time jobs at major software companies, and the process of obtaining and thriving in one of those jobs is not intrinsically color and gender blind, so this argument isn't persuasive.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    > Major open source projects are disproportionately managed and staffed by people with full-time jobs at major software companies, and the process of obtaining and thriving in one of those jobs is not intrinsically color and gender blind, so this argument isn't persuasive. How is it surprising that they work in software? It's like finding out that your welding instructor has worked as a welder; surely somebody who contributes to a field in public is more likely to have a job in that field in private, but does that mean that not having a job precludes you from having a skill? I mean, I've been NEET going on half a year, and I'm contributing to open source projects, do I need a software job to do open source? I was contributing to open source projects before I was ever employed, do I need to have had a job to do open source?
  - justicezyx 9y ago
    > process of obtaining and thriving in one of those jobs is not intrinsically color and gender blind So it's ok now to post a comment with a strong statement without any data?
jasode 9y ago
>we need more [...] people that are good in de-escalating arguments in bug trackers and mailing lists, people that take care of documentations, people that make software work in new cultural contexts (localization, globalization, internationalization, etc.), people that care about user experience etc If you're a male, you have to be careful writing out suggestions like that because to females such as my mother with a career in electronics, it is patronizing. Women can also be a "strong engineers" and they shouldn't be relegated to "open source housekeeping duties" as a dangling carrot to attract them. Yes, Armin Ronacher means no harm but I think men often fall into the trap of thinking they are championing women's causes when they are actually insulting their intelligence.
- tptacek 9y ago
  I agree. We ran into something similar when we were working on Starfighter, where Erin and I were repeatedly told that CTFs were intrinsically male-oriented because women disfavored zero-sum competition (which was surprising for Erin, a roller derby skater, to hear). It also doesn't (at least in my opinion) help the cause of balancing the industry to be telling engineers that the only way to do so is to emphasize soft skills and deemphasize competition (and subtextually with it technical excellence).
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    > CTFs were intrinsically male-oriented because women disfavored zero-sum competition (which was surprising for Erin, a roller derby skater, to hear) Surely you and Erin both recognize that it's possible that both (a) women, generally (compared to men), 'disfavor zero-sum competition'; and (b) Erin favors 'zero-zum competition'. [I'm not claiming that it's true or even that there's significant evidence that women 'disfavor zero-sum competition', absolutely or relative to men.]
  - belorn 9y ago
    I have seen very small variation on how people emphasis things to have extreme effect on the demographic of participants. To take a different topic than IT, a public bath house in the city have a goal that visitors should be 50% women and 50% men. When they first had special a sauna evening called "Relax" with a emphasis on adventure (ie, a few events had names like Everest), they had full booked for men but only about 1/3 ticked sold for the remaining 50% that was dedicated for women. A month later they held a second evening, this time called "Wellness", they also renamed the events. Everest was now called ice sauna, salt sauna was renamed to scrubbing, but other than the name they the exact same events. This time all the tickets for women was sold after just a day but only 2 tickets for men sold in total. A complete reverse. Later events has shown similar pattern where more "adventure"-styled marketing leads to more men and less women, and self-improvement styled marketing leads to more women and less men. A small leap I will make is that people of both genders look towards gendered emphasis to validate their choice. If its for their gender then it is a safe choice, and if its not then doubt arise. The effect being a small bias that depending on what one is doing can have a rather extreme results.
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microcolonel 9y ago
You know, I never stopped to figure out the ethnicities and genders of co-contributors on a project, it truly is an unnatural thought. I'm concerned that the people who are most concerned about diversity in "open source", do so because they consider themselves a threat to it. Maybe white people like diving computers or lake sonar, maybe women care more about topography or teledildonics; but if nobody cares to even know the accidental characteristics of the people who send the patches, then is it an issue when the numbers bear that out?
mafribe 9y ago
everyone agrees that such overt exclusion, if it exists, is racist or sexist. I certainly do not agree with this. Your opponents simply deny that the compiler has the ability to exclude or be sexist or racist. The argument that the compiler or test suite discriminates on anything but merit is for you to make. Good luck. you can't shut down the argument by claiming that it's somehow racist/ sexist against white men. On the contrary, this is an extremely good counterargument, and the reason you try to re-frame it away is precisely because you know it is a good counterargument. Dare we speak of "ptacekian fragility"? There is another re-frame that you maliciously use: you talk about white men, when you should really be talking about white and asian men. The spectacular success of asian men (and -- to a lesser degree -- asian women) in SV (and any profession that needs high degrees of education) absolutely, brutally burns to the crips any claim that there is racism/sexism at play. And you know it -- hence the ongoing reframes.
- tptacek 9y ago
  No, it absolutely does not. The definition of "whiteness" has changed dramatically over the 20th century to accommodate and include the successes of formerly disfavored minorities while maintaining the lower status of latinos and, most especially, African Americans. Italians, Greeks, and the Irish also used not to be "white". It is, if you stop to think about it, a little silly to argue that the success of Asians means there's no meaningful disadvantages to being African American.
  - lobster2 9y ago
    One of the meaningful disadvantages to being African American is having a substantially lower IQ on average compared to most other population groups. I would wager that IQ correlates strongly with performance in any scientific or technical field. And no, this difference is not only due to cultural influence. Up to 80% is genetic. I'm sorry, but I think people on this site prefer to discuss true facts, how politically sensitive they might be.
    - angersock 9y ago
sparkling 9y ago
> I wont accept your pull request because you are [black/female/gay/asian/latino/transgender/whatever minority of the week] Said no one ever
- KirinDave 9y ago
  > I will accept your pull request, but be aware on my twitter I was just talking about how much I despise you and every liar like you. Thank you for the free work, you disgusting child-corrupting liar. Said lots of people just last week.
  - jp_sc 9y ago
    Really? Show me five Github projects where the main developer has said something like that at some point this year.
    - KirinDave 9y ago
      Drupal? Dude got kicked out for giving talks on how women have biological predispositions against rational thought. He was a prominent developer that had a profound influence on the community.
jankotek 9y ago
There is a old saying: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." It can not get more diverse and inclusive than that.
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brighteyes 9y ago
To really understand the issue, you need to look at all the facts. And yes, while women are underrepresented in open source, LGBT people are overrepresented - almost double their percentage in the general population in fact (7% vs 4%). So any theory of "open source drives away women" has to explain why it has the opposite effect on LGBT people. There isn't going to be a simple answer there and maybe we aren't even asking the right questions yet.
- HelloNurse 9y ago
  There's no conflict, it depends on whether these LGBT people are women. I suspect that few lesbian, bisexual, transgender women follow the typical social patterns that keep women away from open source software: few uneducated housewives, few early marriages and unplanned pregnancies interfering with education and work, little inclination in general for taking care of household chores sacrificing themselves so that their S.O. has some free time for open source work, few and/or late children, etc.
metaphorm 9y ago
There's a bit of an elephant-in-the-room here which I wish Armin had discussed more. I agree with Armin on what he did mention, which is that there is great need in OSS projects for people with greater focus on skills besides just hard boiled coding. I wish he had discussed the issue that seems to be creeping up in many places now (recent example: cancellation of Electron Conference) which is that there are many activist groups who are seeking to implement diversity quotas. That is a really scary idea and a step in the wrong direction.
zmoreira 9y ago
If “Diversity in Open Source Is Even Worse Than in Tech Overall” and there are less barriers to participation in Open Source it could be that this "lack of diversity" accurately reflects the interests and capabilities of the different groups? It could be that the different kinds of humans are not identical and given an even playing field different outcomes will result. It could also be that the lack of diversity in tech is the mirror image of the lack of diversity in other fields such as healthcare and education. If that is so it could be that the "lack of diversity" is the result of diversity in human inclinations and it would only be stamped out through increasingly authoritarian measures.
- nanistheonlyist 9y ago
  Authoritarian measures are the name of the game. The point of all this is not to increase inclusion, it is to to increase the power of those who decide what is or is not inclusive.
- HelloNurse 9y ago
  One has to be even more privileged to spend time on open source work than to hold a well-paid IT job; there are additional barriers. For instance, open source contributors need free time, which is usually a consequence of relatively short working hours (i.e. being highly competent and educated) and short commutes (i.e. an expensive house in a convenient location), and not having to spend a lot of time, when at home, on housekeeping, children, old and ill family members, hostile environment, distractions, etc.
Klockan 9y ago
Isn't it strange that diversity gets worse when you add anonymity?
aeorgnoieang 9y ago
All of the members of the [Pocoo Team][1] seem to be white men. [1]: http://www.pocoo.org/team/#team http://www.pocoo.org/team/#team Is that a reflection of your hypocrisy? Or the difficulty of recruiting people that are not white men? I'm guessing it's mostly the latter. You wrote: > When you start an Open Source project today, in particular one which is further disconnected from frontend technologies there is a very high chance the organic community development will be everything but diverse. and given the following, from [this comment][2] in this thread, which seems probably true: > Major open source projects are disproportionately managed and staffed by people with full-time jobs at major software companies, and the process of obtaining and thriving in one of those jobs is not intrinsically color and gender blind, so this argument isn't persuasive. [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14488000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14488000 we should be tempering our judgements of open source projects, e.g. that they're not welcoming to people that are not white men. I'm confused as to what principle or principles you think should actually be adopted. Should all open source projects reflect the 'diversity' of the entire world? Consider the following, from [this comment][3] also from this thread: > LGBT people are overrepresented - almost double their percentage in the general population in fact (7% vs 4%). [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14488689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14488689 Assuming that the above is true, is this a cause for concern? Would you similarly be concerned if it were true that, say, Asian people, or even just Asian men, were over-represented in technology or open source software projects? Is that not a cause for concern for you too? It sure seems like the only cause for concern is that there are too many white men. Would anyone ever criticize an open source project for not having 'enough white people' or 'enough men', let alone 'enough white men'? More from your post: > What's worse is the longer you wait to try to get people involved in the project that would naturally not try to join the harder it will be. When your team is 4 men, the first woman which joins will make a significant impact. When your team is already 20 men you need to get a lot more women on board to have the same impact. My problem with this is that you're pretty clearly, tho implicitly, devaluing contributors that don't help your project meet your diversity quotas. Your team is six white men. Have you considered replacing your existing members with women or people of color? When someone contacts you, your team members, or other contributors to your projects, do you ask them to identify their race, ethnicity, sex, or gender so you can discourage white men from contributing? If not, don't you realize that every white man that joins your team or contributes to your projects is making your diversity problem worse? You're also implicitly bashing your team members and contributors for being the wrong kind of people because you're telling them that their homogeneity is: 1. "not healthy for a project or a community to lack diversity" 2. Contributing to an "echo chamber" 3. Increasing the difficulty of future diversity 4. Hurting the project because they are relatively bad at "de-escalating arguments in bug trackers and mailing lists" 5. Hurting the project because they are relatively bad at "[taking] care of documentation" 6. They are not "people that make software work in new cultural contexts (localization, globalization, internationalization, etc.)", i.e. they are unable to understand or work with other "cultural contexts". 7. They are not "people that care about user experience" --- I'm sure you agree with me in thinking that everyone that wants to 'participate in technology' or contribute to an open source project should be able to do so. And moreover, people that don't even realize that they would enjoy contributing to an open source project should be given that knowledge – all else being equal of course. But that's the key constraint on how much marginal effort should be expended to recruit people that aren't already participating and contributing – all else is not equal. Everything is costly to some degree. De-escalating arguments in bug-trackers or mailing lists – let alone even participating in arguments – requires time and energy! And there's only a finite supply of either! And opportunity costs are real and pervasive – arguing with people can be satisfying, but it can also be incredibly aggravating! Writing documentation – and editing it, or maintaining it, or re-organizing it, etc. – requires time and energy! Someone has to do it and for most open source projects that means someone has to voluntarily do it. And this neglects the fact that 'localizing' or 'globalizing' that same documentation isn't even possible unless one knows at least two languages pretty well! If you're going to "artificially bring balance" to your open source team, your open source project's contributors, or your conference, you're restricting the supply of possible people and thus raising the relative cost of whatever it is that you want done, whether it be writing documentation or providing user support in your issue tracker or mailing list. I haven't personally observed any significant and unfair obstacles preventing people that are not white men from participating in open source projects, or 'technology' generally. But I'm sure they exist. Let's get rid of them. But first, let's actually identify them, and let's be careful with implying that every group of people that doesn't near-perfectly reflect the demographics of its wider community or country or whatever is guilty of overt racism, sexism, or other discrimination.

41 points by Spiritus 9y ago

b6 9y ago

Nobody opposes diversity of experience, perspective, skill, etc. It really is helpful to have people with different use cases testing and developing the software. But "diversity" is being used to mean diversity of gender, ethnicity, etc., as if it matters, as if it is a reliable proxy for those other things like experience and perspective and skill, when it's not. When I was starting to program and talk to people on the net, nobody cared about my age or ethnicity or gender. I was just a name and an area code and some skills. The compiler certainly did not care about my ethnicity or gender. It was perfectly fair to me. I will not go out of my way to try to rope people into my projects because they have different color skin. If people show up to help, I welcome them. I don't particularly care about their genetic code. I don't have any preconception about what the graphs of the ethnicities and genders of contributors would look like. Who cares? We are not our bodies and I won't help build a future where body attributes are considered an important part of identity.

fapjacks 9y ago
This is one of the most well-spoken comments I've ever read on HN.
atomi 9y ago
> as if it matters In terms of programming, where the domain is very specific, I somewhat agree that it doesn't matter. But in a more general sense, since it's life experiences that culminate into who a person is, their perspective will be based on their identity. And it will vary in unexpected ways. If you're a large company in a diverse market like the American market or a global market, you don't want to appear tone deaf in terms of your marketing and your products. So it's important to get differing perspectives before that new launch.
- wyager 9y ago
  > So it's important to get differing perspectives before that new launch. Sure, which is why your marketing team has to be familiar with regional cultures and customs. It doesn't mean you need to account for every target cultural group on your IT support staff.
  - atomi 9y ago
    Well yeah, you've successfully paraphrased my point. As always, context matters.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  I definitely appreciated the Unicode example in this article. It's a nice, clear case where having more diversity (in this case, someone who regularly uses a non-ASCII language) on a team can increase value rapidly. Having someone around who says "hey, this system won't handle my name right, that's super annoying" can add value to the project for a few billion people. Obviously team diversity isn't the only way to achieve that gain, but it's a good one that's often lacking.
tptacek 9y ago
This comment doesn't say anything. Except in very rare cases, people aren't premising their arguments against "diversity" on overt animosity for women and people of color. All you're doing is restating the fundamental dispute: "is it acceptable to continue the practices that have led to an industry disproportionately lacking women and people of color?" The "yes" argument obviously says compilers don't care about gender or skin color. The "no" argument says that arguments in favor of inequitable staffing are a form of the Just World Fallacy. You need to do better than just restate those arguments to add something new.
- b6 9y ago
  There's no need to add something new. I'm just resisting the rise of these new more insidious forms of racism and sexism.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    That's not so much an argument as it is a tired play on words, an attempt to define away the debate. Your opponents in this debate do not believe that working to correct overt exclusion of women and people of color from the industry is a form of racism or sexism. Meanwhile, everyone agrees that such overt exclusion, if it exists, is racist or sexist. So you can argue about whether that exclusion exists, but you can't shut down the argument by claiming that it's somehow racist/sexist against white men.
    - lobster2 9y ago
      By trying to 'correct overt exclusion of women and people of color from the industry'you will basically treat those people preferential over the prevailing population (i.e. white, asian and jewish men). What's not racist and sexist about that?
    - wyager 9y ago
      > overt exclusion Low turnout does not imply someone is being excluded. Different groups of people tend to have different interests. > everyone agrees that such overt exclusion, if it exists, is racist or sexist. > So you can argue about whether that exclusion exists, but you can't shut down the argument by claiming that it's somehow racist/sexist against white men. I don't even know what kind of fallacy this is, but it's definitely out there. "If this hypothetical thing we made up does exist, that would make your argument wrong, so you can't use that argument." Whatever pie-in-the-sky claims you want to make, the direct, practical, and real-world effect of these policies is subverting meritocracy and discriminating against groups of people who are political targets (white and Asian men). It is absolutely both racist and sexist in any sane, non-doublespeak sense of the words.
KirinDave 9y ago
> But "diversity" is being used to mean diversity of gender, ethnicity, etc., as if it matters, as if it is a reliable proxy for those other things like experience and perspective and skill, when it's not. Yes, b6. It is. Your personal experience is of course unique. While your experience may have familiar notes with many people, it's fundamentally different from someone who grew up as a young girl. Your fears and the options presented to you are going to be different. Identical people come to similar conclusions. Folks who have raised this idea of "diversity of thought" think that it adequately addresses this idea that diversity is a value add for software by saying, "Well it's all about thought." But those initial conditions our minds are so sensitive to are not easily ignored. You cannot have it both ways in this. Either you simply don't care about diversity (which is a value decision I am not denying your ability to make), or you do and physical indicators that shape how society treats people are a high quality signal of diversity. You cannot rationally suggest both that diversity is important but that people's traits and backgrounds aren't. People try to turn this into a value proposition here (as it seems like you may be doing) are taking half the situation into account. For a value proposition, you're looking at your project's upside. For example, a product primarily aimed uniquely at women would probably be best served by a qualified woman. But even in this, bias creeps in (the famous study results suggesting men are so acclimated to dominating the conversation that when women talk for half the time, men perceive it as oppressive). In this specific scenario, women have reported being hired and then simply not given the power to do their jobs, or not being present in larger orgs with sufficient numbers to create the impact they were hired to create. But the diversity movement is also trying to reduce the downside for individuals who often find themselves on the brunt end of unfair standards, inappropriate behavior and discriminatory teammates. You may talk all day about how "my compiler doesn't care" but this is you looking down at your desk quietly as folks all over the industry go through terrible and unfair treatment. Your compiler doesn't care about that, but you should. You suggest that changing this status quo would actually be a more subtle form of racism or sexism. This is true, insofar as the top article accidentally falls into a paternalistic role and offers open source housekeeping roles to women as a token offering, thinking this is an incentive. In terms of damaging the fortunes of white men at the expense of offering other people, the truth is that correcting for gender and racial bias in our industry will bring us closer to a meritocracy and offer more potential for talent to emerge than the current state of affairs.

a_imho 9y ago

I don't agree with the implied correlation of user friendliness and diversity, let alone the supposed causation. The Gimp example seems a forced attempt to support Armin's agenda. Disclaimer: I don't know how diverse the Gimp developer base is as opposed to a user friendly competing product.

HelloNurse 9y ago
Let's focus on GIMP, it's a good example. We know that none, or not enough, of the important GIMP developers who made the important UI decisions had particularly good taste for UI, resulting in mediocre choices. But how can we distinguish lack of diversity due to social and economical factors filtering the pool of potential contributors, perfectly fair self-selection of a project committee of people who simply think alike, and random unintentional lack of skill? Would investigating the issue accomplish anything besides aggravating GIMP contributors? Moreover, useful plans should be about concrete attempts to improve GIMP by contributing patches and convincing the maintainers to make changes; attempting to make the GIMP team more diverse in the hope that it performs better is pure wishful thinking.

alexfi 9y ago

I think IT and especially open source is one area, where your gender, background, sexual orientation doesn't matter. The most open source projects I'm using or working on, are made by people I don't know how they look. The only thing that matters is the ability of writing good code. The author is in that point right, that there are more male programmers than female. But to solve this problem you have to start way earlier, with getting the interest to tech things of a child (regardless of gender) in school or even earlier.

tptacek 9y ago
Major open source projects are disproportionately managed and staffed by people with full-time jobs at major software companies, and the process of obtaining and thriving in one of those jobs is not intrinsically color and gender blind, so this argument isn't persuasive.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > Major open source projects are disproportionately managed and staffed by people with full-time jobs at major software companies, and the process of obtaining and thriving in one of those jobs is not intrinsically color and gender blind, so this argument isn't persuasive. How is it surprising that they work in software? It's like finding out that your welding instructor has worked as a welder; surely somebody who contributes to a field in public is more likely to have a job in that field in private, but does that mean that not having a job precludes you from having a skill? I mean, I've been NEET going on half a year, and I'm contributing to open source projects, do I need a software job to do open source? I was contributing to open source projects before I was ever employed, do I need to have had a job to do open source?
- justicezyx 9y ago
  > process of obtaining and thriving in one of those jobs is not intrinsically color and gender blind So it's ok now to post a comment with a strong statement without any data?

jasode 9y ago

>we need more [...] people that are good in de-escalating arguments in bug trackers and mailing lists, people that take care of documentations, people that make software work in new cultural contexts (localization, globalization, internationalization, etc.), people that care about user experience etc If you're a male, you have to be careful writing out suggestions like that because to females such as my mother with a career in electronics, it is patronizing. Women can also be a "strong engineers" and they shouldn't be relegated to "open source housekeeping duties" as a dangling carrot to attract them. Yes, Armin Ronacher means no harm but I think men often fall into the trap of thinking they are championing women's causes when they are actually insulting their intelligence.

tptacek 9y ago
I agree. We ran into something similar when we were working on Starfighter, where Erin and I were repeatedly told that CTFs were intrinsically male-oriented because women disfavored zero-sum competition (which was surprising for Erin, a roller derby skater, to hear). It also doesn't (at least in my opinion) help the cause of balancing the industry to be telling engineers that the only way to do so is to emphasize soft skills and deemphasize competition (and subtextually with it technical excellence).
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  > CTFs were intrinsically male-oriented because women disfavored zero-sum competition (which was surprising for Erin, a roller derby skater, to hear) Surely you and Erin both recognize that it's possible that both (a) women, generally (compared to men), 'disfavor zero-sum competition'; and (b) Erin favors 'zero-zum competition'. [I'm not claiming that it's true or even that there's significant evidence that women 'disfavor zero-sum competition', absolutely or relative to men.]
- belorn 9y ago
  I have seen very small variation on how people emphasis things to have extreme effect on the demographic of participants. To take a different topic than IT, a public bath house in the city have a goal that visitors should be 50% women and 50% men. When they first had special a sauna evening called "Relax" with a emphasis on adventure (ie, a few events had names like Everest), they had full booked for men but only about 1/3 ticked sold for the remaining 50% that was dedicated for women. A month later they held a second evening, this time called "Wellness", they also renamed the events. Everest was now called ice sauna, salt sauna was renamed to scrubbing, but other than the name they the exact same events. This time all the tickets for women was sold after just a day but only 2 tickets for men sold in total. A complete reverse. Later events has shown similar pattern where more "adventure"-styled marketing leads to more men and less women, and self-improvement styled marketing leads to more women and less men. A small leap I will make is that people of both genders look towards gendered emphasis to validate their choice. If its for their gender then it is a safe choice, and if its not then doubt arise. The effect being a small bias that depending on what one is doing can have a rather extreme results.

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microcolonel 9y ago

You know, I never stopped to figure out the ethnicities and genders of co-contributors on a project, it truly is an unnatural thought. I'm concerned that the people who are most concerned about diversity in "open source", do so because they consider themselves a threat to it. Maybe white people like diving computers or lake sonar, maybe women care more about topography or teledildonics; but if nobody cares to even know the accidental characteristics of the people who send the patches, then is it an issue when the numbers bear that out?

mafribe 9y ago

everyone agrees that such overt exclusion, if it exists, is racist or sexist. I certainly do not agree with this. Your opponents simply deny that the compiler has the ability to exclude or be sexist or racist. The argument that the compiler or test suite discriminates on anything but merit is for you to make. Good luck. you can't shut down the argument by claiming that it's somehow racist/ sexist against white men. On the contrary, this is an extremely good counterargument, and the reason you try to re-frame it away is precisely because you know it is a good counterargument. Dare we speak of "ptacekian fragility"? There is another re-frame that you maliciously use: you talk about white men, when you should really be talking about white and asian men. The spectacular success of asian men (and -- to a lesser degree -- asian women) in SV (and any profession that needs high degrees of education) absolutely, brutally burns to the crips any claim that there is racism/sexism at play. And you know it -- hence the ongoing reframes.

tptacek 9y ago
No, it absolutely does not. The definition of "whiteness" has changed dramatically over the 20th century to accommodate and include the successes of formerly disfavored minorities while maintaining the lower status of latinos and, most especially, African Americans. Italians, Greeks, and the Irish also used not to be "white". It is, if you stop to think about it, a little silly to argue that the success of Asians means there's no meaningful disadvantages to being African American.
- lobster2 9y ago
  One of the meaningful disadvantages to being African American is having a substantially lower IQ on average compared to most other population groups. I would wager that IQ correlates strongly with performance in any scientific or technical field. And no, this difference is not only due to cultural influence. Up to 80% is genetic. I'm sorry, but I think people on this site prefer to discuss true facts, how politically sensitive they might be.
  - angersock 9y ago

sparkling 9y ago

> I wont accept your pull request because you are [black/female/gay/asian/latino/transgender/whatever minority of the week] Said no one ever

KirinDave 9y ago
> I will accept your pull request, but be aware on my twitter I was just talking about how much I despise you and every liar like you. Thank you for the free work, you disgusting child-corrupting liar. Said lots of people just last week.
- jp_sc 9y ago
  Really? Show me five Github projects where the main developer has said something like that at some point this year.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    Drupal? Dude got kicked out for giving talks on how women have biological predispositions against rational thought. He was a prominent developer that had a profound influence on the community.

jankotek 9y ago

There is a old saying: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." It can not get more diverse and inclusive than that.

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brighteyes 9y ago

To really understand the issue, you need to look at all the facts. And yes, while women are underrepresented in open source, LGBT people are overrepresented - almost double their percentage in the general population in fact (7% vs 4%). So any theory of "open source drives away women" has to explain why it has the opposite effect on LGBT people. There isn't going to be a simple answer there and maybe we aren't even asking the right questions yet.

HelloNurse 9y ago
There's no conflict, it depends on whether these LGBT people are women. I suspect that few lesbian, bisexual, transgender women follow the typical social patterns that keep women away from open source software: few uneducated housewives, few early marriages and unplanned pregnancies interfering with education and work, little inclination in general for taking care of household chores sacrificing themselves so that their S.O. has some free time for open source work, few and/or late children, etc.

metaphorm 9y ago

There's a bit of an elephant-in-the-room here which I wish Armin had discussed more. I agree with Armin on what he did mention, which is that there is great need in OSS projects for people with greater focus on skills besides just hard boiled coding. I wish he had discussed the issue that seems to be creeping up in many places now (recent example: cancellation of Electron Conference) which is that there are many activist groups who are seeking to implement diversity quotas. That is a really scary idea and a step in the wrong direction.

zmoreira 9y ago

If “Diversity in Open Source Is Even Worse Than in Tech Overall” and there are less barriers to participation in Open Source it could be that this "lack of diversity" accurately reflects the interests and capabilities of the different groups? It could be that the different kinds of humans are not identical and given an even playing field different outcomes will result. It could also be that the lack of diversity in tech is the mirror image of the lack of diversity in other fields such as healthcare and education. If that is so it could be that the "lack of diversity" is the result of diversity in human inclinations and it would only be stamped out through increasingly authoritarian measures.

nanistheonlyist 9y ago
Authoritarian measures are the name of the game. The point of all this is not to increase inclusion, it is to to increase the power of those who decide what is or is not inclusive.
HelloNurse 9y ago
One has to be even more privileged to spend time on open source work than to hold a well-paid IT job; there are additional barriers. For instance, open source contributors need free time, which is usually a consequence of relatively short working hours (i.e. being highly competent and educated) and short commutes (i.e. an expensive house in a convenient location), and not having to spend a lot of time, when at home, on housekeeping, children, old and ill family members, hostile environment, distractions, etc.

Klockan 9y ago

Isn't it strange that diversity gets worse when you add anonymity?

aeorgnoieang 9y ago

All of the members of the [Pocoo Team][1] seem to be white men. [1]: http://www.pocoo.org/team/#team http://www.pocoo.org/team/#team Is that a reflection of your hypocrisy? Or the difficulty of recruiting people that are not white men? I'm guessing it's mostly the latter. You wrote: > When you start an Open Source project today, in particular one which is further disconnected from frontend technologies there is a very high chance the organic community development will be everything but diverse. and given the following, from [this comment][2] in this thread, which seems probably true: > Major open source projects are disproportionately managed and staffed by people with full-time jobs at major software companies, and the process of obtaining and thriving in one of those jobs is not intrinsically color and gender blind, so this argument isn't persuasive. [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14488000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14488000 we should be tempering our judgements of open source projects, e.g. that they're not welcoming to people that are not white men. I'm confused as to what principle or principles you think should actually be adopted. Should all open source projects reflect the 'diversity' of the entire world? Consider the following, from [this comment][3] also from this thread: > LGBT people are overrepresented - almost double their percentage in the general population in fact (7% vs 4%). [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14488689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14488689 Assuming that the above is true, is this a cause for concern? Would you similarly be concerned if it were true that, say, Asian people, or even just Asian men, were over-represented in technology or open source software projects? Is that not a cause for concern for you too? It sure seems like the only cause for concern is that there are too many white men. Would anyone ever criticize an open source project for not having 'enough white people' or 'enough men', let alone 'enough white men'? More from your post: > What's worse is the longer you wait to try to get people involved in the project that would naturally not try to join the harder it will be. When your team is 4 men, the first woman which joins will make a significant impact. When your team is already 20 men you need to get a lot more women on board to have the same impact. My problem with this is that you're pretty clearly, tho implicitly, devaluing contributors that don't help your project meet your diversity quotas. Your team is six white men. Have you considered replacing your existing members with women or people of color? When someone contacts you, your team members, or other contributors to your projects, do you ask them to identify their race, ethnicity, sex, or gender so you can discourage white men from contributing? If not, don't you realize that every white man that joins your team or contributes to your projects is making your diversity problem worse? You're also implicitly bashing your team members and contributors for being the wrong kind of people because you're telling them that their homogeneity is: 1. "not healthy for a project or a community to lack diversity" 2. Contributing to an "echo chamber" 3. Increasing the difficulty of future diversity 4. Hurting the project because they are relatively bad at "de-escalating arguments in bug trackers and mailing lists" 5. Hurting the project because they are relatively bad at "[taking] care of documentation" 6. They are not "people that make software work in new cultural contexts (localization, globalization, internationalization, etc.)", i.e. they are unable to understand or work with other "cultural contexts". 7. They are not "people that care about user experience" --- I'm sure you agree with me in thinking that everyone that wants to 'participate in technology' or contribute to an open source project should be able to do so. And moreover, people that don't even realize that they would enjoy contributing to an open source project should be given that knowledge – all else being equal of course. But that's the key constraint on how much marginal effort should be expended to recruit people that aren't already participating and contributing – all else is not equal. Everything is costly to some degree. De-escalating arguments in bug-trackers or mailing lists – let alone even participating in arguments – requires time and energy! And there's only a finite supply of either! And opportunity costs are real and pervasive – arguing with people can be satisfying, but it can also be incredibly aggravating! Writing documentation – and editing it, or maintaining it, or re-organizing it, etc. – requires time and energy! Someone has to do it and for most open source projects that means someone has to voluntarily do it. And this neglects the fact that 'localizing' or 'globalizing' that same documentation isn't even possible unless one knows at least two languages pretty well! If you're going to "artificially bring balance" to your open source team, your open source project's contributors, or your conference, you're restricting the supply of possible people and thus raising the relative cost of whatever it is that you want done, whether it be writing documentation or providing user support in your issue tracker or mailing list. I haven't personally observed any significant and unfair obstacles preventing people that are not white men from participating in open source projects, or 'technology' generally. But I'm sure they exist. Let's get rid of them. But first, let's actually identify them, and let's be careful with implying that every group of people that doesn't near-perfectly reflect the demographics of its wider community or country or whatever is guilty of overt racism, sexism, or other discrimination.