3 ms·

As the author I want to clarify something: the word "gender" appears once in the article as an example of diversity. The enumeration you gave is more an exampl

As the author I want to clarify something: the word "gender" appears once in the article as an example of diversity. The enumeration you gave is more an example of lack of diversity in roles and behavior than it is gender.

jasode 9y ago
>the word "gender" appears once in the article But people reading it will see the following words that are all in the same semantic space as "gender": >"men", "woman", "women", "male", "someone" (implied female) As used in sentences: >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. >Tech for recent historical reasons is very male heavy but society is not. >We don't need more [...] more strong alpha males but people that are good in de-escalating arguments >So when someone cancels a conference because the speaker lineup after a blind selection was 100% male it just shows how bad the imbalance Therefore, it is not unreasonable to get the impression that the article is heavy on gender imbalance and not so much on skin color. (No explicit mention of "white", "black", "African American", etc.)
Bartweiss 9y ago
Simply counting that up seems a bit disingenuous... The word "gender" appears once, yes. But literally all the specific examples given are gender - adding a woman to a team of 4 versus 20, the gender imbalance of tech, not needing more "strong alpha males", and having 100% male conference lineups. The line under discussion directly contrasts "males" with role diversity. It doesn't explicitly label the other roles as feminine, but it was certainly the impression I got when reading "not more strong alpha males but people that are good in de-escalating arguments". None of this contradicts your understanding of what you meant with your writing, obviously. And the Unicode point is a good example of how a shortage of how other developer diversity (e.g. in languages spoken) can motivate more useful products. But for whatever it's worth, I had to read this comment to find out that you weren't writing the entire piece with gender in mind, and writing that diversity of roles line specifically to state what women would bring to the table.
- the_mitsuhiko 9y ago
  I will adjust the text then if it comes across as such.

jasode 9y ago

>the word "gender" appears once in the article But people reading it will see the following words that are all in the same semantic space as "gender": >"men", "woman", "women", "male", "someone" (implied female) As used in sentences: >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. >Tech for recent historical reasons is very male heavy but society is not. >We don't need more [...] more strong alpha males but people that are good in de-escalating arguments >So when someone cancels a conference because the speaker lineup after a blind selection was 100% male it just shows how bad the imbalance Therefore, it is not unreasonable to get the impression that the article is heavy on gender imbalance and not so much on skin color. (No explicit mention of "white", "black", "African American", etc.)

Bartweiss 9y ago

Simply counting that up seems a bit disingenuous... The word "gender" appears once, yes. But literally all the specific examples given are gender - adding a woman to a team of 4 versus 20, the gender imbalance of tech, not needing more "strong alpha males", and having 100% male conference lineups. The line under discussion directly contrasts "males" with role diversity. It doesn't explicitly label the other roles as feminine, but it was certainly the impression I got when reading "not more strong alpha males but people that are good in de-escalating arguments". None of this contradicts your understanding of what you meant with your writing, obviously. And the Unicode point is a good example of how a shortage of how other developer diversity (e.g. in languages spoken) can motivate more useful products. But for whatever it's worth, I had to read this comment to find out that you weren't writing the entire piece with gender in mind, and writing that diversity of roles line specifically to state what women would bring to the table.

the_mitsuhiko 9y ago
I will adjust the text then if it comes across as such.