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I don't think anyone in this comment chain is saying "we don't want women building stuff". Rather, some commenters are uncomfortable with the assumption that m

by trgv 8y ago

I don't think anyone in this comment chain is saying "we don't want women building stuff". Rather, some commenters are uncomfortable with the assumption that moving from 15 males to 11 males + 5 females is necessarily an improvement. Maybe 5 of the original 15 males were gay. Does that change your perspective? I find this whole way of thinking unsettling. Doesn't it simply depend on who these people are as individuals? I'd also be careful with the argument you've (implicitly) made. It doesn't seem to follow that the distribution of gender of programmers should match the distribution of gender of users. Besides, there must be software projects where 95%+ of users are male or female. In general, I think most of us here agree that gender discrimination is bad, people being discouraged from making career choices due to gender is bad, and sexual harassment is bad. We may disagree on the frequency with which these things occur or how to fix them, but I think we're a lot closer than it appears from these contentious comments.

rosser 8y ago
I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user base's. Please don't put words in my mouth. The thread-parent's comment made it clear that, in his situation, it made things better. Is it going to in every case? No. But using edge cases to argue against the median is even more specious than the argument you assert I was trying to sneak in.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  > I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user base's. Then why say this? > women are on the order of half of their users.
  - rosser 8y ago
    Because if you're ignoring (by simply not hearing) the perspective of a meaningful representation of that ~half of your user-base, you do not, and probably can not understand them. You don't need to have parity between those ratios, but you might want to do better than the "token diversity hire" — assuming you do at all.
- repolfx 8y ago
  The thread-parent didn't make that clear. Rather, he defined success as replacing men with women and then said he'd done that, therefore, it was a success. His post tells us nothing at all about what impact that had on the quality of the resulting software.

by trgv 8y ago

rosser 8y ago

I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user base's. Please don't put words in my mouth. The thread-parent's comment made it clear that, in his situation, it made things better. Is it going to in every case? No. But using edge cases to argue against the median is even more specious than the argument you assert I was trying to sneak in.

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
> I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user base's. Then why say this? > women are on the order of half of their users.
- rosser 8y ago
  Because if you're ignoring (by simply not hearing) the perspective of a meaningful representation of that ~half of your user-base, you do not, and probably can not understand them. You don't need to have parity between those ratios, but you might want to do better than the "token diversity hire" — assuming you do at all.
repolfx 8y ago
The thread-parent didn't make that clear. Rather, he defined success as replacing men with women and then said he'd done that, therefore, it was a success. His post tells us nothing at all about what impact that had on the quality of the resulting software.