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Wow I'm in the most popular demographic again! "White or of European descent: 68.3%" ...seriously though, how relevant is that racial statistic? Should we bre
by gitgud 6y ago
Wow I'm in the most popular demographic again!
"White or of European descent: 68.3%"
...seriously though, how relevant is that racial statistic? Should we break it down by eye color? Hair color?... I think categorising people based on race does more harm than good...
- michaelcampbell 6y agoPeople evidently find it interesting. You did, enough to post about it, for example.
- freehunter 6y agoRacism and sexism is a constant complaint against the tech industry. But unless someone is actually compiling data on it, no one knows how bad the problem actually is (or if it’s actually even a real problem). Problems don’t get solved unless they’re being tracked.
- pdimitar 6y agoSo what problem is being tracked by showing this statistic, exactly?
- freehunter 6y agoCome on man, it was the first sentence of my comment.
- pdimitar 6y agoYour first sentence was a generalisation. I still don't see how reasserting that somebody is white helps... anything related to the problems of racism and sexism, really. Help me here?
- freehunter 6y agoI'm having a hard time assuming good faith based on your comments so I'm going to bow out of this conversation. I'd suggest you take some time to stop and think about why someone might want to track demographic statistics in a field that is constantly under fire for being dominated by young white men.
- pdimitar 6y agoI'm also having a hard time assuming a good faith from you even though in my eyes I asked a fair question and you choose to leave instead. You come across like you have an agenda. What is it? I'm also not seeing what "under fire" means. The IT area has dozens of millions of people employed. If it was truly under fire then I'd assume it would shrink in numbers, at least in terms of representation of white men? But I'm not seeing it happening. If you have links proving otherwise I'd be interested to read them.
- Izkata 6y agoI don't understand why this has been downvoted so much. The question was based on a statistic on users of an English-language website, not even remotely related to discrimination, so why is it being used as an accurate description of discrimination? For that matter, why is one race being more active than another evidence of discrimination at all?
- zomglings 6y agoWhy do you feel as if it does more harm than good? (Genuinely curious.) It's a measurement that I am certainly curious about. I do not belong to that most popular demographic, and have a passive interest in that demographic distribution becoming more proportional to its global distribution.
- gitgud 6y agoWell to me, the color of your skin/eyes/hair shouldn't be matter in any context, let alone programming... And these graphs convince people that it somehow is important on what skin color you have...
- zomglings 6y agoI agree with you that these things shouldn't matter. Unfortunately, we live in a world where they do matter. Measurements like this are necessary if we want to make them matter less.
- gitgud 6y ago> "Measurements like this are necessary if we want to make them matter less." How does measuring skin color help make skin color matter less? To me it emphasises the importance of skin color, when it should be ignored
- Izkata 6y agoThis measured race, it did not measure discrimination even by correlation let alone causation. It is not useful as any sort of evidence of discrimination. The closest thing that can be said is that StackOverflow is biased towards western English speakers, which correlates well with white/European.
- zomglings 6y agoHaving the measurement allows us to relate it to other measurements that others have made. We may not be able to draw conclusions from the Stack Overflow measurement, but we can use it to contextualize information that we are presented with in the future.