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"So first of all, let’s get one thing out of the way: Diversity is good for a community. "If we can’t agree on this fact, the rest of the article is futile. Th

• sp332 14y ago
  A tiny bit of Googling would answer this for you. There are several studies showing that diverse groups are much (much much) better at problem-solving than homogenous groups. e.g. http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full Also, having more diverse groups of open-source developers makes it more likely that the product will appeal to more end-users, and also attract more developers :)
  • krakensden 14y ago
    I'm doubtful the link actually shows what you think it shows. Besides, it takes "identity diverse means functionally diverse" as a given, while the parent is asking if that is true.
    • sp332 14y ago
      That paper has two main points in its conclusion: Our result provides insights into the trade-off between diversity and ability. An ideal group would contain high-ability problem solvers who are diverse. and also But, as we see in the proof of the result, as the pool of problem solvers grows larger, the very best problem solvers must become similar. In the limit, the highest-ability problem solvers cannot be diverse. Here's a paper (linked from my earlier link) that quantifies some of the benefits of diversity for problem solving. https://www.sciencemag.org/content/254/5035/1181.full.pdf https://www.sciencemag.org/content/254/5035/1181.full.pdf and here's one that demonstrates that diverse groups get "highly nonlinear and universal increase in performance" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016727899090065W http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01672789909...
• roguelynn 14y ago
  "We have created this diversity statement because we believe that a diverse Python community is stronger and more vibrant. A diverse community where people treat each other with respect has more potential contributors and more sources for ideas." Source: http://www.python.org/community/diversity/ http://www.python.org/community/diversity/ Universal Design, the idea that produces "buildings, products and environments that are inherently accessible to both people without disabilities and people with disabilities" is the same idea when in the context of diversity in programming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design Think about it, if Apple had a woman's input, do you think it'd be named iPad?!? For f*ck sake, it's the most ridiculous name ever, reminding half the population of the embarrassing trip to the drug store. Plenty more on Diversity just within Python: http://wiki.python.org/moin/DiversityInPython http://wiki.python.org/moin/DiversityInPython
  • jff 14y ago
    > Think about it, if Apple had a woman's input, do you think it'd be named iPad?!? For f*ck sake, it's the most ridiculous name ever, reminding half the population of the embarrassing trip to the drug store. I'm sorry, what? Do women get "embarrassing reminders" every time they pick up a note PAD, or use PADmapper, or discover that someone has PADded their resume?
    • roguelynn 14y ago
      your sentence made me cringe. thanks.
    • rada 14y ago
      I don't but I do cringe whenever I see the world "niggardly" regardless of how objectively irrational that is. There is a lot of nuance that goes into product branding. The parent is not making as absurd a point as you think she (?) is.
  • jmduke 14y ago
    I'm not criticizing your broader point, but I'd love to see your source that the entire marketing department at Apple is male.
• waterhouse 14y ago
  I think this is intended as a general fact--I'm inclined to say "theorem"--about communities, and there was not much of a notion that you would need specific information about a particular community to say that the fact applied to it. Anyway... One advantage of diversity is automatic specialization. Different people have somewhat different strengths and problems, and they develop different skills that are best in either leveraging their strengths or solving their problems. This has the specific benefit that if some threat to everyone in the community suddenly becomes much worse, then (in a diverse community) there will probably be some people who are already specializing in solving that problem, because they or their friends (employers, customers, whatever) suffered from that problem in the past. To take the case of a community that does open-source programming: If, suddenly, a lot of people start caring deeply about performance, it would be a good thing if there already were a couple of people who had figured out techniques to increase performance. Those people might be people trying to run a large business on a low budget, people who hate or suck at multi-threading and worked hard at making primitive operations go faster, people who hate low-level stuff and worked hard at learning to parallelize tasks, and so on. All of these people would have specialized skills that would now become valuable to the community, which could now pick up those skills more quickly and with less pain than if no one had those skills and they had to invent them from scratch.
• pnathan 14y ago
  When a group is more gender-equal, in my experience, it's more polite.
• ajross 14y ago
  I'll bite too: state that theorem as its inverse and dare to argue for it: Demographic uniformity is a good thing. "Lack of diversity" means that people are excluded from a community, either actively or passively. That's a "bad thing" pretty much by definition. You're thinking about the metric ("how many women?"), while the author is thinking about the mechnism implied ("something is keeping women out"). The former is data, and I guess you can argue that it's neither bad nor good. But surely you agree that the latter is bad, right? If there were something keeping women out of the community, you'd want to fix it. Right?
  • streptomycin 14y ago
    > "Lack of diversity" means that people are excluded from a community, either actively or passively. That's a "bad thing" pretty much by definition. Why?
    • true_religion 14y ago
      The prevailing moral judgement is that excluding people from a group because of inflexible factors (like gender) is a bad thing. Because its a moral judgment, we can assume that even if monocultures are functionally superior with regards to performance we still will prefer a diverse culture for the intangible benefit of 'good ethics'.
      • waterhouse 14y ago
        Heh. This brings to mind the thought that a diverse culture is likely to produce monocultures. If some Indians develop a new game, then you'll probably end up with mostly Indians playing the game--if it takes off, then people from other cultures might start playing the game, but the best and the "serious" players would probably be Indians. Even serious non-Indian players would probably pick up more Indian culture than they transmitted their own culture to the sport, and it would at least be very slow to diversify. No, wait, it occurs to me that "some Indians" would require an India, and therefore a kind of monoculture there to start with. Perhaps a "diverse culture" would mean there is no India--there would be equal proportions of all conceivable backgrounds and stuff everywhere, or at least something close to that. But, now, wouldn't that society be a monoculture? A very serious monoculture, with the vulnerabilities that go with it (i.e. lacking the defenses that come with diversity). To give an example: if every city looks the same and has the same number of each kind of building and uses the same proportions of transportation methods and so on, then if a virus gains a mutation that makes it go very well through a particular kind of transportation, it'll be able to infect every city equally well. The situation goes from "virus no one cares about" to "virus able to infect everything". On the other hand, if you had rich cities in which one type of transportation dominated, poor cities in which another one dominated, some cities that were hubs of international travel and others that rarely got any visitors from more than 15 miles away--then you'd go from "virus no one cares about" to "some cities overrun, others barely affected", which makes it much easier to leisurely prepare a response with aid from the barely-affected cities. (Genetic diversity is good for fighting disease, for similar reasons.) Mmm, I have reached the conclusion that the goals of diversity at the level of individuals found in a group, and diversity at the level of groups found throughout civilization [you could define any number of group sizes if you wanted], cannot be simultaneously achieved to their fullest extent. If you have no monocultures, that puts some limits on how diverse your set of cultures can be. This meta-problem gives me a kind of zen feeling.
• lolcatstevens 14y ago
  Typed like a rich white guy. There's a real barrier in our profession -- how many women are in your office? How many black people? -- and why do you think that is? How comfortable do you think your workplace is to a minority or woman? So how are we to study the effect of minorities on open-source when minorities don't want to work in open-source. It's not the money that's holding them back. Real-world measure of goodness? Come on man. Do you hang out with women are colored folk or folks who came up differently than you did? It's nice, right? It's interesting to hear other folks's points of views, right? Maybe you even rethink some things you took for granted. Have you never been around brogrammers? Have you never seen a group of dudes spiral into 4chan? This is common sense, yes. Being a person and interacting with people is my real world measure of goodness.
  • batista 14y ago
    >how many women are in your office? Speaking for my previous company: 3, for a 12 strong team. >How many black people? 0 >-- and why do you think that is?* For black people it's because my country never sent slave merchants to bring black people to work here as slaves, so we haven't artificially built a black population like you did. For women it's because we never get any competent candidates to hire, if we ever even are approached from a woman applicant. Mid-nineties, in my university for CS, women were 1/6 to men. In the Math and Applied Math departments it was 1/1. In biology and medicine it was 2/1. In Literature it was 3/1. And, no, it wasn't about "geeks" being sexist, and that BS. The notion of the "computer geek" wasn't even known at the time, the jobs most of us expected to work were normal office jobs alongside other office workers, and all the students in the campus (from all departments) were more or less the same (kids just out of high school). Women just weren't interested enough to put CS in their application forms for college. So there you have it.
    • hynek 14y ago
      The success of outreach programs prove your “Women just weren't interested enough to put CS in their application forms for college.” wrong. Unless women changed significantly since the mid-nineties which I doubt.
• ajdecon 14y ago
  Honestly, I'd be surprised if the total number of studies on gender balance in open-source projects was higher than single digits. This is probably true, because open-source development doesn't seem to be a well-studied phenomenon in social science; but the effects of diversity on group dynamics in general have been studied extensively. While you may disagree, I'm willing to make the provisional assumption that working and personal relationships among open-source developers are not substantially different from groups which are more commonly studied. (I currently don't have much in the way of academic access, but a few Google Scholar searches and reading some abstracts will at least reveal a large volume of research on these topics. i.e., http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=group+diversity+positive+effects&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=1%2C5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=group+diversity+positive...) More interesting, I think, is the idea that there must be some "real-world measure of goodness" (market share? lines of code?) which is improved by diversity, in order for pursuing diversity to be worthwhile. I'd be willing to argue that even if better diversity led to a persistent decrease in technical quality, it would be worthwhile in terms of positive external effects on society. While "low barriers to entry for all demographic groups" might not be an advantage to the group looking for developers, it could benefit society in the same ways as wheelchair ramps, good employee working conditions, regulation of animal medical testing, and other things we encourage in spite of their cost. In other words -- diversity and fairness can be valued for their own sake, just as much as code quality is a value. (I actually don't think increased diversity would have any negative effects on technical quality, in the long term: instead I'd expect a null effect or a slight positive. I wouldn't be surprised by a short-term negative blip as potentially-biased education and training learns to cope with different people, but I don't see that as a real barrier given the societal positives.) edit for grammar