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Well, I could talk about social justice and basic fairness, but the tone of your question implies that you don't see it that way. So instead, let's look at the

Well, I could talk about social justice and basic fairness, but the tone of your question implies that you don't see it that way. So instead, let's look at the question from a coldly calculating point of view. Let's say I have a open source project, and it's got 100 contributors (or community members, users, whatever -- the it's all the same). If my project follows today's averages, that group will be on the order of 98 men and 2 women. Let's say we work to increase our diversity such that now 50% of our community are women. How big is the community now? That's right -- 200 people. It's not like adding 50% women removes 50% men... if we increase the number of women in our community, we increase the number of people. Now I've got twice as many contributors, twice as many users, twice as much activity, etc. Open source projects live and die on the strength of their communities. Increasing diversity is often actually the easiest way to increase membership, full stop. [Now, in practice, I work on diversity because I care about basic fairness. But the point is that even if you don't give a shit about those sorts of ideals, there are still coldly calculating economy-of-scale arguments for why diversity is important.]

jeremyt 14y ago
Kudos to you for the honest attempt to reframe, but I think you're just using circular logic. In effect, you're saying "If we could get twice as many people, then we would have twice as many people". In reality, there is some reason why women don't want to be programmers. Therefore, it follows that per capita, it's going to be harder to bring women into the fold. To use your example, if you really wanted to increase your contributors to your open source project, you would be much better served to use your limited capital to attract men who are already predisposed to your project but unaware of it rather than women who are both unaware of it and predisposed against it.
- bct 14y ago
  > Therefore, it follows that per capita, it's going to be harder to bring women into the fold. That doesn't follow at all. It could be that the industry has some kind of blind spot that could be easily addressed by e.g. encouraging and welcoming people who are interested but generally left out.
- jacobian 14y ago
  > In effect, you're saying "If we could get twice as many people, then we would have twice as many people". Sorry, I must have not been clear: my point is that if we have twice as many people, then we get twice as much work done, move twice as quickly, etc. Django has about 30 committers, and among us we seem to be able to commit about 10-15 times per day. If we had 60 committers, I'd guess we'd be able to commit about 30 things per day. That's more bugs fixed, more features added, faster velocity between releases, etc. These are things I want. > In reality, there is some reason why women don't want to be programmers. I agree. I suggest that it's because women are systematically being discouraged from joining our communities. I think they's plenty of data to back this up. BTW, it's not programming as a whole; the problem's even worse in open source communities. Women make up roughly 20% of the workforce in technical professions, but only about 2% of open source developers. Even if you believe there's something in that second X chromosome that disinclines women from tech — and for the record I certainly don't buy that argument — that can't explain why the problems ten times worse in open source. > you would be much better served to use your limited capital to attract men who are already predisposed to your project but unaware of it rather than women who are both unaware of it and predisposed against it. How about people who are aware and are predisposed, but have historically been discouraged or outright prevented from getting involved? And look, this isn't a zero-sum game. I can do this and other things too! A lot of the resistance to diversity seems to imply that these efforts somehow detract from other forms of community outreach, but this just isn't true. We are in fact capable of doing multiple things at once.
  - mayanksinghal 14y ago
    > only about 2% of open source developers I am guessing, but could the part time nature of most of open source jobs be a reason for this as well? More conservative/sexist societies generally assign the role of managing home to the female in a family, even if she is a working woman. So while the males have the time and freedom to go for hobby/low-returns open source projects, the females might be left with the responsibility of taking care of the children. I am from an eastern culture and this is definitely something I could see happening here, I am curious if similar conditions exists in western cultures.
typicalrunt 14y ago
Now, in practice, I work on diversity because I care about basic fairness. Get down from the ivory tower please. Where do you get off saying that he doesn't believe in fairness? In fact, the original commenter could be seen as being more fair by simply stating that gender shouldn't matter. At the same time, you're looking at one statistic. The race or religion of project contributors could be looked at, but they aren't because IT IS NOT IMPORTANT. Just to counter any downvotes, when I say it isn't important, I mean the gender debate, not women in general. For some reason, this topic has been rehashed so many times on HN and each time someone tries to look at the argument from a gender-less perspective, people like you -- jacobian -- jump out from the bushes to make statements, charging dissenters with misogyny. Projects can maintain fairness without specifically targeting a demographic, they need only be open to everyone and never turn someone down simply because of an attribute they cannot change [gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, height, etc].
- bct 14y ago
  > they need only be open to everyone The word "only" makes this sentence completely wrong. In startup terms it's like saying that to make a successful product you need only make something useful and put up a web page offering it for sale. It would be great if it was that simple!
  - typicalrunt 14y ago
    This kind of reply is the shit people are lamenting about as a decline in the HN comments. If you cherry-pick sentences out of context, then of course you can make a valid point and invalidate mine. To show context, my entire sentence was: Projects can maintain fairness without specifically targeting a demographic, they need only be open to everyone and never turn someone down simply because of an attribute they cannot change [gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, height, etc]. So by "only" being open to everyone, I assert that projects can maintain fairness. How is this incorrect? I never said the project would be successful, you falsely added that using your metaphor. Is there some other magic bullet for making a project fair? Do we need to inject some discrimination and close-mindedness into it?
tomwalker 14y ago
Should we allow male only events?
- johnleppings 14y ago
  Yes, we should allow male only events. Why not? Or do you mean should we prevent women turning up? No we should not allow events that prevent women turning up. But if an event happens to have no women turn up, then so the fuck what? Are you going to challenge woman-kind why they aren't going? Why would one woman know why every other woman didn't want to attend?
  - tomwalker 14y ago
    I just don't understand why there should be female only events. It should be a beginners class, regardless of sex. Making divides just feels odd
johnleppings 14y ago
I think that's totally illogical. How many members of your community are gay? Have red hair? Are left handed. You have no idea, and you wouldn't recruit based on those characteristics. So why recruit based on gender?
- jacobian 14y ago
  > How many members of your community are gay? Have red hair? Are left handed. The data I've seen suggests that the penetration of these minorities in technology closely tracks their representation in society as a whole. Further, there isn't a history of discrimination against redheads and lefties in open source. Discrimination against gay people is a real problem, though it doesn't seem to have prevented equivalent representation of gay people in tech. But you could make a similar argument about representation of other minorities -- African Americans, say, or Hispanics, or whatever. And it's true, that's a problem too; we should be working towards diversity of all sorts. It's true that I'm focusing my attention of gender diversity, but I'd love to learn more about efforts towards diversity along other axes. Have any pointers?
  - johnleppings 14y ago
    The problem is - should we follow this argument all the way? Do you precisely work out the proportion of people of every conceivable group in every team, and cause a fuss when it isn't right? If you don't, what is the reason for that? Why worry about some groups, but not others. I genuinely think the main reason that people worry about gender, over any other groups, is that it's normally so clear what group people are a member of. And that's not a sound reason to do anything. I also genuinely think that some men cause a fuss about proportion of women in tech groups, simply because they'd like to meet and be able to hit on more women.
    - jacobian 14y ago
      I wish you wouldn't disparage outreach efforts as "causing a fuss." It's patronizing, insulting, and it badly mischaracterizes efforts like the one that kicked off this thread. I see it like this: lack of diversity is a bug on our community. I'd like to fix it, so I work on fixing these bugs. Right now, the information I have available tells me that gender diversity is the worst of the bugs under the "diversity" label, and it's also one I think I have the skills to tackle. This doesn't mean that other bugs are less important, or less worth solving. I happen to believe that this bug is the one that's most worth my time to tackle. Yes, I do see lack of diversity -- in all forms -- as an issue in our community. There are other minorities besides women that're systematically discouraged from entering tech; we should do something about that. Hopefully our fix for the gender bugs can be abstracted and applied in other areas.

jeremyt 14y ago

Kudos to you for the honest attempt to reframe, but I think you're just using circular logic. In effect, you're saying "If we could get twice as many people, then we would have twice as many people". In reality, there is some reason why women don't want to be programmers. Therefore, it follows that per capita, it's going to be harder to bring women into the fold. To use your example, if you really wanted to increase your contributors to your open source project, you would be much better served to use your limited capital to attract men who are already predisposed to your project but unaware of it rather than women who are both unaware of it and predisposed against it.

bct 14y ago
> Therefore, it follows that per capita, it's going to be harder to bring women into the fold. That doesn't follow at all. It could be that the industry has some kind of blind spot that could be easily addressed by e.g. encouraging and welcoming people who are interested but generally left out.
jacobian 14y ago
> In effect, you're saying "If we could get twice as many people, then we would have twice as many people". Sorry, I must have not been clear: my point is that if we have twice as many people, then we get twice as much work done, move twice as quickly, etc. Django has about 30 committers, and among us we seem to be able to commit about 10-15 times per day. If we had 60 committers, I'd guess we'd be able to commit about 30 things per day. That's more bugs fixed, more features added, faster velocity between releases, etc. These are things I want. > In reality, there is some reason why women don't want to be programmers. I agree. I suggest that it's because women are systematically being discouraged from joining our communities. I think they's plenty of data to back this up. BTW, it's not programming as a whole; the problem's even worse in open source communities. Women make up roughly 20% of the workforce in technical professions, but only about 2% of open source developers. Even if you believe there's something in that second X chromosome that disinclines women from tech — and for the record I certainly don't buy that argument — that can't explain why the problems ten times worse in open source. > you would be much better served to use your limited capital to attract men who are already predisposed to your project but unaware of it rather than women who are both unaware of it and predisposed against it. How about people who are aware and are predisposed, but have historically been discouraged or outright prevented from getting involved? And look, this isn't a zero-sum game. I can do this and other things too! A lot of the resistance to diversity seems to imply that these efforts somehow detract from other forms of community outreach, but this just isn't true. We are in fact capable of doing multiple things at once.
- mayanksinghal 14y ago
  > only about 2% of open source developers I am guessing, but could the part time nature of most of open source jobs be a reason for this as well? More conservative/sexist societies generally assign the role of managing home to the female in a family, even if she is a working woman. So while the males have the time and freedom to go for hobby/low-returns open source projects, the females might be left with the responsibility of taking care of the children. I am from an eastern culture and this is definitely something I could see happening here, I am curious if similar conditions exists in western cultures.

typicalrunt 14y ago

Now, in practice, I work on diversity because I care about basic fairness. Get down from the ivory tower please. Where do you get off saying that he doesn't believe in fairness? In fact, the original commenter could be seen as being more fair by simply stating that gender shouldn't matter. At the same time, you're looking at one statistic. The race or religion of project contributors could be looked at, but they aren't because IT IS NOT IMPORTANT. Just to counter any downvotes, when I say it isn't important, I mean the gender debate, not women in general. For some reason, this topic has been rehashed so many times on HN and each time someone tries to look at the argument from a gender-less perspective, people like you -- jacobian -- jump out from the bushes to make statements, charging dissenters with misogyny. Projects can maintain fairness without specifically targeting a demographic, they need only be open to everyone and never turn someone down simply because of an attribute they cannot change [gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, height, etc].

bct 14y ago
> they need only be open to everyone The word "only" makes this sentence completely wrong. In startup terms it's like saying that to make a successful product you need only make something useful and put up a web page offering it for sale. It would be great if it was that simple!
- typicalrunt 14y ago
  This kind of reply is the shit people are lamenting about as a decline in the HN comments. If you cherry-pick sentences out of context, then of course you can make a valid point and invalidate mine. To show context, my entire sentence was: Projects can maintain fairness without specifically targeting a demographic, they need only be open to everyone and never turn someone down simply because of an attribute they cannot change [gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, height, etc]. So by "only" being open to everyone, I assert that projects can maintain fairness. How is this incorrect? I never said the project would be successful, you falsely added that using your metaphor. Is there some other magic bullet for making a project fair? Do we need to inject some discrimination and close-mindedness into it?

tomwalker 14y ago

Should we allow male only events?

johnleppings 14y ago
Yes, we should allow male only events. Why not? Or do you mean should we prevent women turning up? No we should not allow events that prevent women turning up. But if an event happens to have no women turn up, then so the fuck what? Are you going to challenge woman-kind why they aren't going? Why would one woman know why every other woman didn't want to attend?
- tomwalker 14y ago
  I just don't understand why there should be female only events. It should be a beginners class, regardless of sex. Making divides just feels odd

johnleppings 14y ago

I think that's totally illogical. How many members of your community are gay? Have red hair? Are left handed. You have no idea, and you wouldn't recruit based on those characteristics. So why recruit based on gender?

jacobian 14y ago
> How many members of your community are gay? Have red hair? Are left handed. The data I've seen suggests that the penetration of these minorities in technology closely tracks their representation in society as a whole. Further, there isn't a history of discrimination against redheads and lefties in open source. Discrimination against gay people is a real problem, though it doesn't seem to have prevented equivalent representation of gay people in tech. But you could make a similar argument about representation of other minorities -- African Americans, say, or Hispanics, or whatever. And it's true, that's a problem too; we should be working towards diversity of all sorts. It's true that I'm focusing my attention of gender diversity, but I'd love to learn more about efforts towards diversity along other axes. Have any pointers?
- johnleppings 14y ago
  The problem is - should we follow this argument all the way? Do you precisely work out the proportion of people of every conceivable group in every team, and cause a fuss when it isn't right? If you don't, what is the reason for that? Why worry about some groups, but not others. I genuinely think the main reason that people worry about gender, over any other groups, is that it's normally so clear what group people are a member of. And that's not a sound reason to do anything. I also genuinely think that some men cause a fuss about proportion of women in tech groups, simply because they'd like to meet and be able to hit on more women.
  - jacobian 14y ago
    I wish you wouldn't disparage outreach efforts as "causing a fuss." It's patronizing, insulting, and it badly mischaracterizes efforts like the one that kicked off this thread. I see it like this: lack of diversity is a bug on our community. I'd like to fix it, so I work on fixing these bugs. Right now, the information I have available tells me that gender diversity is the worst of the bugs under the "diversity" label, and it's also one I think I have the skills to tackle. This doesn't mean that other bugs are less important, or less worth solving. I happen to believe that this bug is the one that's most worth my time to tackle. Yes, I do see lack of diversity -- in all forms -- as an issue in our community. There are other minorities besides women that're systematically discouraged from entering tech; we should do something about that. Hopefully our fix for the gender bugs can be abstracted and applied in other areas.