is it me or are we going backward?
Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like lately diversity is falling out of fashion as a goal in this industry. I made a tweet seeking sponsors for All-Girl Hack Night’s SXSW event earlier and was surprised by some of the responses. It seems like recent conferences have fewer female speakers, or are more defensive about having none at all.
I thought we were getting better? I thought we’d beaten the dead horse of Why It’s Important To Make An Effort To Include Women and were now in the Fixing It stage? I thought we were safe not talking about this anymore? What the actual fuck, you guys.
Setting aside my dismay at the appearance of backsliding, let’s revisit that imperative Why. Yes, we do need to actively seek out women and people of color as employees, contributors, speakers, and other participants in developer communities. We need to do this because:
- we’re hemorrhaging women and people of color at the earliest levels – if you ignore them, they will probably be gone by the time you’d expect them to be “qualified”
- speaking of “qualified”, if your meritocracy rewards white guys almost exclusively, your meritocracy is a fucking joke
- if you truly care about making this industry better, you try to get all the help you can
- it is – bluntly – wrong that women and people of color were so pointedly excluded for so long, and treating the resulting diversity debt as “the way things are” when it’s a status quo people put effort into creating is utter bullshit
So, yes folks, you need to seek out diverse participants in whatever your endeavor is. The excuse that you’re choosing the best people regardless of gender or race is a fundamentally stupid argument. You’ve already ruled out more than half the population by targeting the population you’re targeting when you target developers. If you want the best developers – not the people who best fit the good ol’ boy developer archetype – you have to work harder, you have to look specifically for the people you know the industry will not automatically support. Women and people of color do not rise to the top level of this industry without someone acknowledging that they aren’t white guys. I know people – women and people of color – who probably hate me for saying that. Sorry. But it does not matter how brilliant you are in this industry if you’re not a white guy until someone in a position of power looks at you and chooses to look beyond your sex or the color of your skin. I want to throw shit when the best women in this industry make claims like, “I did it and if you were as good as me you could do it too” because it’s not just about being good (nevermind that you shouldn’t have to be literally the best of the best to get a seat at the table if you’re not white and male). It sounds like people who inherited money telling poor people to work harder to change their circumstances. There’s luck involved. At some point you had to be lucky enough to be noticed by an insider who took the time to realize you were brilliant. We’re defending a system where achievement and recognition comes not from hard work and genius – merit – but from circumstance.
And before anybody says it, I want to address what I know is coming: “But women get more opportunities! They get considered before equally qualified men!”
1. You’re whining about what’s fair to a group of people who dominate this industry to the exclusion of anyone else? Really?
2. Women do get pushed to the front of the line. That’s affirmative action, and affirmative action is the worst way of achieving balance, except for every other way that’s been tried. Doing nothing has a 100% failure rate. Affirmative action is frequently the only way we see anyone who’s not a white male in the next cubicle or on a stage or a list of core committers. Fucking sucks that we need it, but we are nowhere near the point where we can stop using it.
3. The assumption that if you have an equally qualified man and woman it’s unfair for the woman to get preferential treatment is lulz. What entitles the man to be the default?
I’m sorry I’m being mean, but goddamn it, you guys. I’m sick of hearing this same tired bullshit, as though it occurred to no one to actually look the fuck around and see that this defensive attitude toward ignoring the fucking problem and hoping it goes away is making shit worse.
March 9th, 2012 at 4:51 am
[...] act of scraping away at it while no one was looking. I generally feel that we’ve been sliding backwards.I spent the last couple of weeks dealing with a head butting contest I had with one of the [...]
March 10th, 2012 at 11:24 pm
http://www.garann.com/dev/2012/is-it-me-or-are-we-going-backward/
You are right.
The good news is that there are plenty of reasons to seek diversity – “doing the right thing” on a moral level of “fairness” is only one reason. If we can be OK with focusing on the end result – and not actually give a shit *why* a group becomes more diverse, as long as they do, then I think we can see this through.
How? What are the (other) reasons why a firm would seek diversity besides fairness?
In general, monoculture kills. Read “The Botany of Desire” or “The
Omnivore’s Dilemma” and you’ll see the case for this; Plants and
animals all thrive when more diverse; when they don’t diversify,
one single pathogen can wipe out an entire species (Irish Potato Famine). I think this is absolutely the case with businesses. Building a practice off one mindset will box you out of the market place in no time, *especially* in technology. I think about what my life as a developer would be like if i had never tried jQuery
IT communities (companies, groups, organizations, conferences)
that stick with a white-male mindset are setting themselves up for
failure. There are all kinds of reasons why the world as we know it
might not want to trust the same white men that have fucked-up all
kinds of things in the sociopolitical realm. With the emerging markets in China, South America and India, *just* being a bunch of white guys won’t likely do a group any good. Stockholders and boards should be pushing their firms to a more diverse, inclusive mindset. It’s good business and yields a competitive advantage.
I’m glad to see you are brave enough to speak about this. After all, brave is what we all need to be. Let’s acknowledge that *change* of any kind is difficult. We *all* have a tendency to gravitate toward what we are familiar with and we do that psychologically through identifying similarities in others. It’s often less-than-concious, but it’s all about people’s comfort zones. So we have to encourage others to be brave and expand those comfort zones and diversify. At the organizational level, that is more effectively done when it is posed as a viable business option rather than a moral dilemna. It’s less of a boulder to role up a hill and it leaves guilt by the wayside. Let’s just focus on results…
Wake up everyone! There is an obvious value in diversifying your team /
workforce / network / community / conference / self: Better vision, better adaptability and better flexibility and guess what – it’s a whole lot more fun.
March 15th, 2012 at 3:16 pm
I myself noticed it going “backwards” as well. I looked for a job in 2008 and looking now. I’ve seen more diverse teams back then which were more meritocracy minded, and less word of mouth hiring. Now, it looks like a number of homogeneous white male teams emerged from the recession and got a hold of all the resources. The interesting part I found researching companies on LinkedIn, those people would have nothing in common (school, past work place etc) except gender and skin color, and may be, age within a certain limit. Another interesting part, quite arrogant customer services for their products where I’m a user. It’s like, the accent shifted to an image of a technical genius, not somebody who builds products for the users. With new tools making the development easier then a few years ago. Com’on guys, this is club building, not team and product building.