Thanks. I think so, too.
> There's a systemic tendency at work in society towards judgments about what successful upwardly mobile people (perhaps, particularly, successful upwardly mobile engineers) look like that you probably benefited from... and that someone who's a woman or not white or asian would have to struggle against.
I hadn't thought about that, but I can certainly see how that could be the case. As I said, nearly everyone I've met has assumed that white people don't come from poor families -- this includes a lot of white people as well (though obviously white people who likely did not come from poor families). I've always been too put-off by the assumption (when it's been made explicit) to be particularly friendly towards those who've asserted it, because, despite everything, I'm proud of where I come from and I'm proud of my family. But I can definitely see how that same principle could be at play when it comes to professional stereotypes as well. I'll be trying to pay more attention for it in the future, too.
> ... ideally there'd probably be grants that address economic/upbringing hardship and other structural privileges separately.
I'm honestly not sure there needs to be grants for other structural privileges. If you're in a financial position where you can afford to attend, you don't need a grant, period, regardless of gender, race, what-have-you. Purely need-based grants would also increase diversity: by excluding certain groups of people from the grants, you're effectively excluding subsets of those groups from participating entirely. Now, you're getting the perspectives of women, blacks, hispanics, indigenous Americans, Pacific islanders, well-off Asian men, and well-off white men. Not white and Asian men in general, just the well-off ones. I think it should be obvious why someone who's not well-off would have different experiences from someone who is, and therefore a different perspective, and that by extending the grants to anyone with financial needs you'd only be increasing the amount of diversity available (assuming that a greater number of perspectives implies greater diversity).
We should also ask ourselves: is equal opportunity desirable, and, if so, is it better for equal opportunity to apply at a group level or an individual level? That is, is equal opportunity simply a numbers game or is it a social ideal? When the computing field becomes 50% male / 50% female (and a similarly uniform distribution among races), is that enough that we can step back and confidently declare that we've achieved equal opportunity? Personally, I think that would be neither necessary nor sufficient. Furthermore, while I'm strongly in favor of equal opportunity, I'm not in favor of enforcing equal outcome (that is, I don't think there should be institutional guarantees that everyone who takes the same opportunity achieve the same outcome, because it's simply infeasible, among other reasons), and I think it's important to distinguish the two.
Hell, I say I'm doing OK now, but if it really costs $7,000 to attend Recurse, I still couldn't afford it. It would very nearly clean out my savings account. Not to mention that there's absolutely no way I would be able to take 3 straight months off from work to attend, and during that time I'd still need make mortgage payments, payments on student and auto loans, insurance payments, medical expenses, etc. This leads me to feel like me and people like me are not valued. Personally, I'm used to it by now, but I'd like to see it change for the sake of the boys coming out of high school, especially since, as I said, I'm one of the lucky ones. There are a lot of people coming from similar situations that haven't been so lucky.