> But "diversity" is being used to mean diversity of gender, ethnicity, etc., as if it matters, as if it is a reliable proxy for those other things like experience and perspective and skill, when it's not.
Yes, b6. It is. Your personal experience is of course unique. While your experience may have familiar notes with many people, it's fundamentally different from someone who grew up as a young girl. Your fears and the options presented to you are going to be different.
Identical people come to similar conclusions. Folks who have raised this idea of "diversity of thought" think that it adequately addresses this idea that diversity is a value add for software by saying, "Well it's all about thought." But those initial conditions our minds are so sensitive to are not easily ignored.
You cannot have it both ways in this. Either you simply don't care about diversity (which is a value decision I am not denying your ability to make), or you do and physical indicators that shape how society treats people are a high quality signal of diversity. You cannot rationally suggest both that diversity is important but that people's traits and backgrounds aren't.
People try to turn this into a value proposition here (as it seems like you may be doing) are taking half the situation into account. For a value proposition, you're looking at your project's upside. For example, a product primarily aimed uniquely at women would probably be best served by a qualified woman. But even in this, bias creeps in (the famous study results suggesting men are so acclimated to dominating the conversation that when women talk for half the time, men perceive it as oppressive). In this specific scenario, women have reported being hired and then simply not given the power to do their jobs, or not being present in larger orgs with sufficient numbers to create the impact they were hired to create.
But the diversity movement is also trying to reduce the downside for individuals who often find themselves on the brunt end of unfair standards, inappropriate behavior and discriminatory teammates. You may talk all day about how "my compiler doesn't care" but this is you looking down at your desk quietly as folks all over the industry go through terrible and unfair treatment. Your compiler doesn't care about that, but you should.
You suggest that changing this status quo would actually be a more subtle form of racism or sexism. This is true, insofar as the top article accidentally falls into a paternalistic role and offers open source housekeeping roles to women as a token offering, thinking this is an incentive. In terms of damaging the fortunes of white men at the expense of offering other people, the truth is that correcting for gender and racial bias in our industry will bring us closer to a meritocracy and offer more potential for talent to emerge than the current state of affairs.