Diverse teams gather more information which leads to better insight of edge cases, and ultimately to better products.
So in this case I do not see at all that software from "diverse" teams has gotten better.
I fact I think that overall software has gotten worse in the past decade. There is no structure, quality or documentation. The only thing that matters is that "something visible happens" so it resembles a product.
This is just an assertion currently, and I am not inclined to believe it is true. I would believe it for more "people" and/or culture oriented problems, such as catering, but for the majority of software development problems, diversity in people is nothing compared to diversity of software development experience. Which, ironically if we take as given most developers are white males, we maximise on average by only hiring white males!
All that time I've wasted writing code...
If men and women are fundamentally different then there are good reasons to choose men or women only in a given situation (along normal stereotypes: women are better caregivers, men are better manual labourers).
Recruiting in this way is illegal in a lot of places.
>they're all going to ask the same questions if they all have the same perspectives, biases, etc. //
Then shoudln't you choose people based on their ability to consider the specific perspectives you need?
One of the things about people is the ability to adopt the perspective of others readily.
Different genders/races/cultural backgrounds/educational backgrounds are connected to having different experiences in life. Of course you can imagine what e.g. sexism looks like, but when it happens to you every other day as a woman you will have it much more present than a man. Same thing with other aspects, people who have different racial/educational/cultural backgrounds bring different experiences with them and they might offer them precisely at the point where you didn’t think about it, not because you are a bad person, but because emulating all other perspectives your self is exhausting.
The variance between individuals of both genders and within races/nationalities/etc is big enough for you to look on the individual level. When you say “women are statistically on average better caregivers” and hire only women, not only are you missing out on very talented men, but the functionality of your team is reduced as well. E.g. because in some situation a male caregiver might be a better fit for a given client. Not because they are better or worse at their job, but because beeing male brings a whole set of experiences, cultural expectations etc with itself. The same apparently goes for other traits your employee might have.
Most jobs require teams to react to new and unpredictable challanges and having a broad range of backgrounds, helps them to always have a team member whi knows how to deal with it, because of their background ans life experience.
When you hire a team where you have a monoculture, it is hit or miss. It might work well for a certain job at a certain time, but if anything changes, your team might be less resilent, flexible and able to solve problems compared to a more diverse team.
Apprently there is, otherwise why claim that any gender imbalance in the workplace must be the result of discrimination? I agree with you that diverse points of view can be useful; but diverse points of view imply (average) psychological and cultural differences, diverse attitudes and interests, and these might well be the reason of the gender imbalance. To use a steereotype (don't kill me for this) if female software developers can bring value to a team because on average they have a better eye for UX or design, then it is also probable that more females will be in UX or design than males, creating a gender imbalance in the number of candidates for software development positions.
I don't think Feminists claim any gender imbalance in the workplace must be the result of discrimination. At least the ones I know usually hold much more balanced views here and the subset of them that is for a fixed quota of women in certain fields/levels usually also say, that they really don't think of this as a good solution, but as they unsucessfully atempted to change things using voluntary solutions for decades, they are now in favour of such solutions.
I am a European, so our feminist debate might differ from the one in the US. But you shouldn't listen to the ones screaming the loudest anywhere and think they are representative. If we'd judge white christians based on that it would mean the world would be filled with lunatics, when in fact it is much more nuanced.
> [...] then it is also probable that more females will be in UX or design than males [...]
I think nobody rational would argue agaisnt your thesis. The point feminists usually tend to make about this is, these bilogical tendencies are the only one thing that decides careers – there is also the question of work culture and sociatal expectations, etc.
If you do a little bit of research you will be fascinated how many women helped in the dawn of computation. This was, because before electronic computers, the word "computer" literally meant humans who did the calculations and these humans were predominantly female maths graduates in the dawn of the computer age. The job of a female computer was not well paid, only a fraction of what the male deciding mathematicians earned. But there weren't enough skilled people here, so women filled the position.
When computers became bigger, it started to become more male and the focus shifted from maths specialists to special degrees, the quality of software declined with the quality of education, more men started to work in the fields salaries increased, until at some point it was a male dominated field, with slight shifts in the recent years.
It is conviniently easy to say women are better at the thing they do at a specific point in history (which for some reason is always paid worse) and so they should just stick to it. E.g. today many women work in textiles and fashion, this was the polar opposite 150 years ago, yet today every unreflected person would swear that there is something inherently feminine about working in the textile industry. So IMO biological factors make a difference, but it has significantly more impact whether you live in a society that expects certain genders to fill certain roles. There will always be men or women that go against these roles, but wouldn't it be the best to live in a society where men are not expected to do/be/embody X and women not expected to do/be/embody Y? This would mean everybody could be closer to their true selves, and we end up with the best people for a given job.
In a practical setting the sensible and civilized stance to take on this is not to focus too much on gender and other features when deciding if somebody has the skill, while focusing on it when it is about the "systemic" question, whether somebody should be part of a team or not, with the goal of including people with different backgrounds.
Not sure about what "modern feminism" is about, but the goal is fairness, which means treating women as women and not requiring male characteristics. Basically, detaching personality traits more common in one population (eg gender) from actual job requirements.
The idea that this kind of a priori judgement is not only acceptable but laudible has come as a bit of a surprise.
Not least because it would seem to justify rejecting female applicants for a role where a 'male perspective' is considered important.