How I Stopped Worrying and Started Loving PyLadies
hynek.me
hynek.me
"If we can’t agree on this fact, the rest of the article is futile. There are many studies that support this point and if you’re not convinced, this article isn’t for you."
I'll bite: What real-world measure of goodness (that isn't tautologically identical to diversity) has been shown to increase as a function of an open-source community's diversity, whether gender, racial, or otherwise? I'm very skeptical there is strong enough evidence on this point to justify dismissing the question as quickly as you have. Honestly, I'd be surprised if the total number of studies on gender balance in open-source projects was higher than single digits.
Also, having more diverse groups of open-source developers makes it more likely that the product will appeal to more end-users, and also attract more developers :)
Here's a paper (linked from my earlier link) that quantifies some of the benefits of diversity for problem solving. https://www.sciencemag.org/content/254/5035/1181.full.pdf and here's one that demonstrates that diverse groups get "highly nonlinear and universal increase in performance" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01672789909...
Source: http://www.python.org/community/diversity/
Universal Design, the idea that produces "buildings, products and environments that are inherently accessible to both people without disabilities and people with disabilities" is the same idea when in the context of diversity in programming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design
Think about it, if Apple had a woman's input, do you think it'd be named iPad?!? For f*ck sake, it's the most ridiculous name ever, reminding half the population of the embarrassing trip to the drug store.
Plenty more on Diversity just within Python: http://wiki.python.org/moin/DiversityInPython
I'm sorry, what? Do women get "embarrassing reminders" every time they pick up a note PAD, or use PADmapper, or discover that someone has PADded their resume?
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/the-ipads-name-make...
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-01-27/tech/apple.ipad.reaction_...
Sample comment: "Are there any women in Apple marketing?" asked Brooke Hammerling, founder of Brew Media Relations, a technology public relations firm. "The first impression of every single woman I've spoken to is that it's cringe-inducing. It indicates to me that there wasn't a lot of testing or feedback."
(google iPad + feminine hygiene for lots more examples)
Generally, I think your comment, while perfectly sensible, highlights one of the main problems touched upon in the article.
The author is trying to tell us is that it's important accept the reactions of those who have first-hand experience at face value. No need to apply a rigorous is-this-a-100%-rational-reaction test every time someone says they feel a certain way.
Finally, it is absolutely not necessary for Apple's entire marketing department to be male. The parent could be talking about focus group input, not employee input. In fact, it's likely that iPad's cringe-worthiness was immediately apparent to the women at Apple but they didn't speak up simply because it's embarrassing to talk about periods at work.
Doesn't that run contra to the idea that diversity is necessary/good by definition? Apple's marketing dept. has done a pretty damn good job, what with helping propel the company to the heights that it's gotten to.
As a tangenial but relevant point, there are empirical studies that show the inverse correlation between the number of programmers on a given project and code quality. Nevertheless, I have never seen anyone argue for hard limits on the number of contributors per OSS project. Methinks all the calls for hard data, while seemingly all about science, are really about emotion on your part.
(Sorry about the ad hominem - I am really not trying to attack you personally, I promise - I just don't know how to make my point without it).
Maybe it's awkward when you're a teenager, but once you're an adult?
Really? Because women in the eighties for example didn't seem to have any problems with, say, shoulder-pads, on the contrary, they were VERY popular.
That lame argument was played a lot in some news sites when the thing was introduced. It died in like 1-2 weeks, as 99.9% of the people don't make the BS mental connection between the two things.
Not to mention there isn't much of a connection in the first place. Not much more than notepads, shoulder-pads, launchpads, trackpads or touchpads have...
Plus, wasn't one of the most popular laptop brands the ThinkPad from IBM?
(Oh, and that said, it's only "half the population" of US (and/or UK). In Europe, L.America, Africa or Asia the name doesn't not mean anything at all).
One advantage of diversity is automatic specialization. Different people have somewhat different strengths and problems, and they develop different skills that are best in either leveraging their strengths or solving their problems.
This has the specific benefit that if some threat to everyone in the community suddenly becomes much worse, then (in a diverse community) there will probably be some people who are already specializing in solving that problem, because they or their friends (employers, customers, whatever) suffered from that problem in the past.
To take the case of a community that does open-source programming: If, suddenly, a lot of people start caring deeply about performance, it would be a good thing if there already were a couple of people who had figured out techniques to increase performance. Those people might be people trying to run a large business on a low budget, people who hate or suck at multi-threading and worked hard at making primitive operations go faster, people who hate low-level stuff and worked hard at learning to parallelize tasks, and so on. All of these people would have specialized skills that would now become valuable to the community, which could now pick up those skills more quickly and with less pain than if no one had those skills and they had to invent them from scratch.
"Lack of diversity" means that people are excluded from a community, either actively or passively. That's a "bad thing" pretty much by definition. You're thinking about the metric ("how many women?"), while the author is thinking about the mechnism implied ("something is keeping women out").
The former is data, and I guess you can argue that it's neither bad nor good. But surely you agree that the latter is bad, right? If there were something keeping women out of the community, you'd want to fix it. Right?
Why?
Because its a moral judgment, we can assume that even if monocultures are functionally superior with regards to performance we still will prefer a diverse culture for the intangible benefit of 'good ethics'.
No, wait, it occurs to me that "some Indians" would require an India, and therefore a kind of monoculture there to start with. Perhaps a "diverse culture" would mean there is no India--there would be equal proportions of all conceivable backgrounds and stuff everywhere, or at least something close to that.
But, now, wouldn't that society be a monoculture? A very serious monoculture, with the vulnerabilities that go with it (i.e. lacking the defenses that come with diversity). To give an example: if every city looks the same and has the same number of each kind of building and uses the same proportions of transportation methods and so on, then if a virus gains a mutation that makes it go very well through a particular kind of transportation, it'll be able to infect every city equally well. The situation goes from "virus no one cares about" to "virus able to infect everything". On the other hand, if you had rich cities in which one type of transportation dominated, poor cities in which another one dominated, some cities that were hubs of international travel and others that rarely got any visitors from more than 15 miles away--then you'd go from "virus no one cares about" to "some cities overrun, others barely affected", which makes it much easier to leisurely prepare a response with aid from the barely-affected cities.
(Genetic diversity is good for fighting disease, for similar reasons.)
Mmm, I have reached the conclusion that the goals of diversity at the level of individuals found in a group, and diversity at the level of groups found throughout civilization [you could define any number of group sizes if you wanted], cannot be simultaneously achieved to their fullest extent. If you have no monocultures, that puts some limits on how diverse your set of cultures can be. This meta-problem gives me a kind of zen feeling.
Ok, I'll dare: per the mythical man month, the biggest factor limiting the success of programming teams is communication. A demographicly uniform team can communicate more effectively with each other (due to having a larger shared vocabulary of common experiences) and this reduced communication overhead greatly increases their productivity.
>If there were something keeping women out of the community, you'd want to fix it. Right?
This metrics vs. data thing is precisely why hearing people go on about the lack of women in programming makes me nervous. It reminds me of my manager going on about how our unit test coverage is only 60% and why isn't it 70%; if you define low test coverage as the problem rather than the symptom, we could easily write some terrible tests that would increase the coverage but make our codebase worse.
So likewise, if you start thinking about "only 4% of open source developers are women" as a problem /in itself/, it's very easy to jump from there to doing something that increases the number of women in open source, while actually making things worse (e.g. "let's offer a load of bursaries for female CS undergrads to work on open source projects"; quick, easy, increases that percentage, but could quite possibly backfire by giving women in open source a reputation for low-quality code - and more to the point, does absolutely nothing to address whatever actual problem you're referring to)
Aren't you arguing against OSS here, essentially? Is OSS not the perfect example of communication across cultural and demographic differences? Should Torvalds just shut out everyone under 40 in the name of efficiency?
It reminds me of my manager going on about how our unit test coverage is only 60%.
Splitting your time between coding and test coverage is an extremely poor analogy to inclusivity in software. For one, your time is a resource, software is output. If you split 8 (wo)man hours into 8 hours testing and 0 hours coding, your output goes down; if you add 8 (wo)man hours to a software project, your output goes up. Even more importantly, coding and testing are not people, they don't have feelings, children to feed, etc. The comparison simply doesn't apply.
As far as your point about "bursaries" (had to look it up, it means scholarships), please consider that the original article talks about having more women's user groups and better conference policies and makes no references to financial aid of any kind. It's really not germane to pit every discussion about gender in software against apocalyptic scenarios. Yes, it would be bad if all of a sudden men were totally excluded and women were totally included, but we are far from that now, aren't we? Shall we worry about "loads of bursaries" when said loads become an actual problem?
Of course not, that would be putting the cart before the horse. He should recruit those who work together most efficiently - but if it turns out the most efficient team is demographicly homogeneous (and I suspect that the core linux team is) - then why not? Are you going to argue that he should form a less efficient team in the name of diversity?
>Splitting your time between coding and test coverage is an extremely poor analogy to inclusivity in software. For one, your time is a resource, software is output. If you split 8 (wo)man hours into 8 hours testing and 0 hours coding, your output goes down; if you add 8 (wo)man hours to a software project, your output goes up. Even more importantly, coding and testing are not people, they don't have feelings, children to feed, etc. The comparison simply doesn't apply.
You've misunderstood; my point is not that by focussing on testing you take away from coding. My point is that, while a low test coverage number indicates a problem, if you just focus on the coverage number you can end up doing more harm to the problem you were trying to fix.
The post I replied to was saying "look, if only 4% of OSS developers are female then clearly that indicates some problem." My point is that if we focus too much on the number, then we're only going to treat the symptom. Let's fix the problems, but let's not put too much attention on one shallow number.
Edit. You say: the post I replied to was saying "look, if only 4% of OSS developers are female then clearly that indicates some problem." I've re-read the post that you replied to, and it neither said, nor implied anything of the sort.
Well, if you have it, demographic uniformity is a good thing indeed. If anything it translates to less racial tension, more intra-community trust etc.
That doesn't mean that it's good to expel people, minorities etc, to achieve it if you don't have it. But if you do have it it's translates to fewer problems along the way. In the end, you either struggle FOR integration (ie towards "demographic uniformity") or different groups struggle to exclude the others (ie towards "demographic uniformity" again, but in their favor).
Just ask any African country that has been plagued by different ethnicities and cultures into war for power / control...
Real-world measure of goodness? Come on man. Do you hang out with women are colored folk or folks who came up differently than you did? It's nice, right? It's interesting to hear other folks's points of views, right? Maybe you even rethink some things you took for granted.
Have you never been around brogrammers? Have you never seen a group of dudes spiral into 4chan?
This is common sense, yes. Being a person and interacting with people is my real world measure of goodness.
Speaking for my previous company: 3, for a 12 strong team.
>How many black people?
0
>-- and why do you think that is?*
For black people it's because my country never sent slave merchants to bring black people to work here as slaves, so we haven't artificially built a black population like you did.
For women it's because we never get any competent candidates to hire, if we ever even are approached from a woman applicant.
Mid-nineties, in my university for CS, women were 1/6 to men. In the Math and Applied Math departments it was 1/1. In biology and medicine it was 2/1. In Literature it was 3/1.
And, no, it wasn't about "geeks" being sexist, and that BS.
The notion of the "computer geek" wasn't even known at the time, the jobs most of us expected to work were normal office jobs alongside other office workers, and all the students in the campus (from all departments) were more or less the same (kids just out of high school). Women just weren't interested enough to put CS in their application forms for college.
So there you have it.
Actually it reinforces my point.
If it took "outreach programs" to make them take interest doesn't it mean that they _weren't_ interested enough in CS in the first place?
These barriers are real but you, as a man, can’t really judge that because you hadn’t to cope with them. You could only try to talk to women (stress is on plural) and try to empathize.
Why do you think that is? The money isn't good enough? The life and hours of a developer aren't good enough? Women aren't capable of understanding programming?
Step back, man. You read like yet another HN poster.
If you don't think the brotastic world fostered in our industry is relevant, well, I guess (like the author) trying to expand our profession and tone down male-centric views just aren't for you. Kudos to you, I guess.
This is probably true, because open-source development doesn't seem to be a well-studied phenomenon in social science; but the effects of diversity on group dynamics in general have been studied extensively. While you may disagree, I'm willing to make the provisional assumption that working and personal relationships among open-source developers are not substantially different from groups which are more commonly studied.
(I currently don't have much in the way of academic access, but a few Google Scholar searches and reading some abstracts will at least reveal a large volume of research on these topics. i.e., http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=group+diversity+positive...)
More interesting, I think, is the idea that there must be some "real-world measure of goodness" (market share? lines of code?) which is improved by diversity, in order for pursuing diversity to be worthwhile. I'd be willing to argue that even if better diversity led to a persistent decrease in technical quality, it would be worthwhile in terms of positive external effects on society. While "low barriers to entry for all demographic groups" might not be an advantage to the group looking for developers, it could benefit society in the same ways as wheelchair ramps, good employee working conditions, regulation of animal medical testing, and other things we encourage in spite of their cost.
In other words -- diversity and fairness can be valued for their own sake, just as much as code quality is a value.
(I actually don't think increased diversity would have any negative effects on technical quality, in the long term: instead I'd expect a null effect or a slight positive. I wouldn't be surprised by a short-term negative blip as potentially-biased education and training learns to cope with different people, but I don't see that as a real barrier given the societal positives.)
edit for grammar
Python Core mentorship: http://pythonmentors.com/
PSF Outreach and Education committee: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/outreach-and-educati... - this is meant to help identify groups/etc for the PSF to help fund. Via the http://www.python.org/psf/grants/ program(s) (see also resolutions: http://www.python.org/psf/records/board/resolutions/)
Boston Python Workshop: http://bostonpythonworkshop.com/ (as a side note, see this great post on Boston Ruby: https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/the-steps-boston-ruby-is-tak...)
PyStar: http://pystar.org/ (https://twitter.com/pystarphilly/)
OpenHatch: http://openhatch.org/blog/
Women who code: http://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Code-SF/
Python Sprints projects: http://pythonsprints.com/
Software Carpentry: http://software-carpentry.org/blog/
PyLadies Main: http://pyladies.com/ (groups are popping up all over the US)
I'm probably forgetting a few.
However, this crowd is full of entitled young men who don't like the implication that they somehow had any advantage or are (accidentally or purposefully) discouraging anyone from doing anything. I have literally heard this argument leveled as I tried to explain this to one such rich young white male, "I don't see why women need any [extra consideration] in our community. Nothing stops them from going to school then getting a job, just like I did. ... I never saw a no-girls-allowed sign on the door."
Outrageous, isn't it? The response to the declaration of a problem is to deny the problem exists because it is still strictly possible for a woman to press through the constant stream of discouraging media, denigration, and implicit unfair treatment.
Which just goes to show how incredibly out-of-touch some people can be. And so articles like this serve as reference points during conversations like the one above.
Unfortunately male privilege, usually white male privilege, doesn't allow a large portion of the audience to "get it".