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Remember when the government went anti-DEI crazy and started covering displays of influential women and people of colour at places like NSA? That kind of decision maker may be handling the PSF's grant.
I would like to see this kind of thing treated, socially and legally, as equivalent to saying "This tech organization has a lot of Jews... can we do something about that?" (Indeed, many of the exact same people who are classified as white men who are disproportionately present in tech organizations by DEI advocates are also Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews, and the DEI advocates are treating their white male identity rather than their Jewish identity as politically salient). If some organization refuses to refrain from treating the disproportionate presence of white men in some organization - or the assumed disproportionate presence of white men - as a problem, I think it's reasonable for the US federal government to refuse to give them grant money.
To solve the “all” problem, none of those people need to be removed from the organization. It merely states that diversity is good. To solve the “a lot of” problem necessitates getting rid of those members.
This is fundamentally why one is discriminatory and the other is not.
In the meantime, let's keep to real examples.
I recently read in the local news that some city department, in order to comply with anti-DEI stuff, was changing its name to remove the word 'diversity'... and nothing else. DEI has no legal definition. It feels like the new "woke", where the actual meaning is irrelevant, and its only real purpose is tribalistic social signalling.
In development we'd just accept it as normal to say "Putting each literal value in its own module is not a reasonable application of modular design." without claiming that the name "modular design" is now misunderstood and irrelevant.
Yeah and that's obviously problematic, because the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys".
Are the common, strange brainwashing courses in the room right now?
This is obviously a bad faith take - trying to prevent anyone from even saying, let alone promoting, diversity because sometimes people discriminate (which is already illegal) is absurd even without acknowledging that discrimination happens already. This argument looks a LOT like "keep discriminating against people that aren't like me".
Constructive criticism for good faith people out there reading this who are concerned about "DEI" causing discrimination -- acknowledge all discrimination is bad and take a real stab at working on it as a whole. If your only "attempt" to prevent discrimination is speaking up against people trying to include more diverse sets of people in programming communities then you're doing it wrong (and showing your ass).
No they were at my employer. Usually titled "learn your privilege" and other such things.
[1]: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...
I feel like statements like this are fundamentally vague. What does "supporting" the growth of a diverse and international community look like? Is it different from "facilitating the growth of" such a community? Without concrete definitions I feel like both sides are talking past each other. I would love to see concrete definitions and would be grateful to anyone who can give me sources from either side.
like, somebody going to a "women in tech" conference could result in suddenly having to find millions in cash to pay back the government.
But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
I (a white man) would be upset at preferential treatment of white men. Or white women. Or black men. Or anyone. Where's the "judging by the content of their character" that the social justice movement (rightly) called for? I don't see it much these days.
And for half the hn readership, it appears
Still, just because grants to open-source programming language foundations aren't the most important federal government spending priority, doesn't mean I want the federal government to remove the no-DEI condition on federal grant money.