Lets give more opportunities to the most mollycoddled social class ( white women) in the history of humanity.
However.
My country adopted new electoral legislation a while ago, forcing politicial parties to put the same number of women as men on the voting ballots. I thought it was a silly idea and would lead to a decrease in the quality of candidates, and in the end it wouldn't help women get elected. Then something peculiar happened. Because all those women were on the ballots they became much more visible in the media, and because they were more visible they got elected. Because they got elected, they shook up the political establishment, and that in turn infused politics with fresh ideas, cementing the women's right to be there. After a while, it became so self-evident that a lot of women were on the ballot that the door was opened to other underrepresented communities, and the notion that only portly middle-aged white men could get elected flew out the window. It's gotten to the point that if you got rid of the law mandating it, there would still be a diverse cast on the voting ballots.
So, to conclude by making an actual point, while you can point at this fog creek initiative and see its flaws, and i agree it is a flawed program, you should give it a fair chance and measure it by its achievements. You never know what might come out of it.
The idea that you have to solve the entirety of a gargantuan problem to be doing anything of value is stupid. Most gargantuan problems are solved with steps of progress, not sweeping changes. If we want diversity in our industry, we have to, step by step, start aligning the incentives for young people to get into software in ways that don't overwhelming appeal to white and Asian males. This is one (very) small step along the path.
Now, whether or not this fellowship will actually do anything to help women get into software is a different argument completely. If what you're trying to communicate is that you think this is just PR and won't actually accomplish anything, then fine--there are plenty of arguments that you can make for that stance, but you haven't.
Sorry that merely stating this opinion gets people all riled up and offended.
"Women" doesn't mean "white women", and as Haul4ss pointed out, all women won the right to vote in the U.S. years after minority men did.
More on topic, I think there does need to be more inclusion for women, and there are programs springing up now that are targeting women of all backgrounds which is good. However, there is very little, if anything, being done to target minority men.
I can only speak for myself as a minority male working in tech, but I feel that some of the same unfairness/injustices that affect women apply to minority males as well.
The first is product sensibilities. While it's not better or worse, most women do think about things differently from most men. If a large portion of your customers will be women, it's really difficult to develop software that's intuitive and serves their needs if you don't have some female perspective when building that product.
The second problem it solves is keeping the best and brightest male developers in the industry. It sucks working in an industry where 90% of your coworkers are other men. When I was in school, there were a number of my classmates that switched away from a CS major simply because they wanted more girls in their classes. To a lesser extent, the same happens after people get into the industry and see just how few women they'll get to work with.
It may be cynical, but I think attracting white women to the industry is just as much about better targeting a rich demographic and keeping the white men we already have happy rather than it is about being inclusive.
I tutor a mexican kid both of whose parents are undocumented immigrants they don't seek out( out of fear) or even know about who to play the game, many of his friends sell drugs.
Shouldn't lower socio/economic background trump being a woman when we come up with programs like these?
</sarcasm>
The hyperbole undercuts his argument. And he wonders why people get riled up and offended. :/