Also, once you really take a look at "feminist" issues, they are a bit deeper and more complicated than people who say they don't believe in feminism seem to think.
It is difficult to simply proclaim oneself a feminist, since it has become too broad a category to be a meaningful label anyways. Which school of feminism do you mean when you call yourself a feminist? How many people taking part in this debate are even able to distinguish between these different schools?
That being said, I personally highly prefer working in a diverse team. Teams constituted solely of (white) men tend to be way less fun to work in, compared to a more diverse team. Diversity in my experience does stimulate more creative approaches to a problem domain due to the heterogenous backgrounds of the team.
If you live in an area and work in a field where more white men are qualified for the work available than other colour-sex groups then you probably act in a racist and sexist manner then.
Isn't this just an extension of a reason why (in the UK at least) computing fields are currently skewed, that those who chose those fields were socially dismissed as "nerds". Now, shock horror, other peoples refusal to associate with them due ostensibly to fashion/social mores has lead to homogeneous groups.
It seems to be taken as a truism that such homogeneous groups exist because the internal individual morality enforces biases - but the same result appears to be achievable assuming that those external to the group are the ones with the biases. In practice I imagine it's both.
Wanting your teams to be fun is fine, find a way to determine how "fun" someone is and use that rather than assuming that position in a colour-sex space is a proper metric for "fun-ness".
>Diversity in my experience does stimulate more creative approaches to a problem domain due to the heterogenous backgrounds of the team. //
This is interesting to me because colour and sex don't demonstrate anything about the backgrounds of people yet those are the characteristics you've chosen. In my kids primary school (UK) there are families with heritages that are Chinese, Spanish, Pakistani, South African (Afrikaans), Zimbabwean, German, Welsh, Scottish, English, Polish, and probably a few more I don't know or can't recall; but they're not really that diverse, they are on the whole middle-class British born children. There's seemingly more difference between the few that are working class/multiple-generation unemployed (or just poorer) than between those of different geographic heritage.
It troubles me that people like you will reject giving my kids, who are relatively poor compared to the society around them, any opportunities because you can't see past their colour and sex (white, male). IMO if you're happy to accept that with everything else being equal you should give a job to my youngest's best friend - a black girl - in preference to him just because her grandparents live in Zimbabwe then you've got to also accept those who chose other arbitrary characteristics too, like giving a job to someone just because they're white. I don't think you can equivocate and say racism is fine how you do it but not how someone else does it.
Thats quite a bold assumption. I don't see where I am acting racist by claiming that hetergenous teams are more fun to work in. I have simply made a conclusion from actual experience made time and time again.
> Wanting your teams to be fun is fine, find a way to determine how "fun" someone is and use that rather than assuming that position in a colour-sex space is a proper metric for "fun-ness".
Granted. It should not be the only metric, but I have simply stated my personal experience. Homogenous teams are (in my personal experience) often stuck in certain social dynamics, which they are often not even aware of. Since homogenity in tech is skewed along the racial / sex axis (also somewhat along the age dimension for certain positions), introducing heterogenity along these axis can indeed make sense. And yes, wealth and education of the family are an interesting dimension one could take into account. Now, don't jump to conclusions here. I did never say that one should introduce a race/sex quota when hiring. This is not an easy subject, and I have not made up my mind as to what is the right approach when hiring.
Research indicates that heterogenous teams do indeed perform significantly better than do homogenous teams: http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/better_decis...
> IMO if you're happy to accept that with everything else being equal you should give a job to my youngest's best friend - a black girl - in preference to him just because her grandparents live in Zimbabwe then you've got to also accept those who chose other arbitrary characteristics too, like giving a job to someone just because they're white. I don't think you can equivocate and say racism is fine how you do it but not how someone else does it.
Interesting point. Let me give you another example with a different perspective. I am male, white, born into a well educated middle class family. My sister is adopted and of color. We both had the same upbringing. I simply did not have to overcome the same negative biases as she did. While teachers never questioned my ability to perform in school, they openly questioned my sisters ability to properly perform time and time again (sometimes being openly racist in their comments). She did manage to overcome these obstacles imposed on her, and she is now quite accomplished in a field that is dominated by mostly white male (neuroscience).
Given the exact same background and upbringing, her experience is substantially different from mine. And so are probably the experiences made by your sons black friend.
A person from a different color/gender does inherently have different experience to that of a white male. This experience is not easily measurable, and often not obvious to the outside observer, but a person with such experience (given the same educational merits) can introduce a different perspective into a team, not only making it often "more fun" to work in but probably even enabling it to perform better.
I am fifty-one.
Also in the united states, it is illegal for employers to discriminate against the mentally ill, as well as those who are simply perceived as mentally ill.
I have quite sever bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder. I link to my essays "Living with Schizoaffective Disorder" and "My Deepest Fear" at the top of every single page of my website, including my resume:
http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/
http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/thought-...
"My Deepest Fear" concerns my vividly paranoid visual hallucinations. The specific reason I work as a coder rather than as a physicist is that I still write good code when I am hallucinating. I first realized that to be the case in 1988, I wrote LwSD in 2003 and now I can't get a job.
How often do discussions of diversity include the mentally ill or the middle-aged?
Among my deepest concerns is that I see many younger engineers - startup founders are the worst, as well as the people who they employ - making many of the same stupid mistake I did when I was their age, or the mistakes of my young colleagues.
My aim these days is to find a job where I can teach the children not to fuck up. Unfortunately I cannot get a job because all the young people think I am incapable of writing code.
I did the storage and firewire for a wireless audio recorder that won a technical academy award.