Coding Diversity

I fear that I'm beginning to sound like a stuck record by now, but I can't help attempting to push back against that particular form of inertia that has infected our discipline. First I saw this, then this, but this was the only post that touched on what I personally felt was a real problem. And yes, judging by the resulting comments, it must be a sensitive issue. Usually one can read over such comment blob tennis and laugh, but I was particularly annoyed and frustrated by some of the base assumptions being made in response. Especially since the original remarks were not at all inflammatory in content or tone.

Last year, I interviewed a bunch of women who were studying undergraduate and graduate computer science, and asked them to talk about their experiences from the perspective of gender. Many of them were incredibly conscious of being an "outsider" in the "boys game". It's hard not to feel like this when you're the only girl in a group of 20 or 30 boys. Some definitely felt that once you got deeper into the subject, this feeling more or less evaporated, but it was a very big problem for the younger and less experienced girls. A common theme mentioned was that the lack of diverse role models in programming and computing was offputting and discouraging. This is an incredibly important point. We need real role models, not generic career blurbs, not software luminaries.

I've already talked about how this stagnant gender gap leads to the open source community missing out on many talented contributors. Those who are bluntly denying that there is any problem at all are blatantly misunderstanding the situation. It disgusts me that such a mild and empathic perspective can be so quickly transliterated as an acerbic argument for racial or gender quotas at conferences. WTF? No seriously. What the fuck? To me, this kind of thinking is a sign of a social bubble that needs to be burst. Hence the stuck record problem I'm having. I wish I could contribute something much more constructive, it seems all I've done thus far is to write about it; nothing more than jumping up and down, pointing my finger. It's sad.

Still, I do feel sorry for those guys who ended up in the photo - they didn't ask to be singled out as Werewolves, nor held up as symbols of a white middle class monoculture. But I'm sure they can appreciate that nobody is making anything out against them personally or culturally - it is simply a window on an issue deserving of airtime - that picture really is worth a thousand words. I think Reg is right in that we can't say for certainty that there is a problem by looking at the scene itself. But it is a fair illustration of the wider cultural situation, a situation made worse by the fact that a lot of pale skinned male programmers refuse to recognize that this world doesn't (and shouldn't) revolve solely around them. Yes, there surely is a reason why we talk about a "circle jerk" rather than a "circle poke".

Personally, I can't wait for the day when the programming world faces the same kind of social tsunami as the Usenet world did in that Eternal September. The day when millions of crass teenage kids from all over the developing world link up together online and start remixing the dominant software and discussions in their own images. As that cliché goes: It won't happen overnight, but it will happen.