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The Other Side of Diversity In Tech
An anonymous reader writes: We frequently discuss diversity in the tech industry, and all the initiatives getting underway to encourage women and minorities to enter (and stay in) the field. The prevailing theme is that this will be good for companies, good for innovation, and good for the future of technology. While that's true, greater representation will also be good for the individuals themselves. Erica Joy has been in IT for a long time, and she's worked in many of the industry hotspots. She's written an insightful article on how the lack of diversity has affected her throughout her career. An excerpt: "Unfortunately, my workplace is homogenous and so are my surroundings. I feel different everywhere. I go to work and I stick out like a sore thumb. ... I feel like I've lost my entire cultural identity in effort to be part of the culture I've spent the majority of the last decade in."
Isn't it because without diversity (ie without female and/or ethnic minority) you inevitably recruit from less than 50% (and possibly less than 40%) of the potential pool of talent?
It's rather like asking why it might be bad for innovation if we were only able to offer technology related jobs to those whose surnames begin with the letters A to M...
Which comes from different backgrounds and experiences.
The most effective teams I've been in almost sound like the start of a joke about different people coming into a bar.
In one case there was a technician who repaired military jets, a doctor with most of an anestesia specialty, an engineer who had designed the process in a large yak milk bottling factory and me, an engineer that worked out why bits of power stations broke. We turned out decent code quickly unlike others with a background that stopped with simple algebra and simpler geometry. There was no separation and no step of trying to spoon feed the science to the coder in easily digestible chunks.
The argument runs like this:
We 'assume' that innate interpersonal differences within groups, so that the outliers may be predominantly men at one end and women at the other, or 'white' one end and 'black' the other. But the majority of the distribution is not a homogenous group.
We 'assume' that in most parts of 'the West' the population is almost 50/50 male/female.
So first off we can see that excluding females (choice of toys in infancy, inadvertent influences in childhood, unfriendly environment in tech classes at college, lack of role models in industry, sexism on tech forums, harrassment at work, blatant discrimination) will reduce the pool of candidates by about 50%.
Then we 'assume' that there are plenty of areas where the population is around 80/20 white/minority ethnic and exclude those with a minority ethnic background in the same way. So now the pool of candidates is 40%.
Of course you can argue that if all negative bias is removed, women will never like tech so much, or ethnic minorities will never understand maths as well. That's a totally different argument (and one that's increasingly difficult to make, I think, and it was never an easy one to make to begin with).
But that is where my 40% figure was pulled from, out of thin air, and I'm surpised it has turned out to be controversial!