Dev.to has become a great home for diversity, equity and inclusion content related to the tech industry, including this year's great #shecoded/#the...
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The thing is, this isn't "increasingly" an issue, in my view; tech has been like this for a long time, where the "right" culture is, in western countries, being a white man. Tech has never been a meritocracy or anything close to it.
I don't think anyone working on DEI would advocate for hiring folks who don't have the skills to do a job. Rather, the "equity" part is about creating the conditions for what you'd call a meritocracy—allowing people to succeed regardless of their economic background, gender, sexual orientation, race, or disabilities. Alan Turing was forced out of technology because he was gay; if you read the article @rhymes posted that's listed above, Britain basically killed its own technology industry by forcing out competent women for mediocre men.
There are probably a lot of people who could succeed in programming if given the chance. I'm a pretty good example of this; I've been programming for more than two thirds of my life despite being a relative minority in the tech industry because I had a lot of early encouragement and mentorship, plus the economic background to have regular access to a computer. If we made sure that everyone who showed interest in programming had those things, we might be looking at something closer to a meritocracy now. The question is, how do we build that perfect world where no one does care about differences? That's what DEI is trying to achieve.
Your examples come off as considering the idea of a qualified "native American transsexual" (which, by the way—we don't really use that word anymore in English and it's often considered kind of rude) to be ridiculous, which I think might speak to some unconscious bias even if you didn't mean it that way.
As I already said, no one in DEI wants people to hire unqualified candidates, which is a point you seem to have skimmed over. The intention is to create more qualified candidates from people with potential who might not have gotten the chance otherwise, and to give them an environment that supports that potential. An evening of the playing field, so to speak. Doesn't that sound like what you want?
In my country, we don't yet have federal-level employment protections for gay people, so, uh, I'm not 100% convinced. My point there was that the history of technology is mired in the very opposite of meritocracy, and it's taking us a long time to undo the damage that caused.
Probably the way you'd want to say that phrase is "a transgender native American," although with Native Americans and First Nations folks there's also sometimes other more specific culture- and language-specific gender terms.
In my workplace we talk about hiring for culture growth rather than culture fit—which is to say, what will someone we hire add to our environment in terms of unique experience and perspective? What things will they be able to share with co-workers? What things will they think of that we haven't already? A diverse group of engineers can better understand how a diverse group of users might engage with their end product, as well as the problems that they might run into. For example, we might have less incidents like facial recognition that only works well on white people. That article notes a study that says that facial recognition software made by Asian companies tends to work better on Asian faces—likely because they're more aware of the differences between their own facial features and know to train the software on those points.
I just wanted to say great post and admins are keeping an eye on this discussion. As we continue to improve our moderation tooling and processes, we appreciate the great work of everyone working so hard to keep this community kind, inclusive and constructive.
Amazing job, Carly, Fen, Jess and some other amazing folks who have been here from early days.
Carly, Fen, and Jess! We are so appreciative of the DEI work you all do and champion for the developer community. Thanks so much for putting this list together and for continuing to bring DEI issues to light on DEV. I know it's challenging work and can be emotionally exhausting/triggering for all participants (those who publish, comment, and read!) so thank you all for your consistent presence here.
Meritocracies are composed of people, not computers, even in IT. If you want people to succeed in them, you can't treat them as if they're the same as the things they're working on. People require management; meritocracies require effort.
This is obviously untrue. People are fired from IT jobs all the time for meshing poorly with their superiors, coworkers, and reports -- Google trivially provides thousands of reports of exactly this. I'm not saying that the people who are fired are guilty or have a bad personality, but I am saying personality is 100% a factor in an IT job.
Also, yes we use computers to do our jobs, but the whole point of our jobs is making things for other people. We build tools for people to use. To say that our jobs don't "deal with" people is a mistake.
But what does that mean? By that, I'm asking: what assumptions underpin your meritocracy?
For example, I think being kind and inclusive enables people to program at their highest possible level. So having a meritocracy that accounts for peoples' differences, and individually and uniquely supports and encourages them, is a necessary prerequisite for meritocracy.
You seem to think meritocracies should be gender-, race-, sexuality-, etc.-blind. But that only really enables success on the part of certain people. Wouldn't you want your meritocracy to really foster as much merit as possible? What's the harm in spending time to make sure everyone can participate in the meritocracy equally? It doesn't harm the people already included: more inclusion just means more good programmers!
Race, gender, ability, and socioeconomic background are incredibly important for designing and implementing products that work for a broad segment of the population. If you scrub that out into a monoculture, you replicate the design flaws that already exist today, and that's a bad thing.
It's true that the status quo probably designs products just fine for you. They were designed by people who look like you for people who look like you. That's not the case for the majority of the world's population.
A.) In societies where gender inequality exists, the idea of meritocracy as currently implemented, with the assumptions we currently hold about meritocracy are unfair towards women and other gender minorities.
B.) No one is asking you to be the "least important" as a cishet white male (btw, you don't need to put cis in quotes), we want everyone to be equal. That might look like a drop in status to you either way, but that's what actual meritocracy would demand.
It really feels like you're willfully ignoring the critiques of meritocracy as a flawed implementation of an ideal system, and you just keep batting the term around like a cure all. I recommend doing some reading on the research that's actually been done by qualified academics on the idea of meritocracy and systemic inequality, rather than relying on gut instinct and anecdote. It's difficult to have a coherent conversation when we're operating with such wildly diverging definitions of terms.
That's unfortunately just not true; your meritocracy is composed of people, not cogs. And those people have race and gender and sexuality (and psychology and feelings and children). And they will have issues about them that it will be up to you, as meritocracy-manager, to properly address. Punting on it ("not being in anyone's way") is one form of addressing those issues, but your meritocracy will suffer as a result.
How is this not special pleading? There's nothing different about IT jobs compared to any other jobs, especially with regards to people having requirements to succeed.
Big +1s on Rachel and Massimo's articles. They're really well written and provide great points.
@kmelve wrote a great article with a lot of solid points and was a good response/follow-up for men to Patricia Aas' post "Survival Tips for Women in Tech".
Making tech survivable: What can men do?
Knut Melvær
I'm a big fan of the accessibility posts we have on the tag page. @lkopacz had a great post about alt text:
Writing alternative text that matters
Lindsey Kopacz
@maxwell_dev had a great post recently on accessibility:
The Web Accessibility Introduction I Wish I Had
Max Antonucci
Oh, these are great! Thank you so much for sharing them.
It really feels like you're consistently implying that diverse hiring implies lowering a bar and a distrust that people outside the majority can be good at the job on their own merits. For more on that topic, I'd recommend reading the post linked in this piece:
On lowering the bar
Massimo Artizzu
I too would love it if we existed in a society where conditions for a true meritocracy were possible. I think that's ultimately what we all want. But the fact that access to resources and opportunity is unequal makes the current practice of "meritocracy" an exercise in status-quo based gatekeeping.
@tux0r , my personal opinion is that meritocracy is a fallible concept that wouldn't even work in your idea of a "perfect world".
By saying:
You're also saying that people should just be assimilated to a monoculture where anything that sets them apart is rendered non important despite them being... people.
It's like advocating for an eternal code switching: when you're at home you can be gendered, have an ethnicity, have physical or mental disabilities but when you're at work nope, you need to leave all of that out of the work place but be this awesome "bro" or "gal" (because you still haven't figured out that gender is a spectrum) and high five your way to retirement.
What I find appalling of this world view is that people are people, they are people when they are at home, they are people when they are at work. It's what is different between them that enriches society, otherwise every kind of product (not just software) would be catered to everyone. Why market diapers to babies when you can market them to 25year old too. Why have different shades of colors as "nude makeup" when you can market one single shade to 7 billion people and call it a day? Naomi Campbell is sure going to look amazing on those magazines if she uses Drew Barrymore shades of makeup. Who cares, in this perfect world everyone is one and the same. I'm sure you would find this super dumb, so why the idea of erasing people's identities 8-10 hours a day should be any less dumb?
Let's suppose the current system is indeed meritocratic (which isn't, not even in your world sense): what do we do with privileged individuals that are occupying space because of wealth and not because of skill? Why hasn't this marvelous meritocracy got rid of them?
One thing that I never understand about people in tech who refuse to hear the DEI argument is that they are supposed to be part of the upper echelon of cognitive intelligence (also utterly uninterested in any other type of intelligence, but that's for another day). Able to discern how a complex machine works, able to hunt a bug for weeks and then solve it, able to decide what's the most cost effective solution by evaluating countless factors but as soon as someone says "maybe the status quo isn't perfect" logic and innate curiosity is thrown out of a window faster than I can say "minority". I haven't even started talking about bias. People graduating from MIT that can send people to Mars but can't see that at the end of the day they are human too and not robots, people with bias like you and me and everyone else.
The DEI argument is way bigger than "Google has an abysimal number of black programmers" but this is yet another thing that's ignored by advocates of "meritocracy above all else".
Italy has a law (still valid) from the fascist period that forbids ANY and ALL non citizens to drive any form of public transportation. Are you telling me that no refugee has the skill to drive a bus and use that to provide from themselves and/or their family? No, it's just the system barring them to assimilate. I can link you examples of black and brown first responders that have been berated by callers because "I don't want to be cured by a black doctor". I don't justify these people racism but if you never see anyone that looks like you two things can happen: you don't try (hence you don't become a doctor) and they think you're less than (because some people unfortunately by never having had any contact with anyone outside their own culture, default to skepticism if not racism when presented with a "novelty").
So, if tech is full of habits and customs barring possibly qualified candidates from entering, why are you not willing to change it?
And even if you think that these habits and customs are not real, why aren't you willing to experiment with the status quo? After all, what have you got to lose?
I'll conclude by saying that just this morning I saw the following video on kottke.org:
At some point they say how when men in the 40s discovered there was creativity to be had in film editing, so they started kicking women out of the profession (despite them being the majority in the first few decades of cinema). Rings a bell?