How should the computing and technology community work towards creating a welcoming, diverse, and inclusive community? Is this a moral imperative or a laudable goal or unlikely wish?

I will admit that as a white man I don’t have many first hand experiences of feeling excluded or ostracized because of my identity. Almost anywhere I go in the tech world I find people who look, think, and talk like me. While I’ve felt very welcome and included from my experiences, I’m starting to become more aware of my peers around me who don’t feel the same way. To me diversity isn’t about static calculated statistics and numbers; its about people. Diversity means allowing a diverse group of people from distinct backgrounds to all feel comfortable together. In the tech industry, this means not treating people differently or overly changing expectations just because of some part of their identity.

I think there are two conflicting goals that need to somehow be balanced to fully address this issue. We must learn to be aware of the social situation with respect to diversity, while not letting these factors overly affect our decisions. Either of these ideologies, however, if taken to the extreme, can be extremely harmful.

With only a strong focus on understanding the social situation with respect to diversity:

  1. Professor Bui’s example of sorting potential candidates into groups based solely on their identity really hit me as an example of good intentions gone wrong. On paper the department was being proactive in trying to increase diversity, but in reality they were simply continuing to discrimnate against certain group of people is a more ‘legal’ manner. This removes the meritocraticness of the system by placing higher emphasis on identity rather than pure ability. It also in some ways dehumanizes those groups: In Professor Bui’s example the process structure implied that those minority groups couldn’t be a part of the ‘best candidate’ pool.
  2. In a large group of diverse people from different backgrounds, some of the nuance of different individual cultures and identities is lost. One of the discussions in class this week surrounding conferences like Grace Hopper was the ability for people at these conference to simply be themselves for a period of time. Because of this desire to be around similar people who share your background, I doubt a ‘perfectly diverse’ group of people would ‘fix’ these underlying diversity issues.1

On the other hand if these factors are completely ignored, there are at least two possible negative outcomes:

  1. The cycle of privilege is allowed to propagate. In a strictly meritocratic system, those without the initial resources will be at a potentially perpetual disadvantage, through no fault of their own other than their identity.
  2. There are certain legitimate circumstances where different groups have different needs. The biggest example is pregnant and nursing women. This is a very important time in a woman’s life, and is important for a functioning society. Special considerations must be taken to ensure women are able to take of their child properly. In cases like this, caring for the individual is more important that treating everyone as 100% equal. That’s not at all to say women should be treated as less; on the contrary, they should be treated with even more respect for all the difficulties they have to go through that men could never being to comprehend.

As seen above, there are dangers to both sides of this diversity issues. I think we should all strive to at least be aware of both sides of this issue, and make a conscious effort to respect the human dignity of every person. If that’s too much to ask for, you should really take a deep look at your priorities..


1For all practical purposes in our current state of things, this idea of 'perfect diversity' is a long long way off. I'm not at all arguing that we shouldn't try to increase diversity of minority groups because they won't feel welcome. I'm questioning the idea of strictly adhering to calculated quotas just for the sake of numbers.