Mentoring and diversity for Python [LWN.net]

Mentoring and diversity for Python

Posted Jun 23, 2018 18:06 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Mentoring and diversity for Python by bobbytables
Parent article: Mentoring and diversity for Python

Not long time ago there were very few female orchestra conductors. After all, women just don’t have the required hearing and sense of rhythm. Everybody knows this!

Well, now around 30% of graduating conductors are female.

Mentoring and diversity for Python

Posted Jun 24, 2018 1:49 UTC (Sun) by bobbytables (guest, #65908) [Link] (3 responses)

Being a conductor is a very public role where you cannot hide your gender, plus we are talking about a centuries old profession where men ruled. Obviously there were fossilised dinosaurs against it. Can you really say the same about the tech industry, which is barely 40 years old? Additionally as I said before you can easily hide your age, gender and sexual orientation behind a computer.

There are literally hundreds of scholarships and support programmes to get women to code, and have been for the last ten years. Almost every European government gives grants for hiring women in tech companies.

Look, I'm all for creating new opportunities for people, getting more people to code, etc. But not at the expense of a true meritocracy or enforcing positive discrimination over something which can be done anonymously.

At some point people will realise that it's ok to have preferences and being a woman. Do you want to be a powerful tech industry magnate? Go ahead! Want to be a stay at home mum? That's fine too!

If you want to code and you are good, no-one will really care if you're a woman. If you're bad, you're going to get roasted, no matter what is your gender.

Mentoring and diversity for Python

Posted Jun 25, 2018 8:16 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

> If you want to code and you are good, no-one will really care if you're a woman.

This is simply not borne out by reality.

Mentoring and diversity for Python

Posted Jun 25, 2018 13:46 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

There is, for example, this study showing that having a visibly female name reduces the chances of getting a pull request accepted.

Mentoring and diversity for Python

Posted Jun 25, 2018 9:58 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

My direct experience is that people do care if the person coding something is a woman, not a man, and treat exactly the same code from me differently to the code from my co-workers.

It would be lovely if this was false, and people did not care about the gender of a coder, but that's not the case today.