As a female engineer, I am not diversity

In reference to the point she makes about people not assuming women are developers, I now make it a point to assume two things about most everyone (male and female identifying) that I meet in tech:<p>1) That they are competent and smart until they definitely prove otherwise to me.<p>2) That they are technical and interested in technology.<p>It&#x27;s worked really well for me so far. In practice it means when I meet someone I say &quot;You&#x27;re a dev right?&quot;. Most people appreciate being assumed to be technical, and if they aren&#x27;t we still get a great convo out of it. I admit it&#x27;s kind of a silly thing, but so far in years of doing it I don&#x27;t know of a time it&#x27;s made anyone feel bad.<p>Edit - Also, if their answer to the dev question is that they are instead a product manager, UX, Designer, etc, I try and follow up with a funny compliment about their field. &quot;Ah, so you make apps useable&quot;, etc. Again, just a simple conversational technique to make people feel valued.

Great article. Thanks for sharing this. I think perspectives like yours are what we need to move beyond what are often one-dimensional conversations about diversity.<p>Aside: Please forgive the nitpick, but despite its widespread use I really don&#x27;t think &quot;extroverted introvert&quot; is a thing. The problem is that these two things are opposite ends of a spectrum. I think what people really mean when they say &quot;extroverted introvert&quot; is one of two things:<p>1) Ambivert : &quot;a person whose personality has a balance of extrovert and introvert features&quot;<p>2) Introvert, but not shy : It is a common misconception that introverts are inherently shy. The two are correlated, but not the same thing. You can be introverted and not be shy, either inherently or by learning to overcome shyness. Extra&#x2F;introversion has more to do with your preferences and where you derive energy from. Shyness is more fear-based, and fear can be overcome.<p>Anyway that&#x27;s not really a critical part of your article but I&#x27;ve sort of unintentionally become a Myers-Briggs nerd over the years and enjoy discussing stuff like that :)

I just hope this diversity drama never comes to my country.<p>I already work in a very diverse workplace. Both genders and multiple nationalities are represented, and I really don&#x27;t see what that brigs to the table. I mean, why is diversity good per se?<p>I don&#x27;t see any correlation between any demographic variable and being a good coworker.

I&#x27;m going to say it. The most excluded group in SV are conservative republicans. Its a death sentence to your career to come out as one. If you truly value diversity, their point of view is the most absent from tech.

I do think that pointing at someone&#x27;s physical body and saying, &quot;They bring diversity because they&#x27;re X!&quot; is wrong.<p>However, I do think that gender and race have an influence on your thought processes because of who you tend to associate with.<p>In addition, she spent 15 years in China, which is definitely not very common here in the US. That alone means she&#x27;s going to think somewhat differently than the average engineer.<p>And finally, a lack of diversity in a group (all white hetero males, for example) indicates an attempt to exclude diversity, though perhaps subconsciously.

If men and women are completely interchangeable, physically and psychologically, then this article makes a lot of sense.<p>But if women really do have something different (at least on average) to bring to the table, then this women really does add diversity.<p>The purpose of diversity is not quotas, but differences that work together and add something to the whole.

Does anyone else find it weird&#x2F;disturbing that someone is compiling a list of women engineers and where they work? I understand having a list of influential speakers and such to look up to, but this does not seem to be the case. The author mentioned she has no idea how she made it on there.<p>Link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cristinacordova.github.io&#x2F;women-eng&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cristinacordova.github.io&#x2F;women-eng&#x2F;</a>

I liked the article, but even her expanded definition of diversity doesn&#x27;t resonate completely with me. My brother and I had exactly the same background and upbringing. And we are both remarkably different people. None of the metrics of diversity mentioned here would reflect that, but it&#x27;s reality.<p>The priority should be diverse people, not diverse backgrounds.

I think the finer point is that pinning diversity to something specific like gender works against people that don&#x27;t <i>want</i> to be viewed as a diversity candidate. It&#x27;s hard to get this right and the end goal is that we don&#x27;t even talk about diversity anymore but just recognize its benefits.

I agree with her, diversity is more than just race, sex, sexual preference, etc. However I would say that I think these things as a top level attribute DO correlate with different lived experiences that you want in a diverse workforce.<p>Companies are not going to ask you about your political leanings, they are probably not going to give you some mental test to see how you react to situation A and situation B. If you look at the stats, race and gender do correlate between stark differences in people. For instance, the &quot;wealth gap&quot; between black and white Americans is about 10x, growing in poverty vs. growing up in a stable middle class family causes a different lived experience, you view the world differently because of how you grew up. That&#x27;s not to say that all black people are poor and all white people are rich, but if you&#x27;re working with a limited data set and are thinking about how you can get some people in a room with different lived experiences, you could do a lot worse than saying &quot;let&#x27;s get a mix of different races in here&quot;. I think the same thing applies to women and other traits that companies and institutions use for their diversity metrics.

Interesting that this person does not mention diversity of political opinion, which seems to be lacking.

Does it matter who&#x27;s diversity? If the argument is that a company with a non-diverse workforce can&#x27;t deal with users from different walks of life, they don&#x27;t have a diversity problem, they have an empathy problem. (Arguably most programmers have an empathy problem.)<p>While I&#x27;m sure hiring 2 women and 0.2 black people for every scrum team may help fix the empathy issue, so would hiring white guys who don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re the center of the universe. Of course to do that we&#x27;d need to stop (as an industry) rewarding and recognizing people who think they&#x27;re the elite for doing a perfectly normal white-collar job that occasionally involves high school math.<p>(And I definitely don&#x27;t think we need diversity of political opinions. I don&#x27;t want to know my coworkers&#x27; political opinions, whatever they may be. What would be great would be if I could get coworkers who just don&#x27;t think their particular ideology is super important in terms of their work life. Any companies that are more on the chill side like this?)

The ultimate diversity is individuality. Stop looking at sex, age and skin color and start looking at the competence alone.

This comment might not be relevant to the article.<p>Isn&#x27;t diversity ultimately relative to the group you are comparing to? And how you want to define the group might differ among people? Also how you weigh the trait in relation to its effect on the some kind of performance metric of the group?<p>Someone with trait A could be considered diverse if we define a group with predominantly trait B. Does having diverse traits (a mix of both A and B) highly correlated with better performance&#x2F;survival&#x2F;whatever metric? Maybe having diversity means the group can adapt better over time (surviving an evolutionary bottleneck in some sense)?<p>Most of these concepts are obviously not quantifiable in this way, but I think we need some kind of framework to think about how we define diversity.

Hire remotely if you want diversity...

All this article says to me is that no matter how hard I work or what decisions I make or what my life experiences are, I&#x27;ll never be good enough for progressives. I&#x27;ll fall &quot;lower&quot; than others on some arbitrary and ever-changing grading scale which puts value to my experiences.

<i>&gt; &quot;I’m not bringing in the diverse perspective that is so critical to the success of any company.&quot;</i><p>Based on what evidence, or even logic, is diversity critical to the success of even <i>some</i> companies? Let alone <i>any</i> company?

Agreed, diversity should mean more than simply ethnicity and gender.<p>Age is one thing she left out, it&#x27;s great for one&#x27;s career these days to look ~28.

I&#x27;m kind of surprised by the extent to which people have bought into this diversity thing, to the point where it&#x27;s actually literally a thing people care about. My understanding is that this modern push for diversity and all the rhetoric surrounding it effectively started as a dogwhistle used by liberals to push affirmative action in pursuit of social justice without having to talk about the uncomfortable reality of white privilege and the controversial politics of social justice and reparations. Diversity is sort of a cop-out, a way for liberal white people to convince less liberal white people that affirmative action is the right thing not because white people did anything wrong ever but because it make white people richer.<p>Taking this as a serious thing on its own devoid of the political context in which it became a necessary tactic and getting into the weeds about what truly is diversity is sort of like the liberal equivalent of taking the Republican rhetoric about makers and takers, welfare frauds and the need for voter ids seriously without realizing that these talking points are largely understood by their audiences to be about black people and immigrants. Seeing the world through rhetorical devices created specifically to confuse the issues results in confusion like this entire article. This is not what diversity means to people for whom it&#x27;s an important issue.

I get the point the author is making, but I&#x27;m not 100% sure I agree with how she expressed it. By limiting the definition of diversity&#x2F;minority, we can probably identify a cohort for any individual where they are in the majority.<p>Diversity measured across an entire company or large cohort doesn&#x27;t really show the value of diversity in the first place. For me, the real power of diversity is at a micro-level. The author would absolutely add diversity to a three person team where one member is an Indian woman born, raised, and educated to PhD in India, another is a Croatian man with no formal education beyond secondary school, and the third person was a poor kid from Detroit that scrapped their way through community college and into the job market.<p>When I&#x27;m putting a team together, I try my hardest to create diversity. That doesn&#x27;t mean running through a checklist of gender, ethnicity, sexual identification, etc. but it does mean looking for people with different points of view, experience, and ways of solving problems.<p>tl;dr: Diversity == good, agree gender doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean diversity, diversity is a meaningless term without context.

This article is part of the problem. By pointing out that she does not contribute to &quot;diversity&quot; because of her economic and cultural background, the author reinforces the idea that those are the interesting ingredients of this elusive &quot;diversity.&quot; She says nothing about her ideas, interests, or opinions. Does she perhaps add to diversity by having original thoughts? Or are her political opinions and taste in music predictable? I&#x27;d say this article is evidence that she may in fact possess some intellectual diversity, but that it is something that she herself does not recognize as such.

She doesn&#x27;t know what is it to suffer from diversity. Elizabeth Warren has 0.0001% things to say about that.