Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

> I don't agree with that. Black people are heavily overrepresented in sports in the USA. I personally believe that this is partially due to some physical differences that makes them better at sports, and that even if the cultures were exactly the same, they would still be overrepresented (relative to their proportion in the total population).

I intentionally chose programming as an example because it's an intellectual pursuit. Yes, people of different ethnicities can have different physical characteristics; that much is observable. But the idea that intellectual capacity is an essential difference between racial groups is /the/ white supremacist argument. Ie, the idea that white people are inherently smarter than black people. It's their justification for racial dominance.

> As soon as something involves skill, people will have different levels of success at it.

That is true, but it leads to statical variance across the board. If, for a large enough sample and controlled for mutable factors, white people are more successful at programming than black people, that is an essential trait. Given that we agree that race isn't an objective reality, race can't have essential traits, and thus statistically significant, categorical differences between outcomes must be caused by mutable characteristics like experience, education etc.

> No, this is not. You are making a jump between "a racial group is better at one field" to "a racial group is better than all the other groups", and again to "a racial group is better than all the other groups and should dominate them".

How does a racial group be better at one field, categorically, unless either a) there are social differences like culture or access to education or b) there are essential, immutable differences between them? The important factor in racist reasoning is the idea that black people are less intelligent than white people. It's not true, but it's used to justify relegating them to a lower class.

> Even if deep racial differences existed, I think we could still build a society where people are judged as individuals on what they accomplish

We want this society now, except that differences in intelligence are not caused by race. So it's reasonable to investigate circumstances where outcomes are significantly different in order to understand what mutable systems and institutions could be changed to even the playing field so that capable black and white people can both succeed on merit.

When their graph titled "Tech Journalism Is Less Diverse Than Tech" only shows "white" vs non-"white". When their statistic, introduced with "highlight of the results", only contains data points about "white" vs non-"white".

There's not much else to this article. Therefore, the author reduces diversity to skin colors.

> This white supremacy argument is a disingenuous appeal to the extremely negative connotation

It's a perfectly reasonable argument, if not at times overfitted. In the US, zero (0) presidents have been born post-Civil Rights Act. In fact, Ruby Bridges [0] is only a year older than Bill Gates. So did Ruby's peers just happen to not produce programmers at the same rate as Bill's because they didn't "value" education? Hey, maybe it's true. Who knows? But the idea that a demographic whose grandparents had to be escorted by the national guard to protect them from white supremacist mobs on the way to get an education being behind in education has nothing to do with white supremacy, is ridiculous at absolute best.

> The pipeline problem is not merely a question of unequal opportunity, unless you deny minorities the agency to pursue their own interests.

So let's make the opportunity equal and see where the cards fall. Did the kids in my neighborhood and school find making computer games any less interesting than I did? No, but I could afford a computer. Guess where we are now, respectively.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Bridges

I was going to say the same thing. Immigration into the US is extremely difficult if you aren't already famous/wealthy/well-connected, that if you want a visa, coming in through education is your best bet. And getting a job with a company that will sponsor your visa (to say nothing of one that will sponsor your potential green card) is already difficult, but being a student and having a graduate degree is a good incentive.

You see this phenomenon in policy development too.

My current favorite example is the AI ethics/policy space. A lot is being written by policy people about the "whiteness" of AI and those developing it. But most real world technical and research teams are actually remarkably diverse along many lines (I'm not saying there isn't still work to be done though).

Then you take a look at the AI policy/ethics space... for example, here's the team behind the Council of Europe's Ad-Hoc Committee on AI (CAHAI): https://www.coe.int/en/web/artificial-intelligence/cahai A couple hundred people, all but one who are from the same general demographic and rough age range. Yet it's these people who feel that their energy is best spent criticizing tech teams.