How I Stopped Worrying and Started Loving PyLadies

This is probably true, because open-source development doesn't seem to be a well-studied phenomenon in social science; but the effects of diversity on group dynamics in general have been studied extensively. While you may disagree, I'm willing to make the provisional assumption that working and personal relationships among open-source developers are not substantially different from groups which are more commonly studied.

(I currently don't have much in the way of academic access, but a few Google Scholar searches and reading some abstracts will at least reveal a large volume of research on these topics. i.e., http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=group+diversity+positive...)

More interesting, I think, is the idea that there must be some "real-world measure of goodness" (market share? lines of code?) which is improved by diversity, in order for pursuing diversity to be worthwhile. I'd be willing to argue that even if better diversity led to a persistent decrease in technical quality, it would be worthwhile in terms of positive external effects on society. While "low barriers to entry for all demographic groups" might not be an advantage to the group looking for developers, it could benefit society in the same ways as wheelchair ramps, good employee working conditions, regulation of animal medical testing, and other things we encourage in spite of their cost.

In other words -- diversity and fairness can be valued for their own sake, just as much as code quality is a value.

(I actually don't think increased diversity would have any negative effects on technical quality, in the long term: instead I'd expect a null effect or a slight positive. I wouldn't be surprised by a short-term negative blip as potentially-biased education and training learns to cope with different people, but I don't see that as a real barrier given the societal positives.)

edit for grammar

No, wait, it occurs to me that "some Indians" would require an India, and therefore a kind of monoculture there to start with. Perhaps a "diverse culture" would mean there is no India--there would be equal proportions of all conceivable backgrounds and stuff everywhere, or at least something close to that.

But, now, wouldn't that society be a monoculture? A very serious monoculture, with the vulnerabilities that go with it (i.e. lacking the defenses that come with diversity). To give an example: if every city looks the same and has the same number of each kind of building and uses the same proportions of transportation methods and so on, then if a virus gains a mutation that makes it go very well through a particular kind of transportation, it'll be able to infect every city equally well. The situation goes from "virus no one cares about" to "virus able to infect everything". On the other hand, if you had rich cities in which one type of transportation dominated, poor cities in which another one dominated, some cities that were hubs of international travel and others that rarely got any visitors from more than 15 miles away--then you'd go from "virus no one cares about" to "some cities overrun, others barely affected", which makes it much easier to leisurely prepare a response with aid from the barely-affected cities.

(Genetic diversity is good for fighting disease, for similar reasons.)

Mmm, I have reached the conclusion that the goals of diversity at the level of individuals found in a group, and diversity at the level of groups found throughout civilization [you could define any number of group sizes if you wanted], cannot be simultaneously achieved to their fullest extent. If you have no monocultures, that puts some limits on how diverse your set of cultures can be. This meta-problem gives me a kind of zen feeling.

Aren't you arguing against OSS here, essentially? Is OSS not the perfect example of communication across cultural and demographic differences? Should Torvalds just shut out everyone under 40 in the name of efficiency?

It reminds me of my manager going on about how our unit test coverage is only 60%.

Splitting your time between coding and test coverage is an extremely poor analogy to inclusivity in software. For one, your time is a resource, software is output. If you split 8 (wo)man hours into 8 hours testing and 0 hours coding, your output goes down; if you add 8 (wo)man hours to a software project, your output goes up. Even more importantly, coding and testing are not people, they don't have feelings, children to feed, etc. The comparison simply doesn't apply.

As far as your point about "bursaries" (had to look it up, it means scholarships), please consider that the original article talks about having more women's user groups and better conference policies and makes no references to financial aid of any kind. It's really not germane to pit every discussion about gender in software against apocalyptic scenarios. Yes, it would be bad if all of a sudden men were totally excluded and women were totally included, but we are far from that now, aren't we? Shall we worry about "loads of bursaries" when said loads become an actual problem?

Of course not, that would be putting the cart before the horse. He should recruit those who work together most efficiently - but if it turns out the most efficient team is demographicly homogeneous (and I suspect that the core linux team is) - then why not? Are you going to argue that he should form a less efficient team in the name of diversity?

>Splitting your time between coding and test coverage is an extremely poor analogy to inclusivity in software. For one, your time is a resource, software is output. If you split 8 (wo)man hours into 8 hours testing and 0 hours coding, your output goes down; if you add 8 (wo)man hours to a software project, your output goes up. Even more importantly, coding and testing are not people, they don't have feelings, children to feed, etc. The comparison simply doesn't apply.

You've misunderstood; my point is not that by focussing on testing you take away from coding. My point is that, while a low test coverage number indicates a problem, if you just focus on the coverage number you can end up doing more harm to the problem you were trying to fix.

The post I replied to was saying "look, if only 4% of OSS developers are female then clearly that indicates some problem." My point is that if we focus too much on the number, then we're only going to treat the symptom. Let's fix the problems, but let's not put too much attention on one shallow number.