Daily Reading 14
Diversity & Inclusion in the Tech Industry
Consider the history: That Time When Women Stopped Coding
What occurred during the same time as the beginning of the decline of women in computer science?
The rapid decline occurred as soon as personal computers started to become widespread in households (around 1985.)
Why does it matter that males had been playing on computers growing up?
Having early access to computers gives you an advantage. Being around and using computers while growing up gives you a better sense on what makes a computer tick, and how to use them. Naturally, programming also becomes easier due to this head start you have in being fundamentally tech immersed from a young age. This is an issue though because marketing for personal computers in the 1980s were very very male targeted, so it was much less likely for girls to get access to a computer of their own at a young age than it was for boys.
Ask the question: Why diversity matters to your tech company
When are diversity efforts most successful?
When the higher ups truly understand why diversity helps their company, and how a lack of it can cause blindspots.
Why do diverse companies perform better?
Different life backgrounds and experiences provide different angles and opinions in approaches to problems, and what solutions there could be to them. A wider range of people with a wider range of backgrounds will lead to more varied solutions to problems, and thus more options that homogenous group would never have considered in the first place.
Give an example of how a diverse company can serve a diverse user base or vise-versa.
Most tech applications are made for a humongous userbase, which means that your team is almost assured to have blind spots in terms of accessibility. with high homogeny, failures of your system to work at all for users with traits not shared by your development team will increase massively.
Lets use a simple example, an app that detects a person’s face using their phone’s camera, and takes a portrait photo for them when their head is lined up correctly. The machine detects a face by looking for the whites of the eyes, and the black pupils to ensure the user is lined up with where the application is expecting them.
A few days later, a user reaches out to the company, saying that their system is completely broken, and has never once actually taken their photo correctly, and with no alternate method of taking a photo with a button press, the application is completely useless to them, because said user only has one eye. With an eye patch on, the system never detects a pair of eyes, and thus never takes a photo. An obvious issue, that nobody on the team had ever considered, because nobody on the team knew anyone who wears an eye patch.