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Comment by cyphunk | Hacker News Reader

White male engineer here. The isolation described by the author is felt by many, myself included. Obviously the issue is not a problem with my race or sex but one still closely tied to a lack of diversity in these environments. I don't see how any company can claim to be building any component of our future when its environment can scarcely represent some semblance of actual society. The IT industry has a serious "bro problem". A problem felt perhaps most vividly by the minority groups in this industry but also felt, though in a manner that may be harder to describe and even harder to justify, by many of the majority group. I doubt anyone here would want to live in a city that is 80% white male, much less have it build our future societies.

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What is interesting to me is the author describes feeling most at home when surrounded not by diversity, but by those like her. That's the same reason these companies wind up so homogenous in the first place.

I can't help but wonder if, assuming this is what makes everybody most comfortable (being surrounded by people like them, rather than being surrounded by diversity), the quest for diversity might simply result in cultural balkanization within companies as cultural/racial/gender/social groups coalesce (thanks to that preference)

That very thing already happens at my employer, with regards to age. The company has a diverse selection of age, and the result is fairly strong social siloing by age.

I understand your point. But I don't think the author was arguing just for a different form of homeogeny. But regardless, even if that were the case one has to put themselves in the authors shoes. [Statement A] Having lived in environments where I was the minority I then find it refreshing to be in the majority at times. When I then discuss the issues I find with the homeogenic environment I find myself in you could read Statement A as being an indication I want a different form of homeogeny or as a valid critique of the environment I'm discussing.

Regardless of the authors own desires the situation of the demographic bias that is clearly indisputable in the IT industry warrants her statements be considered on the grounds of the words without subjecting hidden intent. And those words are criticism of this IT homeogeny.

I also agree that your question of cultural balkanisation is interesting. But I don't think the IT industry in particular ever has to worry about this except when it comes to the balkanisation it already creates by dejecting minorities of race and sex, but also in dejecting members of the majority that simply find this environment offers too little culturally to bother with.

It is not a thought about hidden intent, but a thought about the end-game of diversity. Perhaps there is such a thing as too much diversity, for example, where there are no groups in the company with relative homogeneity and everyone feels isolated? Perhaps the value of diversity is not diversity itself, but rather having a selection of possible groups into which a new hire might chose to integrate?

The current narrative around diversity does not seem to quite align to her story, which is why I am intrigued. It raises interesting questions. If her story is a story of a woman leaving one culture of homogeneity that excluded her to another culture of homogeneity that included her, that says different things about the value of diversity than moving from a culture of homogeneity to a culture of diversity.

On the broader question of "diversity", I agree, but would add to this a contemplation of if one extreme requires the other. maybe the answer is an obvious "yes" but does the extreme isolation of one group increase the weight in desire for an opposite?

>Perhaps the value of diversity is not diversity itself, but rather having a selection of possible groups into which a new hire might chose to integrate?

I think this may be one good solution. Sharing her story, and volunteering to help other young women like herself can inspire them with someone in the industry they can relate to. Actions like that, from minorities, will really help.

Those in the majority really need to work to rid themselves of unfair biases. It shouldn't be taboo for one to point out errors in another's bias. Attitudes like that of her teammate in Atlanta are extremely toxic, and he needs to be informed that he was wrong. Even the more subtle errors of mistaking her for a personal assistant or security worker are an indication of how much improvement is necessary. If we can remain blind to stereotypes of race, gender, age, religion, sexual preference, etc. and let actions alone be the basis of judging another, then minorities like the author won't have to lose their identities to work in the industry of their choice.

While being a long term hn lurker, I finally decided to create an account to post because I think my life experience might have something interesting to contribute to this discussion.

While I understand your questions about the end goal of diversity, I feel differently about the benefits people get from it.

> Perhaps the value of diversity is not diversity itself, but rather having a selection of possible groups into which a new hire might chose to integrate?

Here I disagree. While it might be an improvement for people to have an option of a group to self-segregate with - I really do feel that having true meaningful relationships with people of diverse backgrounds (across what ever dimension you are considering) provide tremendous value. I know it sounds a bit like a TV Public Service Announcement, but allow me to give a bit of background.

To me it is natural. I grew up in NYC - a fairly diverse city. I went to a somewhat diverse high school. Throughout most of my life, the majority of my friends have been of different races (black, white, latino, asian,..), religions (christian, jewish, muslim, buddhist, hindu), wealthy, poor.... I've been surrounded by interracial, interethnic, interreligious marriages and honestly thought little of it. It wasn't until I left nyc for college and afterwards for work, that I realized how rare my life experiences were. At that point I realized how different the average persons's life - and how it usually consisted of them being around people that were fairly similar to them. And it's not that there aren't tons of self-selecting self-similar groups in nyc (because like everywhere in the world of course there are and it's the norm); it was that normal life consisted of so continuously moving between different homogeneous and different diverse groups that people understood what it was like to be both in the majority and in the minority - as well as connect with people who were in either.

One example for me was baseball. In middle school, in the span of 3 years I played on 3 different mostly homogeneous baseball teams. An essentially all black little league team one year where I was in the majority, followed by an essentially all latino little league team (a different neighborhood) followed by an essentially all white middle school team. Between the three teams: The first I was a member of the homogeneous group, the second had a different racial minority be the homogeneous group, and the third had the societal majority group be the homogeneous group. All three were different experiences, but in the end... it's all baseball.

The baseball experience and others like it give you a different view of group social dynamics and people you are different from. One other notable point in my life that shaped my views on diversity and acceptance came during my later high school and early college years. It was through interactions with a generalized group of people. In nyc at the time people usually pejoratively referred to them as "bridge and tunnelers" (a term I never particularly cared for). What I saw of them, they were suburbanites living mostly in new jersey or long island who commuted into nyc to party on weekends. If I had to make a generalization comparison I would say there was some overlap with what people think of as the "Jersey Shore", but actual real normal people and not absurd reality tv caricatures. So it was a group I hadn't interacted with much previously, but as I started hanging out with friends a night a bit more, began to interact with them some more through friends of friends or random city encounters. There was something about them that I didn't like - but I couldn't understand why. It was very rare I would have a dislike for a generalized group of people, and am usually pretty easily able to relate to people individually regardless of what particular background they were, but I knew from trying that I couldn't successfully relate to them in conversation. Not that we couldn't have a conversation, but that it didn't feel like a natural conversation, at best just a superficial interaction. I was too young to understand at the time, but I realized later in life my issue with the was that they didn't play by the rules that new yorkers did.

My view of the rules was that people meet, they have differences, they find commonalities and connect over it. But they didn't seem to do that. They had a specific sub-culture and the implicit rule was that to connect with one of them you needed to match their sub-culture. There was no real sharing, no common ground, no meet in the middle. It was connect by adhering to their sub-culture or not connecting. And when differences were noted if was often with derision (ex. A version of the "You actually like that food {blah} of {insert ethnic group here} it's so {weird/smelly/...}"). And I don't mean that they were mean or bad people, or had any form of malice - my conclusion was simply that their values were shaped by being around people who were always very similar to them. It's the exact same way that a new yorker upon meeting someone might comment "You're actually a Boston Red Sox fan? That's ridiculous - they're a terrible franchise." (side note, people's views on sports for whatever reason are somewhat stickier and less accepting than other areas of their lives). It's a comment in ny that probably a lot of people wouldn't think twice about because they're surrounded by so many people who think similarly. It's not a negative marker of who they are, it's simply that they've essentially been around people who mostly hold similar views. (And, btw if you happen to be one of those new yorkers who hasn't left the city, spend some time outside of the city and you'll be shocked to find out how much of the rest of the country can't stand the Yankee's. Especially when they were winning.)

So for that Yankee's fan, I think the best thing is for them to spend some time outside of new york. Have lots of conversations where people discuss the yankees before they know you're a fan. Hear them talk about their team. Afterwards the Yankees fan doesn't have to feel guilty about rooting for the Yankees, nor feel they need to root for them any less. But sitting in an airport on the west coast having a conversation with someone it might be a bit easier for them to say "I realize you're an SF Giants fan, and I'm a Yankees fan, but we can still find stuff to connect over because... hey it's baseball."

So this post has gone on long enough. I could write a ton more, but I feel that I've made my points as best as I could. I truly feel that having meaningful relationships with a diverse group of people in all aspects of life is one of life's greatest benefits and should be the goal in itself. And I felt the need to share this because I've realized as I've aged that this might be something that some people may not know due to simply not having the opportunity to experience it first hand. If the only thing you've experienced is "diversity day" style diversity, or "token diversity" I could completely see the desire to look for the purpose of diversity vs. seeing it as the actual goal.

I could make an analogy to diversity of knowledge of programming languages. If a person sees learning a second programming language as an exercise in "I should 'know' a second language because I'll be more marketable", or "because someone told me it's good" and spends a week or so looking into it they may not find it extremely beneficial in and of itself. But learning and gaining meaningful experience in functional programming the first time is a really self-benefiting task. Even if you never use it professionally, or even if you never use it again, the ideas you are exposed to in a language like Lisp or Haskell change the way you program and think in your language of choice. Diversity of views _is_ the benefit.

My final thoughts are this. If you've ever traveled to a foreign country and stayed with with a family where you barely spoke the language, didn't know the culture, had never tried the food but were completely welcomed like family it's an amazing experience and anyone who has experienced it will agree. That is what being inclusive and accepting of people who are different looks like - they accepted you. That type of acceptance in the presence of difference is what the model of successful diversity looks like to me.

I've never been to NYC, but the diversity there, as you describe it, seems pretty amazing. You're lucky to have grown up within it. I'm married to a Brazilian, and she was the only one who spoke English when I'd visit her there while we were dating. She couldn't translate everything for everyone, so I had to pick up Portuguese as quickly as possible. I can confirm that the welcome I received into that new and different culture was an amazing experience.

I agree with your message about the value of diversity, but the challenge I see is getting everyone to embrace that value. Imagine that group of suburbanites was the majority in a city/industry you want to be in. What do you think can be done to help them understand the value of being open to learning/trying new things from different cultures while they share their own culture with those who want to learn?

This is exactly it. She keeps saying diversity, but what she describes feeling comfortable with is a homogenous environment, just of people she identifies with. She didn't like Oakland because it was diverse, she liked the black part of Oakland because it was full of black people.

i don't think the author said what you think but, regardless, consider if the extreme isolation created by the demographic bias of the work environment did not itself create the desire for the opposite.

When reading this post, I almost expected the writer to turn things around and make a realization of this sort. No hard feelings on my part though - just a sense of anticipation at work.

Obviously the issue is not a problem with my race or sex but one still closely tied to a lack of diversity in these environments.

I don't think that the problem is so much of a lack of diversity, as it is a lack of awareness of group dynamics. It's far too simpleminded to just wish that diversity will solve our social problems. It could help, but it could just as well create a situation that makes things worse.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lt/the_robbers_cave_experiment/

The same unconscious behaviors that make power so seductive and corrupting are the same unconscious processes that causes us to "outgroup" people who are different. Resisting such group psychology is at about the same level of difficulty as overcoming our cravings for sugar.

I could liken our current culture's level of (in)competence with group psychology with the culture's general level of cluelessness when first confronted with distilled alcohols or when dealing with trespassing laws after the advent of airplanes. After 1000's of years where levels of individual power and affluence were constrained by geography and group membership, we have been thrown with exponentially increasing velocity into an era where personal mobility and communications power are creating opportunities for people of different groups to interact. We've gone from mostly stratified to our current highly dynamic state of society in just a few hundred years. Yet we're still largely using "mental furnishings" from our jingoistic and stratified past -- to the point where a lot of dialogue concerning issues of ethnicity, culture, gender, and minority status consists of hostility, distrust, and more typical "mindless jingoism" produced by those same group psychologies.

What's more, I'm not entirely sure that the culture as a whole is capable of dealing with the kind of meta-level thinking it would take to become competently aware of our own group psychology.

This may reflect something I experienced. I grew up in Salt Lake City. I'm not Mormon. In high school, I felt very isolated. I felt like all the social activities centered on the Mormon church, and that I was an outsider because of that.

Twenty or thirty years later, I started to realize: Maybe it was just because I was a nerd. I was small, short, socially awkward, geeky - the usual. It didn't take people rejecting me for me to feel like an outcast.

But the article said there were also racist and sexist jokes. That's an additional source of feeling isolated that the white males (me included) don't have to put up with - and which nobody should have to put up with, ever.

it probably wasn't just because you were a nerd. Utah is incredibly isolating to many non-Mormons.

Please, tell, what jokes are acceptable? That's a very serious question. You cannot joke about gender or race, ok, fair enough. The I guess you cannot joke about nationality as well. Same goes for physical traits or occupation. Same goes for the marital status. Well I guess better not to joke about the humans at all. What's left? Animals? Better not, PETA may be all over you. Let's play it safely and joke about rocks.

And before you are outraged how dare I compare such serious problems as racism and sexism with some trivialities ask yourself: isn't it racist or sexist not to compare them? You say black person has more right to be offended by the joke about black people than some poor white bachelor by the joke about bachelors?

Sadly it seems that the concept of joke is being lost. You can hardly convince anyone that it is possible to tell all kinds of not PC jokes without being racist, sexist, homophobic. Heck the joke itself may be the joke ridiculing racism, sexism, etc. Alas, the finer points will be lost for sure.

We are losing personal responsibility and personal ethics. It's being replaced by pattern recognition and very crude pattern recognition, mostly with stupid regexp matching single words and not being able to see the context at all. _if (match_found) then self.offended = true_

> "what jokes are acceptable?"

From the comment you were responding to:

> "That's an additional source of feeling isolated"

gives you a rule of thumb. Are these jokes isolating? Dave Chappelle tells racist jokes all the time, and they're side-splittingly funny and as far as I can tell not at all isolating. His "black white supremacist" skit is absolutely hilarious. On the other hand, some comedian just today started making slavery-and-rape jokes about a black woman on TV, and it was both unfunny and clearly isolating (as a straight white male, I felt isolated by his jokes. That's how creepy and weird they were.)

I'm a Non-mormon nerd who grew up in SLC, too. I felt the same way, with kids asking me which ward I attended, etc. I've wondered how much of it was from group differences and how much was from personality differences. It may be telling that none of my friends were Mormon (except for one whose parents were Jack-Mormon). There was definitely a sense of exclusion when I lived there, at least on the part of the kids.

Living in Florida now, where LDS are a small minority who are perceived as wholesome, friendly, peaceful, quaint, and somewhat like a more modern version of the Amish. People laugh when I tell them I was beaten up by groups of Mormon children. Being a minority of any type is tough.

BTW, if you lived in the Aves, or attended Horizons or EQUIP in the '80s, I might have known you. There couldn't have been more than a few hundred non-Mormon nerds in the valley, I think.

Sorry. Skyline, class of 1980. Never attended Horizons or EQUIP.

White male engineer here as well, that also identifies with what the OP is saying. When a number of people from all differentiating groups all identify in the same, or similar ways, I don't see how people can continue to call it an issue of diversity.

It appears to me that some people are just not good at making friends (myself included), and it doesn't surprise me that the IT industry has an abundance of people with that difficulty.

  > I don't see how any company can claim to be building any
  > component of our future when its environment can scarcely
  > represent some semblance of actual society.

And I don't see how that's relevant at all. It's the same as saying that "I don't see how agriculture can feed our society when farmers can scarcely represent some semblance of actual society".

As long as you are actively seeking diversity you won't have diversity. The true diversity comes when it no longer matters.

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