In a now very famous research, investigators found that code written by women was more likely to be approved by their peers than that written by men. The researchers had the hypothesis that it was going to be the other way around – imagine their surprise! Further research explained why that happened – the code was approved, sure, but only if the people approving it didn’t know women wrote it.
This is nothing more than an institutionalized
Report on something women in IT bitterly job function email list learn from experience in the workplace: that a lot of members of the software development community don’t see women as valuable as men. And that’s in the face of evidence telling another story!
The biases are there and they are naturalized. People, in general, see software development as a boys club. Maybe because it’s always been that way. Yet, it doesn’t have to be. Many of the things we perceive as natural aren’t so. Once you start looking closer, you begin to see the cracks on those long-held beliefs.
For instance, software development
Isn’t naturally male-centric. And as why gender diversity matters such, we can change it (albeit with a lot of effort for everyone involved). Now, some might ask why we’d want to force this change and not let it happen organically. In fact, there are people that infamously spoke against gender diversity.
Beyond common sense telling us that email data fighting gender diversity is plain wrong, there are several arguments we could use to support the need for it in software development. Here is why development teams should embrace gender diversity.
