Maybe because it excludes people based on their race/sex?
Helping the disadvantaged is a noble goal, but race/sex is a poor proxy for privilege. That program would accept an African queen and exclude an Indian untouchable.
I look at it more holistically. Men are not underrepresented in the industry and open source community. Neither are the various races not addressed by this particular scholarship. There are other programs you can apply for to get paid to work on LLVM or other open source projects, such as Google Summer of Code. I don't see how this program could actually have a detrimental effect on anyone, let alone a racist or sexist one.
My issue is that the scholarship lumps all the Asian groups together, as if Indians or Chinese have the same language, culture and representation in technology as Hmong or Cambodians. It just plays into racial stereotypes[1] in America.
I agree, as an Asian who is not Indian or Chinese, the scholarship could be made more inclusive. The invisibilty of minorty asian populations is a problem in America in general.
If the courses are run specifically for a group of people, based on their attributes, this subjects them to bias before they even walk in the door.
One way that this sort of sexist/racist approach could be detrimental is if it's served by one, or few, organisations, the courses could accidentally (or, in extremis, purposefully) be using methods that cause entrenchment of existing partitions between different groups of people. Perhaps one set of courses teaches in a certain innocent manner, and the minorities that consume the course therefore learn in a particular way, or leave out key issues.
There's also the possibility of being indoctrinated against those groups that are not welcomed; again, not necessarily on purpose - I don't intend to demonise such organisations.
Somewhat analogous to recent machine learning/algorithms being found to be prejudiced as their programmers may be unknowingly prejudiced - e.g. facial recognition working poorly for faces of people with dark skin.
Pretending that racism and sexism don't exist and never existed is a nonsensical stance to take and is usually a stance taken by someone who feels that they never have to worry about them. Programs like AA exist because it still is a problem. There are still a lot of people in power with those disgusting ideas. When it was argued that voting rights act was antiquated because racism was no longer a major issue, North Carolina's government went and gerrymandered their state to group black people together and give them less power[1]
Programs like that are out reach to help people that have been looked over or would have been discriminated against out right in the past. They're there to help people, not to punish anyone.
There was a comment in the previous thread suggesting that the diversity scholarship was sexist and racist. In a world where racism and sexism were absent, then a scholarship directed towards a particular gender or race would be racist or sexist. I believe the point of the original poster is that to label the scholarship as racist or sexist is to assume that we live in a world with racial/gender/ethnic equality.
Isn't denying someone eligibility on the basis of their skin color and sex racist and sexist? Again no one previously denied or even alluded to racism/sexism not existing.