[BadassFractal]

Very frequently that argument gets made for teams and organizations where that kind of representation is pointless.

Does your cloud ops team rolling out container clusters need 51% female representation to bring the female perspective to devops? How exactly is diversity going to help there?

Don't get me wrong, having an environment where women feel welcome, instead of a locker room boys-club, is quite sensible if you want to open the doors to that 10-20% pool of candidates that otherwise would not be enticed to join you. BUT, the argument that diversity of genitalia, melanin, and sexual orientations will somehow make Docker work better is nonsense.

There's plenty of evidence to show that super homogenous groups perform exceptionally well, and there are countless examples out there of teams that excel without any kind of "perceived" diversity among them. There's likely diversity of thought between them, but that's not what anybody cares about today.

[castlecrasher2]

>There's likely diversity of thought between them, but that's not what anybody cares about today.

I agree. In fact, Apple's former VP of diversity (or whatever they called it), a black woman, was probably forced to resign because she stated a room full of blond white men could be diverse. It's practically a cult at this point.

[BadassFractal]

It has, unfortunately, become a prominent moral issue, and a way to signal one's team affiliation. The label "diversity" evokes as emotional of a response as "gun control", "pro choice", "immigration", "Affirmative Action" etc. It's a tribal identifier, not a topic of conversation. You're either with us, or you're a hate monger with no human dignity to be acknowledged.

Just saying "Hey guys, I don't know if this it totally sensible, can we take a breather and investigate if this really makes sense?" immediately equates you to someone with a tiki torch or an Uncle Tom, if you don't happen to be caucasian.

Ironically, this self-consuming zeal is at its most fervent in the Bay Area, which is AS progressive and left leaning as you can imagine. Everybody's preaching to the choir. And because invoking moderation in the area is seen as a moral transgression, the region cannot but constantly radicalize itself even further, due to lack of opposing opinion.

And yes, the Apple case is amusing. You could have put together a room of white men of all sorts of social, cultural and financial backgrounds from the US, South Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, South America etc and regardless they would have all been immediately reduced to "cisgendered, privileged white men". I guess we have a word for that kind of treatment, but apparently it only applies in one direction.