I agree with you that this is great but

> The very fact that this is newsworthy says a lot about the lack of diversity in our industry.

I don't like this logic. The news media has their own agenda, we shouldn't use "what they choose to write about" as a barometer.

Well the news media write about a lot of things but that's different to being newsworthy. Readers decide that. It's why Yahoo's homepage might have a story about a wounded war veteran returning home next to one of Kim and Kayne. When Kim and Kayne get 10x or 100x the shares it's not Yahoo's fault right?

> The news media has their own agenda, we shouldn't use "what they choose to write about" as a barometer.

I don't like this logic. It presumes that there's some dark cabal of web journalists conspiring to change the world.

Unfortunately their agenda is typically, 'will we get advertising revenue from our target demographic by publishing this?'

Nothing more sinister than that.

And given this was published to, uh, a _news site for and about POC_ and not a tech news site.... (take a look at the domain, maybe?) what nefarious agenda could they POSSIBLY be running? Maybe one that promotes POC, and responds positively to a company that celebrates its diversity?

Frankly, this is wilfully ignorant. To suggest that the production of media is devoid of political or ideological interest beyond ad dollars is, I think, stretching the boundary of believability to a breaking point.

Well, sure. It's pretty impossible to be completely unbiased.

But the parent of my comment couched the phrase as if there's some dark cabal pushing some evil agenda. It reeked of a cis-gendered cis-sexual white male privilege soaked persecution complex.

You lost me with your jargon, not sure what your point is there.

Regardless, being _biased_ is most definitely _not_ the substance of any interesting critique of media. Rather, it's trivially obvious that the production of media is intricately related to ideological beliefs and political agendas - precisely because media is the primary tool of mass persuasion. Look no further than the long, storied history of newspaper barons.

Fundamentally, media functions as a legitimation strategy for normative beliefs; a structure for the normalization of acceptable opinion.

That's a really, really big (and insulting) leap you made there.

I didn't say it was sinister, I just said that we shouldn't use the existence of this article as a barometer of the problems in the industry.

> 'will we get advertising revenue from our target demographic by publishing this?'

I agree this is the most likely agenda. But it's not the agenda I want to use to determine what to do in this industry.

Thank you! It is rare to see a positive comment on Hacker News regarding diversity in tech.

>The very fact that this is newsworthy says a lot about the lack of diversity in our industry. As a society we should try to find more ways to encourage women and minorities of all sorts to get into this industry.

Why? What's the benefit from this? They aren't barred in no way in pursuing these kind of careers

> They aren't barred in no way in pursuing these kind of careers

Even if I interpret that to merely mean actively barred, I still don't think it's true. But women and minorities are certainly passively barred from these kind of careers. By virtue of opportunity, environment, peer group, role model, education, and all sorts of passive mechanisms.

That's why colleges discriminate against whites and asians? I want to be judged and to judge by merit, not by some leftist agenda of "equality". And you come up with this argument without any proof, only that it's "well-known". I would like to see the numbers, if you may.

In Germany, a "study" is often cited saying that men were better paid than women. However, peer review uncovered that the media covering this study omitted the fact that the women also worked less hours than men and thus got less money (obviously).

This however does not stop "female-rights-activists" from citing it over and over again. I'm sick of it.

I also don't like the notion that women are portraied as victims here. Most women I know don't want to go into tech-jobs because they think it's fucking boring. Live with it, people!

I know it's also due to socialization, but do we really want to change the entire society just to shoehorn exactly 50% in our employee statistics? Who benefits from this?

I know no woman who is sad because she just can't get hold in a tech job. If a woman is passionate about something, and pursues it, it will work out for her. Same with men of course.

Oh, and why don't people go berserk because we have like 96% women as educators (kindergartens, pre-schools, ...). Oh yeah, right, I know, because you can't earn as much money with that.

  the fact that the women also worked less hours than men

Why is that? Could it be that women are still subject to traditional roles, even in advanced countries like Germany? http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/files/epo_campai...

Or maybe that women of a certain age are discriminated against during the hiring process because of maternity leave? https://books.google.com/books?id=26FB_ny0tVsC&pg=PA114&lpg=...

Or any of those many other reasons that people talk about that explain the statistic? The issue isn't as black and white as you want to make it.

  I know it's also due to socialization, but do we really want to change the entire society just to shoehorn exactly 50% in our employee statistics? 

Diversity increases performance. So yes, yes we do.

  Most women I know don't want to go into tech-jobs because they think it's fucking boring. Live with it, people!

I guess all those programmers who were originally women back when men saw it is as "secretary" work and there wasn't a lot of money in it just absolutely found technology boring. Or all those game-designers/programmers who were women, before it became popular and the market crashed? No, you're right, there can be no other explanations.

  If a woman is passionate about something, and pursues it, it will work out for her.

Just have to navigate all that there discrimination and sexual harassment and it'll be totally fine.

  Oh, and why don't people go berserk because we have like 96% women as educators

Perhaps we can discuss why men aren't seeking those positions.

If you're looking to have a dispassionate and thoughtful conversation about a contentious subject, referring to other people's perspective as a "leftist agenda of 'equality'" isn't a great way to go about it.

Well constantly repeating some unproven theories, pushing them everywhere and harassing everyone who disagrees looks kinda like an agenda

So what you're saying is that rather than discussing this particular story, you'd like to discuss a different story, one about how you feel when you get into debates with some other group of people.

I am not interested in this debate and further feel like it's not remotely germane to this thread, which is why I feel entitled to tell you how uninteresting I find that debate.

I suggest you write a story about how you feel harassed by people who seem to have an agenda, and then submit it to HN and see how it does, rather than using this story about Slack and these four engineers as a coatrack.

Yes, having a iMac instead of a windows in the home, with a parent who forbid me from playing games but allowed me to write my own, made a lot of the difference. My peer group was not interested in anything to do with computers besides world of warcraft.

This is not a sarcastic comment.

And so is, for example, your average white man from Appalachia.

> They aren't barred in no way in pursuing these kind of careers

Admittedly, this is about (academic) science, not tech, but Neil deGrasse Tyson disagrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7ihNLEDiuM