Maybe you wonder why I take statements about diversity and inclusion so seriously? Why I don't just shut up and return to working on FoC projects instead? Members of this community come from diverse backgrounds. I am from exUSSR country which makes me 3% among other members according to Question Nine in the Survey. Maybe I have some insights that other members don't due to their background? Group identity ideologies have very very bad history in my country. Group identity ideology led to the Civil War in Tsarist Russia, which caused death of 10.7 millions of people. Group identity ideology led to massive deportations of Chechens, Koreans, Wolga Germans, and other peoples in USSR. Groups of people were accused of "being sympathetic to the enemy" solely based on their ethnicity. Hundreds of thousands died during the process of deportation. Millions of Russians don't know their own heritage, because their grandmothers and grandfathers had to keep their mouths shut to not be identified with a "wrong" group. Group identity ideology was a driving mechanism of Red Terror (1917–1922) which got killed up to 100.000 people. Family legend says that my great grandfather was one of the victims. Here is what Martin Latsis, one of the prominent participants in the Red Terror, has to say about his decision making:

We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror[1].

Of course, we are not living in XX century anymore, no one would get tortured or killed today. Instead, people would be excluded or silenced, as it happened in USSR. As it happens in other tech communities. Judging person solely on his group identity is wrong. That's is why racial discrimination is wrong. That's why sexism is wrong. That's why unfair filtering of Asian applicants in Harvard is wrong [2]. Just like I cannot stay silent when some Nazi guy casually uses Übermensch and Untermensch notions to reason about people, I cannot stay silent when people use terms like "underrepresented group". It is equaly dangerous to think in those terms. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martin_Latsis&oldid=943762048 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html

@Zubairq — Vladimir was never asked to leave, and from the very start I've actually been encouraging him to stay. I've spent many hours messaging with him in private, and I've consistently maintained that he is perfectly welcome to keep participating, only contingent on him not continuing to act in a way that makes other people uncomfortable, which I did my best to explain unambiguously and in depth. Throughout our private conversations, he seemed to me to be kind and considerate, and thinking very deeply about the issue. We managed to get down to what I feel is the root of his concerns, and I provided examples of how I approach thinking about the topic and how I take his concerns seriously and don't intend to do any of the things he was concerned about happening. He's decided to leave because, as I understand it, he wants to be able to argue against the language people use when they talk about diversity. He doesn't think it's appropriate for people to use terms like "systemic", "intersectional", or even the terms "diversity" and "inclusion", because he believes they're associated with a left-wing political viewpoint, and that introduces a degree of bias that leads to issues. In response to that, I've asked that he be more careful about how he respond to other people here — that he avoid labeling things as "left-wing" or "politically biased" and instead explain what he means by those terms. He's also voiced some concern about the diversity initiatives themselves, that they might (my words, not his) degrade the quality of our community by moving the focus away from tech. So I asked that he stop openly voicing opposition to our diversity initiatives. We had already had a big discussion about that here in #CEXED56UR and elsewhere. Earlier, I had said that people are no longer welcome to oppose our diversity initiatives, and I think that bothered him a lot, which I can understand. I did a bad job of expressing my thinking at that time, and clarified it for him here. I also asked that he not continue to push the matter in the #C5T9GPWFL thread about our new podcast episode. He (and @Achraf Kassioui) refused to respect that request, which they're perfectly allowed to do, it just means they're not acting in an amicable way. I haven't been either, but only because I've been forced to do some comment moderation, which I don't feel good about. As I explained a moment ago, I had to delete one of his comments because it included a kind of subversive sexism that I will not allow in this community. As far as I can tell, he meant no harm, but that's irrelevant. This stuff is hard, but I'm doing my best. I have learned a lot from this experience. I don't like how I've handled things generally. However, sexism is not allowed and I feel I was correct to remove it. But I never said that Vladimir was unwelcome, and I've spent a considerable amount of time trying to show him that he is, and help him have opportunities to express his concerns and let me address them.

I actually spent 9 years on OKCupid looking for a woman that shared my interest in programming. In all that time, do you know how many women I found in my city whose online dating profile expressed an interest in programming? Zero. One day out of curiosity I searched for male profiles that talked about programming, and there were several results. These are facts. My lived experience seems to agree with the scientific literature. I do know that some women are interested in programming and I have met some in person. But it's clear to me that the ratio is strongly skewed toward men. I wish it weren't this way. If more women were into programming, I could have married one and we could be making things together. Instead I have to make things on my own and my wife doesn't understand and doesn't care what I am creating. This is not what I wanted. But it's reality. You can say, "well, the fact that there are too many men drives the women away." Maybe. But when I learned to program, I didn't know any programmers, no males and no females. I didn't go look at the gender balance and say "ahh, more males, this must be an appropriate field for me!" I think there was something inside me, let's call it "thing-orientation", which caused me to be interested in programming despite the fact that I didn't know anyone who was a programmer. What's offensive about recognizing that women are less likely to have this natural interest?

I also want to bring up a subtle philosophical point which I think is often missed. "Programming" is not a field with a hard boundary set in stone. It is not like a fixed size garment, handed down from Gods, that just happens to fit "men" better. It is itself a human created artifact, shaped and molded by us. So what programming "is" or "should be" is itself fluid, and it is up to us to shape it further however we want it to look.

As for the "where are the women programmers? I've looked and can't find them" factor — let's not rely on personal experience, because it's an uneven world out there. I'm married to a programmer, but we met at an artsy coffee shop because she does experimental leatherwork and I do experimental music. The fact that we both code was random luck. I work on a team where we have just as many women coders as men coders, but that's because we trained them to code (the women and the men — everyone was hired as an artist, including me, and learned to code on the job). A bunch of my female friends in the music scene also picked up programming, so they could make wilder music — none of my male friends did. There are plenty of women coders in the world, and we can easily make more by helping people learn. We just need to raise our own expectations about what "normal" should be.