That last point, about pairing this survey with another initiative, is something I'll expand on a bit right off the bat. I don't think a survey — any survey — will improve diversity here on its own. I think we need to have more events / projects / initiatives in place before the survey goes out. The survey will (hopefully) reach people who aren't already here, making them aware that we exist, and the other initiatives will give them a reason to actually come and participate. For the women that are here but just lurk, I hope that these initiatives will give them cause to become active. Here are a few ideas. One thing I've been wanting to do is have more women as guests on the podcast. I've been working on a list of potential guests ever since I recorded my first episode with Jack Rusher. There are quite a few women devs whose work I admire, but none of them are working on an FoC-like project, so I haven't felt right inviting any of them on. This whole time, I've been quietly asking around about women who would be good guests, but I've only received 4 suggestions, and again none of them are meaningfully working on something FoC-related. This is obviously a massive blind spot for me, so going forward I'm going to make a much more overt call for women working on FoC. If you reading this know of anyone that I should interview, I'd love to know. Another project that would be a nice addition to our website — something like the Whole Code Catalog that Steve made, but collecting the important FoC projects by women. This would be an invaluable resource. One other thing that would both send a signal of interest and create an opportunity for participation would be some sort of event, like a virtual microconf, with an explicit gender-balance goal. Ideally I'd like to organize something that was all-women, but I worry that we wouldn't have enough presenters and it'd put too much pressure on the handful who did respond. I have a sincere, serious interest in making this community more welcoming for women, and having more women join and stay. I will need help.

this was my favorite talk from bobkonf, you should interview her too: https://bobkonf.de/2020/startsev.html

And maybe looking on the HCI side of Future of Coding? But I have no name to give right now, though.

We're always going to have a problem with diversity though when culture, stereotypes, product marketing, and existing institutions impart divisive forces between genders beginning in childhood. Most women are long gone before they have a chance to reach this community.

I want to echo that comment on tokenism. Let's not do anything to showcase (positively discriminate) women unless we can reasonably defend that we're legitimately supporting women. A podcast episode with a relevant female guest sounds great, but a tab on the website labelled "projects by women" feels (and will appear) tokenistic.

That's a great point. Better than me making a collection like "FoC Projects By Women", would be us finding an existing woman who is making a collection like this and offering to feature her work prominently via the community, perhaps with some funding. Does that feel like a better approach?

I know that the primary focus is on gender diversity, but what do you think about adding some geographical diversity aspect to it? The first survey showed that some part of the world and cultures are very underrepresented. I think this is also an important issue and it would be great if we can work also on that subject. Maybe in the new survey we can ask for ideas to work on it. Just an illustration fo what can be done: maybe we can encourage some channels in the slack dedicated to discussions in other language than english (#spanish...).