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1. Diversity in the Tech Industry Is it Time to Acknowledge Diversity in the Tech Industry? The Technology industry has been widely seen as an unnecessarily exclusive area for a long time now. Your average programmer archetype is usually a white man, reinforced by years of media portrayals of computing, coding and gaming as solely men’s pursuits. Initially it was just a marketing gimmick to sell the latest Commodore or Sinclair products, but like many advertising campaigns, its message has become part of popular culture and crafted a mould which every programmer, or anyone interested in computing is expected to follow. However, as more and more companies in the technology industry are trying to embrace diversity, either by hiring more employees from minority groups or simply making positive soundbites about it, it’s time to analyse why some in the tech industry insist on perpetuating attitudes that alienate potential friends and employees and hold back the industry as a whole. One part of the issue is that a lot of tech experts view their field of expertise like a treehouse club rather than an open industry, open to everyone. A lot of people feel a sense of oneness and community in their chosen occupation, which if left isolated and unchallenged leads to a Groupthink-esque situation, where talented and friendly people are automatically excluded from the ingroup due to something that seems to threaten the cohesiveness of the group, like a woman joining a field/hobby dominated by men, such as engineering, the military and computing. It can also play along racial, religious, sexual and ethnic prejudices, with the contributions of female, black, LGBTQ and non-European computer scientists downplayed or ignored.

2. The role of women especially has been debated for decades, with Ada Lovelace, commonly regarded as the first computer programmer, being a common point of controversy. It can be valid to question the contributions of individual scientists in good faith, but those who frequently deny or ignore the contributions of female scientists who contributed to computer science are usually trying to fit their agenda to reality, where computing was always a white, straight boys-only club. The persecution of scientists like Alan Turing under the UK’s anti-gay laws and the gradual removal of other LGBT computer scientists from history like Christopher Strachey, Edith Windsor, Lynn Conway and Sophie Wilson, whose contributions to the field cannot be overestimated, remain unacknowledged outside of specific circles. A storm of controversy recently erupted over a memo written by a Google employee that disputes the origins of the long-debated pay gap between female and male employees. In it, he labels attempts to bring a more diverse group of employees into the company ‘unfair’, presumably to the vast majority of white men that dominate the field. He then accuses Google itself of having an undue bias towards left-leaning, progressive politics, but the most disturbing aspect of it is when he attempts to use long-debunked evolutionary psychology talking points that imply women aren’t as biologically capable as men at performing IT-related tasks, citing ‘anxiety’ as a common issue with female tech employees and suggesting women would work better in ‘creative’ fields like artistry. He was promptly fired, but not before the memo and its aftershock became another cause célèbre on right-wing internet circles, seeing it as another example of the ‘culture war’ in tech. This is the uglier side of the pushback against diversity, where many see the inclusion of people outside the usual programmer archetype as infiltration by a malevolent outside force.

3. Many who attempt to persevere despite this are harassed and demeaned, not just online by anonymous trolls but also in the workplace by their fellow employees. Despite all the attention and pressure being put on companies hiring employees from more diverse fields, it seems that a lot of these employees end up quitting early in their careers due to the stress that all of this behaviour causes. The technology industry was never a white, male, straight, European boys-only club. Computer science has been contributed to by just about every corner of the globe, by every gender, sexuality and ethnicity despite frequently being scrubbed from the books, accidentally or deliberately. The toxic atmosphere that has been cultivated around this field will only hold the technology industry back in the long term as more and more young hobbyists and enthusiasts have their dreams dashed the second they step through the door into the workplace, or onto an online forum. Despite the commonality of the views expressed in the Google memo, the fact that the employee was fired for it should signal some progress in fighting this. Let’s hope this push back against diversity is only the remnants of an exclusionary and once-dominant attitude in the industry, and we can finally harness the talents of those who were turned down or harassed out of the industry for no reason other than prejudice. Chetaru is a UK SEO agency based in Darlington that is excited about building a better future with the latest technology and IT solutions available. Chetaru has the IT know-how that your firm needs to succeed and thrive, from beautiful responsive websites to economical SEO services and useful mobile app designs. For more details visit: https://chetaru.com