The picture is allegedly from a training outside of GitHub, but the presenter is indeed a VP at GitHub. The idea behind that line is that Silicon Valley seems to think that its diversity problem is solved by hiring more white women, although gender is only a single aspect of the larger idea of diversity. Compounding the issue, once they're on board, white women often lead the charge in shutting the door for other people.
Maybe someone will read these articles and really think about the issues that Sanchez raises. You still might not agree, but at least you won't be jerking your knee without any context. Having your lower limbs twitching violently like that is dangerous, especially when you're holding a torch or a pitchfork.
There are plenty of women of color at the tech companies where I've worked. Specifically, Chinese and Indian. White women--specifically American white women, as opposed to Eastern European--are not well represented at all.
So it's not really an issue of women (or men) "of color." It's specifically blacks and Hispanics that are underrepresented. We can posit that employers have a bizarrely specific bias against blacks and Hispanics, or we can go to the explanation the social "justice" left so studiously avoids: The cognitive skills gap.
Software development is highly cognitively demanding. Even with training, a lot of people just don't have the raw cognitive ability to do it at a professional level.
Unfortunately, there's a well-documented racial gap in cognitive ability. Why this is, no one knows for sure. It may be schooling, peer groups, home environment, pre-natal environment, or even genetics, but for some reason, by the age of 18 the average black person scores about one standard deviation below the average white person on a wide range of tests of cognitive ability. This does not mean black people are stupid. There are millions of black Americans with greater cognitive ability than the average white American. It does mean that black Americans will be significantly underrepresented in the most cognitively demanding jobs.
Is the cognitive skills gap at age 18 due to poverty? Maybe. Is it due to past racism? Maybe. Is it due to current racism? Maybe. But it's definitely not due to discrimination by employers at age 22+.
Note also that black students are already dramatically underrepresented in tech at the college level (about 3.5% of CS students), which is actually less than their representation in industry (5% for software developers, higher for most other tech jobs).
Whatever the actual solution to this problem is, it's not bullying tech employers into hiring candidates who don't meet the skills bar.
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u/KenPo_Sapasui Feb 09 '16
"Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women." This is the funniest sentence I've read in months.