A couple of new blog posts (1, 2) by Anil Dash have sparked a lot of discussion (see here and here, for instance) about the value of diversity–specifically in this case, gender diversity–in high tech.
This is a timely topic for me. At work, I’ve recently joined a newly-formed development team. As we were sitting in team meetings this week, I realized that there is only one woman on this team (and she is the product owner, which, in our development methodology, makes her kind of an adjunct team member).
Our other two teams at work have at least two women members (all QA and technical writers; we don’t have any female programmers), and I’ve been very pleased with the team dynamics of both those teams.
For several reasons, I’m currently slightly uncomfortable with the dynamics of the new team, and it struck me this week that one of those reasons is that it felt kind of ‘good-ol-boy’ish. After reading Anil’s posts and some discussion of them, I emailed the team lead to discuss the issue of gender diversity on the new team. We’ll see what happens.