The programmer who created Python isn’t interested in mentoring white guys

https://qz.com/1624252/pythons-creator-thinks-it-has-a-diversity-problem/

by nitramm • 7 years ago

17 3 7 years ago

Jonnax• 7 years ago

Here's the quote below which is quite reasonable, it's their time mentoring so they should mentor how they like. I feel like the article is designed to kindle the fires of internet drama.

“It’s not just about writing the code, but you have stand up for your code and defend your code, and there is a certain male attitude that is endemic in many projects where a woman would just not feel comfortable claiming that she is right,” he explained. “A guy who knows less than that woman might honestly believe [he is right], so they present a much more confident image.” In his experience, van Rossum sees incompetent men’s ideas gaining acceptance more often than merited because they are more forceful in how they present them.

Van Rossum believes that the different attitudes of women and men in programming communities is due to wider societal problems that we need to fix from the bottom up. “I’ve always felt that feminism was right and we need to change the whole society,” he said. In the meantime, he feels a responsibility to act in the places he has influence, like in the Python community.

He believes the key to making open-source communities more inclusive is establishing (and enforcing) codes of conduct and mentoring. Van Rossum says that he now mentors women and underrepresented minority programmers. “But white guys can forget it,” he said. “They are not the ones who need it most.” (In typical programmer speak, he calls mentoring a “completely distributed, democratic approach.”)

belorn• 7 years ago

He is free to do what ever he wants but I find nothing reasonable in generalization that reduced complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender. To quote Carl Sagan, reducing people down to single bits of information is intellectual laziness.

"Ethnic groups are stereotyped, the citizens of other nations and religions are stereotyped, the genders and sexual preferences are stereotyped, people born in various times of the year are stereotyped (Sun-sign astrology), and occupations are stereotyped. The most generous interpretation ascribes it to a kind of intellectual laziness: instead of judging people on their individual merits and deficits, we concentrate on one or two bits of information about them, and then place them in a small number of previously constructed pigeonholes.

This saves the trouble of thinking, at the price in many cases of committing a profound injustice. It also shields the stereotyper from contact with the enormous variety of people, the multiplicity of ways of being human. Even if stereotyping were valid on average, it is bound to fail in many individual cases: human variation runs to bell-type curves. There's an average value of any quality, and smaller numbers of people running off in both extremes."

thedevindevops• 7 years ago

I feel this article would win more people over if it had a more positive spin, e.g. "I can't mentor white men - there are too many women of colour beating down my door for mentorship" or something like that.

The programmer who created Python isn’t interested in mentoring white guys

Related Stories