Gender Diversity

Gender Diversity has always been a controversial challenge and despite having many people trying to make diverse team and reduce the dominance of one gender in industry, every method used did not successfully close the gap in software industry and in fact almost all the methods were controversial at-least during their introduction phase. So, it is to be concluded that gender diversity is a very sensitive topic and one has to be very careful while addressing those issues.

To start with the very basic thought of is diversity really necessary? Is it worth the effort we put in to achieve it? Well, it is accepted undoubtedly that we should embrace diversity and there are studies that show that diverse team outperform non diverse team and also multicultural social networks tend to promote creativity. It is not all positives with diversity, there are also few negative factors such as basic human nature to prefer working with others who are similar with them in terms of values, beliefs and attitudes. So, they can form groups within teams which is obviously not good for the overall benefit fo the team. Diversity is necessary and also it should be looked after to not go to the extreme where everything breaks apart.

As, we can see that diversity is indeed necessary, what are the ways you can achieve it? Unfortunately, There is no one golden way. If we had one, then gender diversity wouldn’t be a problem anymore. So, everyone make their own research on how to improve diversity in their teams and some times those ways go too far, where the name of gender diversity turns into gender discrimination. The Irene Curie fellowship of a dutch university, which allowed only female applicants for first 6 months of posting the job is a good example where the goal was to have more female applicants and the result was that male applicants were discriminated. That is the reason there is a desperate need for an ideal method which will encourage gender diversity but not be a discrimination to the other genders.

GenderMag is one such tool which as I see it as a debugger for gender bias. GenderMag helps developers to find the existing gender biases within software. Biases always creep in software unintentionally of course, but to find them and and fix them. The core of the GenderMag Method is a gender-specialised cognitive walkthrough and a set of GenderMag personas that focus on five cognitive factors in problem-solving styles.

So, to conclude I don’t have a one golden way to improve diversity (I hope to change this sentence in future 🤞🏻). But, whatever method you use in trial of gender diversity we have to be careful to not make it a discrimination.