Comment by xpaulbettsx
10 years ago
While I applaud the initiative, it's also a pretty strong indictment of the JavaScript / node.js community that there is not even a single non-male OSS maintainer on this list of important JS projects.
What is being done in the JS community by those who lead it to make progress on this and who is leading that charge? If the answer is "Nobody", why is that true?
There is plenty being done in JS/node communities (plural! because there is more than one) at all levels. It just turns out that change doesn't happen over night.
Conferences already reverse discriminate by aiming for a gender balance in speakers (despite the submissions they chose from being very imbalanced). User groups have adopted CoCs to protect female and minority members. There are even female-only special interest groups. There's also this: https://github.com/nodejs/inclusivity
Besides, the list you're referring to is not an exhaustive list of important JS projects. It's a list of maintainers who have signed this open letter. What does their gender add to the conversation?
Inclusivity in programming comunities and JS/node in particular has drastically improved throughout the past decade. But structural changes take a long time to show results. The distribution you're seeing today represents what was being done in the past, not what is happening today.
Addendum: if all the non-males majoring in literary/communications/gender studies who complain about the lack of diversity in STEM would major in STEM, maybe they would no longer have anything to complain about. Whining isn't a science.
...pretty strong indictment...
This is like blaming the schools for poverty. Yes it would be wonderful if Node module maintainers were a perfectly representative blend of all the races, genders, religions, and orientations on Earth. The gap between that vision of Node and the one we have pales in comparison to the gap between that vision of Earth and the one we inhabit.
You could open a pull request on the list itself.
Tell us, why does the gender matter in this debate? Sounds rather sexist to me.
Why did this get downvoted? Ugh.
Hmm what does this have to do a) with topic b) with node.js?