Being a lot on Twitter lately, I am wondering if these stats are accurate when it comes to the dev world in general, or demonstrate what happens particularly in Stack Overflow.
I do agree that we do need more diversity, but I think a lot of the groups you mentioned are avoiding posting in Stack Overflow due to the attitude there. I remember I tried to post a bit in my early career days but after a few "Well actually" answers, I gave up on it, and only used it for finding information rather than being part of the community, as I didn't want to risk my (already kinda low) confidence to try to take up space there. I didn't respond to the survey either, I didn't even realise when it was on. I m still a dev though, a female one, with a bit more than 4 y of experience.
I believe it could be the case that more people are like me, they just don't see Stack Overflow as a community they could contribute in. Wondering if that raises the question if we believe it is an inclusive community and how much we want it to be.
Brian Rinaldi is a Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly with over 20 years experience as a developer for the web. Brian is active in the community running CFE.dev and Orlando Devs.
This is a very good point. As I mention in the intro, when I say developers here it means respondents - so any bias in the population of responses will impact the results. As you mention, due to the nature of the community, there is likely some bias in terms of the demographics. Some have argued that they think that Stack Overflow audience skews younger and less experienced while, as you mention, the audience could also skew more towards white males.
We can't really know how close to the truth the data is since, unlike political polls, there is no election or other final result that proves the data right or wrong. That being said, it is one of many data points (though an important one given its size and scope) that reflect a lack of diversity in our community in general. Perhaps it is off by some percentage points here and there, but I'd be shocked if the actual numbers are hugely different. For example, might the overall developer population be more like 10-15% female? That certainly doesn't seem outrageous, but nonetheless I think the data here on that subject just simply reflects that, even if we take potential bias into account, we are nowhere near where we want to be or should be.
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Being a lot on Twitter lately, I am wondering if these stats are accurate when it comes to the dev world in general, or demonstrate what happens particularly in Stack Overflow.
I do agree that we do need more diversity, but I think a lot of the groups you mentioned are avoiding posting in Stack Overflow due to the attitude there. I remember I tried to post a bit in my early career days but after a few "Well actually" answers, I gave up on it, and only used it for finding information rather than being part of the community, as I didn't want to risk my (already kinda low) confidence to try to take up space there. I didn't respond to the survey either, I didn't even realise when it was on. I m still a dev though, a female one, with a bit more than 4 y of experience.
I believe it could be the case that more people are like me, they just don't see Stack Overflow as a community they could contribute in. Wondering if that raises the question if we believe it is an inclusive community and how much we want it to be.
This is a very good point. As I mention in the intro, when I say developers here it means respondents - so any bias in the population of responses will impact the results. As you mention, due to the nature of the community, there is likely some bias in terms of the demographics. Some have argued that they think that Stack Overflow audience skews younger and less experienced while, as you mention, the audience could also skew more towards white males.
We can't really know how close to the truth the data is since, unlike political polls, there is no election or other final result that proves the data right or wrong. That being said, it is one of many data points (though an important one given its size and scope) that reflect a lack of diversity in our community in general. Perhaps it is off by some percentage points here and there, but I'd be shocked if the actual numbers are hugely different. For example, might the overall developer population be more like 10-15% female? That certainly doesn't seem outrageous, but nonetheless I think the data here on that subject just simply reflects that, even if we take potential bias into account, we are nowhere near where we want to be or should be.