Noticing a difference and treating someone a certain way because of that difference are not the same. I'm not going to pretend all the people I meet are the same gender, same sexual orientation, same nationality, or that they have the same skin color, eye color, hair color, or religion.

I'll even go so far as to refuse to treat them all the same. I'll treat them differently. They are different people who expect and deserve different behavior from me. I may even treat them differently based on some of those factors. What I won't do is treat one better or worse than another because of those factors.

A light-skinned person I'll be more careful to offer sunscreen. A man I'll be much more likely to follow into the bathroom to continue a conversation than a woman. Someone who speaks my language better than others I'll expect to grasp what I'm saying more easily. These are not wrongful discrimination. Wrongful discrimination is when you try to push people forward or hold them back for no good reason.

To celebrate examples of a minority often discouraged from an activity who persevered isn't discriminating in favor of that minority. It's pointing out that you disagree with the discrimination against that minority. Women in programming are in fact an extreme minority. That's not a problem if no other women really want to be programmers. It is a problem if they really would like to be programmers but find the pressure to stay away from the profession too much hassle to go through. I know which explanation I expect to be the case. Maybe there is a natural male majority in the field, but if not for social pressure it shouldn't be so pronounced as the actual numbers are.

What I want to see isn't women placed before men in recruiting programmers. I would like to see every woman who wants to do the work given every chance to train and work in the field as a man of equal ability. I say this as a white man who was passed over for certain scholarships because I was white, while others with lesser scores got those same scholarships because they were awarded points for skin color. When you discriminate for one group, you discriminate against another. Don't advance anyone or keep anyone from advancing for the wrong reasons. Punishing people in 2009 for things that happened decades ago doesn't help anything, but making sure there's a truly level playing field does.

All that said, I'm all for people being allowed to remain anonymous or gender-unknown if they choose. Please don't "out" people who don't want their personal data known.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.