The 2018 List of 200 Black Women in Tech to Follow On Twitter List by Jay Jay Ghatt.
I assume most people reading my blog are likely technical experts in one or more areas. To become such experts, you have worked, read, practiced and talked to others about your area of expertise. Becoming or even getting close to being an expert, is hard work.
Notice that you didn’t say, for example, you saw an XML book in a bookstore or a friend of yours had a book on XQuery or you remember other people like you, who didn’t know anything about XML, discussing it. That’s not the path to becoming an expert in XML.
Surprise, surprise, surprise, that’s also not the path to being an expert in any other field.
It’s also not the path to learning what diversity and feminism can bring to tech. If you don’t think tech needs help, remember there are legacy flaws in chip architecture more than 20 years old.
We can’t know if a design environment enriched by diversity and feminism would have avoided those flaws. What we do know is those flaws and many others were produced in monochrome and non-diverse environments. So, should we continue with design process conditions known to fail or should we try for more complex interactions?
For the impatient:
FOLLOW ALL: If you are on Twitter, you can follow everyone on this list at once by following this Twitter List! (emphasis in original)
For the non-impatient, Ghatt has all 200 members with their Twitter bios listed, should you want to pick and choose.
The first step towards the advantages of diversity is to start listening to diverse voices. That requires effort on your part. Just like becoming an expert.