[1]: https://openssf.org/blog/2025/09/23/open-infrastructure-is-n...
I can't find a date on this letter - is it recent?
September 2025.
Also (and ironically), in the past, this kind of stuff often did have a DEI component of its own. Meaning that a fair bit of that fund would go not to high profile projects, nor to the ones that company actually uses the most, but to whoever can put together a proposal ticking the most "diversity" boxes.
Either way, the point is that companies are simply uninterested in extending any sort of meaningful support, nevermind doing so in proportion to utility derived. And, honestly, why would they? Economically speaking there's no upside to it so long as you can enjoy the benefits regardless and rely on others to prop things up. And ethically speaking, large organizations are completely and utterly amoral in general, so they will only respond to ethical arguments if these translate to some meaningful economic upsides or downsides - and the big corps already know from experience that they can get away with things much worse than not contributing to the commons. It's not like people will boycott, say, Microsoft over its recent withdrawal of support from Python.
So you have to increase the minimum. This could be achieved by contract, ie. not allowing free pulls like Docker have done, or by convincing companies that support PyPI and the like is the minimum. Unfortunately the latter would involve companies thinking and planning for the future, which is massively out of fashion.
(Emphasis mine)
I'm curious if any lawyer folks could weigh in as to whether this language means that the entire sentence requires the mentioned programs to be "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." If so, one might argue that a "DEI program" was not in violation of a Federal anti-discrimination law.
Obviously no one would want to have to go to court and this likely would be an unacceptable risk.
The Executive branch can make any claim it wants, but the Judiciary branch has the authority to decide what a reviewable claim means.
In the absence of such a statement, the first claim would need to be "the DEI program your company runs is against federal law", which could then be tested in the courts.
Understood; while I disagree with the GP's point, I do appreciate your response.
I don't believe such example clauses raise the threshold for the defense against a claim given that there could be practically unlimited number of such examples. I don't believe that any such example so highlighted creates an effective higher priority than any other possible example under 14th amendment equal protection grounds.
There is no language that will magically prevent a government from canceling a grant and requiring a grantee to pursue relief from the court. This type of guarantee does not exist.
Statements about not breaking specific existing laws are common in government contracts in the US (at all levels), functionally, they make violating the law a breach of contract. This enables the government to declare a breach and cancel the contract without the litigation that would be required for even a civil penalty for breaking the law, forcing the contractor to litigate for breach of contract (claiming that they did not breach the contract so that the government cancellation was itself a breach) instead.
Using a fantasy (“discriminatory equity ideology”) with an initialism collision with a common inclusivity practice (DEI), combined with recent practice by the same Administration, is clearly a signal of where the government intends to apply the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach in this case.
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
A "prohibited boycott" is apparently a legal term aimed specifically at boycotting Israel/Israeli companies, so unless PSF intended to violate federal law or do an Israel boycott, they probably weren't at risk. They mention they talked to other nonprofits, but don't mention talking to their lawyers. I would hope they did consult counsel, because it would be a shame to turn down that much money solely on the basis of word of mouth from non-attorneys.
Interestingly, they may get more in donations than they would have from this grant, so maybe that needs to be including in the risk estimate as well...
And the lawyer would be able to present hundreds of cases covering billions of dollars of federal grants, cancelled since Trump issued EO 14151 setting in black and white the Administration's broad crusade against funding anything with contact with DEI and declaring the DEI prohibition a policy for all federal grants and contracts, under different grant programs, many of which were originally awarded before Trump came back to office and which would not have had DEI terms in the original grant language. They'd also be able to point out that some of the cancellations had been litigated to the Supreme Court and allowed, other clawbacks had been struck down by lower courts and were still in appeals.
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...
But if the concern is about the provision allowing NSF to claw back funds that have been spent by the organization then the question remains: has that happened? Right now if you search for terms related to NSF clawbacks, most of the top results refer to the PSF's statement or forum discussions about it (like this one). I can't find any instances of a federal clawback related to DEI. If that had happened I would assume that the response from the awardee would have been noisy.
Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.
US leadership is undermined by the politicization of these grants. That is something that members of this community, largely a US-based, VC-oriented audience, should be deeply, deeply troubled by.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/154584-ig-audit-of-irs-ac...
And even if you personally want to hassle someone with friends in the right places, what are the odds every other leaf of every other part of the organization(s) does? There will always be someone who has no morals and wants to climb the ladder who's happy to read between the lines and drop the ball.
It's just how it is. On some level, I'm not even sure this is a bad thing. If the executive can't change prioritization implicitly then the organization is either stupid or unaccountable.
> In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
> The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration's audit found (page 14): "For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles)."[11] Bloomberg News reported on May 14, 2013, "None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected."
The IRS took some stupid shortcuts by trying to look at keywords (including those linked to liberal causes) for more scrutiny of if they met the criteria of a non profit. There's no evidence this was done based on partisanship and it did not cause any groups to be rejected
https://www.wired.com/story/the-trump-administration-is-comi...
Not to completely change the topic, but to add context, the Ruby Central drama that has unfolded over the past few weeks originally began as a brainstorm to raise ~$250k in annual funds.
It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway. I don't mean this negatively: they're broad but still subject matter experts, parachuting in new people would be administrative malpractice, and they know just as much what conclusions can and can't be drawn from an analysis plan.
Historically, yes; as well as firing leadership and moving decisions usually made further down the chain up to the new leadership, this administration has also fired a lot of the existing grant reviewers in most of the big health an science grant-issuing agencies (and probably smaller ones, too, but those would have made fewer headlines) as part of the political purges of, well, a lot of the federal civil service earlier this year.
I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch.
However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weight; it is inoperative.
Ok. Suppose that's true. The government can terminate grants that don't include that language equally as easily -- and, indeed, I just found that there are multiple current cases against the government for doing exactly that: health grants [1], solar grants [2], education grants [3].
Is your point is that the inclusion of this inoperative language makes it easier than it already is for the government to cancel grants and to defend against the subsequent lawsuits until the plaintiffs are pressured into compliance from lack of funding?
[1]https://coag.gov/press-releases/weiser-sues-hhs-kennedy-publ... [2]https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/state-c... [3]https://www.k12dive.com/news/state-lawsuit-Education-Departm...
You are claiming that if the PSF took the grant and the NSF, or the president, decided the PSF was promoting DEI they would not be able to claw back funds?
The language itself also overly broad. The stipulation from the grant didn't just cover activities funded by the grant itself. In the very language quoted on the PSF blog, they needed to affirm that as an organization they "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI." Read that again. The language expressly states that they cannot operate ANY programs that advance or promote DEI during the term of the award. So if a PSF member volunteers with PyLadies, would that count as "advanc[ing] or promot[ing] DEI?"
In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it. If something like this was found buried in a contract I was evaluating with my lawyer, we'd immediately redline it as overly broad and overbearing.
It’s not inoperative. A contract requirement that is redundant with a legal requirement still has separate effect (that is explicit here since this clause is a basis for both cancelling an award that has already been made and clawing back funds that have already been disbursed, separate from any penalties for the violation of the law itself.)
> In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it.
If by “this kind” you just mean “incorporating existing legal obligations separately as contract obligations with contractual consequences”, every government contract has multiple such clauses and has for decades.
If by “this kind” you mean more narrowly incorporating the specific anti-DEI provisions and partisan propaganda about DEI inside the clause also incorporating existing legal requirements, I’m pretty sure you will find that most federal contracts that have had their language drafted in the last few months have something like that because of agency implementations of EO 14151. How many people are signinf them...well, I would say look at whoever is still getting federal money, but given the shutdown that’s harder to see...
"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."
Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)
Now it can spend the money on important stuff like packaging. uv is amazing, but also a symptom of the wrong people stewarding that money.
Also, DEI in recruitment / screening can be important to ensure that the results of the study apply not just to the majority demographic. It's just common sense.
not at all the same
It's shocking how fast this administration has gotten institutions to abandon their beliefs, and ones that don't should be rewarded.
So they signed the amendments and spent the money...
> It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding.
It doesn't seem to be a renewal, and they seem to have applied before the clauses were added.
- - -
Additionally, on September 29, 2025, the NSF posted
> The U.S. National Science Foundation announced the first-ever Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open-Source Ecosystems (NSF Safe-OSE) investment in an inaugural cohort of 8 teams
Implying that until that point, there was no distribution of funds as part of Safe-OSE, so no prior years of funding existed
https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&...
If you want to buy cyber security, just do that. Linking cybersecurity payments to social issues reduces how much cybersecurity you can get. Sometimes you can find win-win-win scenarios. There are values that are worth enforcing as a baseline. But you always pay a price somewhere.
Anyway, I signed up to be a PSF member.
- Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.
They're saying the terms give the Trump administration what's essentially a "kill the PSF" button. Which they may want to use for any number of arbitrary reasons. Maybe the PSF runs a conference with a trans speaker, or someone has to be ousted for being openly racist. If it gets the attention of right wing media that's the end.
The "just comply with the law" people are being extremely naive. There can be no assumption of good faith here.
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
So there's no plausible way that agreeing to these terms would have contractually bound PSF in any way that they were not already bound by statute. Completely silly ideological posturing to turn down the money.
Someone wrote it into the grant agreement. It's a fair bet that they think that has some effect beyond what the law already achieves.
Of course it has an effect, but that effect is giving the NSF the ability to sue over a grantee's alleged breaches of discrimination law, instead of that being limited to parties discriminated against and the EEOCs.
Here's a list of math grants identified by the Senate to be DEI-related because they contained strings like "homo" and "inequality": https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1ioo2x9/database_of_w...
Here's the actual list of NSF cancelled grants: https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities#termination-list. You can also explore the data at https://grant-witness.us/nsf-data.html. There are 1667 in there, so I'll just highlight a couple and note the "illegal DEI":
- Center for Integrated Quantum Materials
- CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge
- Remote homology detection with evolutionary profile HMMs
- SBIR Phase II: Real-time Community-in-the-Loop Platform for Improved Urban Flood Forecasting and Management
- RCN: Augmenting Intelligence Through Collective Learning
- Mechanisms for the establishment of polarity during whole-body regeneration
- CAREER: Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event - quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation
When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal, knowing in your heart that they're wrong is not very helpful.
It's not and I didn't suggest it was. It gives the NSF itself the ability to litigate discrimination by grantees (in order to claw back its funds) instead of only the people discriminated against and the EEOC being able to do that. That's a real effect! But it doesn't impose any new obligations whatsoever on PSF - just changes the recourse mechanism if PSF violates legal obligations they already had.
> When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal
As far as I know this has not happened in any of the cases you mention and _could_ not happen. Yes, grants have been cancelled for dumb reasons, but nothing has been clawed back. Right? What would the mechanism for clawing back the money without a lawsuit even be?
Turning down money is the easiest thing in the world, if you have the fortitude. I think a lot of organisations don't.
On the other hand, the federal government has gone after law firms that are not actually in violation of law and forced settlements due to their DEI programs, so you can't actually trust that you won't be hassled. Additionally, that you won't at minimum have the money clawed back, even if the claims are meritless, as the administration has done on Congressionally appropriated funds repeatedly as part of DOGE efforts.
Years later courts may agree no federal anti discrimination laws were violated but it's too late-- the damage has been done.
EO 14151—the policy of which the rewriting of the standard anti-discrimination clause in this way is a part of the implementation—characterizes DEI entirely as illegal discrimination (but the new backformation “discriminatory equity ideology” is not found in the EO, that’s apparently a newer invention to avoid the dissonance of using the actual expansion of the initialism while characterizing it as directly the opposite of what it is.
It is certainly relevsant to evaluating whether or not it is worthwhile to apply for the grant. That sufficient litigation might reverse an application of the policy in the EO that the agreement text clearly highlights the intent to enforce as inconsistent with the underlying law isn’t worth much unless the cost of expected litigation would be dwarfed by the size of the contract award, and for a $1.5 million grant application, that’s...not very much litigation.
Not sure why you think roughly 50% give him the benefit of the doubt on dedication to the rule of law.
If anyone has any polling data to the contrary, I'd love to see it.
Winning by 5% (even assuming no third party votes) is 52.5% (with 47.5% for the opponent) not 55%, if there are any third-party votes, that gets even lower.
A piece written in March 2025 discussing a hypothetical for the November 2024 election is not describing the state of the world in October 2025.
Beyond that, the August 2025 (since October's aren't available yet) poll numbers don't seem that much better. That the Democratic Party approval is neck and neck with the Republicans despite the Republicans' blatant corruption and incompetence speaks volumes about how unpopular the Democratic Party is. They need to reform drastically before the midterms next year.
This right here is moving the goalposts.
> we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
There's some ambiguity in syntax as to whether or not "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws" attaches to "discriminatory equity ideology" or "any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology." Given the (improper) comma before the 'or', I'm inclined to lean towards an intended interpretation of the former. That is to say, the government intends to read the statement as affirming no advancement or promotion of DEI, regardless of whether or not they violate any US laws.
(The current administration also advances the proposition that advancing or promoting DEI itself is a violation of US laws, so it's a rather academic question.)
I assume they are intentional. The whole point is to make society less integrity based and more pay to play based. If you’re sufficiently influential, then it’s a mistake that is forgiven. If you aren’t, then you suffer the consequences.
It’s how it works in low trust societies. You haggle for everything, from produce to traffic tickets to building permits to criminal charges. Everything.
It basically boils down to: A) Disparate Treatment is always in every case unlawful for any reason except "legitimate business need" B) "legitimate business need" is no longer including "diversity equity and inclusion", but preferencing Female Gynocologists is still going to be fine. C) "Disparate impact" claims are no longer valid, unless remedy a concrete discriminatory practice.
If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
A shame and a waste as it sounds like the project would have been beneficial outside of the Python ecosystem, had it been funded.
An important responsibility of the people running a FOSS community's backing non-profit is to keep the org safe and stable, as the community relies on it for vital services and legal representation. A risk like that is unacceptable, even more than in commercial business.
$1.5M at 4% is nice.
But I suppose the "proposal" means these funds come with a distribution plan attached?
In more established non-profit areas there's usually also quite some compliance overhead and audits to be passed, so this can be someone's fulltime job on the org side. FOSS backing orgs are typically smaller and less experienced, so donors have so far found ways to make things easier for them and give more leeway.
This is it. The conditions / circumstances of the clawback are irrelevant. If there's any possibility of a clawback, then the grant is a rope to hang your organization with.
I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
This is the whole reason the administration is implementing these policies. It's not just about political opposition to diversity programs, it's about getting hooks into science funding as a whole. With a clawback clause, the administration gets the ability to defund any study that produces results they don't like.
They'll use this to selectively block science across entire fields - mRNA vaccines, climate studies, psychology - I fully expect to see this administration cutting funding from anything that contradicts their official narratives.
How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
I ask, because being in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws would be a problem whether or not you took the money.
“Discriminatory equity ideology” seems intended to be an expansion of DEI (its not the normal meaning of that term, but the structure would be an odd coincidence if it was intended to be an alternative) in which case the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note added comma after ideology).
If “DEI” and “discriminatory equity ideology” were intended as alternatives, the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note removed comma before “or”)
In either case, the “in violation of federal anti-discrimination law” clearly applies to the whole structure. To make it not do so, you’d have to interpret the meaning as best expressed by:
"[...] that advance or promote DEI or, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law, discriminatory equity ideology.”
That is, that they were intended as alternatives, but also that the “in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law” was misplaced.
But it really doesn’t matter that much how you read it, when you recognize that the whole reason it is in there at all is as implementaiton of the policy in EO 14151, which characterizes DEI (with its normal expansion, not the new one that looks like an expansion but could be read as an alternative) as categorically a violation of federal anti-discrimination law.
After all this whining about cancel culture for years and swearing up and down that the government was going to start cracking down on free speech, they have weaponized the government to do just that in the name of protecting 1A. But it’s not just conservative cancel culture, it’s straight up government censorship.
Did your lawyer say otherwise? Interested to understand
> We were forced to withdraw our application and turn down the funding, thanks to new language that was added to the agreement requiring us to affirm that we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
> Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities.
Therefore, I can definitely see why the PSF's lawyers encouraged giving this clause an extremely wide berth and pulling the grant entirely.
The administration can try to press charges, but they don’t control the courts
* They will ignore it and still claw back the money, with force if needed
* They go higher and higher through the courts until it lands on the table of the supreme court that conveniently sides with the administration.
You can't win a fight in the system. Law is broken and not reliable anymore.
Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
There's a reason that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all gave Trump money to demolish the East Wing of the White House and build a ballroom. And it's not their love of ballroom dancing.
But PSF doing this and not playing the game is really awesome. I just hope they can fund themselves through other means.
EU should be stepping up more with funding for projects like this as a replacement for US tech. Major secure reliable funding for open source projects that EU infrastructure can be built on would only increase our independence.
Not to Godwin the thread, but that is exactly what the executives at IBM thought about their European subsidiary Dehomag in the 1930s. Soon they were custom building machines that organized the logistics of the Holocaust.
They got away with it and kept all the profits and were exempted at Nuremberg, for the same reason as all the rocket scientists: America needed the tech.
I do! Have you read Timothy Snyder yet? He warns that most of the dictator's power is granted willingly. That's what this is, so to the extent you believe they are blameless, their acquiescence is in real terms making it so much worse:
"Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." -- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Meanwhile, just to be clear about the game being played, food stamps are set to expire for 40 million people this week, and healthcare premiums are set to double in just a few months. I don't believe tech corporations have any plans to help Americans with their food and healthcare needs, despite being keen to chip in for the ballroom gilding.
When you have a full time secret police that wanders the streets kidnapping people, yeah that has a chilling effect, people want to keep their heads down.
And its tricky, because they will ignore the huge protests, and they want some sort of armed or civil disobedience when it comes to their secret police because they are looking for excuses to label them Antifa terrorists and escalate.
I don't see the obvious play here for Americans looking to fight this. Maybe the Midterms could help, maybe if enough local action, maybe the US to too big to cow like that, maybe the blue states have enough independence to survive the federal overreach, maybe Trump dies and MAGA dies with him.
I thought Germany still frowned on policies like Trump’s, though I suppose demolishing the White House was on its todo list at some point in the past.
It's a shame that months of NSF grant-writing work was completely wasted though.
Pretty much every "negotiation" with the Trump administration seems to work that way: An iterated prisoner's-dilemma, where any cooperation from you just means they'll betray you even harder next time...
I can also predict the next step here: UT Austin is likely to agree to the compact and will be given a huge monetary award (although I don't think it's a foregone conclusion- they didn't reply within the deadline which suggests that they are working behind the scenes on an agreement).
This forces them to cloak their real demands in something deniable, and that means you can play naive and act like the subtext was never seen.
Doing so publicly would undermine the public efforts of the same big tech firms to curry favor from the Trump Administration to secure public contracts, regulatory favors, etc. (including the very public scrapping of their own DEI programs), so I wouldn’t expect it or any other positive public involvement from them that would be connected to this. They’ve already chosen a side in this fight.
Yes they have, this is a time of choosing. So seeing which side tech companies have chosen, tech employees can now also choose accordingly.
To everyone here who spent the last decade making $400k+options at these tech firms that are now funding this fascist administration, we see you. You are making a choice as to which side you are on.
Remember doing and saying nothing is a choice.
And I’m not sure what “most people”, is supposed to mean; you do realize you’re talking about 49% – that is, under half, so definitively not “most” – of the US of A’s population?[0]
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-american...
This suggests two possible paths forward: either we move beyond the theoretical underpinnings and focus on practical inclusion — supporting people from diverse backgrounds through approaches with broad consensus.
Or DEI becomes increasingly marginalized, championed primarily by masked activists who struggle to maintain relevance.
> The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14.
How many trillions of dollars depend on Python?
Yes, I mean trillion. Those market caps didn't skyrocket on nothing. A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. Even with more complicated backends a Python layer is usually available, and used. A whole lot of other stuff depends on Python too, but the AI part is obvious.
This is the weird part about our (global![0]) economics that I just don't get. We'll run billions of dollars in the red for a decade or more to get a startup going yet we can't give a million to these backbones? Just because they're open source? It's insane! If we looked at projects like this as a company we'd call their product extremely successful and they'd be able to charge out the wazoo for it. So the main difference is what? That it's open source? That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix. In the very least I want those devs paid enough that they don't get enticed by some large government entity trying to sneak in backdoors or bugs.
[0] it's not just the US, nor is it just capitalist countries. You can point me at grants but let's get honest, $5m is crazy low for their importance. They're providing more than 1000x that value in return.
[side note] I do know big companies often contribute and will put a handful of people on payroll to develop, bug hunt, etc. But even if we include that I'm pretty sure the point still stands. I'm open to being wrong though, I don't know the actual numbers
[P.S.S] seems to parallel our willingness to fund science. Similarly people will cry "but what is the value" from a smartphone communicating over the Internet, with the monetary value practically hitting them in the face.
Independent of how one feels about the current US administration, I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it, but in reality I know that no company will do it in good will either.
I've been thinking a lot in terms of financing, but the current system of grants, where some agency tied with the executive body will approve or reject something, is fundamentally broken, as we can see.
In those cases of critical infrastructure, I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs where the foundations can apply, and then they could have their financing without being at the whims of some branch of the executive.
> I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it
But my point is that a project like this is global. I want the US putting money in. We're the richest and benefiting the most. But I also want other countries putting money in. They should have a vested interest too.
I think an interesting mechanism might be to use agencies like the NSA. We know their red teams but what about the blue? I'd love for the blue teams to get more funding and have a goal to find and patch exploits, rather than capitalize on them. Obviously should have a firewall between the teams. But this should be true for any country. It might just be some starting point as it could be a better argument for the people that don't already understand the extreme importance of these types of open source projects.
> I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs
It's definitely not an easy problem. Like what do you do? Tax big companies (idk, an extra 0.1%?), audit to determine dependencies, distribute those taxes accordingly? In theory this should be simple and could even be automated, but I'm sure in the cat and mouse game the complexity would increase incredibly fast.
But hey, it shouldn't just be America. Different countries can try different ideas
That in turn suggests that a lot of money currently being spent is wasted, or worse, used for ill. We would be better served by taking all the assets of the Fortune 500 and distributing them widely to tons of little groups. Some of those groups may turn out to be the next Python, and for the ones that don't, well, we didn't waste much money on them. Right now what we get instead is hundreds of billions of dollars going to advertising algorithms.
The reason it's crazy that the PSF survives on $5 million isn't that $5 million is crazy little, it's that too many other entities are crazy big.
I do see a lot of companies trying to cut corners and make things as cheap as possible but I fundamentally believe that this ends up increasing costs in the long run. Which is a bit weird since I know a lot of business people and most seem to be familiar with Boot Theory[0] and even agree with it. But maybe it is one of those things that is just not realized in practice. Yet I constantly see these sacrifices being made. Profits over product. I don't think that actually leads to more profits. Maybe in the quarter, but not long term. It's a sustainable strategy if you've monopolized the market though...
I also notice that when layoffs come around that the people who decide who to lay off tend to not lay off themselves. Great way to become management heavy... When in reality, if you have a lot of "rockstar programmers" they should be able to mostly manage themselves. You want to keep them from going down too many rabbit holes and help them prioritize, but for the most part experts know what is most important in the system they're working in.
It's also a sustainable strategy if the market has become so distorted that it's difficult for consumers to distinguish the good products from the bad. This is a pervasive problem these days. It may still be the case that a good pair of boots will last you 10 years, but how can you tell which pair is the good one? There are 10,000 brands, all of them have 4.7 star ratings because of bots, most of them have a picture that looks nothing like what you'll receive, and if they wear out in two years you'll have no recourse because the brand was just a facade over a "ghost workshop" that's now producing the same crap under another name. Trying to vote with your dollars is like pushing on a rope.
> When in reality, if you have a lot of "rockstar programmers" they should be able to mostly manage themselves.
I'm not so sure about this. There are many people who are good at doing things but not at organizing that activity in a coherent way (especially across a team). Also when the people doing the "real work" are also managing, they often have a tendency to give the managing short shrift because they'd rather do the "real work".
I agree we could do with a lot fewer managers than we currently have, but I think we do need some. (And this isn't just about software, it's about companies and organizations in general.) But I think we would be better off with more democratized company structures where the managers' power ultimately rests on the consent of the workers, so that when you have these clashes that currently result in "half the staff resigned in protest" they would instead result in "the CEO was fired due to lack of support from the staff".
> if the market has become so distorted that it's difficult for consumers to distinguish the good products from the bad
> I'm not so sure about this.
So I do agree that we need managers. Their job is to validate direction, ensure people are able to do their specialized job with minimal interruptions, and all that jazz. I think we often confuse "speed" with "velocity." The experts know the direction things need to go, but a manager's job is to ensure that those vectors are aligned across teams and aligned with the company goal. But we also get confused with thinking the goal is "to make money" and not differentiate it from "to make money by producing a useful product.". It's easy to drop that part off, but doing so shifts your customers from those that purchase your product to "shareholders". Even if shareholder price is based on people buying your product...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45742272
[2] https://westviewnews.org/2019/11/01/bell-labs-second-best-ke...
Well, but I'm saying it's not just tech, it's becoming everything. (Unless by "tech" you mean "tech has made all markets act this way".) I guess one way to look at what I'm saying is that online marketplaces are inherently more "lemon-leaning" because the buyer's ability to assess the quality of the good is inherently limited (since they can't actually see, touch, or use it).
Interestingly the "solution" that e-commerce seems to have settled on is "free shipping with free returns". This limits the damage of buying a lemon, since the customer can just send it back. But it creates a sort of moral hazard for both buyers and sellers: the buyer has an incentive to essentially operate like a spammer, selling crappy goods just on the off chance that a few won't get returned; and the seller is encouraged to just buy willy-nilly since they can just return anything that turns out to be crap. This generates an enormous amount of waste and churn and exacerbates the downward spiral of the lemon market.
> But we also get confused with thinking the goal is "to make money" and not differentiate it from "to make money by producing a useful product.".
This is the crux of the issue. I don't see that as an issue of "management" really though. I mean it is an issue of management but at a higher level, in the way the executives manage the whole company, or the way the board manages the executives, rather than the way mid-level managers manage actual workers.
But ultimately it's an issue of values. As you say, too many people have drifted away from any value system that would place any kind of constraints on "the goal is to make money".
> I'm saying it's not just tech, it's becoming everything.
> Interestingly the "solution" that e-commerce seems to have settled on is "free shipping with free returns". This limits the damage of buying a lemon, since the customer can just send it back
Not to mention that the inconvenience itself creates enough friction that people are just more likely to keep garbage. Especially if it is very cheap. I think this was also true with physically purchased items but just that the rate of "false positives" was lower since you could physically inspect them.
> This is the crux of the issue. I don't see that as an issue of "management" really though.
But I think something that is more actionable and that we as the developers and engineers can address is recognizing that we had a shift in culture. There used to be some contention between the managers and engineers. It was adversarial by nature. While I think that creates friction, that this was a beneficial feature, not a flaw[2]. To be a tad over simplified, the engineer's focus is on the product. When push comes to shove, profits get sacrificed in order to ensure the quality of the product. On the other side the business people take the opposite role. This contention helps navigate the complex setting where we need to create good products but also stay in business. If the engineer gets to much weight then the business goes under while trying to fix all the problems. Perfection cannot exist, so the endeavor can be endless[3], and the business fails. On the other hand, if the business people have too much weight then they'll ship the lowest quality product that customers will still buy. The contention often resolved around what "minimum viable product" actually meant. To the engineer, it is a product that generally works in the sense of the intended design. To the business person, it is what the customer will buy.
The shift I've seen is that I see fewer and fewer engineers care deeply about the product. They aren't personally vested in it, beyond a monetary sense. When I've talked to others about bugs which should be reasonably quick to resolve I find more often the response is "but what's the (monetary) value in that?" This is not our job as an engineer! Our focus is on the product. It may be the job of the engineering manager to make that argument to the business side if the solution is going to take long enough, but I've seen this response given to bugs that may take only a few hours to fix or even have a PR already set up! To me, this is insane.
Don't get me wrong, I love that coding pays very well, but that's not why I do it. There's plenty of other ways to make money, and make even more. My cousin sells insurance and spends all his days golfing, eating at country clubs, and makes over $300k/yr[4]. My neighbor is a plumber who started his own business and hires guys starting at $100k/yr and they provide on the job training. There's a lot of ways to make good money. The reason I do this work is because I enjoy the work. Because I can take pride in this type of work. Because I'm good at it. Because I can finish my day or a project and take pride in my accomplishments. But I feel that this is the shift. Coding is not just for nerds anymore. Many coders now care about money first and product second (if at all). The "tech bros". I wouldn't mind them so much if they just didn't need to justify their mindset and interfere with mine. I feel that's part of the problem. They've become the dominant force in the coding world and normalized the exaggeration of their abilities that they believe they are the best. Like what, we send people through months of interviews, to do tons of leetcode and standardized tests to what... end up with shit work? I don't think we're hiring "the best". I think we're wasting money.
I think we fix these issues by pushing back a bit more. Explain why the manager's idea of a MVP is not a real MVP. Support our coworkers who raise these concerns in a meeting. Just a small comment will do. Push back against the engineers who offer overly simplified solutions and promises that lead to tech debt. To remember that we can both make good money and good products at the same time. To remember that pushing back is not disloyalty to the company. That pushing back is in fact loyalty to the company, because we do it because we care about what is being made.
There's no easy fix here, but I think there are things we can do and we should be more open about this culture shift. I grew up dreaming of the Sci-Fi utopia of Star Trek and of Asimov. I got into STEM because I wanted to help create that world. Is that no longer our goal? Do we really believe this goal is at odds with making a good living?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069062
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018803
[2] I think we believed it to be a flaw. Certainly management did as it is employees undermining them. Engineers see it as a flaw too because they have to spend time arguing and it is frustrating. Easier to just shut up and get paid, right?
[3] I think all but junior engineers understand this. I hate the phrase "don't let perfection be the enemy of 'good enough'" because the contention was never about perfection. The contention was about what is 'good enough'. The phrase shuts down that conversation, which is an important one.
[4] I don't intend to say his work is easy. It is easy to look at what he does and think he doesn't work hard. But I've seen him in action and it is clear he has honed his skills.
10 of the 13 people of their staff doesn’t even know how to write a hello world program https://www.python.org/psf/records/staff/
I mean is OSS effective despite the funding problem, or if we gave every maintainer a million quid, would they all stop making tough decisions ?
I suspect that it’s the organisations that define the decision quality - but that’s just a hunch.
do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
I don't believe they intended for their motive to be secret at all. This was an opportunity to bring attention to their political position.
That's probably not true given their prominence and the conservative people who've grumbled about them for years, but let's assume that it is the case. Think about what happens next:
If they took the money, they have a substantially non-zero risk that they would be asked to return _all_ of it based on politically-motivated enforcement triggered by anything the PSF does and would face the prospect of spending at least that much money defending themselves in court if they disagreed. You can't rule out that being as simple as someone at PyCon does something which a conservative influencer dislikes.
If they don't take the money, they don't have to estimate the likelihood of the clawback provision being exercised or spend any time trying to protect themselves in that event.
If you're a small non-profit, recognizing when you don't have the resources to fight a particular battle is a very useful skill. It seems very consistent to say that in the choice between a potential trap and no trap they had to avoid a small but non-zero risk of something which could bankrupt the organization.
> I don't believe they intended for their motive to be secret at all. This was an opportunity to bring attention to their political position.
Their motives were never secret – it's literally in the mission statement on their website! – so it's a bit unclear what the point of this paragraph was. Reporting political interference in technical organizations seems like something which is pretty broadly of interest to the community and the amount of positive attention it's getting seems to support that.
Time to amp up my Xmas donation.
Anti-DEI clauses push out under-represented contributors, and the lost funding delays protections millions rely on.
Shame on the decision-makers who made that tradeoff.
Given this, I could easily see work supporting the creation of less biased models being used as an attack vector. They made the right call.
> I was one of the board members who voted to reject this funding - a unanimous but tough decision. I’m proud to serve on a board that can make difficult decisions like this.
Kudos to Simon and the rest of the board. Accepting that money would be more than a strategic mistake, it'd be an existential danger to the PSF itself.
And for those who want to fund the security of one of the few remaining independent foundation-led package ecosystems:
(this is a rough cut - I know there are other posts left in the thread that arguably belong here, but this time I'm in a bit of a rush)
(please, everyone, you can make substantive points thoughtfully but do so within the guardrails at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - avoid the generic-indignant-flamey-snarky-namecalley-hardcore-battley sectors of internet discourse - we're trying for something different here and we need everyone to help with that)
> “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
I applaud them for taking a stand, it seems to be more and more rare these days.
Isn't that when you let your mates buy into your corrupt private investment vehicles for cheap?
Yes, these terms are usually called "laws", you might've heard of them.
We always discriminate. We have to. But only some discrimination is allowed and some are not allowed. The difference is what kind of discrimination people feel is fair and unfair.
On some level, the idea that we all discriminate has the potential to help us move beyond the "racist/not-racist" dichotomy. (I prefer the formulation "we all discriminate" over the dubious alternative "we're all racist".) But I'm not sure it will ever achieve mass acceptance, because it activates the human impulse to self-justify.
I dream that one day someone will come up with version of this idea that is universally acceptable.
Federal funding of research created the Internet that you are posting this idiocy on.
Or are you trying to hang this entire thing on a definition of DEI that somehow always and exclusively means illegal race or gender based discrimination (I assume against white men)?
These conversations are so absurd sometimes. I'm baffled by how spitting mad people can decide they are to fight these straw men. Then I'm annoyed by (and suspicious of) the overwhelming silence from most of these sources when it comes to other obvious examples of racial discrimination or things like the government trying to remove history books that mention slavery.
These things don't look like good faith to me.
Anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion forces turn out to be (gasp) against all of diversity, and equity, and inclusion.
Should not be a new or surprising statement at all in this type of thing, let alone a question of if it's un-American.
On the surface, it is simply a requirement that the grantee comply with existing non-discrimination laws coupled with a completely fictional example of a potential violation (“discriminatory equity ideology”) provided as an example that happens to have an initialism collision with a real thing. This is legal and (but for the propaganda example) routine.
But... the text viewed in isolation is not the issue.
Does it matter for the Trump administration what is legal and what isn't?
The prior admin made it so that their chosen DEI programs fit "Federal Law". This admin has done a complete 180. Courts haven't tested any of this yet. It's all a hammer being wielded by the side in power.
https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-52
This is basically the US Federal Government’s standard Master Services Agreement (MSA).
Yes, and anyone who takes the Barry Goldwater libertarian position that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 constituted an un-American government dictate about how you can run your business with respect to discrimination based on demographic categories probably agrees with you. There's a real sense in which this administration is invoking the formally-neutral legal infrastructure that has been built up over many years by liberals with the intention of securing the civil rights of various marginalized groups, and ostentatiously using it as a weapon against groups that are discriminating against white people or white men in particular and feel like they are acting righteously in doing so.
More generally, there's all sorts of laws in every country including America that involve the government dictating how you run your business, or how you run your business if you want to be eligible for government grants. No one actually thinks that a law becomes illegitimate if it dictates how a person can run their business, unless they are such a radical anarchist that they entirely reject the legitimacy of any kind of government or law at all.
So basically, the PSF wants to discriminate, the government doesn't want them to do so, and that's a problem? Am I reading this correctly?
Okay, so can you help me interpret that correctly, then? What other conclusion should I draw from this?
The explicit mention of DEI is a way of saying "yes, that means ALL kinds of discrimination, including the kinds you may believe are morally correct".
The language means that if PSF at any point, maybe years from now, at some conference or wherever maybe somehow supports or hosts a panel about diversity and inclusion, the NSF can force them to pay the money back, even though it's already spent. That's not "wanting to discriminate", it's a free ticket for a rogue government to bully the PSF without a good argument, if it ever sees fit.
Even if I were an angry right wing DEI-hater I wouldn't accept the grant under these terms. If the government can just grab it back whatever under vague accusations, the money is just a liability.
If you're in the former group just man up and say it, don't waste our time with the equivocating, "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???"
There's no contradiction, or even tension, between these three positions:
1. "DEI is about taking jobs from white people and giving them to undeserving others"
2. "the deserving are spread across different races and genders etc. and we should capture that better"
3. "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???"
so what exactly are you trying to say?
What's happening guys?
And then someone came in and took advantage of that
The people who benefited from those who sacrificed for rights and equality over the past century got complacent and lazy.
The current rhetoric is exactly the same as was used to discriminate against my ancestors 100 years ago. The only substitutions are the different slurs. Everyone who wants to talks about race and immigrants should be required to listen to 8 hours of radio programs from the early 1900s saying the exact same thing about them and their ancestors.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran, 1790
You fight or you lose. Every time; all the time. Politics is a contact sport and you don't get to opt out.
For that kind of money, I would put a large national flag in the banner of the socketcluster.io website, I would relocate HQ to whatever country and state they want. I would never utter the word 'diversity' for the rest of my life and upon receiving the money, I would take a screenshot, frame it, put it up on the back wall of my new office and I would pray to it every morning to give thanks.
For a non-profit backing a community, an important goal is to ensure the long-term sustainability and viability of the org, because the community relies on it to keep infra working, legal representation in place, and other vital needs.
Accepting those $1.5mio would have come with significant "we want that money back" risk, as the post explains. At a $5mio annual budget that could seriously destabilize a small org like this, from the money shortfall to community unrest. Taking this money would be irresponsible.
My two cents, as treasurer of another large FOSS non-profit.
(Not an American.)
I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education."
In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive grants without risk of being sued. It's plainly obvious the line is not drawn at restraining "overly progressive policies" - it's just arbitrarily placed so the govt can pick and choose the winners based on allegiance.
It's a shame that folks with a strong moral fiber are now punished for wanting to help their communities.
That said, law in the US and one’s opinions on what constitutes discrimination are different things.
> We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
This sounds like a fairly broad based outreach program. The inclusion of an organization that supports girls is just one of the avenues they used. There is nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes I feel like founding an organization called Men In Science & Engineering Research, simply because the acronym (MISER) would be a fitting parody for those who promote blind equality (i.e. the type of equality that hoards the riches of science for men).
As a similar example: my close Vietnamese friend met all of his best friends and girlfriend in college in VSA, a Vietnamese club. All of my non white friends went to 'Latinos in X' 'Asians in X' etc. clubs. There were no equivalents for me! I don't resent anybody for this (by dint of my personality I don't really care), and in truth it was probably good for my cold networking skills (perhaps widening the unseen advantage gap that I supposedly have even further), but I also think it's difficult to look at this and not understand why people are so discontent with DEI identity politics.
I can see how it might seem weird to an alien who knew what men and women were, but had no context for the existing state and history of society.
I can't see how it would seem weird to anyone else, however.
So what is the solution? I can't say I know. But I do know that these things very much breed discontentment and it is at the very least important to recognize why.
To reframe your scenario: imagine you went to a school and some of your classmates came from poor families and couldn't afford clothes, food, or a laptop etc. To help those students, the teacher used class funds to buy them new shoes and get them a nice laptop to get their work done. Do you still think it's unfair that you don't get new shoes, laptop, or cookies?
The solution to your original question is to understand why the teacher is giving girls 4 cookies and then just be happy that more people get a fair shot at life.
The difference between your scenario is just how visible it is; I have never ever had somebody go up to me and say 'This opportunity is being given to you because you're a white male'! If anything, it's the opposite! Did you know I was not eligible _to apply_ for a single scholarship for college a few years back, solely based on my race and gender? It was pretty demoralizing!
Again, I'm not saying that I _haven't_ benefitted from being a white male in some indescribable unknown way; but unlike in your scenario, I cannot _see_ this. Think about the average person, who goes their whole life seeing others being handed stuff specifically because of their race and gender and when they complain about it they simply get told 'Do you have no empathy? Your life is much better off than theirs!'
Again, who knows what the right solution is. But I don't think that it's the status quo.
I mean, having to cater to the feelings of overly sensitive men is how most of these problems started in the first place.
Please try to imagine advocating for women's rights 100 years ago and hearing somebody say something like 'overly sensitive women want to vote! Psh!' If you want to argue for DEI please try to present good faith arguments.
Personally, I don't really get butthurt about things, so this isn't a problem for me (although I do think it's a problem in general as it is obviously going to anger people). I do think one of the main problems with DEI is that it attempts to address the symptoms instead of the root cause of the problem. I.e. trying to get girls into stem / coding in highschool or college instead of figuring out why they're less interested in it from a much younger age (and if that's even a problem; classic nature vs nurture problem).
>DEI is that it attempts to address the symptoms instead of the root cause of the problem. I.e. trying to get girls into stem / coding in highschool or college instead of figuring out why they're less interested in it from a much younger age (and if that's even a problem; classic nature vs nurture problem).
Except there are DEI initiatives that look at every level.
Being in favor of the status quo is pretty easy, I admit, and hey, if you happen to benefit disproportionately from the status quo, bonus, right?
Yes, appearances matter! That's why Trump is president right now (a fact, in case it isn't clear, I'm not happy about)! Because the American people were unhappy with the status quo. Whether or not you think DEI is "fair". And when people like you ignore this, you alienate the voting class, which you need on your side!
> Except there are DEI initiatives that look at every level.
No, there are not DEI initiatives for pre kindergarten / very early school. Not that I've heard of at least, and definitely not on a large scale. And I'm not even talking about adding DEI there; I'm simply saying that we should really be asking why the gap between men and women in STEM seems to start so young (and if it really is because of something that hurts girls, remove that. Which would still not be DEI!)
> Being in favor of the status quo is pretty easy, I admit, and hey, if you happen to benefit disproportionately from the status quo, bonus, right?
...what? I am arguing against the current status quo. And it's true, it would be beneficial to me for DEI to be removed / identity politics abolished. I also believe it would be beneficial to everyone (albeit to a lesser extent), but that's beyond the scope of this argument.
Now the boys have cookies and the girls have cookies.
Except the cookies are not actually cookies, they just represent what you'll learn by attending the class.
That is out reach.
I don't see jocks complaining about fitness outreach programs to geeks. That'd be absurd.
But guys famously will complain about:
1. Women reading science fiction
2. Women watching science fiction on TV.
3. Women playing d&d
4. Women playing online games
5. Women writing code.
To be fair, many women are judgemental about male nurses or even male teachers.
That type of idiocy has to stop both ways. Let people do what they want to do.
In your head? The first two are specially absurd. How would anyone know what women watch or read in their houses?
> No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa).
In our world, men do know that women face barriers to entering STEM education and STEM careers that men do not face. Many men seem to ignore that fact, though, or pretend it's not true, and I will continue to roll my eyes at their annoyance about "Women in STEM" programs.
What a bizarre analogy...
“I can see how it might seem weird to an alien who knew what men and women were, but had no context for the existing state and history of society.”
Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
Is that rhetorical? Have you looked, or just assumed their absence?
My cursory search seems to indicate that there are some, although I don't have bandwidth to investigate in any depth and I'm not sure just what criteria you'd want to use for qualification.
Here's what I found after a quick search. If you're interested I'm sure you could research and find more information.
https://www.arizonacollege.edu/blog/men-wanted-new-efforts-t...
> Only 12% of the nurses providing patient care at hospitals and health clinics today are men. Although the percentage of nurses has increased — men made up just 2.7% of nurses in 1970 — nursing is still considered a “pink collar” profession, a female-dominated field.
https://www.belmont.edu/stories/articles/2025/men-in-educati...
> A critical shortage of male teachers continues to affect K-12 education across America, with men making up just 23% of elementary and secondary school teachers today, down from 30% in 1987, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Belmont University's College of Education is addressing this gender gap through intentional recruitment, mentorship and innovative program design.
I’m reminded of a retired college admissions administrator whose theory was that some of the men in college gap was over-confidence: statistically the women who applied overall were far closer to the women who were accepted, whereas like a third of their male applicants had no chance so a roughly even balance of applicants turned 2:1 in favor of women being accepted. I’m sure that many of them grumble about DEI, unaware that merit is _why_ they weren’t accepted whereas their fathers’ generation would’ve found room for many of them via legacy or sports spots.
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33513171/
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959782...
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
Biological sciences are STEM of course. But if we're going to extend the definition, why not include all fields that involve technical skills? How about accountants and lawyers?
I'm concerned that you only proposed adding medical and nursing students because it's the only additional field that would support your argument. That strikes me as goalpost moving, so I hope it was just an omission.
DEI keeps on saying "more women in universities! More women in universities!" even though universities have been majority women for decades now. It's a one way ratchet that never stops.
What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
And your father/grandfather was enslaved by the government to fight in the Vietnam war until 1975.
> What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
Blatant hypocrisy, you think 60% of college students being women is good, but consider it horrible sexism that at one time 60% of college students were men.
You don't want equality, you just want everything to be female dominated.
Bad-faith arguments seem to be your shtick, given your comment history on this post.
I don't want everything dominated by women, I just recognize that the work of undoing their marginalization is not complete.
No, “DEI” doesn’t keep saying that. Why are you making up a strawman to fight?
There’s actually quite a bit of outreach-type programs aimed at getting them in the door, and a lot less after that because despite women dominating degrees and entry-level hires, men still disproportionately dominate management and leadership roles.
That's because, in general, STEM itself is already a "Men in STEM" program. We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.
Creating a "Men in STEM" program would be a waste of time, and would just be about scoring conservative political points.
This is the mistake DEI proponents make. There is no "we men", there are individuals and discriminating towards them is not ok and also illegal.
I don't believe this is true. I think the gendered difference in interest in the cluster of topics we label "STEM" is mostly biological and deeply-seated - one piece of evidence I find very convincing is the observation that non-human primates exhibit the same sorts of gendered behavior with toys that human children do (females wanting to treat any kind of toy as a doll, males wanting to treat any kind of toy as a tool, etc.).
I also don't think that boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls. I think that girls are explicitly encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in much greater numbers than boys - this is exactly a consequence of the above-noted social fact that "Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly". And as you say, this is because males are much more likely to be intrinsically interested in pursuing STEM education and careers, whereas females are more likely to require explicit societal encouragement to do so. I've read more than one account of a woman who had worked in some kind of software-related field admitting that she wasn't intrinsically excited about the work, but felt like she would be a bad feminist if she left a STEM track to do something more traditionally female-coded instead.
This is actually why I don’t think the differences are mostly social: there’s a lot of evo-psych speculation which gets widely referenced in casual discussion but when you look at the details turns out to be much weaker. For example, that famous Hines 2002 study about vervet monkey toy preference relied on grouping toys into categories based on human leanings: a police car was masculine while a cooking pot feminine despite no vervet monkey ever associating a pot with mother’s home cooking, and the effect went away when they used other groupings (e.g. animate or inanimate objects).
What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.
When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.
It's certainly possible that particular study had limitations or was otherwise bad. This is a hard thing to study rigorously. My understanding wasn't that the primates were choosing toys based on gender association in (some) human societies, it's that they were playing with the same physical objects in gendered ways. And this is consistent with the anecdotal observation about human children I've heard from many parents that girls like to play with any toy as if it is a doll whereas boys like to play with any toy as if it is a tool or a gun; girls being given toy cars and then tucking them into a toy bed as if they were a doll, etc.
> What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.
I don't think I would claim that women are innately worse at engineering (and I think that "engineering" is a broad enough field with enough subspecializations that it's difficult to judge engineering skill in a way that is both objective and useful). I'd claim that women are systematically less interested in the kinds of highly technical systems-focused work we associate with fields like software engineering. In other words, I think that both men and women can be taught to program a computer and do software engineering, but that men (really AMAB people, I think transwomen pattern like cis men in this respect) are much more likely to be deeply interested in programming computers and voluntarily spend a lot of time doing it to the exclusion of other things, which eventually caches out in programming as a whole being a very male-skewed field.
I think the lower gender gap in the Soviet Union and other mid-20th-century Communist states is explained by exactly what you said, explicit social and political pressure for gender equality. I also suspect that even in the Soviet system, there might have been more equal numbers of men and women doing STEM work or programming work specifically, but (at least as far as computer programming goes), males were systematically more intrinsically interested in and energized by the actual programming, whereas the women were more likely to just be doing their jobs and feeling like they would rather be spending their time doing something else. The Soviet system was in any case characterized by a large amount of state control over how people worked, in ways we generally find authoritarian today, and it's not a model I would like to see modern US employment policy follow.
> When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.
I agree that these are interesting and complex questions that cognitive scientists should attempt to study to the best of their ability. I don't think there's a reason to assume that boys are encouraged to play with building toys and games, rather than innately choosing to do this to the exclusion of other types of play - certainly it's as likely to be innately biological as being good at 3-D rotation itself is.
> I don't think there's a reason to assume that boys are encouraged to play with building toys and games, rather than innately choosing to do this to the exclusion of other types of play - certainly it's as likely to be innately biological as being good at 3-D rotation itself is.
Interesting take. I faced abusive repercussion in daycare for playing with the cooking set and dolls because “those aren’t my toys and it’s wrong”, so while I was inclined to think this was very much socially enforced dimorphism, your comment seems to suggest that I am in some way more “biologically feminine” than most skeptics would like to suggest. curious !
As for us being overrepresented in tech, for a lot of gals I know it’s a way for our merit to be judged over our appearance, similar to socially awkward guys preferring work that doesn’t take constant face-to-face.
If you wanted to leverage the "private club" exemption per Roberts v Jaycees, then you would be disqualified from using public spaces as well, which -- my wife established a "girls who code" organization and it benefited greatly from the use of both public and lent private spaces, but she could not have done without the ability to use both as it would have been extremely cost prohibitive (and it wasn't in any way profitable anyway)
Years ago, my wife founded two chapters of a national organization who did "girls who code" sorts of things. There was (to her) a surprising amount of infighting about how to handle registrations from males. Leadership felt that men should not be allowed to attend, but there were at least a couple of chapter leads (including my wife) who felt that men should be allowed to attend, but where spots were scarce, they should be prioritized to women.
Disregarding the politics of it, there was definitely not a shortage of men who were discouraged from signing up because they were somehow icked out over the name. I'm sure some men were, and I'm sure others probably deferred on the grounds that they didn't want to take spots away from those for whom the mission was intended -- but because the organization was unwilling to publish official guidance for reasons I won't bother to opine on, my wife was routinely in the position of having to explain her attendance policies to men who had signed up
This ties into a very specific confusion about affinity groups. Specifically, they generally are not exclusionary (in part because it's largely illegal). The only thing preventing boys from participating in a "girls who code" type of event is the boys don't want to go to something with "girls" in the name.
That very much depends on the group. Years ago, my wife founded two chapters of a national organization who did "girls who code" sorts of things. There was (to her) a surprising amount of infighting about how to handle registrations from males. Leadership felt that men should not be allowed to attend, but there were at least a couple of chapter leads (including my wife) who felt that men should be allowed to attend, but where spots were scarce, they should be prioritized to women.
Disregarding the politics of it, there was definitely not a shortage of men who were discouraged from signing up because they were somehow icked out over the name. I'm sure some men were, and I'm sure others probably deferred on the grounds that they didn't want to take spots away from those for whom the mission was intended -- but because the organization was unwilling to publish official guidance for reasons I won't bother to opine on, my wife was routinely in the position of having to explain her attendance policies to men who had signed up
Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender, will never be a stable system for equity. It always bring push back, which usually escalate hostilities and bring more polarization.
I would like to imagine than in the place of DEI or anti-DEI, we will instead see a push for programs that look to the individual and their need for support. Needing mentors and support is not born out of gender or skin color, nor faith or sexual orientation. Its born from human need to improve oneself and those around us. That is a program that deserve government grants, and I wish there was governments that would support that in 2025 political climate.
I noted today in local Swedish news that one of the largest STEM university in Sweden found that they have now reached their gender equallity goals for technical programs, and is looking to change the diversity program towards other demographics that has been overlooked and gotten worse over the years in term of gender equallity, like for students in biology and chemistry. Time will tell what the people with strong moral fiber will do, as there seems to be a lot of resistance among those who previous was supported by that diversity program.
Our definitions of the community in general must differ. This was not what I saw.
> Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender
This is a straw man. Skin and gender were not the only factors he considered. And he considered gender because of patterns of failure when other mentors mentored women.
It's a remarkably stable system for inequity.
Ensure that students of any type have excellent public schools. Ensure that people without resources, of any background, have access to higher education. This can be by grants for the very poor, just as it can be by government backed, guaranteed approved student loans.
Healthy, stable food in schools is an excellent way to keep a child's mind on education.
These things level the playing field. There are plenty of white males who need such help to be on a level playing field with wealthier families too. I grew up in a rural community in Canada, and saw many smart but underprivileged(including trouble with keeping food on the table) families end up with grants to go to university.
If you do this, if you provide the capability for merit to shine, and ensure that merit can be fed intellectually, you're doing much of the work required for true equality.
I frankly don't give a rat's ass about women being in any specific field, or someone of whatever skin tone. I do 100% care if people want to, but cannot!! I want all who are capable, to be able to express that capability.
If this is done, and done correctly, then the numbers of candidates applying for jobs will result in numbers indicative of candidates in the field. And more importantly, of people wanting to be in those fields. If you get 11% women in the field, and 11% women applicants, and nothing prevented women from entering that field, you're where you want to be.
We don't need to encourage people to enter a field. We need to only ensure they can if they want to.
This sort of "women are weak and are scared of entering fields" is bizarre, from an equality standpoint. The same for people with different skin tones. Why do people seem to think women, for example, are weak and incapable of pursing their dreams? They are not!
The women I've known in my life have been strong in opinion and in drive, the same goes for people of any racial background. There are of course those that are not, but I've seen lazy, undriven white males too.
People don't need to be prodded, dragged, pulled into a field.
They just need to have no way that they are hindered. They just need the freedom to choose. To know that they can pursue that which they desire.
Support at the ground level does this.
I agree that DEI often acts as a fig leave over a whole bunch of other systemic issues, and the European vs American cultural and historical landscapes are already so different as to make any cross-the-pound discussion on DEI extremely hard to navigate, but I still commend the PSF for not taking clearly ideological orders from a funding body. That road would have lead to nothing but trouble.
Honestly such statements weird me out. How did we come to saying such things being considered normal??
This is the real problem. They use vague statements to make decisions based on loyalty with just enough merit as distraction.
Everything will get much worse for everyone, and they will probably set back the progress of causes they use as vehicles in their loyalty crusade. I increasingly see other outcomes becoming less likely.
A relevant tweet from 2016 (https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595):
> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.
If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.
Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.
The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.
Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.
> the Justice Department secured a settlement agreement with Meta (formerly Facebook) in February 2025, alleging that Meta’s ad delivery system used machine-learning algorithms relying on Fair Housing Act (FHA)-protected characteristics such as race, national origin, and sex to determine who saw housing ads
Furthermore, you seem to be conflating different meanings of the word "advertisement" where the one you've chosen to support your point is a broad meaning that would seem to make Barbie commercials that feature only girls illegal (which is obviously not the case).
In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups".
I expect that I'll get accused of making this up, which is why the latter is an exact quote shown on page 28 in this court case: https://www.scribd.com/document/372802863/18-CIV-00442-ARNE-...
But how do you think people arrive at the conclusion that whites/males have been favored in the past? Do they:
1) inspect their hiring practices and find evidence of discrimination
2) look at the proportion of minorities in the company vs proportion of minorities in the general population and conclude that any disparity is proof of discrimination
I'm curious why you say that, since we've arguably been managing without "the best for the job" for centuries, anytime the best was a woman or a minority.
A set of rules for fairness require that current decisions only account for individual merit; not special status.
But in any case, it seems like your answer is zero, right?
It really makes you think that all the "men and women are the same and sometimes women are even better" always starts at the silicon valley jobs and stops right at enlistment which would be actual equality.
Why do you think that? Because it makes you feel good or because there is an actual measurable benefit? And no you don't need to have a specific skin color or sexual orientation to be considered diverse/different. If you think "all white dudes are/think the same" maybe change white to black and say that in front of a mirror.
First, we are all enriched by having a variety of experiences and perspectives available to draw upon.
Second, I feel stronger bonds with historically marginalized humans than with humans who happen to belong to my own demographic.
> If you think "all white dudes are/think the same"
Ha, we definitely do not all think alike.
The moment HR rejects a candidate for being "insufficiently diverse" that's a zero sum game isn't it?
The difference, I think, is that I'm not blind to the advantages I receive every day for being a white male. In the words of Louis CK, "If you're a white male and don't admit that it is thoroughly awesome, you're an asshole."
For example, if your country gets attacked, primarily the men go and defend their country and people. Is that "thoroughly awesome"? Anyway have a nice day
Really like what? There are many concrete examples of how "white dudes" are statistically are disadvantaged.
Higher rate to being victim of a violent crime, suicide, homelessness, harsher sentences, dying at work, dying younger, dying in a war, white guilt
Oh for sure, for sure. It's hard to predict exactly how the secondary effects play out. But I was referring to the primary intended effects, which I think is what the person I was replying to was talking about.
You missed the memo, they're not pushing this narrative any longer. The poor attempt to launder DEI via the disabled is twisted and transparent. The ADA predates DEI by decades, and has broad support from both sides of the aisle.
And yeah, the ADA has received broad bipartisan support in passage because it's well understood even by partisans that disabilities affect everyone, so it's important to have protections in place.
What's not so understood by partisans is how those disabilities manifest, so since the passage of the ADA there has also been widespread pushback on what qualifies as a disability, and what accommodations are reasonable. THAT is a whole different conversation which, as someone who is disabled and covered under the ADA, I will say can be like pulling teeth to get protections guaranteed under the law. For example, businesses are often loathe to make physical accommodations like ramps and elevators, and there is often resistance to providing accommodations for mental health conditions or neurodiversity.
But DEI itself is about creating equitable access and participation for everyone. This includes people who are disabled, and at no point in time has DEI not included disabled people. Maybe for the terminally online right, who only focus on gender and race, but that's not what it's all about in the real world. Notably, DEI also has been a driving force for veteran employment (having dedicated veteran hiring pipelines is absolutely DEI). It's very common for people to do what you're doing now -- "All the accommodations I like and/or benefit me are sound law and not DEI; all the accommodations I don't like are DEI and must be outlawed"
No they're not. Fairness is antithetical to DEI.
>But DEI itself is about creating equitable access and participation for everyone.
DEI is specifically designed to exclude those who rank low on the oppression Olympics rankings, access and participation are antithetical to DEI.
>Notably, DEI also has been a driving force for veteran employment (having dedicated veteran hiring pipelines is absolutely DEI).
These existed before DEI.
>It's very common for people to do what you're doing now -- "All the accommodations I like and/or benefit me are sound law and not DEI; all the accommodations I don't like are DEI and must be outlawed"
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”
You and 0xDEAFBEAD answer that question no, because that benefit discriminates in your mind against all non-abused children. And against all adults, probably. I don’t know how deep the grievance mobilization goes.
The rationale for racial preferences in 2025 is not that they are a benefit to individuals who were personally harmed by racial discrimination. The institutions engaging in these practices insist that they are otherwise engaged in race blind practices. If such practices existed, DEI as we know it would be unnecessary. We could simply just enforce the existing laws in a race-blind way.
No, this is a consequence of your ideology, which assumes that racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Act and etc. (Hence “we could simply just enforce. . .”) Mine does not.
Note that the metaphor as stated by 0xDEAFBEAD, which you already said was good, did not include this additional generational gap.
It’s also not even an ideological matter. It’s a testable fact. There’s very little evidence that universities and corporations are discriminating against non-whites/asians.
1. Fewer minorities *want* to go to college -- what do you think causes that bias?
2. Minorities want to go to college, but due to factors of their environment are less able to make it to college -- what do you think leads to that inability?
3. Minorities want to go to college, and their environment is just as supportive of that goal as for white, but minorities are less capable (on average) of achieving that goal -- what are we to make of this?
4. Some other explanation I haven't thought of????
>Your terminology escalation to "abuse" seems absurd to me
It was an analogy.
>white people in general seem to have done fine
Black people in the US are also doing far better than Black people in Africa or frankly pretty much any other country with a large Black population.
That analogy is invalid because the original injustice here was discrimination, and people are proposing more discrimination in order to correct the original discrimination. Maybe that would be reasonable if you could be sure that the new discrimination narrowly targets people who unjustly benefited from the old discrimination. However, in practice this is unlikely to be the case: You'll have a situation where senior engineers benefited from discrimination, and we discriminate against a different set of junior engineers in order to "balance the scales". Two wrongs don't make a right.
Furthermore, as a method for achieving justice this is highly dysfunctional. There's no way to get consensus on what the "sentence" should be. There's no way to measure the degree to which the "sentence" has been meted out. It's just a big case of "squeaky wheel gets the grease". The more DEI professionals you hire, the more they will advocate for the need to hire DEI professionals, until the thing collapses into self-parody and Trump gets re-elected.
It's already possible to sue corporations for discrimination and violation of civil rights law. Why is this remedy insufficient? Maybe because there isn't actually a good legal case to be made that the alleged discrimination actually occurred, and people are just grasping at straws?
In any case: We can play these sort of zero-sum and negative-sum games until the cows come home. Functional societies don't cry over spilled milk, and instead focus on positive-sum games. To facilitate positive-sum games, we need a stable and predictable legal framework, not quixotic justice quests which mysteriously get ever more urgent the more the injustice recedes into the past.
A better way to look at it: We can and should try to mitigate the indirect, generational disadvantages of past racial discrimination. Some of those disadvantages are domino effects, manifested over many years. They're the evil twin of generational wealth.
Those generational disadvantages can be a drag on the descendants of the victims of the past discrimination. That gives a certain amount of comparative advantage to those of us whose ancestors didn't suffer racial discrimination — and who benefit from present-day white advantage even when our ancestors weren't among the racial oppressors.
Sure, my various immigrant grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents had to deal with a certain amount of ethnic discrimination. But it was nothing like that suffered by nonwhites.
The YouTube "head start in the race of life" video is spot on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vvHWAjh3Ks
Some will say, it's not my job to mitigate today's effects of past discrimination. That seems ... uncitizenly, if you will.
Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment.
Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment. The entire point of DEI was to eliminate illegal biases.
See also: No True Scotsman Fallacy
There's no "this is DEI this is not DEI" but any halfway sane and truthful assessment would focus on what the proponents claimed, said, and propagated as their intentions. Just as the Christians of the time were intending to do with the crusades.
Calling this a "no true Scotsman fallacy" is just attempting to misapply a logical fallacy to avoid looking at the issue truthfully and honestly.
I think you're very mistaken. Not only were their guides, but there were federal regulations mandating that the laws be broken. It is/was a mess.
I don't work for you. It's not my job to do research for you. If you're genuinely curious and interested in the truth it won't be hard for you to find. Literally go search and read the regulatory language in a few major industries. Start with the department of education. It doesn't seem like you're curious though, it seems like you're combative.
Usually when somebody makes broad vague assertions of evidence but refuses to back it up, I find that they are either mistaken about their experiences and that their take aways do not really follow from their primary evidence. Though usually it's those on the more DEI side that say "I'm not responsible for educating you" that make these mistakes! In the past year I'm seeing it from people that think DEI is about discrimination, so it's an interesting evolution. The argument is still unconvincing, no matter who says it. And again, I'm not saying you must produce anything for anybody else, I'm just saying that you end up looking like you don't have anything to actually produce.
My mistake was answering judahmeek's question directly. They asked "What are your sources?" and I answered with the truth, that my impressions came from reading the regulations myself. Instead I should have just not replied at all, because I didn't have the time then to go re-do the research and find all the links. It's not like I save every link I visit when exploring my own curiosity. I am not trying to get some paper published here, just trying to understand whats going on and occasionally share what things seem like to me on HN. Also if they had said something like "This is shocking to me, can you point me where to look into this for myself" I would have probably waited and made a more constructive response.
I hope you appreciate that I just took time out of my day to do this for you, primarily because I found your response (in contrast to judahmeek's) reasonably respectful.
What I noticed when I looked into this last year was that regulatory implementations of the affirmative action executive order 11246 continuously increased and seemed to hit a couple inflection points. I think one was in 2000 and one was in 2021, but there may have been more. I didn't save all the sources that I read to give me the impression I got last year, but after spending about 30 min trying to find at least some of them, it wasn't hard to start to see the picture again.
Note that there is a lot of disparate facts here that paint a picture, and they will paint different pictures depending on the stance the reader starts with before engaging. When I explored this last time, I came at it with curious skepticism. The picture they painted for me, was that something that was well intentioned (affirmative action) came with an assumption: if organizations hire blindly based on merit, over time the distributions of their workforce will match the distributions of the pool of applicants applying to work there. To implement affirmative action these organizations need to include everyone in the pools of applicants, which may require disproportional outreach to invite minorities. Based on this assumption, recommendations were made into outreach programs and requirements were set to measure outcomes. Over time the outcomes didn't match expectations, so regulatory pressure was increased. As the regulatory pressure increased, it put more pressure on all levels within these organizations to take action beyond just outreach programs. So what was federally mandated across many industries specifically was race, gender, sexuality reporting and making plans to reach distributions representative of the broader population. Given this accountability set by federal regulations, and decades of efforts to try to solve the problem with outreach and merit based hiring not leading to the expected outcomes, efforts naturally expanded beyond outreach into all relevant decisions (hiring, promoting). That is how you get people being hired and promoted based on race, gender, sexuality instead of merit. (The exact opposite of the original intention).
For example in Title 41: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-41/subtitle-B/chapter-60/... See 60-2.16 placement goals
Federal contract compliance programs https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2014/12/09/2014-28...
FAR 52.222-23 https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.222-23 Construction firms must set goals for gender participation in workforce
SEC Release no 34-92590 https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/sro/nasdaq/2021/34-92590.pdf Publicly traded companies that don't have at least two minorities on their board risk being delisted from exchanges
What I remember from last year as most shocking were Department of Education regulations and NSF incentives, but I can't find those primary sources now. The NSF website seems gutted. What I recall was that NSF set criteria in grant awards to incentivize institutions to have a diverse workforce. I can find evidence of this from secondary sources, but not the primary source I remember seeing last year. Similarly what I remember, is that the DOE mandated DEI reporting and planning and tied it to federal funding/support. The effect was that leaders would put pressure on the organization beyond just job placement recruitment/outreach. The reporting and accountability focused on diversity and representation throughout the entire organization, and so the "plans" and more importantly implications would extend beyond just outreach and impact placement decisions from hiring, to special training / career acceleration programs and promotions.
I think it crossed a line for some people in the years following 2021 (EO 13985) when these regulations were expanded to include factors related to peoples sexual orientation and preferences. Once some manager who was just trying to get through their quarter and hire the candidate that will the do best job has to forgo what seems like the best candidate in favor of some other candidate because of how they chose to identify or who they like to have sex with, well... yeah it was getting ridiculous.
Let me be extremely clear that I don't condone discrimination. I think we should do our best to support everyone to thrive. We just have to be careful about confusing responsibility with privilege, and respect how hard it is to design incentive systems that actually produce the desired outcomes.
You can look at the evidence that I am presenting here and call it weak and argue against it. Or you can consider that I dug this up in 30 min on my lunch break as a favor to you, as someone with no motive other than curiosity and concern.
Also you didn't ask me to link you to my sources, you asked me what my sources were. I answered your question directly in the best way I could at the time.
Expecting an internet stranger to spend an hour digging up sources for you, when you don't ask respectfully or with any inclination of curiosity comes off as combative - I am not here to debate, I am here to discuss. If you are genuinely curious, take 30 seconds to scroll down and find the other comment I made that took me an hour to put together.
You & I definitely have different definitions of "not hard to find", however.
There was a trial. The government lost. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/21...
That is Congress passing a law distributing grants in a way that was determined to be illegal, quite different! And in fact there are long standing government contracting preferences of that sort, from long before DEI was a term or something that corporate America sought.
It's an especially big distinction when the question was for sources of DEI advocates handing out instructions to corporate decision makers no how to break the law. It's not even remotely connected.
Laws are made by Congress.
Companies were also demanding race-conscious staffing practices at the law firms they used: https://www.wsj.com/business/law-firm-clients-demand-more-bl.... Microsoft offered financial bonuses to law firms for promoting lawyers from specific racial groups: https://today.westlaw.com/Document/If3eb4570033e11eb8e48d387....
You’re correct about the law, and the EEOC interpretation has been consistent for decades: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-15-race-and-color.... But in practice, in many though not all places, “DEI” became a vehicle for double standards, quotas, and other illegal hiring practices.
I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... When they got into corporate America, including law firms, they brought those ideas with them. But even though pre-SFFA law authorized race-based affirmative action in universities, it was never legal for hiring.
So you had this situation where not only did the big corporations engage in illegal hiring practices. But their law firms advising them were themselves engaged in illegal hiring practices. They all opened themselves up to major liability.
I feel like you're ignoring that racial preferences were practiced openly for the entirety of the existence of the university systems in the US. It's just that for almost all of time, the preference was for "white non-Jews" (where "white" was historically malleable: Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
75% of that aforementioned group of white students would not have been admitted had it been based on merit. 70 percent of all legacy applicants are white, compared with 40 percent of all applicants who do not fall under those categories.
Why does the average applicant need to be penalized when their grandparents legally could not attend these institutions? I think it's pretty obvious why people have such reactions to DEI when it's literally just "legacies for people who legally were barred from participating".
Averages are meaningless, only individuals matter. Suggesting that preference for legacies be removed is a fine topic on its own, but it's orthogonal to explicitly discriminating against individual applicants based upon the color of their skin.
Since you clearly feel strongly about this topic, I'll ask again. Why should the poor white kid with no legacy relationship get cast aside for some other non-legacy kid with a tan?
Exactly. We shouldn’t treat similarly situated people differently because of group averages. That’s the definition of racism.
It’s also irrational in practice. If you want to compare whose grandparents had it harder, Indians and Chinese are clearly entitled to the most affirmative action.
This is obvious to any adult in the room. But the benefactors of said biases do not want to acknowledge it since it lays bare their utter mediocrity.
Wow, I am extremely happy to know that all racism ended in 1964!
I am going to use the crap out of that reference whenever I see people on HN creatively redefining Europe to exclude parts in order to dishonestly back up some point.
Personally I'm very much for the goals of DEI and very much against some of the means that were being taken to reach those goals. It's an extremely difficult and complex problem.
I can't help but wonder if the movement had just focused on inclusion and primarily where there is leverage towards future prosperity, if there wouldn't have been such a backlash and the efforts would have been enduring and compounding.
Slipping that "equity" in there is a trap to confuse responsibility with privilege and cause a lot of trouble that is extremely hard to work through. It's the justification for representation-driven hiring and selection (affirmative action), and equity based hiring practices that were both federally mandated AND constitutionally illegal at the same time.
I can't help but suspect it's something like satisfaction, where if you pursue it directly it's fleeting and destructive but if you focus on the inputs you get more of it and it's enduring.
Using claims that something is illegal to discredit an argument is extremely dubious.
Some “DEI” was high level measures like recruiting at a broader set of universities. But in the last 5 years it routinely got down to discussing the race of specific individuals in the context of whether to hire them or enter into business relationships.
So seems like all this talk by HR people didn't really change any hiring practices. It's also funny how everyone is outraged by the DEI programs, instead of the real discrimination that is happening in hiring.
anecdote /'ænɪk,doʊt/
noun
short account of an incident (especially a biographical one)If someone is racist in a manner that's outweighed 10:1 by opposite racist practices, that's something we do want to stop, but it shouldn't be top priority and definitely shouldn't be treated as the example of what racism looks like these days.
I can't find the Microsoft thing, but apparently among fortune 500 companies only 1.6% of CEOs are black. Even double that would still be an extremely low number. So unless you think some truly cosmic random odds happened here, that 1.6% is evidence of lots of racism.
Also, the study suggests that, even with this flawed methodology, a bulk of industries are in the least discrimination category with only a 3% lower callback rate for “black sounding names.”
And the bulk are not at 3%, the bulk are between 5 and 10. 3 was the absolute lowest.
Also you didn't mention the CEO thing, does that mean my numbers were sufficient to address that worry?
The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... A black applicant to Harvard with an academic index in the 5th decile had an 800-900% higher chance of admission than a white or asian candidate with the same qualifications. This isn’t just CEOs. The pattern was similar at UNC, a state school.
The least single industry was 3%. And each single industry is a very noisy data point, based on a couple companies and needing more data points. By the time you aggregate into more solid data, like those bigger categories, it's more than 3%.
But the whole thing could use better methods and more data for sure.
> The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison
In comparison to this specific resume effect it's pretty big, but that was just a basic example, not an attempt to list the biggest issue.
In comparison to the fortune 500 CEOs the overall effect here is smaller (no I'm not going to look at 5th decile in isolation).
Also even after this bias was applied, they're admitting a below-population-average amount of black students and a far above-population-average amount of asian students. So there's a bunch of other data necessary to properly analyze what's going on and how bad it is. Should there be a super tight correlation to academic decile? There are huge differences in school quality that muddy the signals, and those differences often correlate with race.
I'm not saying they did nothing wrong, but I'm saying it's unclear what the numbers should have been.
The metric-goal gets pushed down to lower hierarchy levels, and from then on, all it takes is turning a blind eye and you get the results we've seen in the court case I cited above. The smart ones just don't put it in writing.
Obviously, it is not fair to discredit all DEI initiatives simply because some of them (possibly a small minority of them) have lead to illegal hiring practices, but it is nonetheless an issue that it happens. That's obviously still true even if it seems entirely antithetical to the point of said initiatives. How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.
Personally, I feel the existence of illegal discrimination in service of improving diversity numbers felt like it was treated as an open secret for almost as long as I've been working in tech. I honestly figured it was mostly an urban myth, but it does seem to be a recurring problem that needs addressing.
(I also was somewhat skeptical of police ticket quotas being prevalent, as they are routinely brought up in every day conversation despite being illegal in most jurisdictions I've been, but that also turned out to be largely accurate. Color me surprised.)
Between the Labor Dept and various think-tanks/economic research groups, there should/could be data.
I suspect there are a small number of very public MegaCorps doing illegal DEI and that’s enough to illicit the backlash we’re seeing.
I know from my own employer, DEI is about outreach during recruiting and a combination of training for all employees and providing opportunities for people to gather and talk (via coffee talks and round tables that with DEI topics, but open to all).
Gee, it's almost like we're re-learning what the origin of the phrase "even the appearance of impropriety" is.
The solution to "DEI has run amok!" is not "Ban DEI!" but "better define what DEI means and what is within bounds/outside bounds". But, the latter doesn't fit on a campaign poster, so here we are...
That's a complete statement that nobody is even advocating for. We already have the enforcement mechanisms in place.
Just because a law is violated doesn't mean that we get rid of the entire scheme and try something else. Theft does not mean that we need to get rid of property rights, and theft doesn't mean that we need to stop people from seeking material goods.
Perhaps there should be better enforcement mechanisms, but I'm sure that all the DEI advocates would be all ears, because the illegal violations of the law are not what DEI advocates want, precisely because it leads to backlashes in addition to being counter to the explicit goals of all DEI advocates I have ever heard.
> Just because a law is violated doesn't mean that we get rid of the entire scheme and try something else. Theft does not mean that we need to get rid of property rights, and theft doesn't mean that we need to stop people from seeking material goods.
> Perhaps there should be better enforcement mechanisms, but I'm sure that all the DEI advocates would be all ears, because the illegal violations of the law are not what DEI advocates want, precisely because it leads to backlashes in addition to being counter to the explicit goals of all DEI advocates I have ever heard.
My point is just that it seems to be a real problem worth discussion and consideration, not just something made up for concern trolling. Whenever you have potential incentives to violate the law, there is reason to be somewhat concerned. It doesn't always manifest, but sometimes it does.
(P.S.: It is true that nobody is advocating for illegal hiring practices, at least not in good faith. Still, disregarding the apparent connection between DEI initiatives and illegal hiring practices they can incentivize just terminates the discussion.)
In your mind, if Google researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for, let's say, the past 15 years, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?
IBM's CEO infamously championed DEI-as-quota which led to wave of lawsuits that IBM was forced to settle.
The memory holing on this topic is concerning.
The FAA, on an official test that ATC candidates were required to take, would disqualify applicants if they didn't answer questions like "what was your worst subject in school" with answers like "math" or "science." This explicitly was to increase racial diversity, which is both patronizing in the extreme and really stupid.
When I bring this up in SF, people accuse me of making it up. It's not that people don't remember it, it's that political polarization has blinded us to our side doing batshit crazy things. Another similar example was "defund the police" which is a crazy slogan on its face, yet for a year Democrats felt compelled to sanewash it.
I am about as blue and pro-DEI as someone could reasonably be and I think that this stuff is small potatoes compared to a president who has been continuously trying to send the army in to crush Democratic-leaning cities. That being said, I'm pretty sympathetic to people who are suspicious of DEI because we do not have a good track record of auditing these programs.
I listened to video and I did not see anywhere where Jessica made an observation along those lines.
I did not hear quotas talked about explicitly either, though companies wanting more diverse candidates from TripleByte, which might have been caused by quotes in the company but Harj does not indicate any companies came out and said that.
I'll summarize: TripleByte guy describes how companies prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms. He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.
IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie that diversity and merit can be found at scale, even when the world market only has so many "diverse" and "meritorious" candidates available for a given position. This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
Link's? Timestamps? I skimmed the much of the podcast now and I did not hear anything like this from Jessica.
> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms
Quota is specifically a fixed share of something. "prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals" is not a quota, but an approach like that could be motivated by a quota.
I think quota has specific legal ramifications too so when the term was used in the comment but not used in the link I thought it was important to point it out.
> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals;
I have only fully watched the video you linked to as of yet, not the full podcast. The companies Harj talked about wanted diversity in that top TripleByte metric pool, something that Harj said they were not able to supply. To me it sounds like the companies are clearly saying what they want but Harj/TripleByte was not able to supply.
Harj's says the companies would not explicitly ask for lowering the metric cut off for diversity. My attempt to transcribe what he said "noone would actually want to explicitly say that".
> He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.
Most clients in my experience are annoyed when they want something, want to pay you for it, and you can not provide it. The details and complexities often do not factor in, they want a black box they stick money in and get a solution out so they can focus on their companies core competences.
> IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie ...
You seem to making a big claim, but it is not detailed in a way that I can respond to. I do not see TripleByte or Harj claiming they are doing science or demographic research about the world populations I do not think an large or sweeping claims can be built off what they are saying.
> This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
The article you link to here is a particular persons opinion and advocates for change that person wants, it does not document anything more general than that like your statement implied. It does not document a trend in the field of moving away from blind auditions, I don't follow the field closely so I would know if there is one, but this article does not document it.
It's hard to take these sorts of complaints seriously unless you can quantify in what percentage of cases we get the bad kind of DEI you describe.
Sure, if 90% of DEI is discriminatory hiring practices, then sure, that's a problem. But if it's 10% instead, then we should certainly call it out, but we should accept that, in any kind of initiative, there's going to be some bad behavior.
(Instead, of course, the right turns it into a culture war topic.)
All that I can say is that the form of DEI that I, myself, saw and experienced certainly included a lot of the "bad" form, people were justifying it (and some still are in this thread), and it was very clear that daring to criticize it would be a career-limiting move. You can look at the rest of the thread to see both personal anecdotes and further sources showing other large companies doing this.
The way it usually worked was that metrics for diversity hiring were set top down, without specifying how they should be achieved, and then the company openly turned a blind eye to such "bad behavior".
Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
I suspect it works so well as a "culture war topic" because many people have personal experiences not just with such practices, but also with being silenced and gaslit (told that what they experienced doesn't actually happen and is just a culture war topic) when trying to speak out against them.
It is also quite telling how everyone is up in arms about these discriminatory hiring practices, but the same people don't bat an eyelash about the fact that discrimination happens mostly the other way, I don't know how many studies I've read that showed that cv's with names associated with certain ethnicities have much lower chances to be invited to interview than the same cv with a white name.
> Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
Have you read the actual article?
Because the race based pity hiring programs didn't actually address the pipeline problems.
The PSF grant one or a different one? In the PSF one, nobody is getting ostracized and fired for daring to suggest DEI, in fact, they are turning down a grant for a more pro-DEI stance.
You might be in trouble for actually implementing DEI programs, but it's not a taboo topic that can't even safely be talked about. Criticism of any DEI-related practice, whether it's illegal hiring discrimination or presubmits that yell at you for using an ever-expanding list of now-verboten words, was taboo in many places.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-settles-28...
So maybe one could argue maybe they were not DEI enough!
On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?
My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.
Disclosure: I work at Google.
[1] https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/819bcce604bf5ff7...
>On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?
>My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.
I provided data. Not anecdotes. The data shows how the demographics of Google have shifted. The data shows how the professional prospects of minorities have shifted when it comes to Google jobs. The data does not show "no change at all".
A change from 90.4% to 90.7% percentage points I doubt is statistically significant. Phrasing it "at the expense" sounds like it's some terrible decline.
The conversation so far I believe has been about DEI in the US. Why focus on APAC, instead of the the US?
>Only looking at hiring % doesn't mean anything if we don't know the composition of the hiring pool.
What does that mean? Are you saying that if the fraction of CS grads that are Black+ also increased from 2.2% to 10.0%, then Google's DEI efforts did nothing? That conclusion doesn't hold. Google has a lot of DEI efforts, including ones to increase the number of Black+ people who choose to major in CS.
If I misunderstood your comment as being critical of DEI policies on the basis of being discriminatory along protected characteristics, I apologize in advance.
Which can be socioeconomic rather than racial..
It’s hard to break into the club of people who know CEOs or have parents or relatives who are VPs of major companies and can provide access for startups by people they know, for example.
> Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
There is no world in which 40% of programmers are women. 1% in 2011 is also probably evidence of discrimination. But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks. There just aren't that many women programmers.
If DEI is all about promoting women in the hopes that they'll succeed later, I could get behind that. But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
I've certainly heard that claim manu times, but never seen it backed up with actual data or even reputable anecdotes. Can you share the sources that led you to this conclusion?
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
It's like some people really want to feel angry and accept the most vague or fabricated statements as real facts.
But anytime you sit down and try to go the root of the issue in good faith you realize they really was nothing. Best you can find is someone on Twitter that said something stupid and then they use it as if that means there's a whole apparatus enforcing national wide policy based on that person's tweet.
You do know there were exams leaked to a group right?
Obviously men are stronger than women and so different standards are reasonable, yet this is also the exact same reason (well, one amongst many) that militaries traditionally did not permit women to participate in direct combat operation. A unit is only as strong as its weakest link.
The US military is now moving towards gender-neutral standards, but that will take one of two forms. If standards are maintained then it will be an implicit ban on women from the most physically intensive roles, or it will be lowered standards for everybody.
[1] - https://www.military.com/military-fitness/marine-corps-fitne...
Not necessarily. It's certainly possible that, if you go and rank the top 100 python speaker candidates, 40 of them will be women. The total number of female programmers will certainly influence the number in the top 100, but it won't define it.
GP said that the PyCon speaker review process starts blinded, meaning that reviewers don't know the gender of the speaker candidates. So if they got 1000 submissions, and had to pick 100 of them, and 40 of those chosen were women, they were likely among the top 100 speaker candidates, or at least approximately so.
> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
Big fat [citation needed] there. (Not just for the idea that it happens -- I'm sure it has happened at least once -- but to support your assertion of "often".)
But on the other hand if the PyCon is achieving 40% female speakers, how could it not be said that there is some pretty heavy bias going on introduced by the outreach process? Unless I turn out to live in a very isolated community of programmers (and internet for that matter) the Python community is far more male skewed than that. Diversity of gender at PyCon almost has to be excluding the actual Python community from the speaker selection process if it has that sort of gender balance. Might be good or bad, but if that is a neutral sampling process then it'd be really interesting to learn where all these python girls are hiding because they aren't applying for developer positions.
The PSF not taking the deal is the right play because as we've seen repeatedly over the past few months the current admin has zero issue using these things as leverage for harassment and politically motivated gain, which never ends no matter how much you try and appease them.
If anyone points out that fact on PSF infrastructure, you ban them (yes, this has happened).
You create a couple of programs that are mostly ineffective but good for PR.
You never mention any economic or other injustices that could upset the corporate sponsors.
You support and promote job replacement by AI while blogging about redistributing jobs via DEI.
Annoyingly they actually do have the data to answer which it is, because Pycon's review process has a first stage which is blind, and a second stage which isn't. So if they published how many talks get rejected at each stage, by year and vendor, then we could draw actual conclusions.
I couldn't find where they have published those numbers though so we can't draw any conclusions here.
It has two sides, one promoting, and one denying. Based on race. DEI activists are always talking about the first. How great it is. And never talks about second, to not to ruin the rosy picture. Just recently I visited a hospital in mostly white area. Inside it looked like african consulate. There are still DEI stickers on the wals. What they did they denied jobs to all white applicants.
Looks like Python foundation decided to promote exactly this. Well, you will not get a penny from me till you change the course.
I'd like to point out that this commenter assumed these doctors did not earn their positions purely based on skin color. I don't see how this is functionally different than classic racism. "DEI" complaints often seem to fit this fact pattern. In particular, I've never heard a white man described as a DEI hire.
* IRS audit into the PSF's 501c3 status
* if the PSF has received federal funds in the past, they'll probably be targeted by the DOJ's "Civil Rights Fraud Initiative"
* pressure on corporate sponsors, especially those that are federal contractors
Grant writing and the gigantic infrastructure for checking that the researchers are doing exactly what you've approved is an enormous burden on progress.
That way, this sort of situation would result in the revocation of the python license, instead of the grant proposal.
It seems like a win-win to me
DEI has always been a weird thing because half the people supposedly doing it were always just trying to curry favor with people in positions of power who supported it, and now that the winds have shifted they're equally happy to curry favor by getting rid of it. They signal virtue or vice depending on how virtuous or vicious the leader.
I think the PSF actually wants to do the right thing, which in the current perverse environment makes them more likely to be targeted. The wisest move is not to play.
Essentially that means for every dollar not spent on, say, the PSF; then an other organization willing to denounce DEI is going to get these $1.5M.
I fear less for the opportunity loss to _proper_ organizations, and worry that activist anti-DEI/partisan organizations are artificially going to get a massive funding increase.
In that setup, it may be the lesser of two evils for the PSF to accept that grant, if only to deny a more partisan organization to get this funding.
Striving for equality according to MAGA is discrimination. Make systematic racism and sexism great again like it’s <1950s?
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
This is the real problem. It's not about DEI really. It's the same problem as so much else this year: the US government is currently wildly unpredictable and doing business with such an entity is a liability.
As a Python user, I do wish that the PSF wouldn't institute DEI policies on their own volition; but ultimately they're a private organization that I have no relationship with, and they're entitled to make political decisions differently than I would. But in terms of receiving taxpayer money, I'm glad that these US federal government grant rules are putting real financial pressure on them.
According to their recent post they only have 6 months of runway before going broke. https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/connecting-the-dots.htm...
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