Let's apply the Principle of Charity here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity). The words you quoted don't say that, and it's easy to find plausible ways of reading them that don't mean that. Indeed, when you say that something "sounds like" X, it's you who are adding X, not the author. Choosing that interpretation in order to dismiss it seems unnecessary, and likely to polarize the responses. (I mention the latter because of how unpolarized and thoughtful the thread has been—edit: or had been.)

   I’ve lived several places in the Bay Area: San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, 
   San Bruno. All places I didn’t feel like I didn’t belong. I walked around 
   and saw scant few other black women.

Also, from her article, the sole time she mentions being happy at work is this:

   our team was predominantly black. I could relate to my teammates without 
   having to conform. I didn’t have to be anything different than who I was and 
   I flourished there. I was mostly happy at work [...]

[1] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06081.html

[2] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06085.html

So not only could the woman in the story be more comfortable because there are more black people, but also other races who are typically more welcoming

I believe in NYC the type of comfort is more forced and the wage gap is probably much larger. It's more of a "deal with it because I have to" and being comfortable with black folks because it's easiest, not because they see black people as equals. My suspicion is mostly because of the support NYC'ers seemingly have of elected officials that espouse "zero tolerance" and "stop-frisk" policies.

I'm speculating quite a bit here, it would be nice to here if my theory matches anyone’s real world experiences with both places.

She talks about not fitting in until she reaches Oakland and the issue of racism.

A huge portion of the article is talking about her not wanting to do an activity that the rest of the team does (e.g. video gaming or drinking beer) I do not feel as though these activities are specifically 'white male engineer' activities. If the team was predominantly black, and these activities still being participated in would she have still felt pressured to attend? I assume she would.

If someone says they're uncomfortable they're uncomfortable. Even with black teammates, as a woman she might still feel those activities are not her usual thing to do.

And what you wrote very much isn't what the author wrote.

That's the point.

That said, reading through the article I don't see the author ever claiming that she wants the industry to have predominantly black teams, or that predominantly black teams are the pinnacle of diversity as you suggest. In fact what I was so impressed by how little opinion or suggestion she provided throughout the entire article. For the most part, simply a listing of events that occurred through her career and the impact it had on her.

Regarding the specific quote mentioned in the great-grandparent comment: "When I transferred to my second team there, Desktop Support, diversity lightning struck: I was a black woman reporting to another black woman in a technical role."

Maybe I'm misreading it, but I interpreted it as follows: The expression "lightning struck" generally means that a rare event occurred (I didn't see much listing of it on google, but I've heard the expression many times. Maybe it's a regional thing?). The rare event in this case was, "a black woman reporting to a black woman in a technical role." And I think most people working in tech would pretty much agree this is rare (I don't think I've ever seen it).

And I believe excerpting the next sentence without the two that follows it is somewhat removing the sentence from its context. Here I include all three - she writes: "Moreover, our team was predominantly black. I could relate to my teammates without having to conform. I didn’t have to be anything different than who I was and I flourished there."

My take here is that being secure in an environment where she could relax, she didn't have to spend significant mental cycles trying to conform to other's expectations of her, and she could just be herself and be accepted - as a result she "flourished". Whether that is just personally or also professionally isn't explicitly stated.

Finally quoting another comment you made below >True, but mostly what I meant was that it's funny that she refers to a room full of black people as a utopia of diversity, when it's really just that she happens to be in the majority there.

As far as I could see the author never states the idea of a team of predominantly black people being a utopia or ideal of diversity. I believe this might be an incorrect interpretation of what was written. She does say how wonderful it is to work in an environment where you are accepted for who you are (which she found on that team discussed above), not that a person needs a homogeneous team to be accepted. To support this, near the end she sates what she would like to see in an ideal case "Ideally I’d like to work in a less homogeneous environment where I don’t feel so different." Ie. less homogeneity. However, even that, she doesn't ask of the industry. She doesn't ask for there to be more black people in tech; her simple request, the final sentence of her essay is "My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted." The only change she is asking for is that Tech allow people who are different to feel accepted for who they are. An incredibly modest but valuable human request.

In general I try to avoid writing comments quoting other people like this because no matter how well meaning you may be, when read on the internet it often comes across as sniping. So I'll leave things there, as I do genuinely appreciate this discussion, and hopefully this comment came across as a positive discussion as I intended.

My goal was just to point out that we should be cautious and ensure that in discussions we separate what the author is saying from our interpretation of their intent. It's a challenging task to do in any reading.

Maybe! But your level of comfort around people who are like you doesn't dictate your ability to be inclusive. It just shows how important diversity is to help us understand why we may be uncomfortable in these scenarios and how to address it.

She talked quite a bit about that in the article; I believe she was clear, if you aren't taking single sentences or even paragraphs out of context. I believe she is saying that in a team that at least somewhat shares her race and gender, she can expect her race and gender to be invisible and not part of the equation. Whereas, in a team where she is the only black woman on the team, she expects other things to determine her fate (based on prior experience in similar situations), and that causes her distress (as it would for anyone).

Being in the majority allows one to be ignorant of problems of diversity. She hasn't said she needs to be in the majority to be happy. What she has said, I believe, is that she needs to not have to think about blending in in order to be happy; and a massive preponderance of white males in the workplace does not allow her that freedom, because of the direct and indirect actions of some white males.

Your point is expressed very well.

Made me think about how, though I have been the sole or one-of-a-few white guy(s) in work situations and maybe at times times taken out of my comfort zone. But not to the extent that the author describes. I cant imagine dealing with what she describes.

Saying it is the same thing is disingenuous or worse.

I gave you the benefit of the doubt earlier, but this is outright distortion.

I don't think the 'diversity lightning struck' phrase is clear. So without clarification from the author we should probably skip over it rather than analyse it deeply and concentrate on the other bits that are clear.

The general theme of the article is about her experience in a minority (of one) so silly to focus in on a comment about her working as a majority.

So if you're asking what you should do, the answer is: the exact opposite of whatever you're doing now.

Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. If mistakes are being made because of clueless action, then having them "do the opposite" is still going result in clueless actions. The proper antidote is honest and open communication.

The key takeaway is that her environments didn't foster this communication. I doubt that the majority of the environments she was in had enough capacity for self-awareness and introspection to make such a thing easy and apparent. I would also posit, that the very mechanical pattern-matching way we currently implement "political correctness" is counterproductive in this way. I wonder if the fear around issues of race and group inclusiveness didn't drive the HR response she described.

Political correctness shouldn't be about enforcing superficial behavior. It should be about the epistemic health of a group. It should be about how well a group can discover and absorb cultural issues is isn't yet aware of.

There is no definition for a diverse group, but her one sample isn't diverse. Google searched "Picture of Diverse People" http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/056/19e/34082f9.jp...

The reality is that yes, people are going to feel more comfortable with people who are like them. I don't see that changing any time soon, and I don't fault her for that feeling of relief. But it's disingenuous at best to say "there need to be more black people for me to identify with" is the solution, or even a solution, for how to deal with diversity. The average group of 10 Americans will have one black person and six non-Latino whites. It's understandable for that situation to make you uncomfortable, just as I'd probably be at least mildly uncomfortable on a team with six blacks, a Chinese person, an Indian, and a Hispanic. I'm open to suggestions to make it easier, but if the simple state of being in a minority is all it takes, I really don't know what to do.

No, she wasn't "naturally conformant", saying she was is a bit of racism on your part.

In the very next paragraph:

"After The Home Depot, I took a position at a lottery/parimutuel company. I returned to being the only black woman, but the team there wasn’t very close knit so everybody did their own thing, did their job, and went home."

It makes it clear that the issue is not a lack of racial homogeneity, but racism, especially when combined with a cliquish work environment.

With the above quote, the author directly refutes your claim that "the simple state of being in a minority is all it takes".

The author does not say "there need to be more black people for me to identify with", but consistently says "My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted."

(It's also a bit weird that people keep calling that example 'non-diverse', when entirely-white groups of developers are still the norm. Even a predominantly white group -- but with some people of colour -- is unusually diverse in this field, sadly.)

By this definition, a team of white, south asian and east asian people is diverse. A team of black Americans is not.

You seem to be using some alternate definition - I'm guessing diversity for you means "sufficient numbers of non-Asian minorities", but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Let's take the immediately preceding example, where the author had a black woman as a supervisor. The author describes this as 'diversity lightning'. If you interpret this narrowly, this makes absolutely no sense: there's no way in which a single person can be considered diverse. On the other hand, if you think about it at an environmental or company level, things look different.

Suppose we take a random US tech company's employees and dump them in a vase. (Let's ignore the ethical issues with this for a moment.) At this point, we'd expect the odds of a random draw to reflect the tech industry's demographics, which is to say, predominantly white and asian males. If you draw this 'predominantly black' development team from the vase, though, you need to update your priors. You probably shouldn't calculate your posterior as 'everyone at this company is black' -- but you'd still probably guess that you're looking at a tech company where there are more black people and women than average. Which is to say, you'd expect that the company as a whole was more diverse.

I think this second reading is a lot more charitable to the author. I also think it's the more interesting reading; the demographic representation in a small group is subject to a huge amount of randomness, but the demographics of a entire organization are more telling, and can reveal more interesting things about policy and bias. As a community, software people are normally biased toward systems-level thinking; it's weird to me that in this particular issue people have this laser-focus on small groups and tokenism.

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man - basically the opposite of a straw man.

Make an effort to include every member of your team in your activities. It's Burkeian "omission of good" rather than "commission of evil". Let's assume that you're perfectly non-exclusionary. Fine. What are you doing to be inclusionary?

You know what stuck out to me? This line:

> I remember asking if we could do other outings that didn’t include beer and getting voted down.

I know that feel, and I'm neither black nor female.

Which is more important to you? Making a coworker feel included in your social gathering or drinking the right drink because it was Thursday?

Or more succinctly: is your tradition more important, or is your coworker more important?

Yes, your coworker should also try to fit in and properly conform to the standards your clique sets, and if it's so impossible for you to hang out together because there's absolutely no activity you have in common, then I wouldn't be surprised if they left the company.

You could have gone and gotten bubble tea on Tuesday instead, for instance.

Its outside of work. Your own convictions and interests should dictate what you do outside of work. There are more differences between drinking beer at a bar and drinking non alcoholic drinks at a starbucks. People are going to enjoy them separately and unfortunately, for many people, the activities are not interchangeable. I personally don't drink, but I would never suggest to co-workers that they change their outside of work habits because I don't want to go to a bar.

It's clearly different if its a work sponsored event.

I like that you put the word "approve" into my mouth. It's an excellent straw man technique and pretty underhanded. Well done. Full marks for rhetorical technique.

> I personally don't drink, but I would never suggest to co-workers that they change their outside of work habits because I don't want to go to a bar.

And yet, that's not what's happening.

The situation at hand is that there exists a group of people who like to do Activity A. Now a new person, Person P, joins the group who does not like doing Activity A.

Now, Person P has a choice. They can either leave the group or they can force themselves to do Activity A.

> It's clearly different if its a work sponsored event.

The thing that you're all missing is that the fact that it's in a workplace is completely irrelevant.

Let's assume Activity A is "going to a fellowship meeting on Friday nights". Would an atheist feel included if everyone simply said, "Oh, you don't want to? Guess we're leaving you behind, then." Or worse, if they said, "Oh, you don't want to? But you'll really like it! We demand you come along and do something you won't enjoy!"

"Can't we just go and play board games or something?" "No, fellowship is far more important! That's what we do on Friday nights."

In response, I would like to criticize yours. Person P did not join a "Going out to bar" group. They entered into an at-will employment agreement with a business entity. Person P should be neither obliged to join said "Going out to bar" group, nor should they expect that group to change their activity that everyone in the group enjoys (to a less enjoyable activity) simply to accommodate a new co-worker.

In your example, if my co-workers were religious and were talking about an event they were attending outside of work, there is no issue. I don't understand why you think your co-workers have some contractual duty to be inclusive in their personal lives. They might invite me because they personally enjoy working with me and want to extend our working relationship to a more casual, friendship environment, but I am under no contractual or employment obligation to go, therefore there is no duty by the company (or its employees, which are just extensions of the company in a work environment) to specifically be all inclusive.

The point is people are drawn to an activity for a certain reason. No group is going to take nicely to someone coming in and getting angry when they (where they could be 5-6 people) don't change their outside of work behavior to accommodate a single person.

If you honestly can't engage with me without putting words in my mouth, I really don't see the point in taking you seriously.

Do you have a better word for this required need (than duty) that you say exists?

(By the way, the definition of duty: something that one is expected or required to do by moral or legal obligation. That is what I feel you are describing when you say people are required by necessity to include their co-workers. Maybe you should work on your communication skills instead of refusing to acknowledge your claim (a claim that implied employers have a right to police the personal, social events of their employees) was baseless and had no merit at all.)

I'll certainly concede I could have communicated better; that's basically always true anyways because NOT PERFECT. But the idea that I could have gotten through to you, who can't seem to reply without figuring out a way to twist what I've said, is ridiculous.

Grow up, entertain yourself; participate in events if you enjoy them, or if not, suggest events you'll enjoy. But don't whine if they don't share your idea of fun and hence decline.

If you live in a reasonably sized city, you can find people into doing damn near whatever floats your boat.

This is really basic social skills.

I couldn't agree with you more here. I have been labeled MANY times as in the "after hours drinking group" by people that "don't drink" and I really not sure why I would care.

I don't talk about how people are in the "World of Warcraft group" and since I don't play world of warcraft you should come to the bar! ;) But really, those wow'ers should. It's fun.

I don't like bars; its loud and crowded and there's absolutely nothing I want to do there. But can't please everybody.

See how all those statements were about me? That's because this is about my free time. And you, and all my coworkers for that matter, have no claim on it.

That's super-great for you, but what if work people don't want to do something that you enjoy? Lemme guess: you won't hang out with them, right? Because that'd be a waste of your time.

Fun fact: that's the definition of you are not being included. But you didn't want to be invited to their uncool party anyways, right?

> And you, and all my coworkers for that matter, have no claim on it.

Why do you even bother hanging out with your coworkers at all? Like, what's in it for you? Are they just extra bodies filling in the space for doing something you enjoy?

   That's super-great for you, but what if work people don't want to do 
   something that you enjoy? Lemme guess: you won't hang out with them, right? 
   Because that'd be a waste of your time.

It's like being an adult with a life. This is clearly upsetting to you for some strange reason.

I'd say it's more interesting that when you are in the majority and similar to those with power, you don't deal with certain bullshit and it's easier to relax and get shit done.

That sounds a bit like all the other white engineers that aren't really focused on cultural sensitivities because they are (can be) focused on other things.

On one hand the author feels she loses her cultural identity by trying to mingle with a while group. On the other she advocates diversity. And yes, she also feels comfortable when working in a predominantly black team.

I think the solution that she forgets to mention is having people of all groups equally represented (most or less) in any field. With that happening, I can see how nobody would feel like an outsider, and get to preserve their cultural prefernces and tastes, along with mingling with other cultures and races.

It doesn't have to be a black team, a white team and a brown team. All that is needed is people of all races in the workplace with diverse teams. That will balance things out.

As for "What can you do as a white person other than not being a racist and voicing your prejudices openly" .. I don't think there's much you can do. I guess those of you in recruiting positions can encourage people from all backgrounds to come up. Not saying give special treatment to minorities, but generally try to keep bias away from recruitment procedures. Same applies to promotions, relocations and the like.

Just be normal. Is that really so difficult to be?

All people ever want is to work around normal people. I'm not sure why that is a impossible expectation to have. People's skin color, ethnicity, religion, language, nationality, religion or whatever is the person's private business. Just being fair to their performance on the job can solve all the issues.

>>This sounds like she's most comfortable working only with black people

If you treat people badly over and over, over years. And then you consider your birth right to screw their careers and life. And all the person at the other end wants to protect themselves from this, I don't see what's so wrong with it.

What should she do otherwise? If all your efforts to succeed with just efforts fail, Its perfectly fine to act in your best interest.

No, she doesn't like extroverts, and saying that is socially unacceptable, so she's going all "black vs white" instead.

Look at the comments along the lines of

"everybody did their own thing, did their job, and went home." (I love that kind of working environment, its unfortunately rare to have a professional working environment)

"I remember asking if we could do other outings that didn’t include beer and getting voted down." (despite not being a black woman, I feel exactly the same way as she does WRT this topic, so I suspect her and I would get along great, other than the whole we're both apparently introverts so getting along great would mean sitting silently, very happily, with each other)

There is an anecdotal aspect to her argument. As a white dude I've met and worked with a lot of really weird white dudes over the decades, and thats apparently ok. She met ONE weird white dude, ONE!, and that's a big problem solely because she's a black woman. I'm not impressed. I'm not saying weirdos are good or correct or shouldn't be punished, but I am saying that trying to portray weirdos as as "a black women problem" is extremely inaccurate. They are a PITA for us all, or there exist PITA weirdos that affect every ethnic or social group. And to be honest, management and HR are utterly ineffective at weeding out weirdos regardless if the people offended are white dudes or black women, which is fairness, in a way.

I'd argue that dealing with weirdos is an adult social skill. So a long time ago I sat next to a guy with a severe temper problem who would scream at me occasionally, usually just nonsense although sometimes I admit I'd provoke him a bit. Well, it was not exactly paradise, but I'm a big boy so its "OK". It did freak out people who weren't as tough as I was, which I found amusing (You're the one who's freaked out while I'm the one sitting next to him?) The ideal social interaction system might be all candy and balloons and girl scout songs all the time but adults can and should handle something a bit worse, a bit more realistic. Toughen up, basically. She is apparently under the mistaken impression that no weirdos ever bug white dudes magically because we're the oppressor, and that is quite inaccurate.

Also the author doesn't describe one "weird" guy as you suggest. She describes an individual who was far and beyond offensive. Whatever his reasons that's not appropriate in every day life much less in the workplace.

Being white gives you the ability to brush this off as not your problem, or not that unusual but for someone like the author who is doubly on the outskirts the fact that a situation like that isn't addressed promptly and decisively sends the message that she isn't a valued part of the team. If you value that guys right to be overtly offensive and racist more than her right to be offended by it you are creating a culture that implicitly doesn't value a certain segment. In this case both blacks and women

Just as the person you replied to said... it's one person who is a FAR outlier example. So you agree she described one person.

> "Being white gives you the ability to brush this off as not your problem"

That's just reversing racism. No skin color of any kind is an automatic anything. There are trends but being "white" is not a panacea for all life situations.

> "If you value that guys right to be overtly offensive and racist"

I'll just quote the original comment.. " I'm not saying weirdos are good or correct or shouldn't be punished, but I am saying that trying to portray weirdos as as "a black women problem" is extremely inaccurate."

That's not the impression I got from the post. She clearly feels that the established "normal" (setting aside the obvious asshole outliers) isn't making her feel welcome. Just being the only black woman is apparently enough to do that, because of her fear that there might be a problem, even if it hasn't materialized. The easy response is to tell her that she needs to get over it and stop inventing problems where nobody is actually out to get her, but there are enough stories like hers that there's probably more to it.

Create an atmosphere where people can talk about things that make them uncomfortable. Granted, much of the language and distorted dogma around race and gender issues has made this difficult. It's anti-intellectual claptrap to label things like objectification and stereotyping as things that are like "sin." Those are epiphenomena of human social information processing. They are things to be aware of, not things to shame people with.

The good news in that, is that the same things one does to foster honest and direct communication around technical issues are the same things one does to foster honest and direct communication around social issues. The bad news in this, is that to accomplish that, you are going to have to get past a lot of the BS and recrimination that acts as a barrier. (For the record, I think the way "political correctness" is currently implemented doesn't help on the whole.)

This sounds like she's most comfortable working only with black people - in which case, the pleas for all-inclusive diversity sound a bit hollow...

I don't think it's that she only wants to hang out with black people. It's that she wishes she felt as comfortable around tech coworkers as she does in predominantly black settings. Is it possible that she's doing things that exacerbate her feelings? Sure. Again, that's something to be cured with honest and direct communication.

If we all rationally applied what we now know about group psychology, we should anticipate many of the events and situations she described happening. Also, if the entire group of coworkers were anticipating and applying such knowledge, I would posit things would go differently. Unfortunately, the fear and social coercion around the current version of "political correctness" work against this and instead produce an atmosphere of fear and tiptoeing around hair-triggers for fear of being tarred with labels synonymous with villainy. Could you imagine such an atmosphere around implementing continuous integration, or effective testing, or coding practices?

Instead, encountering different cultures/sub-cultures should be considered an instance of encountering "known unknowns." One should go into the situation with a stance of discovery. That is what "cultural sensitivity" should really mean, not this tiptoeing/gotcha game BS that we play.

EDIT: A series of questions for 3rd party readers: Is your workplace about "open and honest motivated problem solving" in the social dimension? Or is it more like "tiptoeing around gotchas?" Or is it a combination of the two concerning different social issues? What does it mean?

Okay, great, but what does that mean? If something I do is making someone I work with uncomfortable, I'm open to hearing it, but it would hardly help the situation to go around asking if people feel comfortable. Maybe if I were a manager, I could bring up such concerns in a one-on-one meeting, but if they seem reasonably happy but privately feel excluded, how am I supposed to know?

Have you created an atmosphere where people can bring up "uncomfortable" technical issues? Do people feel comfortable admitting mistakes? Is the group unified in motivated and introspective problem solving towards a shared goal? Hopefully the answers to the above are all yes. Where they are yes, how did someone foster those conditions?

Maybe if I were a manager, I could bring up such concerns in a one-on-one meeting, but if they seem reasonably happy but privately feel excluded, how am I supposed to know?

I think managers are precisely the ones to foster such atmospheres. I suspect that sub-cultural monocultures (cliques) are much easier to form than very self-aware groups. Also, technical issues are easier to talk about and settle arguments around. Social issues are difficult because they deal with so many things on the boundaries of our conscious awareness.

EDIT: In fairness, it seems likely that some of the steps she took to try and fit in may have contributed to her alienation. I think I understand this firsthand.

Isn't this applicable to all sorts of group pathologies, not just ones that touch on race?

But on the other hand, going around to all the minorities and asking them if they feel like I treat them fairly seems (a) supremely uncomfortable on a personal level, (b) more divisive and patronizing than anything else I'm likely to do, and (c) like a chore I really shouldn't be entirely responsible for dealing with just to avoid being labelled an oppressor.

Why does it have to be particularly about race/ethnicity and directed towards minorities? The goal of artistic collaboration in groups is to get to a point there there isn't any "thing you can't say." The sort of "chore" you're talking about is an exercise that can be used to gain awareness of anything that's supposed to be hard to talk about.

Also, if there's a workplace where people feel comfortable talking about anything that comes up except when it has to do with race, this strikes me as a symptom. And frankly speaking, I think this includes most workplaces out there. (So no wonder people take homogeneity as the easy way out!)

I've been giving it some thought about why, at least personally, I like to connect with my team, play games together, send jokes, look at new tech toys. I realized that, for myself at least, my work group is my only social circle and I have no other personal bonds or social groups.

I've only been in one group like that. All of my other more diverse groups, all of which I've loved, I have enjoyed a great work relationship, but nothing in common other than the work. The more diverse a group, the more the focus is on just work, no water cooler talk, no goofing off.

If I was faced with a work group I have nothing in common with, the work would be my focus, and I would itch the social scratch outside of work, without my co-workers. Changing yourself to fit into a group is something I figured people just grew out of after leaving high school.

The asshole, I agree with you, but that was just the one. The rest of the story I felt was her own projection, in a microcosm we've all dealt with that in the past. As others have said, an HR department is there to diffuse a situation for the company, not help you. She wanted to please everyone else, I've known plenty of people like that, I'm sure everyone has, they do everything they can, and still feel guilty about it.

Being passed up for a promotion is more likely about scratching the back of someone they know than trying to slight her. I know others who have experienced similar things, because the bosses wanted kickbacks from friends of the contractors, or could get a $1000 referral fee. The reasons people are jerks can also be not because of you, your race, your gender, but because they are acting selfishly. I've personally experienced similar situations being passed up and I imagine it was because they knew the people at the company they contracted in. The in house developers yell "we can do it!" but the money changing hands is too good to pass up.

By the time she mentions NY or the Bay Area she doesn't have a sense of self at all, only the mask. No one else seems to be the oppressor, if I was the odd white male out in a team of a different race and gender I wouldn't try to wear their suits, it wouldn't work in the same way I've seen people try to fit into groups that they just weren't them, but they were discovering who they were.

There is a lot of hardship, depression, self deprecation, and terrible treatment she endured. I'm glad she shared her story, there are other who feel the same about who they are, not just because of race or gender. I'm glad she is taking action in defining who she is as a person, and how she wants to influence people who meet her.

However saying the industry needs to change isn't accurate, it is akin to asking for cliques to not exist, for like minded people to not congregate. She changed herself to fit in, she is now defining who she is, the solution is not to ask others to change to make everyone feel included and accepted. She felt changed, so now she wants to change the industry, which includes the rest of the non-asshole workers.

I've been in very diverse groups, very homogeneous groups, I spent a year in a group as the only male. The real trick is to do as she is doing now, focus on making a you that you like, then cultivate that pride and energy, until being yourself isn't work, but just like putting on shoes.

I would ask for cliques to be self aware of the cognitive distortions group affiliation instincts produce. This could only enhance the problem solving ability of the group as a whole. I would suggest that like minded people congregate, but do so with an awareness of how group psychology operates.

Actually, it's not just industry that needs to change, but humanity as a whole. We can't keep going around unaware of group psychology and the emotional and irrational distortions it produces. We might as well start with industry, particularly the startups. It's exactly this sort of self-awareness that they're supposed to be good at.

I ask because I've never heard of "self-awareness" associated with startups before and in my personal experience the vast majority of startups and startup people are incredibly un-self-aware.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html