> But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline.
Only if you believe in diversity for diversity's sake, and it's important to realize that not everyone does. Personally I'm much more concerned about equal opportunity for underrepresented groups than what my coworkers actually look like.
If you really, really care about diversity it's very easy to be involved. I can guarantee you there's a program to teach computer skills to young students (often those who are economically disadvantaged) in your city.
I'm involved in one and I can guarantee you that it's about 1000 times easier to blog about the issue than teach programming principles to kids.
My average student is a 14-year-old black female who wants to learn web dev. It should go without saying, I've not seen even a hint of ability difference based on gender or race. We cover JS as well as HTML/CSS -- this is not a design class, but a real development class where kids are writing native markup and code.
The program is free and held at the public library. All students are there because they want to learn. I thought some might come due to parental pressure, but I haven't seen that.
Only if you believe in diversity for diversity's sake, and it's important to realize that not everyone does. Personally I'm much more concerned about equal opportunity for underrepresented groups than what my coworkers actually look like.
If you really, really care about diversity it's very easy to be involved. I can guarantee you there's a program to teach computer skills to young students (often those who are economically disadvantaged) in your city.