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Because that is what Corporate actually cares about. Or at least race & gender. Probably age to a lesser degree. The "gender" part has been emphasized recently via the "pronoun problem", but both race & gender have entered into the general world out in so many flavors. Call it "affirmative action". Call it "inclusive". Call it whatever you want.

My personal take on all of this: Programming (and nearly all the SE network of Q&A, but especially the programming and other technical sites) should be a race, age & gender-agnostic field. For better or worse, that is not always the case, but that should be the goal, not to make it "better" for a historically disaffected group but simply "great" for "everyone".

The question becomes whether to somehow proactively figure out how to "solve" that problem by asking who your users are (which appears to be the case with this survey) and somehow use that information to make the site better (if group 'a' seems happier than group 'b' then figure out how to make things better for 'b' - a noble goal if you can actually do anything about it) or to simply produce a product that has no inherent bias for/against any race, gender or age, where everyone is welcome and nobody cares if you are male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc.

SE historically has been a site where you could ask a programming question and (unless you wanted to let people know by way of your username or an actual photo in your profile) nobody would know or care whether you were male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc. Because C, PHP, Python, Java, etc. do not give different error messages for women and HTML/CSS produces different output in different browsers but not dependent on the age of the user.

Now if you're trying to sell a company to some big "words are all that matter, not deeds" corporation, then maybe this all matters. If you are trying to simply provide a place where people can ask technical questions and get answers, it doesn't matter AT ALL. Maybe a different system like Codidact will do a better job of that, focusing on the users and not on political correctness.

But I digress.

Because that is what Corporate actually cares about. Or at least race & gender. Probably age to a lesser degree. The "gender" part has been emphasized recently via the "pronoun problem", but both race & gender have entered into the general world out in so many flavors. Call it "affirmative action". Call it "inclusive". Call it whatever you want.

My personal take on all of this: Programming (and nearly all the SE network of Q&A, but especially the programming and other technical sites) should be a race, age & gender-agnostic field. For better or worse, that is not always the case, but that should be the goal, not to make it "better" for a historically disaffected group but simply "great" for "everyone".

The question becomes whether to somehow proactively figure out how to "solve" that problem by asking who your users are (which appears to be the case with this survey) and somehow use that information to make the site better (if group 'a' seems happier than group 'b' then figure out how to make things better for 'b' - a noble goal if you can actually do anything about it) or to simply produce a product that has no inherent bias for/against any race, gender or age, where everyone is welcome and nobody cares if you are male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc.

SE historically has been a site where you could ask a programming question and (unless you wanted to let people know by way of your username or an actual photo in your profile) nobody would know or care whether you were male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc. Because C, PHP, Python, Java, etc. do not give different error messages for women and HTML/CSS produces different output in different browsers but not dependent on the age of the user.

Now if you're trying to sell a company to some big "words are all that matter, not deeds" corporation, then maybe this all matters. If you are trying to simply provide a place where people can ask technical questions and get answers, it doesn't matter AT ALL. Maybe a different system like Codidact (I am one of many people involved in developing Codidact, and there are many other open source Q&A systems out there) will do a better job of that, focusing on the users and not on political correctness.

But I digress.

Because that is what Corporate actually cares about. Or at least race & gender. Probably age to a lesser degree. The "gender" part has been emphasized recently via the "pronoun problem", but both race & gender have entered into the general world out in so many flavors. Call it "affirmative action". Call it "inclusive". Call it whatever you want.

My personal take on all of this: Programming (and nearly all the SE network of Q&A, but especially the programming and other technical sites) should be a race, age & gender-agnostic field. For better or worse, that is not always the case, but that should be the goal, not to make it "better" for a historically disaffected group but simply "great" for "everyone".

The question becomes whether to somehow proactively figure out how to "solve" that problem by asking who your users are (which appears to be the case with this survey) and somehow use that information to make the site better (if group 'a' seems happier than group 'b' then figure out how to make things better for 'b' - a noble goal if you can actually do anything about it) or to simply produce a product that has no inherent bias for/against any race, gender or age, where everyone is welcome and nobody cares if you are male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc. And actually, IMHO, SE historically has been a site where you could ask a programming question and (unless you wanted to let people know by way of your username or an actual photo in your profile) nobody would know or care whether you were male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc. Because C, PHP, Python, Java, etc. do not give different error messages for women and HTML/CSS produces different output in different browsers but not dependent on the age of the user. Etc.

Now if you're trying to sell a company to some big "words are all that matter, not deeds" corporation, then maybe this all matters. If you are trying to simply provide a place where people can ask technical questions and get answers, it doesn't matter AT ALL. Maybe a different system like Codidact will do a better job of that, focusing on the users and not on political correctness.

But I digress.

Because that is what Corporate actually cares about. Or at least race & gender. Probably age to a lesser degree. The "gender" part has been emphasized recently via the "pronoun problem", but both race & gender have entered into the general world out in so many flavors. Call it "affirmative action". Call it "inclusive". Call it whatever you want.

My personal take on all of this: Programming (and nearly all the SE network of Q&A, but especially the programming and other technical sites) should be a race, age & gender-agnostic field. For better or worse, that is not always the case, but that should be the goal, not to make it "better" for a historically disaffected group but simply "great" for "everyone".

The question becomes whether to somehow proactively figure out how to "solve" that problem by asking who your users are (which appears to be the case with this survey) and somehow use that information to make the site better (if group 'a' seems happier than group 'b' then figure out how to make things better for 'b' - a noble goal if you can actually do anything about it) or to simply produce a product that has no inherent bias for/against any race, gender or age, where everyone is welcome and nobody cares if you are male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc. 

SE historically has been a site where you could ask a programming question and (unless you wanted to let people know by way of your username or an actual photo in your profile) nobody would know or care whether you were male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc. Because C, PHP, Python, Java, etc. do not give different error messages for women and HTML/CSS produces different output in different browsers but not dependent on the age of the user.

Now if you're trying to sell a company to some big "words are all that matter, not deeds" corporation, then maybe this all matters. If you are trying to simply provide a place where people can ask technical questions and get answers, it doesn't matter AT ALL. Maybe a different system like Codidact will do a better job of that, focusing on the users and not on political correctness.

But I digress.

Because that is what Corporate actually cares about. Or at least race & gender. Probably age to a lesser degree. The "gender" part has been emphasized recently via the "pronoun problem", but both race & gender have entered into the general world out in so many flavors. Call it "affirmative action". Call it "inclusive". Call it whatever you want.

My personal take on all of this: Programming (and nearly all the SE network of Q&A, but especially the programming and other technical sites) should be a race, age & gender-agnostic field. For better or worse, that is not always the case, but that should be the goal, not to make it "better" for a historically disaffected group but simply "great" for "everyone".

The question becomes whether to somehow proactively figure out how to "solve" that problem by asking who your users are (which appears to be the case with this survey) and somehow use that information to make the site better (if group 'a' seems happier than group 'b' then figure out how to make things better for 'b' - a noble goal if you can actually do anything about it) or or to simply produce a product that has no inherent bias for/against any race, gender or age, where everyone is welcome and nobody cares if you are male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc. And actually, IMHO, SE historically has been a site where you could ask a programming question and (unless you wanted to let people know by way of your username or an actual photo in your profile) nobody would know or care whether you were male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc. Because C, PHP, Python, Java, etc. do not give different error messages for women and HTML/CSS produces different output in different browsers but not dependent on the age of the user. Etc.

Now if you're trying to sell a company to some big "words are all that matter, not deeds" corporation, then maybe this all matters. If you are trying to simply provide a place where people can ask technical questions and get answers, it doesn't matter AT ALL. Maybe a different system like Codidact will do a better job of that, focusing on the users and not on political correctness.

But I digress.

Because that is what Corporate actually cares about. Or at least race & gender. Probably age to a lesser degree. The "gender" part has been emphasized recently via the "pronoun problem", but both race & gender have entered into the general world out in so many flavors. Call it "affirmative action". Call it "inclusive". Call it whatever you want.

My personal take on all of this: Programming (and nearly all the SE network of Q&A, but especially the programming and other technical sites) should be a race, age & gender-agnostic field. For better or worse, that is not always the case, but that should be the goal, not to make it "better" for a historically disaffected group but simply "great" for "everyone".

The question becomes whether to somehow proactively figure out how to "solve" that problem by asking who your users are (which appears to be the case with this survey) and somehow use that information to make the site better (if group 'a' seems happier than group 'b' then figure out how to make things better for 'b' - a noble goal if you can actually do anything about it) or to simply produce a product that has no inherent bias for/against any race, gender or age, where everyone is welcome and nobody cares if you are male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc. And actually, IMHO, SE historically has been a site where you could ask a programming question and (unless you wanted to let people know by way of your username or an actual photo in your profile) nobody would know or care whether you were male, female, non-binary, young, old, white, black, etc. Because C, PHP, Python, Java, etc. do not give different error messages for women and HTML/CSS produces different output in different browsers but not dependent on the age of the user. Etc.

Now if you're trying to sell a company to some big "words are all that matter, not deeds" corporation, then maybe this all matters. If you are trying to simply provide a place where people can ask technical questions and get answers, it doesn't matter AT ALL. Maybe a different system like Codidact will do a better job of that, focusing on the users and not on political correctness.

But I digress.