In the software field, we pride ourselves on fairness, openness, and the fact that our workplaces

are largely meritocracies. And compared to other environments, I would say this is certainly true.

It's one of the reasons I love being a developer. And yet, if we look at programming jobs in Silicon

Valley, you'll see that over 85% of them are filled by men, which means that less than 15%

are filled by women. If we look at it from a race perspective,

it's even more bleak. Among the major tech companies like Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn,

you'll see that over 90% of the employees are either white or Asian. Black and Hispanics

combined make up less than 4% of the total employees, and it's probably an even smaller

percent among developers within those companies. Given that they represent 20% of the total employees, and it's probably an even smaller percent among developers

within those companies. Given that they represent 28% of the U.S. population, this means that there

are seven times fewer black and Hispanic developers than there should be. Folks, this is wrong.

We should all be doing what we can to help improve this balance, as it's not just the right

thing to do, but we individually and as an industry will be better for it.

This week, you'll meet Kate Hiddleston, who gave an excellent talk at PyCon 2015 entitled

How Our Engineering Environments Are Killing Diversity and How We Can Fix It.

What's great about this is that it comes with ideas for improving

things. I think you'll enjoy this conversation. I know that I did. This is Talk Python to me.

Episode 55 recorded April 20th, 2016. I'm a developer in many senses of the word because I make these applications, but I also use these verbs to make this music.

I constructed line by line, just like when I'm coding another software design.

In both cases, it's about design patterns.

Anyone can get the job done.

It's the execution that matters.

...