[clug] Open Source Software's Dirty Little Secret

[Sam Couter]

Jacinta Richardson <jarich at perltraining.com.au> wrote:
> FOSS isn't business, but if increasing the diversity of senior roles can make a
> company run that much better, is it so far-fetched to believe that increasing
> the number of women in your project can make it both more productive and enjoyable?

I'll just pipe up here and say that unless there's more to those studies
that you haven't passed on, you're confusing correlation with causality.

It's very easy to hypothesise that the organisation which encourages
diversity is not more successful because of the diversity itself, but
because of the factors that lead to diversity. The hypothesis is that
diversity and success are both the effect, and that the cause is not
excluding good ideas, skills or people based on factors other than
merit. Which seems like pretty sound business sense to me.

Given that these are sociological studies, I don't think it's likely
that an experiment to test my hypothesis can be easily conducted, and
maybe it's not all that relevant a distinction anyway.

Now that I've said that, I'll go back in the corner. Interesting
discussion to read but I don't think I really have much value to add.
-- 
Sam Couter         |  mailto:sam at couter.id.au
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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