> It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.

I would like to see this kind of thing treated, socially and legally, as equivalent to saying "This tech organization has a lot of Jews... can we do something about that?" (Indeed, many of the exact same people who are classified as white men who are disproportionately present in tech organizations by DEI advocates are also Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews, and the DEI advocates are treating their white male identity rather than their Jewish identity as politically salient). If some organization refuses to refrain from treating the disproportionate presence of white men in some organization - or the assumed disproportionate presence of white men - as a problem, I think it's reasonable for the US federal government to refuse to give them grant money.

You must understand the difference between those two statements, I refuse to believe that you do not, so this response is more aimed toward people that might not realize what you’re doing here. There is a vast difference between “all” and “a lot of”.

To solve the “all” problem, none of those people need to be removed from the organization. It merely states that diversity is good. To solve the “a lot of” problem necessitates getting rid of those members.

This is fundamentally why one is discriminatory and the other is not.

Yes, once we end up in a situation where majority of companies are run by Jews and alternatives are worse, it's harder to function in the society as not a Jew, we're facing decades long discrimination in different aspects of life, and individual action in response to incidents of discrimination is not enough... then I sure hope dei will concentrate on societal change to help non-Jews.

In the meantime, let's keep to real examples.

Ironically, the Gaza situation isn't helping your analogy here.

Would everyone agree with that definition, though? It seems like discussions around DEI tend to go in circles, because proponents see bad implementations as not really DEI, and opponents see good implementations as not really DEI either.

I recently read in the local news that some city department, in order to comply with anti-DEI stuff, was changing its name to remove the word 'diversity'... and nothing else. DEI has no legal definition. It feels like the new "woke", where the actual meaning is irrelevant, and its only real purpose is tribalistic social signalling.

By accepting the grant they are giving themselves a legal responsibility to “not do DEI” where the government arbitrarily decides what DEI is. Even something like employing a trans software engineer or talking about the impact Python is having in POC communities could be considered reason to go after PSF legally or rescind the grant. It’s just not worth the risk for the reward.

That’s really the problem: the grant comes with vague terms covering the entire organization, which could be arbitrarily redefined at any time in the future. It’s like signing a contract to deliver a product without any clauses protecting you if the client keeps changing their mind.

Naming things is hard. Yet we deal with lots of other vague concepts without losing our minds. There are some extreme voices, but somehow I've never heard anyone actually digging deeper into the issues to describe dei as just tribalistic signalling. When you strip out everything else, maybe that's a sign you lost all nuance?

In development we'd just accept it as normal to say "Putting each literal value in its own module is not a reasonable application of modular design." without claiming that the name "modular design" is now misunderstood and irrelevant.

> the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys"

Are the common, strange brainwashing courses in the room right now?

This is obviously a bad faith take - trying to prevent anyone from even saying, let alone promoting, diversity because sometimes people discriminate (which is already illegal) is absurd even without acknowledging that discrimination happens already. This argument looks a LOT like "keep discriminating against people that aren't like me".

Constructive criticism for good faith people out there reading this who are concerned about "DEI" causing discrimination -- acknowledge all discrimination is bad and take a real stab at working on it as a whole. If your only "attempt" to prevent discrimination is speaking up against people trying to include more diverse sets of people in programming communities then you're doing it wrong (and showing your ass).

> Are the common, strange brainwashing courses in the room right now?

No they were at my employer. Usually titled "learn your privilege" and other such things.