Key Points
I kind of would understand if they decided not to ask about people, but they still ask geography, age, developer type, years of coding, and a bunch of things about salary and education, says Sasha Luccioni, a member of the board of Women in Machine Learning, an organization lobbying to increase awareness of, and appreciation for, women in the tech sector..
The likelihood of at least one man appearing as an author of research on AI is twice as great as an AI publication having at least one woman.. We did not exclude demographic questions from this year's survey to skirt our responsibility there, says Joy Liuzzo, Stack Overflows vice president of marketing..
Liuzzo acknowledged there's a lot of work to be done to make the field of software development more diverse and inclusive, and Stack Overflow has a big role to play in that work..
We recognize there is much more to be done, and we are committed to doing the work to make change happen, she says.. However, thats small comfort to Kate Devlin, a reader in artificial intelligence and society at Kings College, London..
Whatever the reasons for removing key questions about whos using the platform, the survey resultsor lack of themhighlight a problem with Stack Overflows user demographics, and a broader issue across tech: Non-male participants are woefully underrepresented..
