diversity

What can we do to encourage more women to join the programming field?

I saw this question that got closed for being subjective and argumentative and this one on how to encourage someone in general. I felt like the first was a valid question, but perhaps the question was put forward in the wrong manner. The second doesn't seem to address this particular issue. As a father of a daughter with very good mat...

How important is diversity in a team of programmers?

Lots of companies have "diversity" as one of their goals. I.e. people from a wide variety of backgrounds. The idea being that different backgrounds will result in different ways of approaching problems and the result will be better solutions. How much is this true in practice? Do you find it is good to have teams consisting of people fr...