"Stack Overflow Isn't Very Welcoming" especially [...] marginalized groups?

Question

In today's blog post "Stack Overflow isn't very welcoming" Jay Hanlon writes:

Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.

I can perfectly understand why newer coders might feel this way, other sites probably have similar problems (e.g. Wikipedia "Please don't bite the newcomers").

What I'm curious about is why "women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups" also feel this way.

• Is there more data regarding this (in case someone from Stack Exchange Inc. reads this)?
• Since (in my opinion) few users use their actual name or picture in their profile, I would have assumed that active discrimination should be less of an issue here. If my assumption is correct, why do these groups still feel unwelcome?
• If it is not active discrimination, are there identifiable other reasons?

I do not want to kick off a gender or race discussion here, please keep this civil.

Answer 1

Preface: everything here is something that I have experienced, or seen others experience, in general both. In all cases, I've experienced/seen it both on SE and in general in life (SE is made up of real people after all).

I'd keep in mind that a lot of the folks you might like to hear from may not be comfortable posting here, because they're very likely to have their experiences questioned, and possibly worse. You may get a better sense of these things later, when SE shares additional data or notes from their conversations with folks.

One specific thing: even if somehow there's absolutely no bias, and all of the unwelcoming behavior is completely fair, that can easily affect some more than others. If someone has already faced more of an uphill battle against others' expectations through their education and career, as women and people of color (in particular in tech) often have, then the likelihood they're willing to put up with more of it for the sake of Q&A is reduced.

And of course, when you get beyond SO, the subject matter of the questions can bring out all kinds of ugly behavior. Some topics attract more hostility and judgment, and that hurts even if it's eventually flagged and deleted.

This question actually provides a couple great examples of this:

• Just because you're asking about this topic, you have to worry about debates devolving into incivility, and you were aware enough to put a footnote in your question.

• You asked why members of marginalized groups feel this way, and you've gotten answers from people who aren't in those groups explaining how they don't see any problems. This isn't surprising to me at this point, but it's still disappointing, and certainly doesn't make me feel welcome.

Finally, I'd like to address this:

Since (in my opinion) few users use their actual name or picture in their profile, I would have assumed that active discrimination should be less of an issue here. If my assumption is correct, why do these groups still feel unwelcome?

I generally agree with the first part: users often do not provide the opportunity for others to actively discriminate based on gender or race. However, this doesn't mean things are fair. If for example men are more likely to feel comfortable using an obviously male name, perhaps even their real name or part of it (which I've seen plenty of), while women are more likely to use a nongendered pseudonym, that's already a sign that those women feel less welcome.

Also, think about the experience of a person using the site with a nongendered name. Everyone will likely assume they're male, and call them "he" in comments. To the users who are male that's no big deal, to the ones who aren't, maybe they don't care, but maybe it's one more little reminder that they're not what the site expects, that they're passing as someone they're not in order to smooth things out.

Answer 2

I'd like to take the opportunity to hopefully shed a little light on what the blog post is referencing by bringing up a couple meta posts from some of SO's sister sites and bring forward some voices detailing the issues described:

• From Interpersonal Skills: Apologies and parting notes

  I've given this a lot of thought over the last month or so. Initially this was going to be a heated rant about how awful the minority experience on Interpersonal Skills is, and how that's the reason I'm leaving, but if I'm really honest with myself, there's a lot more to it than that.

  ...

  I guess the TL;DR is that Stack Exchange has a culture problem, the experience for minorities who dare to talk about the minority experience is often pretty terrible. I don't really know how to stop fighting when presented with those situations, so untill the situation improves, or I learn to better deal with it, I shouldn't be participating here.

This question is unique in that it's a particularly well written explanation on what the blog post was discussing, almost word-for-word, but there are a lot of other meta posts from SO's sister sites where it's posited that new users and users of different backgrounds are treated poorly:

• From Politics: Do we really want to tolerate personal attacks and antisemitism here?

  We have a user here who frequently engages in personal and antisemitic attacks against other users. They have very few answers or questions, their only purpose on this site seems to be to spread hate and to insult and troll people.

• From Workplace: Let's try to work with users before chasing them off

  Our new users are like interns or perhaps fresh grads. They have some basic skills and knowledge, but they're going to get it wrong sometimes. Quickly deleting their questions is like firing them. Requesting clarification, closing, editing, and allowing time to fix it is like your supervisor's corrective action.

• From Academia: Why are we challenging the premise rather than answering the question (question on potential sexist remarks)?

  I find the reaction to this question quite unreasonable. The responses were overwhelmingly negative and focused on trying to prove that OP is wrong in assessing whether a given situation was possibly sexist or not. The reaction was similar to what happened to an older, very similar question. That one was much better received, and the meta post about it also indicated questioning the premises in the question was not the right way to go.

• From SciFi: Why did our primary chatroom get nuked?

  There are a few areas where you should generally anticipate problems however. For instance, if you're bringing up a topic that large groups of people have physically marched to protest in real life, then you should not expect a calm conversation from random folks on the 'Net.

• From Skeptics: https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3843/non-notable-claims-made-only-on-hate-and-or-conspiracy-sites-should-be-deleted

  The question Did Benjamin Netanyahu say this about Christian Zionists? cites as the sources of the claim sites/blogs which are straight up from the darkest corners of the web. All those sites are antisemitic, they have claims that Jews rule the world, that Barack Obama is a communist coming to take the money and civil liberties of the American people. One of the sites even has a screen grab of Netanyahu "shape shifting" which means that they think he's a lizard person. One of the sources is a Facebook post, the comments to which are a strange religious argument between two people and the rest are "proofs" that Jews control the economy. And the profile that posted the FB post is just... wow... Zukerberg is a secret grandson of Rothschild, and uses FB to control something, and Jews faked the Holocaust to take control of the media.

  ...

  We shouldn't allow the site to become just a dumping ground for racist and bigoted ideas.

I grabbed a few questions from sites I frequent that I had off the top of my head, but you can go to pretty much any semi-popular exchange site's meta, sort by votes, and find some kind of allusion to this issue on the top page. Rest assured, whether there is a problem worth fixing is a different question entirely, but there is a good pool of individual cases where Stack Exchange has led minority users and new users to feel that they've been poorly treated, or lead to situations where a reasonable person would feel that a minority/new user would have been poorly treated had the situation persisted.

Answer 3

So... Hi.

I'm not sure if I count as a person of colour (as you Americans would say it) or a BME (as I suppose the Brits do?). These are labels that aren't actually universal. I'll probably go with "minority" and well, general experiences.

I'm not going to talk solutions - I'm not sure what I can do, but rather share my own experiences.

I'm one of the folks who have used the network as a whole and it's a place that has a good deal of my spare time and emotional energy. I'm ethnic Indian, Singaporean (and not many of us here!) and male - so I hope as a minority (in my country), a minority in terms of the overall user base and well, ok, I cannot help my gender, but 2 of that list isn't bad. So I'm a very small representation of the folks we're talking about in terms of inclusiveness.

I joined Super User at a pretty dark point of my life - and it helped me find the very confidence that people seem to claim Stack Overflow causes them to lose. I did spend a little while, as I do with any community I engage in, to try to get to learn the way we do things. This is probably a pain point for many.

It's worth remembering that ideally Stack Exchange is a meritocracy - and the changes we need is how we act outside the core of our site. We need to be more mindful of how we interact with anyone on a platform designed to minimise social interaction.

It's really easy to feel guilt over the "other", that women, or minorities or something. Some folks are really vocal about it, but the key's really trying to find that balance that gets new users the help they need, while keeping more established users engaged and happy.

As a moderator, and part of the community that's sprung up around Super User - I'm often telling folks to see what we can do to make our site a better place. And well, sometimes it feels like the rest of us are an afterthought. Many of the other sites do feel very diverse, in terms of, well all these things.

And sometimes people are... not as nice as I would hope. This is not acceptable - and I don't care to who it is. We try to deal with it but we need to know when and how.

I feel in no way excluded by my community, and many others I've engaged in. Others may feel differently but we really do need people to talk to us, rather than stay completely on the sidelines and try to talk to us from way over there if we are to change anything.

And that's what it's really about. If anyone walks in and actually makes an attempt and leaves thinking "what a terrible place", we've failed.

But here's the thing. If someone's going to tell us they have issues due to their gender, or their ethnicity, and say "your site is terrible" - we need to know where to start. Show us you get how things work a little. Show us what's broken. We'll take a look and try our best to fix it.

Considering how most sites run - we're surprisingly independent most of the time. Any change in how we behave's not going to be at a corporate level. I mean, let's consider what's changed since the summer of love. There are still many of the same notes we heard years ago. More or less, blog posts on the topic feel a bit like fluff.

It's tempting to go, "someone has failed" and assign blame and say oh "we need to be more inclusive". In a practical sense - most Stack Exchange communities run themselves, and we rely on our lovely Community Managers only when there's stuff that's outside our optics.

At the end of the day, to me the end goal is to be excellent to each other, regardless of country, gender, race, or as the old joke goes, species. It's worth keeping that in mind.

Answer 4

I was very confused at first as to why the blog post decided to bring gender and race into this. After all, so many people here have generic profile pictures and nondescript names—it's impossible to guess at a glance what demographics they fall into. And, unlike some other sites, race and gender are irrelevant for nearly all topics, so it's pretty rare to see it come up in the first place.

However, I finally found the one answer that makes sense: statistics.

Stack Overflow has some idea of what the demographics are (on Stack Overflow) for one reason: the yearly Developer Survey. For example, the 2018 one found that 92.9% of survey respondents were male, 6.9% were female, and 0.9% were "non-binary, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming".

While the proportion of women to men varies from country to country, a quick search shows that the United States is generally considered lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to women in tech. But even in the US women earn 18% of the Computer Science degrees and 26% of computing jobs, so I think I can see why the stats from the Developer Survey are a little low when it comes to women.

I suspect that this same pattern will show up in other demographics, if you look at the numbers.

The why of this is a lot harder to answer. From what I've read from other people (and also some of what I've experienced myself, as a woman), Stack Overflow doesn't seem to have too much of a problem with sexist or racist comments. It's something else, and I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that:

While some research has found that impostorism is higher among women than men (Clance and Imes 1978; McGregor et al. 2008), other studies have failed to produce gender differences (Cokley et al. 2013; Cowman and Ferrari 2002). However, there is some evidence that higher levels of impostor feelings are associated with GPA for women but not men (King and Cooley 1995). We speculate that given differences in gender socialization, men may be less impacted by impostorism than women. When research has found differences, it usually indicates women being more susceptible to impostorism.
_{The Roles of Gender Stigma Consciousness, Impostor Phenomenon and Academic Self-Concept in the Academic Outcomes of Women and Men}

I think the connection that that the blog post wants us to make is that hostile or condescending comments, even when they contain otherwise factual information, can make people feel like they don't belong (and if you're already having those feelings, it hits you harder).

---

Lastly, I feel the need to quote Cosmo:

And if [programming] doesn't sound like women's work—well, it just is.

---

_{Note: parts of this answer were blatantly plagiarized from my other answer here.}

Answer 5

What I'm curious about is why "women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups" also feel this way.

One thing that I think the blog post kinda dropped the ball on was being a little more direct about Stack Exchange being more than Stack Overflow, or even more than just the technical sites.

If your only experience on the network is on the technical sites, it's almost understandable that you don't see the problems described in the blog post. I say "almost understandable" because, I seem to remember more than a few discussions about gender inclusion on Stack Overflow's meta.

I'd like to invite those that haven't visited the network's more subjective sites to do so. Where issues of racism, sexism, LGBT+ issues, xenophobia, and etc may be on-topic, things have certainly crossed the line from the implicit bias mentioned in the blog post to some pretty shocking explicit bias.

From my own personal experiences on the network, I can understand why so many people are hesitant to accept that there's a problem. I started out on Stack Overflow and found it to be leaps and bounds better than most online communities. I even felt a little insulted when users claimed that SO had a gender discrimination problem, because I hadn't seen that happen on Stack Overflow.

But then I branched out onto other network sites, more subjective network sites, like The Workplace, Worldbuilding, and eventually becoming the top scoring user on Interpersonal Skills... It was really hard not to see it.

While on Interpersonal Skills, I created the lgbt+ tag because it looked as though we had a subset of questions related to the LGBT+ experience. At first I thought this could serve as a great resource for members of a community that is very near and dear to my heart, (I am a cis pansexual man who is happily married to a pansexual trans/gender-fluid person.)

I really honestly believed that the Stack Exchange model would work for LGBT+ related interpersonal skills questions. I really honestly believed in the Stack Exchange model. Full stop.

What I was shocked to see was the often nasty responses that many of these questions received. Worse than that, I was shocked to see that many of the users who were posting these awful responses weren't new users. Most were coming to IPS with the association bonus, some of them were even moderate to high rep users on other sites, certainly not users who didn't know how the Stack Exchange model was supposed to work.

Granted, the majority of the IPS community was trying their best to flag these awful comments and answers, most of the worst posts and comments would eventually be deleted.

At this point you may be asking:

So... What's the problem? The crap was deleted, that's how the system is supposed to work!

The problem is that the crap shouldn't be posted to begin with. And... Well... New crap gets posted under nearly every question using the tag, more often than not, by somewhat established users who should know better.

Beyond that, the very worst cases seem to happen when a question hits the Hot Network Questions list. The IPS community seems to be able to keep things on track pretty well, for the most part, but when things hit the HNQ things tend to get really awful really quickly.

Some of it is implicit bias, users who seem well meaning, yet behave in somewhat tone deaf ways. On the other hand... I've witnessed and been targeted by some really ugly explicit stuff as well.

As a network, and as a community, I would like to think that we can do better. The first step is being willing to acknowledge that we're not as great as we would like to think we are. There are some very real problems, and if we can't even agree on that, we're unlikely to solve them.

Answer 6

I can't personally think of reasons why 'people of color' (I hate that phrase btw, if it's supposed to imply that a white person is somehow a special 'neutral' or 'non' colour) would feel marginalised, and I'm not personally sure what other marginalized groups are being referred to.

However I'm pretty confident in saying that in most of the cultures I've known, women tend to value a bit of positive friendliness in interaction much more than it's valued here on SE. There's a culture in tech where it's the norm to be neutral, and OK to be negative. That will exclude.

Felienne in her NDC London talk (from about 11:00, or from 12:30 if you have less time) talks about how this culture is accepted in the tech community, but not so much in others.

It's not specific to the tech community - it's a macho thing that's common to all sorts of male-dominated communities... and there's the exclusion of women, right there.

---

EDIT - here's a random quote from one of my friends in tech who is both female, and a mixture of quite a few ethnic minorities:

Stackoverflow - lol. I don't care about that sort of thing. I don't think it is racist or sexist, I just think they are greedy for those gold and silver medals (or badges?) and are hostile like vultures.......

Just one data point - make of what it you will!

Answer 7

Since (in my opinion) few users use their actual name or picture in their profile, I would have assumed that active discrimination should be less of an issue here. If my assumption is correct, why do these groups still feel unwelcome?

If it is not active discrimination, are there identifiable other reasons?

Yes, a lot of users do use their actual name, whether it's the first name or a part of their own name, or their own profile picture. Though a large amount of users still use usernames. Whether a username is used or not, it may, or may not lead to more discrimination.

Though, to be honest, I don't think gender and ethnicity drives much action here on Stack Overflow. That'S (O|E) can be considered hostile to newcomers, that honestly wouldn't surprise me. There are a lot of people who post without reading the FAQ's the tour, etc., and misunderstand how the site works. I.e. posting comments as answers is something that, on Stack Overflow, happens possibly hundreds of times per day, and most of these posts (saying posts because they're posted as answers, while they're comments, or votes depending on the type) get downvoted. Duplicates get downvoted, (on Stack Overflow) tool requests get downvoted, TB questions get downvoted, etc.

Though I honestly don't think this is a group-related problem; this is a lack of user education. Most new users don't know what they can and can't post on Stack Overflow. Though the topic of user education and that is a separate topic for another time.

Anyways, as far as I can see, the Stack Exchange network moderates by content. There are, as with everywhere else, exceptions, but that's my general opinion of it. From what I've seen in general related to reviews and downvotes, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. doesn't matter¹.

Though, it's worth mentioning the blog post:

Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.

As I already mentioned, new coders doesn't surprise me. As for women, people of color, and other marginalized groups, is there really any data to back that up? I've never experienced any of it (I might of course have been "lucky" or whatever it's appropriate to call it), but in the end it boils down to the quality of the post, not the poster. And I'm not saying "discrimination never happens on the basis of the poster being in a marginalized group", but downvotes are rarely cast because of the poster being who they are. In my opinion, the hostility some people experience isn't because they're a part of a marginalized group, but more because of post quality. A good post gets upvotes and generally positive responses, independently of who posted it.

Racism and sexism is, in my opinion, not a big problem. I'm not saying it never happens, but it's far from common that a post gets downvoted because the OP is, e.g. a woman. In my opinion, it looks like a majority of new users in the Stack Exchange network think downvotes are personal (that downvotes symbolize "you're wrong", "you suck", etc.). See this related MSO discussion. The problem also created a feature request for hiding scores under 0 for low-rep users.

TL;DR For most users, with extremely few exceptions it's the content of the post that gets judged, not the OP's gender, ethnicity, religion etc.

---

Although I do agree Stack Overflow (and the rest of the Stack Exchange network) has some problems with the handling of new users, these problems are usually caused by the post. If the OP posts a low-quality post regardless of rep, how the community responds is usually the same (downvotes, closevotes or delete votes (depending on which applies), and few comments).

There are cases where there are people who actually try helping the poster improve their post (where such applies; there isn't as much to fix on clear duplicates, but if there's missing code there's a possibility that other people try helping OP creating a good post. And the reason I again mention post quality is because I believe this is where Stack Overflow could improve. If new users are "trained" better, they might learn how to post better. Better post quality would mean fewer downvotes, getting upvotes, and the OP not feeling as "badly received".

On a related note, there was a recent comment on a downvoted and now closed answer where OP thought their profile picture was the reason for the downvotes. Again using the marginalized group card. The post should be closed (No MCVE, not here to discuss that though) but the original poster took the downvotes and closing personally and thought it was on the grounds of their gender. Or at least they tried saying the person in their profile picture wasn't them.

So yes, there are people who feel their post gets judged on the grounds of them being the poster, but (in my opinion), the poster isn't actually what gets judged about a post.

As for hate in general, there are of course actual hate posts (and hate messages in chat), but these generally get deleted. They exist, but there aren't a lot of them (all though there are exception on sites that are directly targeted by hate posts. For an instance Hinduism.SE is currently seeing a heavy wave of R/A posts from the same poster).

---

^{1: With the exception of hate posts targeted at specific groups. These are, however, removed, and their existence is an exception to the network in general.}

Answer 8

My personal opinion is that this blog post simply boils down to a fine example of virtue signalling. It was a painful wall of text to read. I'll try to be brief in my explanation as to why I feel this way.

Full disclosure if you can't tell by my pic: I am a white male, but I am also cishet. I got super privilege, but it doesn't stop me from getting my fair share of snarky comments on all sites in the SE network. I've actually once considered proposing a feature to allow blocking users after this one guy with 8k+ rep would make a constant effort of leaving jerky comments on my questions. Another guy with an astounding level of rep (he's now at 38k and an ADMIN) actually once told me he was going to come and slap me. I reported it only to later see him chuckling in the same comments about how he got reported, yet the original comment still remained. Both the original and his reaction comment garnered a good number of community upvotes as well. This tells us a few things:

1. There is collusion between the site staff and certain high-ranking users
2. that being being cishet white male doesn't shield me from abuse
3. there is mob mentality where users rally around harrassers which further encourages them

Why do I bring this up? Yes, there are a lot of bigoted folks, but there are a lot more people who just want to be d*cks (that's not ducks, either). SE is no exception. The message in the blog in question could have easily been conveyed without including women and POC. SE could have just taken the egalitarian approach and instituted general guidelines regarding being mean-spirited, but they wouldn't be able to signal their virtue hard enough with just that alone. Now they've stuck yet another divisive wedge in the SE community that's just going introduce polarity rather than solving a problem that most likely isn't even as severe as they're claiming.

As for the point you made in your OP, you're mostly correct. Unless you use your face in your profile pic like mine or your name is BlackProgrammerGuy or UterusHaver2096, there's not really any way to determine someone's ethnicity or sex. Now you can obviously use their grammar and sentence structure as a general clue as to their ethnicity, but I am on the side of, "You need to be reasonably fluent in the language you're speaking in order to convey your message". I would never be an outright total turd to someone with bad English, but I will at least call it out with something like, "I can't understand your question enough to provide an answer".

Anyway, I wish SE would stop utilizing their network as a platform to execute their political activism. I wish it could just be a Q&A site and nothing more.

Answer 9

I have no reason to support nor dispute the claim of unfriendliness toward women or “people of color” but all of the examples in the blog apply to newbies of any gender or race. Or to put it another way, I agree with all the complaints, but none of them indicate gender or race discrimination. Even the mention of “sweetie” without context could be interpreted many ways.

To put it another way, I've experienced unwarranted snarkiness on ___.SE but that does not mean SE is hostile to white males.

Answer 10

What I'm curious about is why "women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups" also feel this way.

Largely, I believe that the issue is that there are people who strongly believe that attempts to highlight, address, or redress any perceived imbalance is implicitly an attack on them.

This issue is much more visible on SE sites that aren't focused on technology, where it ranges from "practically invisible" to "a major issue that has caused major and repeated debate".

However, it can be seen here, in this thread, where multiple comments have been made about "social justice advocates", "politically correct" and "social justice warriors". Where comments like:

Didn't you get the memo? You're a white male, nobody cares about our feelings. Gratitude for contributing quality content? Nah, in this new world how people(and white males are of course not people) feel about things is much more important.

And

I don't like the "people of color" thing either. And I don't buy the "exclusion of women" thing. IMHO it's used an excuse for blatant patent discrimination against men. Can you imagine the furore that would ensure if some guy proposed men-only shortlists?

are not only made, but are well supported by the community.

Maybe there is discrimination against white males. But that's not what is causing friction here. The friction occurs because some people in majority groups feel that there's so much attention focused on minority groups that people in the majority groups get labeled negatively as a result.

Some of them get defensive. An even smaller portion get offensive, attacking what they perceive as society treating them unjustly.

As a result, frequently when someone brings up perceived bias against a minority group, someone who is not in that minority group tries to change the conversation. Sometimes the intent seems to be to change the conversation to become about site policy. Sometimes it is about making a valid frame challenge. But frequently it is about how the person bringing up the issue in the first place is wrong, even if it is an otherwise valid, on-topic question for the community it was raised in.

All it takes is acknowledging that the other groups may be being marginalized, and you get statements like:

What I do find more tantalising is instead of SO thanking us for our non-paid efforts and investment of time, it goes with the political correct flow of other projects of saying the feelings of a perceived 8% user base are more important than the 92% of the user base here.

It's an overt case of members of the majority feeling like even mentioning these issues somehow detracts from them, personally. Not only should the smaller group not be explicitly acknowledged, but the larger group deserves active praise for... well, presumably not behaving worse.

This leads to instant debate, and because these are controversial topics, moderators are hesitant to step in until the Be Nice policy is fairly clearly being violated.

In the meantime, comments that are blatantly disparaging of entire populations, such as

Or maybe, just maybe, women(generally speaking) just don't love programming enough to use their free time to participate in SO?

are made, and remain visible for hours or even days, attracting upvotes.

Regardless of whether you believe the groups mentioned in the blog post are truly marginalized, or even if you just dispute how marginalized they are, its very clear that a significant portion of our community does not welcome certain topics that are of particular relevance to members of these groups.

Answer 11

No, there's no evidence that they're made to feel this way.

First, there's a claim which is undoubtedly true:

Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.

There's no question people feel marginalized. This can be proven many ways, but as the blog post says:

Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.

But afterwards, an insidious word change comes in. Although the undeniable truth is that people feel marginalized, the author makes an unwarranted jump; one that is surprisingly subtle:

He assumes that since people feel marginalized, it's because they were made to feel marginalized.

He makes this logical leap, not in a user-critical paragraph, but in a sanctimonious psychoanalysis allegedly aimed at himself:

It was hard to accept some of the (valid) criticism, especially the idea that women and people of color felt particularly unwelcome. There’s a weird paradox with bias. Those of us who have privilege, but care deeply about reducing bias should be uniquely positioned to help, but we struggle the hardest to recognize that we are (unintentionally) biased ourselves.² As it happens, making people feel left out is a deep personal fear of mine.

Now, there is zero evidence that someone who feels marginalized was made to feel marginalized due to racism or sexism or ableism or any other exclusatory ism. It's quite possible the user felt excluded due to newbie status, dupe asking, or many downvotes due to low-quality questions. Or it's possible the user simply has a complex. To quote the article, maybe they have a 'deep-rooted kickball phobia' as well.

In fact the only available evidence points to Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow as being inclusive environments, one which is not racist by any means.

So I focused on what we were proud of: We are one of the only large sites where it’s practically impossible to find a single slur – our community takes them down in minutes. We don’t tolerate our female users being called “sweetie” or getting hit on.

I am not racist. I suspect the vast majority of the users on this site aren't racist. And I deeply resent being told that I am racist.

It's not that I feel resentful; It's that that blog post made me feel resentful.

Answer 12

What I do find more tantalising is instead of SO thanking us for our non-paid efforts and investment of time, it goes with the political correct flow of other projects of saying the feelings of a perceived 8% user base are more important than the 92% of the user base here.

In the two years I have been here, I have not seen much discrimination based on races, and none on sex at all, at least on technical forums...As others say, due to our anonymity in the Internet, how can SO make such affirmations about "discrimination".

There is indeed the so called discrimination of "bad English". However, as a native Latin guy and EFL speaker that often does hundreds of multiple edits to my posts to strive for a better English.... I think that I might more than qualified to wonder: why should I be obliged to entertain questions from countries where English is an official language, and people that just want a quick fix and do not want to invest time composing questions, or even often, just dump logs at us. However, I am far more lenient often when I see posts from countries where they struggle with English, especially when I see an effort was put in the question.

Nonetheless, at which point, what prevents people participating in forums of tongues where they are more proficient? If they are by choice in an English forum, where do we draw the line into trying to salvage a question or close it?

Why not opening more forums in their respective languages? For instance, we already have Spanish and Portuguese forums here. What would prevent opening forums in another languages? Case in point, we have an onslaught of bad quality and repetitive questions about Kali Linux. What would prevent anyone doing something positive and opening a forum in Hindi for Kali Linux, instead of always complaining questions about Kali Linux in bad English are not particularly welcomed?

Furthermore, what does it prevent anyone doing more work and investment, in a profile and also be a slight more high ranking user instead of using discardable users? We are all users of all walks of life, nationalities and different backgrounds - as anything in life, to achieve something you have to work for it.

What the SO blog post is forgetting is the thousand of man-work hours many of us have put here. We do indeed have many complaints about moderation here. Many of them are genuine. Many of them are also about people that feels entitled that we have to entertain them wether they are willing or not to put any effort in the question or answer, and wether they make an effort to write a coherent post, which do takes an investment of time and effort. Some people even are clearly abusive in demanding their God given right for an answer to non-paid people. I am not their paid serf.

All in all, I am writing this to remember we are here providing what has been a good service and reference for thousands of professionals for free.

Despite the though love from the users side too...I have posted here hundreds (or thousands?) of posts. I do not affirm I have been the more patient and correct person. However, if SO also wishes to embark in a politically correct crusade at the expense of people basically working for free here, and telling us a small percentage is more important than we are, and that we ought to entertain them for free... I will be (re)considering wether it is worth keeping contributing here.

Answer 13

I think the answer is in the question itself. To me it seems pretty simple:

Most people use a fake name and profile picture on this (or any other for that matter) forum. Thus, by definition this place (or any other anonymous forum) is gender-, race-, hairstyle-, eye-color- etc neutral.

Some people are more sensitive to harshness, some are less. This does not make someone who is harsh based on a wrongly formatted question any sort of an -ist (racist, chauvinist, name it). This only makes him harsh.

I agree that people should be as patient and kind as they can. I fully support that. But saying that anyone is any of the above mentioned -ists because he made a snarky comment to a person whose gender, race, eye-color etc he has absolutely no idea of, to be honest, seems rather ridiculous.

Answer 14

@apaul and @FélixGagnon-Grenier suggested that I put my comments above into an answer, so I am (even though I suspect it is asking for trouble). I'm going to edit a bit since I have paragraphing and more space here.

Thank you for pointing out the Wikipedia situation; I have been thinking for a few days that everyone has been acting like this is unique to SO/SE, but it is actually not. Of course, each platform has distinctive features (non profit versus for profit is a big one), but there is much to be learned from their experiences. That said, given that no one attacked white males, why do you think they feel so attacked and respond so defensively and loudly when the experiences and perceptions of other groups are discussed? This is an honest question, for example you are not asking for data about that group.

I want to give you another perspective to consider in terms of your three bullet points. In my observation, and it was more complex than this, there were two important things that led to the changes in treatment of LGBTQ people in the United States that are relevant to your post.

First, there really was a movement that encouraged people to reveal their sexual orientation. Things like "coming out day" but more important tens of thousands of family and friends interaction meant that lots of people knew people who were impacted by hate and discrimination. This made it public and personal so that even conservatives would say "my son", "my niece", "my neighbor."

So, the fact that you don't know genders actually may be contributing to the problem. Maybe if you realized that people you like were subject to some of these issues would mean you could ask them about it or make you more aware.

The second thing was that people talked about the ways in which having hide their identities impacted them in large and small ways. Not being able to put their partner's picture on the desk at work or bring a partner to a family or work event or not being able to visit a partner in the hospital or to plan a funeral. Many of us never had thought about these concrete issues and how they would wear away at people and when we did, we knew it had to change. This is one of the themes that President Obama mentioned in discussing his "evolution" on gay marriage. This is also one reason why "don't ask, don't tell," which sounds so neutral on the surface, was so demoralizing for so many LGBTQ military people in their daily lives.

When people on SO/SE say everyone should have a "neutral" identity that reflects a combination of idealism and naivete. When 90% of users are male (based on the data SO purchases) then neutral is going to be assumed to be male. And that has all kinds of implications of perceptions and experiences, such as when a new user comes to a site or when a female user wonders whether her experiences are related to gender. Or when a male user wonders whether his experiences are related to gender ... except probably it wouldn't occur to him to wonder about that except perhaps if these kinds of discussions come up. I don't see a lot of that but maybe those people are just not posting.

---

I'll add some extra links and observations here about data and that get at the complexity of this a bit more, but won't do a deep dive on the strengths/weaknesses of each citation. But I think if you read them there is a great deal worth thinking about. Also if you read the comments on the non-scholarly (i.e. popular) articles or Twitter threads discussing them they are telling. Finally, all three of these have downloadable data so that you can re-analyze and explore your own hypotheses.

Women in the 2016 Stack Overflow Survey

This is Julia Silge's dive into women's survey responses from 2016. It is important for a few reasons, one of which is that women in 2016 were under-represented in the survey even compared to their representation on SO itself. For this answer, though, the more important thing I believe is the places where there were large differences. First, the gender make up the different technologies (and therefore I assume people posting on different tags) is very different. I, overall, have had good experiences on SO, but I hang out on the R tag, and R is number 3 in female representation. My experience might be very different if I was mainly on the F# tag, I don't know. Similarly, the experiences of men in those tags might be different than other tags. What I do know is that there is not a single, uniform SO experience.

There is so much that is interesting in this data set.

Github Open Source Survey

This is a very interesting survey done on Github and involving a number of academic investigators. They have one of the best thought out sampling designs and do a good job explaining the limitations. Yes, it is focused on open source contributions, but I think there is a pretty clear analog to SE/SO, particularly the technical sites. What I find particularly interesting is that "negative interactions are infrequent but highly visible" because in this whole series of discussions about the blog post there is not enough attention being paid to this distinction. One bad meal, at one branch of a chain restaurant, if it goes viral can damage that restaurant for years.

Another interesting finding is that women express a preference for clearly documented policies, procedures, and guidelines. SO/SE has an abundance of these, and, although they can sometimes be hard to find or confusing, the desire to document these seems very positive.

Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men

This is the published, final revised version of a study for which an earlier version made a big splash and got some criticism and, as should happens, that criticism resulted in a better final paper. This study illustrates why it is that despite the toll that hiding your identity can take, women often assume male or gender neutral identities when attempting to make technical contributions. I recommend this article also because it has a good literature review and because they consider numerous alternative explanations and additional variables.

(Your post is not low quality, the following is more of a response to this whole blog-related discussion. I want to say that I find it disturbing that on M.SO/M.SE people keep asking "where's the data?" and no one is asking "What research have you done?" especially when some of those people are complaining bitterly about "low quality" and "no research" questions. It was not hard for me to find these sources of data I want to be clear that it is not our job to do your research. If there is something that you don't understand after doing the reading, that's a valid question. I feel people have been remarkably restrained about pointing this out, but that's also part of the issue.)

Answer 15

This might be irrelevant and "making it all about me" but:

I am (or was) an experienced coder and SO user

• My most recent 12 questions there (in the last year) have a median upscore vote of 0
• Unlike when SO started (my first 12 questions, in 2009, had a median score of 4)
• 8 of the most recent had only one answer -- although a useful answer, which I accepted, so no complaints, and thank you for the answers,

Even so I don't feel it's especially welcoming, "elitist" might be one of several fair descriptions.

When the OP wrote, "Too many ... especially", I guess that means:

• These people find it even more unwelcoming than most/regular users do

and/or:

• This is a key or target demographic for us ("SE inc."), because they're an under-served market and/or because it would be in the public good to serve the up-and-coming generations, the "newcomers"

Also (though I'm not a sociologist or educator), a very important reason is that "marginalised people" might internalise rejection -- e.g., on feeling rejected, they leave. On feeling unwelcome, why stay? Why even try? One of the consequences of (our) "privilege" might be "confidence", "self-confidence" -- I think I can probably ask a lucid question, and if you just dislike it perhaps that's no problem of mine, maybe someone else will answer, I am used to being able to exchange with peers.

So as well as their being less welcome (to whatever extent SE is elitist), perhaps any hostility has a disproportionate effect on people who are less secure, just starting out, need the help getting set up and settled in.

Answer 16

There is no evidence.

While there's no question certain people feel marginalized, there's no evidence of groups being marginalized. And there's certainly no evidence that people are being made to feel marginalized.

It's just a typical SJW-style witch hunt.

I'll basically copy and paste as an answer what I posted here as a question:

(All the following is a quote, italics are quotes from the original blog post.)

I have just read this blog post with much dismay -

Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.

If anybody here knows Vox Day's Rules for SJW's (and I imagine many do, as he is a popular, if controversial, scifi author), that blog post is a word-for-word article with his parody SJW article in his book.

First, a caveat: I'm all for being nice and respectful. Name-calling and such should never be allowed on our site. But this article goes far beyond requiring being nice: It makes nonsensical observations about motives which are unprovable.

For example:

Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.

Considering that the vast majority of users here are anonymous, how in the world would the author of the article know what color they are? Moreover how would the so-called elitists act racist to users they do not know the colors of? And although some users may be elitist, the vast majority of elitism on the sites stems from expertise - the main reason I turn to SE and not quora in the first place. I want experts, not random schmos, to answer my questions. I find that if you have expertise, you will not feel elitism.

They get downvoted, but don’t know why, or called lazy for not speaking English fluently.

I think I speak for most users here that if you don't know a passable English, then don't post. This is an English-language site.

It was hard to accept some of the (valid) criticism, especially the idea that women and people of color felt particularly unwelcome.

Why would they feel unwelcome? Can you please provide us examples - real concrete examples - when someone was made to feel unwelcome? (I do not want examples where someone felt unwelcome. I'm sure there's many. I WANT EXAMPLES WHERE THEY WERE MADE TO FEEL UNWELCOME!)

There’s a weird paradox with bias. Those of us who have privilege, but care deeply about reducing bias should be uniquely positioned to help, but we struggle the hardest to recognize that we are (unintentionally) biased ourselves.²

This is pure SJWness. Again, speak for yourself. I personally am not biased. I don't have a racist bone in my body. I also don't have privilege. But I don't like being told what negative traits I have by someone who has never met me.

Also, please provide concrete examples that we're unintentionally biased.

As it happens, making people feel left out is a deep personal fear of mine. (There is probably a seriously repressed playground kickball thing in my past somewhere.)

So, why take it out on us? Go to a therapist. My goal on this site is to fill it with quality, well written info. I want the people who only want to ask 'Who's Stronger, Dumbledore or Gandalf' not to feel welcome - unless, of course, there's a canon answer.

Ironically, that made it harder for me to accept the possibility that something I work on could make outsiders feel unwanted.

Again, HOW are we making them feel unwanted? Concrete examples please.

So I focused on what we were proud of: We are one of the only large sites where it’s practically impossible to find a single slur – our community takes them down in minutes. We don’t tolerate our female users being called “sweetie” or getting hit on.

That's great - because we don't tolerate racists or sexists here. Like we shouldn't.

Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.

SO what? Why would they feel less welcome? We take care of all racist comments. And it's hard to believe that people are being intentionally racist to them, as most users are anonymous! So if they feel less-welcome, it's their problem, not ours! (Maybe feeling left out is a deep personal thing of theirs. Especially since the content on the site is not causing the problem, as already has been established.)

In fact, there is no evidence that racial or other minorities who post quality content are being discriminated against. More likely, perhaps some people posted poor content, and when it was downvoted, blamed it on racism. If you're leveling such serious accusations as bigotry, that requires serious proof.

There are opportunities to work on things like reviewing site copy for inclusive language.

What the heck is inclusive language? It's coding (or in our case sci-fi.)How can computer coding or scifi be exclusive? I'm merely discussing my work. I have no plans to insult anyone. But if everytime I give an example, I have to make sure to write 'he or she' instead of 'he', and triple check anything for microagressions, that will cut down on the quality of my content. And if I have to use 'xir', fuhgeddaboutit.

Maybe it’s time we re-visited things like our “no pleases or thank yous’” rule.

ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!! I don't care if the main site makes this change, I sure hope scifi.se doesn't, because this is one of the best rules on the site. It clears away clutter and stops your inbox from being filled with meaningless crap. There's no reason to exchange that just in case someone may be insulted if he or she or xir didn't get thanked. The upvotes are more than enough of a thank you.

Users aren’t “too lazy” to search; searching takes less work than posting.

As someone who often moderates first-question queues, I can assert that his is demonstrably untrue.

But a larger, more diverse community produces better artifacts, not worse ones.

Diverse in what way? If you mean diversity in race, by all means. We already have a diverse crowd. Considering that this is an expert online forum, we don't care what color you are as long as you know your stuff. But if you mean diverse in skill level, in no means does having an influx of knowledgeless noobs increase the quality of the site. (For evidence, see: Quora.)

So, is SciFi.SE going to become a SJW safe space where no one's feelings are hurt, where badly-phrased questions become the norm, and where 'Thank you' comments fill up your inbox; or are we going to stay a quality site where expertise matters far more than making sure your language is sufficiently inclusive?

In other words

Why would we let bad policies that lower the quality of the site just because someone's feelings may be hurt unintentionally?

Answer 17

Please refer to this question and its answers, especially mine:

Sexism in conversation moderation, or, why wasn't I suspended?

The entire chain must be read, as there are multiple answers from moderators, and especially Tim Post's initial answer and subsequent walk-back.

Also, in this answer, I included a link to an actual study assessing the sexism on Stack Overflow followed be attempts at detailing the nature and impact of it on users:

Measuring the participation of women on Stack Overflow

Answer 18

OP, you are absolutely correct to criticise that point in the article.

The author provided some anecdotal evidence for new users feeling intimidated which I think no-one will disagree with, even if SO is well within its rights to ensure new users learn the rules.

The author has not, however, provided any references or sources for the claim that "women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups" "experience StackOverflow as a hostile place", I'm guessing because the data simply will not exist to support such a ridiculous position.

Perhaps the most troubling section:

Those of us who have privilege, but care deeply about reducing bias should be uniquely positioned to help, but we struggle the hardest to recognize that we are (unintentionally) biased ourselves.² As it happens, making people feel left out is a deep personal fear of mine.

"Those of us who have privilege" is a typical social justice warrior reference to white men, and not people with a high reputation score. This is made explicit with the reference to the "implicit bias test." It's absolutely useless, not repeatable, guarantees nothing, and is not even supported by the creators.

Is SO difficult for a high-rep user? No.

Is SO a difficult place for the average low-rep new user? Sure.

Is SO any more difficult for [group]? Only if you're willing to argue for that group being inferior to the average new, low-rep, user. There is nothing about SO that forces [group] into a bad situation and people who are abusive are dealt with by the mods.

So in short; This article argues for "making people feel included" while at the same time alienating "Those of us who have privilege;" who are either white men or high-reps, neither of which have done anything wrong.

Answer 19

In many other industries management releasing a mea culpa admitting to failures and oversights of the self-described magnitude outlined in the blog post (and by self-admission extended to the entire SE network) would be a prelude to resignations/terminations - whatever their reasons may have been for feeling they were not living up to a certain self-defined standard, or releasing a document detailing the ways they feel they didn't, to the public.

They say:

As of last week, we’re prioritizing this and staffing it with talented employees from our Executive, Community, Data, Design, Research, and Engineering teams. We’re listening to our community and those sharing their experiences.

I see.

Answer 20

Yes, I have noticed that on many forums people are very unhelpful, and sometimes harmful, probably without knowing it. I've been doing this kind of development work for over 10 years. I'm not new, BUT the stuff I ask about here is stuff that's new to me (and probably should be to anyone asking a question).

This is my typical experience with StackOverflow:

• I have a question. I try to figure it out. I stuggle, so I research it. I try for hours to find the answer to no success.
• I farm it out to other groups, one of which could be Stack.
• I ask a question, making sure it hasn't been asked before, like "How do I change this HTML feature without editing the CSS or JS? I can't touch the CSS because I don't have access and JS is disabled."
• After three downvotes, I get "Why do you need to do that?" Ugh. Now my question has an answer, so people are not likely to look at it.
• I respond, saying I need to edit an HTML file whose CSS I can't access it. (If I could, I wouldn't have this question.)
• Oh, two more downvotes also. No reason.
• Four people share links saying "This has been asked before". More downvotes.
• I reply, saying these questions do not answer my question and I have read all of these before asking. (Which is why I asked.)
• Someone asks to see code. So I show code.
• Then someone asks for me to explain the code, explain what I've tried, and what the results were. So I do. I explain. I provide a CodePen.
• The response: Too long; Didn't read. More downvotes.
• Then my account gets suspended for asking bad questions. Meanwhile I don't have an answer, and now I don't have a stack account. And Stack won't let you contact them or ask for a lift - and won't let you go back and delete your questions if they consider it "bad".

It's just a waste of time. It feely cliquey and kind of like bullying. Our questions help you build your corpus of content and user base. Stop holding us back. Nobody benefits there. These are gripes I have with many forums but Stack is by far the worst.

Oh and to top it off, someone will ask a question that's really simple and easy to find on Google and get hundreds of upvotes. What the?! WHY!!

I'll tell people "stay away from Stack" and they usually reply with either "what's Stack?" or "yeah, I already know".

It's about time StackExchange got a little lashing back from this! I never understood how something like this could be popular... or functional at all. I think Stack suffers from a lack of empathy. People don't understand WHY people are asking the questions and HOW people are thinking when they encounter these issues. I'm a professor of web development, and I like to focus on introductory level courses because I know what the students are feeling and thinking. Stack needs more of that.

Answer 21

You didn't do your research, put minimal effort into answering your own question, but because your level of ignorance (note that I mean this in a literal, factual sense, not as an insult), intellectual laziness (OK, this one is an insult, but one which is intended to jog you out of your familiar patterns of thought and get you thinking about your own behavior. No offense, bro) and implicit bias is one shared by the majority of the readership of Meta, your question will not be closed. In fact, it is considered on-topic, interesting, and worthy of discussion. It has also attracted numerous commenters who wish to allege that there is no problem, that "gender bias" is fake news, and that things are Just Fine How They Are.

So to answer your question, all you need to do is look at the conversations it has sparked. Lots of people outside the groups you asked about answering for the people inside those groups. And why should the people inside those groups expend precious time and energy answering your questions when you have made no effort to answer them for yourself?