FAQs for Black, Queer, Female Software Engineers
And why you might think twice before you ask them
A recent National Center for Women & Information Technology “By the Numbers” report puts Black women in computing in 2018 at 3% — and this statistic does not make a distinction between technical and nontechnical women in computing. Of the overall U.S. population, roughly 4.5% identify as LGBT. Since it’s incredibly hard to find industry-wide statistics on LGBT folks in tech, let’s take an extremely optimistic view and assume 4.5% of people in computing are LGBT. Combining these two percentages tells us that .00135% of the computing workforce identifies as Black, queer, and female.
And remember, this is an extremely back-of-the-napkin calculation that does not distinguish between technical and nontechnical women, and uses an almost certainly incorrectly optimistic estimation of the percentage of LGBT folks in tech.
But beyond these numbers, all of this matters because the lived experience of being such an extreme unicorn can teach all of us what not to do around the buzzword topics of “diversity” and “inclusion.”
Three questions I’m tired of answering
- What’s it like to be a woman on this all-male team?
- Did this happen because you…
