Diverse teams gather more information which leads to better insight of edge cases, and ultimately to better products.
If men and women are fundamentally different then there are good reasons to choose men or women only in a given situation (along normal stereotypes: women are better caregivers, men are better manual labourers).
Recruiting in this way is illegal in a lot of places.
>they're all going to ask the same questions if they all have the same perspectives, biases, etc. //
Then shoudln't you choose people based on their ability to consider the specific perspectives you need?
One of the things about people is the ability to adopt the perspective of others readily.
Different genders/races/cultural backgrounds/educational backgrounds are connected to having different experiences in life. Of course you can imagine what e.g. sexism looks like, but when it happens to you every other day as a woman you will have it much more present than a man. Same thing with other aspects, people who have different racial/educational/cultural backgrounds bring different experiences with them and they might offer them precisely at the point where you didn’t think about it, not because you are a bad person, but because emulating all other perspectives your self is exhausting.
The variance between individuals of both genders and within races/nationalities/etc is big enough for you to look on the individual level. When you say “women are statistically on average better caregivers” and hire only women, not only are you missing out on very talented men, but the functionality of your team is reduced as well. E.g. because in some situation a male caregiver might be a better fit for a given client. Not because they are better or worse at their job, but because beeing male brings a whole set of experiences, cultural expectations etc with itself. The same apparently goes for other traits your employee might have.
Most jobs require teams to react to new and unpredictable challanges and having a broad range of backgrounds, helps them to always have a team member whi knows how to deal with it, because of their background ans life experience.
When you hire a team where you have a monoculture, it is hit or miss. It might work well for a certain job at a certain time, but if anything changes, your team might be less resilent, flexible and able to solve problems compared to a more diverse team.
Apprently there is, otherwise why claim that any gender imbalance in the workplace must be the result of discrimination? I agree with you that diverse points of view can be useful; but diverse points of view imply (average) psychological and cultural differences, diverse attitudes and interests, and these might well be the reason of the gender imbalance. To use a steereotype (don't kill me for this) if female software developers can bring value to a team because on average they have a better eye for UX or design, then it is also probable that more females will be in UX or design than males, creating a gender imbalance in the number of candidates for software development positions.
Not sure about what "modern feminism" is about, but the goal is fairness, which means treating women as women and not requiring male characteristics. Basically, detaching personality traits more common in one population (eg gender) from actual job requirements.
All that time I've wasted writing code...
So in this case I do not see at all that software from "diverse" teams has gotten better.
I fact I think that overall software has gotten worse in the past decade. There is no structure, quality or documentation. The only thing that matters is that "something visible happens" so it resembles a product.
This is just an assertion currently, and I am not inclined to believe it is true. I would believe it for more "people" and/or culture oriented problems, such as catering, but for the majority of software development problems, diversity in people is nothing compared to diversity of software development experience. Which, ironically if we take as given most developers are white males, we maximise on average by only hiring white males!
The idea that this kind of a priori judgement is not only acceptable but laudible has come as a bit of a surprise.
Not least because it would seem to justify rejecting female applicants for a role where a 'male perspective' is considered important.
