I’m a white male. I’ve never been subject to discrimination in the workplace because of these things, so I wondered whether I have any claim to write about women in IT.

I have worked in all-male teams and in teams with (limited) numbers of women. I’ve also had (mostly) male managers and (occasional) female managers. Whilst it’s not very scientific, those teams with women in them felt different, a different energy or dynamic. There may be evidence to support this: according to this article in HBR “if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises”.

I recently tweeted “I'm wondering if we should seek gender-neutral versions of craftsman and journeyman in #IT?  "crafter" and "journey____" ?? #WomenInIT” and this spurred me to write this article.

Is “craftsman” too gendered a term? If so something like “crafter” is quite an easy change to make “software craftsman” becomes “software crafter”, I actually quite like this.

“Journeyman” seems a little harder, “journeyperson” seems a little clunky; perhaps “journeying software developer”? I’m not sure.

There is sometimes the view that this is all “political correctness gone mad”, so it’s probably a good idea to start with what we want our industry and our day-to-day work lives to be like.

If we accept that women improve our teams, and better teams make better software, and better software improves the world; then we need more women in IT. If this means that we (that is the “male we”) need to use a few different words here and there then so be it. We just need to think of good, non-patronising, sincere, gender-neutral (and hopefully still catchy) versions of these words.

There is of course a whole lot more to encouraging (or not discouraging) more girls to take an interest in IT, from schooling systems to general societal gender-biases.

Ultimately if I as an individual want the benefits of more women in the teams I work in, then I need to ask myself what can I do to help make this happen.

Often discussions such as these turn into “I only believe in meritocracy, I don’t care what gender you are” type statements. I too ultimately believe in the “best person should get the job” type thinking, however I also recognize that as a white male I’ve never had to deal with discrimination.

Diversity in general is usually a good thing: religion, gender, race, technical background, age, etc. A team, comprised of 10 people that are all the same, with exactly the same skills and outlooks will be weaker overall than a more diverse team.

How can we represent the world with our software if we don’t represent it within our development teams?

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