Young? First-Gen? Female? New? Here’s Why You Belong Here Too

Engineering is hard. Tech is hard. Feeling like you don’t belong in these fields? Even harder.

Identity Diversity can be divided into 2 categories: observable characteristsics and underlying characteristics. Observable characteristics are Age, Clothing or Style of Dress, Expressions or Mannerisms, Gender, Physical Ability, and Skin Color. Underlying characteristics are, Cultural Identity, Educational Background, Experience Level, Family Status, Socioeconomic Class, and Values & Beliefs. At some point in your life, you have likely walked into a room where someone made you feel uncomfortable due to some characteristic listed above. Sometimes, discomfort can be healthy and lead to personal growth; other times, it may be extreme enough to make you dissociate and wish you never walked into that room at all. It’s normal to feel this way when entering a new environment, but extreme discomfort becomes an issue when feelings of disconnection are prolonged, especially if these feelings affect how someone participates in social and professional interactions.

What is a diversity bonus? From the book The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy (1), diversity bonuses result from teams composed of diverse thinkers outperforming homogenous groups on complex tasks. Essentially, the best teams balance members’ individual ability and collective diversity. Fortunately, open source communities are based on the merit of contributors and the quality of their conduct Section 3i. of the CNCF Charter. Thus, make space to recognize your technical expertise and determination brought you here. If your identity or perspectives set you apart, let that be a reason to stay.

The benefits of identity diversity are uncovered in complex systems that span across multiple disciplines – because there was no single path you could have taken to get where you are today. Even better, there is no single path to get where you want to go. Think of your cognitive ability like a toolkit, picking up skills on the many paths available to you (1). Everything you have lived through gives rise to exponentially diverse ways of seeing and engaging with the world.

Belonging fuels innovation. Using gender as one basis for comparison, research affirms open source contributions are evaluated on technical merit and identity alone is not a determining factor in acceptance of pull requests (2). This is great! However, gaps exist at the top of leadership chains, indicating a need to support growth into decision-making and maintainer roles (2). By embracing identity diversity, open source communities gain broader participation, more inclusive design decisions, and solutions that reflect the needs of the global user base they serve. It’s crucial to realize that “knowing less is often an opportunity to do more” (3).

There’s a case for belonging and business value too. McKinsey & Company has a great series of reports investigating the business value of diversity from the past decade: Why Diversity Matters (2015), Delivering Through Diversity (2018), and Diversity Wins (2020). In the 2023 report, Diversity Matters Even More, they concluded, internationally, companies in the bottom quartile for gender and ethnic diversity are 66 percent less likely to outperform financially on average, and a lack of diversity may be getting more expensive.

This connection between diversity and performance extends beyond the corporate world. In open source communities, diversity doesn’t just improve outcomes – it expands perspective, accelerates innovation, and strengthens the technologies we build together. There is a seat for you at the table, but you have to go sit in it. And for the rest of us, we’ll pull out the chair.

Sources

1 Page, S. E. The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy. Princeton University Press. (2017).

2 Hechtl, C., Joblin, M. & Apel, S. Is perceived gender related to contributions and standing in open-source software projects?. Empir Software Eng 30, 123 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-025-10653-x

3 Guidara, W. Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. Optimism Press. (2022).

4 Terrell J, Kofink A, Middleton J, Rainear C, Murphy-Hill E, Parnin C, Stallings J. Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men. PeerJ Computer Science 3:e111 (2017). https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.111