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Consider the history: That Time When Women Stopped Coding

1. What occured during the same time as the beginning of the decline of women in computer sciene?
   The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.

2. Why does it matter that males had been playing on computers growing up?
   These early personal computers weren’t much more than toys. You could play pong or simple shooting games, maybe do some word processing. And these toys were marketed almost entirely to men and boys.

This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture.

Review the data: Employee breakdown of key technology companies

What three take-a-ways do you have looking at this data?

1. the number of males exceeds the number of female employees
2. the white employees exceeds the black employees
3. the diversity is low

Why diversity matters to your tech company

1. When are diversity efforts most successful?
   when they’re driven by a commitment from company leaders

2. Why do diverse companies perform better?
   Given that diverse teams are smarter and more creative than homogeneous ones, it is unsurprising that a wealth of research shows a strong correlation between diverse organizations and positive financial outcomes.

3. Give an example of how a diverse company can serve a diverse user base or vise-versa?
   When the employees of an organization better represent their users and desired users, they will build more effectively for those groups. When YouTube’s almost entirely right-handed developer team built the iOS app without considering how left-handed people would use it, for example, 5% to 10% of videos were uploaded upside down as a result. This factor may be especially relevant for leaders of consumer tech companies.