[shayway]

Would everyone agree with that definition, though? It seems like discussions around DEI tend to go in circles, because proponents see bad implementations as not really DEI, and opponents see good implementations as not really DEI either.

I recently read in the local news that some city department, in order to comply with anti-DEI stuff, was changing its name to remove the word 'diversity'... and nothing else. DEI has no legal definition. It feels like the new "woke", where the actual meaning is irrelevant, and its only real purpose is tribalistic social signalling.

[Shawnj2]

By accepting the grant they are giving themselves a legal responsibility to “not do DEI” where the government arbitrarily decides what DEI is. Even something like employing a trans software engineer or talking about the impact Python is having in POC communities could be considered reason to go after PSF legally or rescind the grant. It’s just not worth the risk for the reward.

[acdha]

That’s really the problem: the grant comes with vague terms covering the entire organization, which could be arbitrarily redefined at any time in the future. It’s like signing a contract to deliver a product without any clauses protecting you if the client keeps changing their mind.

[viraptor]

Naming things is hard. Yet we deal with lots of other vague concepts without losing our minds. There are some extreme voices, but somehow I've never heard anyone actually digging deeper into the issues to describe dei as just tribalistic signalling. When you strip out everything else, maybe that's a sign you lost all nuance?

In development we'd just accept it as normal to say "Putting each literal value in its own module is not a reasonable application of modular design." without claiming that the name "modular design" is now misunderstood and irrelevant.