It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
Remember when the government went anti-DEI crazy and started covering displays of influential women and people of colour at places like NSA? That kind of decision maker may be handling the PSF's grant.
> It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
I would like to see this kind of thing treated, socially and legally, as equivalent to saying "This tech organization has a lot of Jews... can we do something about that?" (Indeed, many of the exact same people who are classified as white men who are disproportionately present in tech organizations by DEI advocates are also Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews, and the DEI advocates are treating their white male identity rather than their Jewish identity as politically salient). If some organization refuses to refrain from treating the disproportionate presence of white men in some organization - or the assumed disproportionate presence of white men - as a problem, I think it's reasonable for the US federal government to refuse to give them grant money.
You must understand the difference between those two statements, I refuse to believe that you do not, so this response is more aimed toward people that might not realize what you’re doing here. There is a vast difference between “all” and “a lot of”.
To solve the “all” problem, none of those people need to be removed from the organization. It merely states that diversity is good. To solve the “a lot of” problem necessitates getting rid of those members.
This is fundamentally why one is discriminatory and the other is not.
Yes, once we end up in a situation where majority of companies are run by Jews and alternatives are worse, it's harder to function in the society as not a Jew, we're facing decades long discrimination in different aspects of life, and individual action in response to incidents of discrimination is not enough... then I sure hope dei will concentrate on societal change to help non-Jews.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
Yeah and that's obviously problematic, because the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys".
> the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys"
Are the common, strange brainwashing courses in the room right now?
This is obviously a bad faith take - trying to prevent anyone from even saying, let alone promoting, diversity because sometimes people discriminate (which is already illegal) is absurd even without acknowledging that discrimination happens already. This argument looks a LOT like "keep discriminating against people that aren't like me".
Constructive criticism for good faith people out there reading this who are concerned about "DEI" causing discrimination -- acknowledge all discrimination is bad and take a real stab at working on it as a whole. If your only "attempt" to prevent discrimination is speaking up against people trying to include more diverse sets of people in programming communities then you're doing it wrong (and showing your ass).
The PSF withdrew their application for the grant from the US government after being presented with terms that included "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", which conflicts with their mission statement: "The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers."
> "… to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers."
I feel like statements like this are fundamentally vague. What does "supporting" the growth of a diverse and international community look like? Is it different from "facilitating the growth of" such a community? Without concrete definitions I feel like both sides are talking past each other. I would love to see concrete definitions and would be grateful to anyone who can give me sources from either side.
it the previous hn post, tbe major topic was that the government could claw back its money with any flimsey premise, about anything the organization does or people related to it do, and not specific to the project the grant was for
like, somebody going to a "women in tech" conference could result in suddenly having to find millions in cash to pay back the government.
Guido has been fairly vocal about mentoring exclusively women in Python, because he's of the opinion that they need the help much more than men as far as breaking into the industry.
But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
> But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
I (a white man) would be upset at preferential treatment of white men. Or white women. Or black men. Or anyone. Where's the "judging by the content of their character" that the social justice movement (rightly) called for? I don't see it much these days.
> But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
Admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to white men is an instant rage-boner for most of Trump's opponents and also every previous US presidential administration and prestigious institution for as long as I've been alive. If individuals in their private capacity want to do preferential treatment for specific demographic categories, they can do so; but I don't want them to get government grants that comes out of my taxes for it.
Please please please insist your government money stop being spent for all the other discrimination going on. I don't think python grants should be anywhere near the top of that list.
Yeah Python grants are small potatoes. Things like https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/5/28/dei-rise-and-fa... , which involves threatening federal funding to Harvard in a way that induced them to make at least some DEI-related policy changes, is a much bigger priority.
Still, just because grants to open-source programming language foundations aren't the most important federal government spending priority, doesn't mean I want the federal government to remove the no-DEI condition on federal grant money.
