The point of these diversity initiatives is to actively consider the ways in which sociocultural constraints have barred certain minority groups from entering our industry and work against those constraints to open up our industry to these underrepresented populations.

Of course it’s going to seem like we are “lowering the bar” because that bar was forged in an industry that doesn’t value diversity. How do you expect to dismantle a system without questioning the values and standards that form the foundation of that system?

Diversity is good for the industry because we all benefit from having people from different backgrounds and with different life experiences contribute their voices.

When building a large-scale web application, you wouldn’t want to form a team of people with solely front-end development experience. With such a limited set of experiences, you naturally end up with a limited end result. Instead, you want a wide range of experiences and skills: network infrastructure, databases, server-side, and so on.

Similarly, why do we continue to fill our organizations with people who have the same life experiences? Who have the same background, who come from the same schools, who have faced the same challenges?

If our industry is filled with homogeneous perspectives, then it can’t evolve and we all lose. Diversity is key to this industry’s future.

It’s not lowering the bar; it’s opening the door.