for 15 years, Stack Overflow has been the main hub for computer programming and development discussions. It’s where users who face a tricky conundrum or run into a wall in their code can turn to ask questions of fellow users.
And historically, it has been a male-dominated space. In the organization’s annual survey of its users, conducted in 2022, 92 percent of respondents identified as male and three-quarters as white or European. The platform then acknowledged that it has “considerable work to do”.
But in 2023, Stack Overflow’s survey, published June 13, removed questions about gender and race.
“I’d kind of understand if they decided not to ask about people, but they’re still asking about geography, age, type of developer, years of coding, and a bunch of things about salary and education,” says Sasha Luccioni, a member of the board of directors of Women in Machine Learning, an organization that lobbies to raise awareness of and appreciation for women in the tech industry. “But no sex. That is really screwed up.”
Luccioni says the decision not to collect data on gender balance — especially after previous years have shown it to be so skewed — avoids rather than confronts the issue. “This is very symptomatic of the tech industry,” she says. “It’s not just about AI, it’s about general. Like, who, who code our code? Young white male people.”
By 2022, only one in four researchers publishing academic papers on AI will be women. The chance of at least one man appearing as the author of a study on AI is twice as likely as an AI publication with at least one woman.
“We didn’t exclude demographic questions from this year’s survey to avoid our responsibility there,” said Joy Liuzzo, Stack Overflow’s vice president of marketing. “We removed the demographic questions due to concerns about personally identifiable information given the increasingly complex regulatory environment and the highly international nature of the survey.”
Liuzzo acknowledged, “There’s a lot of work to be done to make the field of software development more diverse and inclusive, and Stack Overflow plays a big role in that work.” She says that in recent weeks the organization has published a new, more inclusive code of conduct and revised the process of asking questions on the platform. She hopes this will reduce barriers to entry, which historically may have led underrepresented groups to avoid the site. “We recognize that much more needs to be done and we are committed to doing the work to enable change,” she says.
That’s some small consolation for Kate Devlin, a reader in artificial intelligence and society at King’s College, London, though. “It’s common knowledge that technology has a gender problem,” she says. “If we want to take diversity in technology seriously, we need to know what the landscape looks like.” Devlin points out that it’s hard to measure progress — or regression — without a baseline of data.
Whatever the reasons for the removal of key questions about who uses the platform, the survey results—or lack thereof—point to a problem with Stack Overflow’s user demographics and a broader problem across the technology: non-male participants are sadly underrepresented.
