What’s in a name, Bob?

Humans. What I’m about to say may seem elementary. Perhaps you’ll feel its value is miniscule in the overall scheme of things. But this is something I keep coming up against again and again — have been coming up against for the last 20 years working in technology (in Australia, admittedly) — and I don’t think it’s miniscule at all. It’s a telling symptom of the bigger problem.

Maybe a problem that you have.

We’re all labouring under the burden of homogeneity in tech. It’s too white, it’s too male-dominated. We all know. We (I’m narrowing “we” to white people from this point forward) complain about it. We write long thinkpieces on Medium pondering why we can’t just change it. We go and test our biases and ask ourselves why we can’t just make the world more equitable. We acknowledge that it’s costing us all—businesses, individuals, and the economy as a whole—real, actual money.

And then we write a book on coding and use men’s names in all the examples.

Or we prepare a presentation on security and, in the airport example, show a CCTV-styled picture of a bearded, brown person in a corridor and write something like “Shafik” in 90's-thriller-flick computer-type letters to the right of his face.

Or we explain an example — in an article, in a conversation — in which all humans’ names are Anglo. And not even just Anglo — old-school and/or upper-class Anglo (Amy, Bob and Matt, for example, rather than Taylah, Jai or Jaxon). God forbid we should use a non-gendered name or “they” instead of a gendered pronoun.

What we say matters. In a positive example, at the very least it communicates our internal biases and, believe me, this is immediately offputting for anyone who’s outside their scope. In a negative example (e.g. the airport security one above), it’s just plain offensive. What if there aren’t any brown people in the room? It’s still offensive!

Using only Anglo, traditionally white, or male names isn’t just “not inclusive.” It’s preclusive. It precludes those who might have included themselves from doing just that. And it precludes others from including them — even mentally.

Beyond that, lazily reaching for a decades-old stereotype (a.k.a. racial profiling) reveals that we continue to subscribe to the self-absorbed social ignorance — the unworldliness—on which the tech sector was founded. That it’s inherently and intrinsically about privileged white people in developed countries building stuff for privileged white people in developed countries. White people building cool stuff for themselves. Which, obviously, is a notion that must necessarily be deconstructed by the true action of inclusivity.

Want to see more diversity in tech? Start talking like it, at the very least.