Brief web search should explain the issues. Alternatively, this story should
https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-May/122922.html
I wouldn't necessarily draw from LLVM an opinion for Boost, as indeed some recently received private email pointed out (let's call it "passionately worded", it's weird how boost-dev is my sole source of such kind of email, despite me participating in over a dozen mailing lists and forums). Setting aside the moral or legal issues with discrimination based on sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinions, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, or birth (the UN and ECHR definition I believe), I also don't think there is any such problem in the C++ community, except in one regard which I'll come back to. Speaking as a former GSoC admin, many of our students - perhaps even most - came particularly from the poorer parts of the world where the GSoC stipend is worth a lot more. I don't think there is any racial diversity problem. We definitely showed excessive selection bias towards those who wrote good English, and I did a lot of work to try and debias that towards people who could code instead. But even then, in the statistical analyses of our ranking patterns, I never discerned any bias regarding applicant. As anyone who has attended a C++ conference or standards meeting knows, there is a wide fluidity of folk, some of the more fluid of which are amongst the highest esteemed engineers in C++. Nobody sees anything once people start discussing C++. I don't think there is any LGBT diversity problem, if anything in terms of percentages I think we're ahead of general society, possibly precisely because we don't see anything but expertise in C++. In all this, C++ has a very similar community to Physics, where a very similar culture prevails. In fact, the staff at C++ Now in Aspen often comment on the similarities, because the Physics conference is very close date wise to C++ Now, and apart from us being a bit plumper on average, and wearing more t-shirts, it is apparently hard to tell us apart. Where I do think we have a diversity problem is in female participation, and I think that has similar reasons for a similar lack of participation as in Physics (the percentage of women is almost identical). In my five years at GSoC I believe we only ever had one woman as a student, and that was despite my best efforts to do better. I'd need to go dig out the spreadsheets, but the cause was lack of female applications. I don't think we ever received more than five out of many hundreds of applications. And incidentally, the very worst of those applications was vastly better than the average we receive. Now *that* diversity problem I'd very much like to do something about as that's a real problem in C++. I know me and Jon Kalb and lots of others have discussed this problem in depth, and on multiple occasions, and the conference organisers have adopted codes of conduct and other welcoming measures, plus some of the folk at ACCU have worked on increasing bringing more kids into C++ via coding camps and so on. So it's not like nothing is being done about this. But equally, like in Physics, it's very tough to do better if the C++ employment culture is uncompetitive for women. What few women start out in a career in C++ see a marked exodus about five years in, they move into management or into a different technology, and I find that unwelcome. But also illustrative - C++ has a very traditional employment culture compared to say web development, or Python, or even Rust. Employers expect you there onsite eight hours a day, there are a lot of legacy code bases full of arcane bespoke knowledge, and experience is often prioritised over capability in big multinationals. None of this makes C++ competitive to alternative choices for women whose work history may need to be more flexible, less full time, less buried in bespoke arcanery. Anyway, that's my ha'pennies worth on this topic: better to concentrate on problems specific to C++ rather than import culture wars from the US. And if you're reading this and you are in a position to enact workplace cultural changes more tolerant of part time work and other female participation friendly changes, please do make it happen. We get there incrementally only through individual change, and C++ needs to compete better against other programming language ecosystems and cultures than it has been doing. Niall