What about e.g. social apps where some communities face a much higher risk of receiving abuse?

Looking more broadly, it wasn't that long ago that you could easily find American software developers treating internationalisation as a frill or people talking about accessibility as a niche concern. (Now a growing percentage of people recognize that in addition to being the right thing to do, it also benefits more people than they thought due to temporary limits due to environment - ever see how many people use subtitles on the subway/bus?, illness/injury, distraction, etc.)

The key point for me is seeing this as a larger goal of encouraging as many people as possible to participate in building the technology right increasingly shapes our world. One key thing is that people aren't limited to certain types of contribution: there's probably no uniquely feminine contribution to C++ but how well the standards community works or how the language is designed will charge based on who's involved. If it's mostly very smart MIT grads, someone else might contribute not because of their race, gender, etc. but because their life experience has been different, and that's usually important for moving something out of the core guru community into broader usage.

Remember all of the guys who decried GUIs as unnecessary crutches when Real Men(tm) used a CLI? The problem wasn't that they were (generally) white men but simply that they had a very narrow view of what people wanted to do and how much training was reasonable to accept just to be able to check your email or edit a file. That's laughable now but it wasn't hard to find examples just a generation back.

> Looking more broadly, it wasn't that long ago that you could easily find American software developers treating internationalisation as a frill or people talking about accessibility as a niche concern. (Now a growing percentage of people recognize that in addition to being the right thing to do, it also benefits more people than they thought due to temporary limits due to environment - ever see how many people use subtitles on the subway/bus?, illness/injury, distraction, etc.)

Is there any evidence that better support for internationalization and accessibility was driven by a more diverse workforce? It seems more likely that these were driven by market forces (increased demand as well as lower costs as i8n/accessibility tools/practices evolved).

> how well the standards community works or how the language is designed will charge based on who's involved.

There's even some evidence that some diversity helps groups make better decisions, but there's no reason to believe that the effect is large nor that the optimal diversity is above the current level. In other words, there's no reason to believe that more diversity will be beneficial.