How many people are on your team?

How many of them look like you?

How many have the same skin color? The same number of wrinkles and the same amount of grey hair? The same gender?

Study after study shows that team diversity (across all sorts of metrics: age, gender, culture, sexual orientation, religion) leads to better performance and outcomes. When our goal is to solve new and unique problems, as it usually is in software engineering, the more unique perspectives we have, and the more unique backgrounds we have represented, the more likely we are to come upon a new and unique solution to our problem.

We need teams that look like they were assembled by Starfleet.