A List Apart Web Design Survey Data—for the Black People

Without Tiffany Brown, her article “A List Apart 2008 Survey,” I would not have known about this survey and the fact that they release their raw data for free. Very cool. So I decided to do the “divisive” and “hostile” thang and look up the people in this survey who dared to describe themselves as “Black.” Since I added the challenge of using OpenOffice.org instead of importing this stuff into a “real” database my, look-ups are extremely simplistic:

The number of Black developers: 87 out of 32,831. Most are between 25 and 32 from the United States, with Bachelor degrees. Seven are from the continent of Africa. One is from the Middle East.

The number of Black female developers: 13.

The number of Black creative directors/art directors: 25.

The number of Black female creative directors/art directors: 3.

It is important to understand that more people in this survey described themselves as “Other”—and what is really interesting is that almost the same percentage of people gave no answer to this question than the total percentage of those calling themselves “Black.” Just these numbers alone explain why I would never expect to “monetize” my Blog in the manner the “mainstream” suggests.

I am not implying that more people “should” describe themselves as “Black”—I am saying that when I use the word to describe myself (or facets of me) I know statistically how few people among the web tech elite are interested in this description. But somehow my behavior persists. You have your thirty-two thousand theories as to why this “Black thing” still happens and me gots mine…

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