In reply to Peter Shaw.

Yes most of those all men’s teams are not the best. That should be called out.

Good to see we agree on that. So how would you think a culture like that is gonna change? Speaking up alone unfortunately isn’t enough. That probably would work on individuals and maybe small teams, but not when you try to improve the culture of the whole field (including many corporate organizations) that’s been like that for decades.

WordPress has always been about democratizing publishing, so it’s not woke tokenism. It’s part of the WP community fabric to take a stand against these kind of imbalances and attempt to straighten that out. At least that’s my understanding. 5.6 being an all women team is a form of speaking up, but on large scale.

Will this approach entirely solve the issue? That would be awesome, but I guess a little more is needed to accomplish that. That doesn’t mean that WP shouldn’t even try. I think this approach will definitely create a stir (discussion is good I think) in the field, and organizations will reassess their ways.

the WordPress 5.6 release team is not the best it could

Were the previous release teams the best it could, all of them? When is a team the best team on the planet? There is literally more than enough quality in the WordPress ecosystem these days, so I wouldn’t worry about that. Quality or being the best fit for a role isn’t defined by being a woman or a man. That’s the whole point.