B. If Ruby and Rails are widely adopted a quarter of developers will be women.

C. Women often are not early adopters for the same reason most homeless guys are guys. Women are more risk-averse and will join when it looks less like a gamble. Go to Dice.com enter keyword Java to see my point. Simply they like a dependable paycheck, maybe less of a paycheck but more of a certain paycheck.

D. Mark Shuttleworth handled the nudies on the wallpaper better.

I guess it is more a case of reaching out to actually get them as community and company.
Make jobs (and conferences) more interesting and creative as example and consider not only programming but also social skills too (and by god, some IT shops would need that).

AQ: Unfortunately, moving forward without making it clear that the presentation was unacceptable is no longer an option, not if you’re serious about encouraging female presence in the Ruby community. The problem isn’t so much the presentation as the fact that a very vocal and influential minority of the community refuses to accept the legitimacy of the opinions of an (apparently) less-influential minority of the community. Saying “let’s focus on writing awesome code” is sticking your head in the sand and hoping that the problem fixes itself. The programming community has been focusing on writing awesome code for decades now, and, well … we all know how well that’s worked as far as encouraging female participation goes.

The core issue is actually very close to what Giles pointed out. Somebody gave a presentation that made some people in the audience feel marginalized and devalued, and when this was pointed out to the presenter, his reaction was basically to claim that they shouldn’t have felt that way. This demonstrates both incredible insensitivity and a profound lack of respect for the people who (very respectfully) complained. Worse, a lot of the community seems to think this isn’t a problem, which communicates the exact same thing. And now saying, “whatever, let’s forget about it” — what? Like it or not, this sends two messages:

1. The presentation was perfectly okay.
2. When women in the community are marginalized, nobody’s going to back them up.

That second message is your problem. Fixing it isn’t easy, but you won’t make real progress if you don’t.

Thats a cool idea! As I said above – I’m thinking about interesting ways to support the drive to get more women involved.

I agree with you about apologizing but I disagree about Ruby in schools. It doesnt really matter how much money we actually raise, my eyes were pointed in the direction of trying to make something positive out of this ‘thing’. I don’t think teaching a couple of kids Ruby is going to change the community, but what is anyone else doing? There are two ways to effect change here:
- teach people.
- write code.
I’m trying to do both as best I can. What I DONT think is going to help this community is continuing to argue about what happened/if it was offensive.

It pissed me off, because I sympathized with the offended woman, but even if I hadn’t, it would have been bad tactics. It’s not just disrespectful to other people, it’s self-sabotaging. It adds bad feeling to the situation and poisons the whole concept of apology. If you’re arguing with somebody while pretending to be apologizing, you’re insulting their intelligence and sending the message that a real apology isn’t necessary. This implies that consideration for others doesn’t actually matter. These are all poisonous things. They make a community unhealthy.

I’ve been in arguments where people who were on my side of the argument did those kinds of things. I’ve had to take time away from the argument I was making to dismantle the argument they were making and leach the poison from it.

It’s very, very bad to argue in bad faith. It doesn’t just make you a dick. It means everybody who was adding their energy to your side of the debate now has to stop and put their energy instead into staying clear of the taint of turning into a dickhead too by endorsing whatever you did.

by the way, I’m not sure if the Matt commenting in this thread is the oh-so-controversial Matt at the center of this thread, but I agree that the teaching Ruby in schools idea is kind of irrelevant.

I agree and disagree with you.

1 – Yes, 1000$ is not going to get Ruby into schools and the curriculums of 1000s of Colleges and High Schools are not going to change over night (or even ever). However, this community is really pretty small. World-wide, there are how many Ruby developers? 20K? 30 maybe? That means that a pebble can make a huge ripple. For example, this was a conference of ~200(!!) people and it was one presentation out of >15, and look what’s come out of it. If we can teach 20 kids Ruby thats NOT a nothing in the scale that we’re operating on.

2 – I think people have a right to be upset, but up and leaving a community because of a couple individuals is a bad move in my opinion. I understand Mike’s decision to leave the Activists, but thats different then saying ‘The Ruby community are assholes’. However many people there are in the community that you don’t agree with on moral/social issues, I’ve found there are an overwhelming amount of awesome, smart, supportive individuals, who write great code and are good to talk to. As much as DHH might be a sort of Figure-Head of Rails, its still an open-source project, and if you want to change something or have a different opinion, its still pretty easy to do so. If you love Ruby but hate Rails, come to Sinatra, or Ramaze, or write your own framework!

3 – My goal was to try to influence a bit of a mode switch in this discussion. Let’s talk constructively about this. I’m really open to suggestions/conversations about how to make Ruby as welcoming a programming community as possible. In the anonymous world of the internet, there are always going to be assholes on the far reaches of every spectrum. We cant be all Bounty Hunter and try to hunt them down. We need to just hit hyperdrive and continue to write the awesome code we have been.

1. It’s not going to happen on a large scale any time soon. Curricula take time to change.
2. This whole fiasco clearly shows that there are structural problems (see: http://afreshcup.com/2009/04/28/a-painful-decision/) that will continue to drive women away from the community.

For more perspective (I’m male) I pointed one of my best female programmer friends at these blog posts yesterday, and, later that day, asked her what she thought. She was aghast. “They accept this at their conferences?” She would have felt intimidated and uncomfortable at the presentation, but what really upset her was that there were so many people defending the slides and the speaker’s non-apology (not to mention DHH’s endorsement). She’s hardly the sensitive-flower type, but she won’t be coming near the Ruby community any time soon if she can help it. Which is a shame, because she’s a damn good coder.

So: http://dyepot-teapot.com/2009/04/26/so-now-what/ and http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2009/04/27/what-works-getting-more-women-involved-in-open-source/ both contain useful suggestions for moving forward. But I would add one more:

When people cross the line, you have to tell them.

You don’t have to excoriate them for it, maybe they made an honest mistake. But you have to engage them about it and let them know you think they crossed the line. Yes, it’s hard to do this. Sure, smart people can disagree about where the line is. Smart people can also have bad judgment. Smart people can lack empathy. You don’t have to hate them for it, but that doesn’t mean you can excuse it, either. This is doubly true when said smart people are community leaders.

Go-along-to-get-along will just ensure that these problems keep coming back, over and over again.

> Let’s actually make this happen. How can we get more women in software development? How can we bring more women into the Ruby community?

Please don’t say you’re offended by people who were offended by people who were offended by people. Social recursion in action