New Rails workshops to bring more women into the Boston software scene

Sorry, I must have not been clear: my point is that if we have twice as many people, then we get twice as much work done, move twice as quickly, etc. Django has about 30 committers, and among us we seem to be able to commit about 10-15 times per day. If we had 60 committers, I'd guess we'd be able to commit about 30 things per day. That's more bugs fixed, more features added, faster velocity between releases, etc. These are things I want.

> In reality, there is some reason why women don't want to be programmers.

I agree. I suggest that it's because women are systematically being discouraged from joining our communities. I think they's plenty of data to back this up.

BTW, it's not programming as a whole; the problem's even worse in open source communities. Women make up roughly 20% of the workforce in technical professions, but only about 2% of open source developers. Even if you believe there's something in that second X chromosome that disinclines women from tech — and for the record I certainly don't buy that argument — that can't explain why the problems ten times worse in open source.

> you would be much better served to use your limited capital to attract men who are already predisposed to your project but unaware of it rather than women who are both unaware of it and predisposed against it.

How about people who are aware and are predisposed, but have historically been discouraged or outright prevented from getting involved?

And look, this isn't a zero-sum game. I can do this and other things too! A lot of the resistance to diversity seems to imply that these efforts somehow detract from other forms of community outreach, but this just isn't true. We are in fact capable of doing multiple things at once.

I see it like this: lack of diversity is a bug on our community. I'd like to fix it, so I work on fixing these bugs. Right now, the information I have available tells me that gender diversity is the worst of the bugs under the "diversity" label, and it's also one I think I have the skills to tackle. This doesn't mean that other bugs are less important, or less worth solving. I happen to believe that this bug is the one that's most worth my time to tackle.

Yes, I do see lack of diversity -- in all forms -- as an issue in our community. There are other minorities besides women that're systematically discouraged from entering tech; we should do something about that. Hopefully our fix for the gender bugs can be abstracted and applied in other areas.

This is not just an abstract inconvenience either. Whenever you are part of a historically marginalized minority -- whether by color, gender, or nationality -- it will likely be more uncomfortable for you to enter fields where you are the only person from your group. This is particularly true for women.

Not only are sexist comments more likely when there are not a lot of women at events (see http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-...), the women will also likely feel more uncomfortable because of the disproportion. Let me quote a posting on our outreach mailing list thread from a woman to elaborate:

"I have definitely never experienced anything threatening or offensive at a Ruby group meeting. But, you show up at an event where there are 50 men or more to 3 women, and you grow to expect some double-takes. Some women, like me, are okay with that. A lot aren't. And it makes it hard to show up alone or when you don't know anyone if you know you're going to stick out like a sore thumb. A man can show up at boston.rb for the first time and not have anyone pay the least attention. A woman cannot.

"There's some critical mass that needs to be reached before that's not true anymore, and it's just hard work to get there. There needs to be enough women who don't care if they stick out, so the women who do care don't stick out so much. And you need to make plans to meet the women you know there, so they already know someone. That could be a component of any project night, outreach, or mentorship effort -- encouraging people to come to the meetings, and affirmatively planning to meet them there."

I hope these points carry at least a little weight for you. Thank you for raising the challenge.

No, come on, that's grossly unfair.

I would never challenge or question a woman for seeking knowledge. I would never treat a woman any differently. You're implying that I'm doing something objectionable like those who grope or make sexist jokes.

I'm saying that I'm not interested in anyone's gender, and I don't think it should be a property of interest to anyone except for dating.

I think that saying "hey! you're a woman! this special event is just for you! there's the main event as well, which we'd love you to come to, but there's also this special one just for you" is offensive.

Perhaps I've missed some part of the community, or I don't attend the right (wrong?) conferences, but I've never seen anything that discourages women. The only possibility is that they see an existing low proportion of women and then conclude it's not for them. Well that's their loss and their prejudice.