Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

railsbridgeboston.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 52 posts

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

#41

Post by typicalrunt »

king_jester wrote: post #25
typicalrunt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, in practice, I work on diversity because I care about basic fairness. Get down from the ivory tower please. Where do you get off saying that he doesn't believe in fairness? In fact, the original commenter could be seen as being more fair by simply stating that gender shouldn't matter. At the same time, you're looking at one statistic. The race or religion of project contributors could be looked at, but they aren…

> In fact, the original commenter could be seen as being more fair by simply stating that gender shouldn't matter. We don't live in a vacuum, so even if we feel that gender shouldn't matter it already does in fundamental ways. > At the same time, you're looking at one statistic. The race or religion of project contributors could be looked at, but they aren't because IT IS NOT IMPORTANT. Actually this is really import…

All valid points. I appreciate the response.

This is a minor nitpick, but I'll bite. I realize nobody explicitly called anyone a mysogynist, but neither did I. There is a difference between saying someone is mysogynist the adjective and mysogyny the noun. jacobian inferred that because the OP doesn't care about diversity then he doesn't care about fairness. That is tantamount to charging someone with sexual discrimination, also known as mysogyny.

[Edit: I upvoted king_jester because, regardless of whether I agree with him on all points, his reply was concise, helpful and he wasn't being a dick]

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

#42

Post by typicalrunt »

bct wrote: post #19
typicalrunt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, in practice, I work on diversity because I care about basic fairness. Get down from the ivory tower please. Where do you get off saying that he doesn't believe in fairness? In fact, the original commenter could be seen as being more fair by simply stating that gender shouldn't matter. At the same time, you're looking at one statistic. The race or religion of project contributors could be looked at, but they aren…

> they need only be open to everyone The word "only" makes this sentence completely wrong. In startup terms it's like saying that to make a successful product you need only make something useful and put up a web page offering it for sale. It would be great if it was that simple!

This kind of reply is the shit people are lamenting about as a decline in the HN comments. If you cherry-pick sentences out of context, then of course you can make a valid point and invalidate mine.

To show context, my entire sentence was: Projects can maintain fairness without specifically targeting a demographic, they need only be open to everyone and never turn someone down simply because of an attribute they cannot change [gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, height, etc].

So by "only" being open to everyone, I assert that projects can maintain fairness. How is this incorrect? I never said the project would be successful, you falsely added that using your metaphor. Is there some other magic bullet for making a project fair? Do we need to inject some discrimination and close-mindedness into it?

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

#43

Post by jacobian »

johnleppings wrote: post #37
king_jester wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get defensive, if you want to call it that, because I think any attempt to specially encourage one involuntary group is patronising. If anything this RailsBridge workshop shows that there are woman who are voluntarily interested and want resources like this workshop, so this is definitely not involuntary. > You can't ask woman-kind why none of their group aren't attending because she has nothing to do with the re…

"reactions like yours where women are challenged and questioned for seeking knowledge in the first place" 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 t…

> [...] I've never seen anything that discourages women.

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents

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

#44

Post by jacobian »

typicalrunt wrote: post #41
king_jester wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, the original commenter could be seen as being more fair by simply stating that gender shouldn't matter. We don't live in a vacuum, so even if we feel that gender shouldn't matter it already does in fundamental ways. > At the same time, you're looking at one statistic. The race or religion of project contributors could be looked at, but they aren't because IT IS NOT IMPORTANT. Actually this is really import…

All valid points. I appreciate the response. This is a minor nitpick, but I'll bite. I realize nobody explicitly called anyone a mysogynist, but neither did I. There is a difference between saying someone is mysogynist the adjective and mysogyny the noun. jacobian inferred that because the OP doesn't care about diversity then he doesn't care about fairness. That is tantamount to charging someone with sexual discrimin…

> jacobian inferred that because the OP doesn't care about diversity then he doesn't care about fairness. That is tantamount to charging someone with sexual discrimination, also known as mysogyny.

Really it's not. There's a big difference between active discrimination and just not caring. I said that my guess is that icedancer doesn't see lack of diversity as a moral problem, not that s/he is a engaging in discrimination. Accusing me of "jumping out of the bushes" to "attack dissenters" is really unfair. Look, I appreciate that some people don't see lack gender diversity as a problem. I disagree, but I'm never going to convince those people to see the issue in my terms. I hope you'll re-read my comment and try to assume just a tiny bit of good faith on my part.

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

#45

Post by bct »

typicalrunt wrote: post #42
bct wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they need only be open to everyone The word "only" makes this sentence completely wrong. In startup terms it's like saying that to make a successful product you need only make something useful and put up a web page offering it for sale. It would be great if it was that simple!

This kind of reply is the shit people are lamenting about as a decline in the HN comments. If you cherry-pick sentences out of context, then of course you can make a valid point and invalidate mine. To show context, my entire sentence was: Projects can maintain fairness without specifically targeting a demographic, they need only be open to everyone and never turn someone down simply because of an attribute they cann…

I never said anything about success.

We don't need to inject discrimination and close-mindedness, but we do need to counteract it. That means we can't just passively "be open".

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

#46

Post by tomwalker »

johnleppings wrote: post #29
tomwalker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we allow male only events?

Yes, we should allow male only events. Why not? Or do you mean should we prevent women turning up? No we should not allow events that prevent women turning up. But if an event happens to have no women turn up, then so the fuck what? Are you going to challenge woman-kind why they aren't going? Why would one woman know why every other woman didn't want to attend?

I just don't understand why there should be female only events. It should be a beginners class, regardless of sex.

Making divides just feels odd

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

#47

Post by ultrasaurus12 »

RailsBridge started its open workshop project in mid-2009 with curriculum and processes that are open source and can be used by anyone to teach any group.

Sarah Mei and I felt that we could change the ratio simply by teaching more women Ruby on Rails, we would have more women in our community, and we were right.

We agreed to make our first workshop open to people with any level of programming experience. (Men could come if they participated in the outreach and found a woman to sign up.)

We thought it would be hard to find women to attend our first workshop. We brainstormed for weeks about how to connect to various women's groups and corporate organizations. Then after two tweets and and one email, we had a waiting list in less than 24 hours. Over the last 3 years the pattern repeats itself, no matter where we have workshops, we consistently have waiting lists of women who want to attend. In SF, we have workshops every month, and routinely have 60 people (mostly women) on the waitlist.

Women do want to write code. We usually have 20% who have never coded before, but typically 50-70% self-identify as non-programmers. Are you a programmer if you just write SQL? does bash count as programming for a sys admin? does it could if you did COBOL 20 years ago, but you can't do any of the modern stuff? maybe you got a CS degree, but have never done more than a toy app? From a teaching perspective, if you answered yes to any of those questions, you are way ahead of the total beginners -- you understand variables and expressing logic in words and symbols.

We have diversity issues in tech, and it isn't just about gender and race. I believe those are just the most visible outward symptom of a problem where we have fairly homogeneous work and communication styles, as well as background and patterns of thinking. If we are going to solve the very real problems we have in this world (and many of those solutions will be facilitated with tech), we need all kinds of people. We need diversity of thought.

If you only have one kind of people on your team by a visible metric, you are likely to have much deeper diversity issues. Just because you have a woman or a person of color on the team doesn't necessarily mean you've solved your diversity problems.

I applaud the Boston folks for their success in their recent workshop. If you think that the language you develop in would be great for anyone/everyone to learn, you should do the same.

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

#48

Post by telecaster »

ultrasaurus12 wrote: post #47

RailsBridge started its open workshop project in mid-2009 with curriculum and processes that are open source and can be used by anyone to teach any group. Sarah Mei and I felt that we could change the ratio simply by teaching more women Ruby on Rails, we would have more women in our community, and we were right. We agreed to make our first workshop open to people with any level of programming experience. (Men could c…

Thank you Sarah and Sarah for starting all this & paving the road for us. The workshop team loved doing it, and we feel very proud be to furthering the mission you gave birth to.

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

#49

Post by icelancer »

jacobian wrote: post #40
icelancer wrote: post #38

At our company, we'd love to add more women developers, and our Chief Architect feels the same way. However, it strikes me as... weird... to focus on it. I don't know. Targeting women for the sake of targeting women has never sat well with me, and though I lack the necessary parts to judge from that side of the aisle, it almost seems patronizing/condescending. Do I want better diversity in our organization? Absolutel…

Before 2003, in the entire history of the NFL there had only been seven minority coaches. That year, the league passed the Rooney Rule ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule ), which required that teams interview at least one minority candidate for coaching positions. Note that it didn't require that teams hire minority candidates — just that they consider them. Today, about a quarter of current coaches are non-w…

Trust me, we interview everyone who passes a phone screen and has a promising resume. It's just that so, so few of them are actually women.

I actively pursued an acquaintance of mine to try and get her to work for us, as she was just graduating from a top engineering undergraduate school and was an actuary. Sadly, she took a position in NYC (understandable).

We're very strict on hiring, so we do interview many candidates for each position that opens up (we have plenty of open positions now that we can't seem to fill).

If we set an interviewing quota, it could literally take us years to hire someone for a mid-level developer position simply because we would get no applicants or no referrals from recruiters that were women. It's just how it is. Very sad.

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

#50

Post by heatherpayne »

vimota wrote: post #4

Reminiscent of LLC: http://ladieslearningcode.com/ I was a mentor for the Ruby class and absolutely loved the experience, students of all backgrounds were so eager to learn and understand programming.

Thanks for sharing, vimota!

- Heather Payne (Founder, Ladies Learning Code)

Post reply on HN