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That being said, good luck to the OP with getting reasonable responses to this post. If this ends up anything like Twitter, anything other than mindless agreement with certain people appears to cause folks to be hung out to dry.
I may be biased, but I run a conference[1] including a Rails Girls workshop in Berlin and the whole thing just got so much better since we bring new people on board. They are newbies, alright, but hasn't the argument for the IT industry always been on how easy it is to get started, even with a different education?
Imagine a world where computer literacy was taught to girls and boys from grade 1. Where instead of funneling the vast majority of children into football, volleyball and cheerleading we actually spent those resources and time helping them learn a skill that would help them become useful members of society.
I think what's been lost in this argument as of late is that yes, girls aren't encouraged to code, but neither are boys! It was never cool to code. Popular boys and girls (sports related usually) would physically and verbally abuse you for being too into computers from about middle school on up.
For some reason, boys seem more resistant to this abuse and will struggle through it for the love of computers. It shouldn't be that big of a challenge to pick up useful skills but we need to restructure what our society values.
>My wife is a nurse. A female dominated field. I also own a construction company. A male dominated field. In neither field would you see a company or an organization suggest hiring one gender over the other to satisfy a ratio. The only difference between men and women is their physical power. Yes, construction company is a male dominated field, because men are more suitable for doing that kind of job because of their…
Surely you can't be serious.
Just an idea. If you want to write a serious article on the subject of women in tech, no matter what your views are, you're probably better off not putting a "no girls allowed" graphic on top, no matter how "funny" or "ironic" you may think it is.
With a long history of having 30+ speakers at our events, the idea was proposed that we enforce a 1:1 ratio of men and women for our speakers.
Here we go again...
We'll keep going round and round until it gets fixed...
Just an idea. If you want to write a serious article on the subject of women in tech, no matter what your views are, you're probably better off not putting a "no girls allowed" graphic on top, no matter how "funny" or "ironic" you may think it is.
Do you realize that this double standard is harmful for everyone?
When this filter doesn't work, moderator intervention kicks in.
(Incidentally, his rejection of "Women Who Code, PyLadies, Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, etc" of course doesn't mention the benefit of countering the influence of society's goofy system of patriarchy, which teaches people quite dysfunctional behavior.)
With a long history of having 30+ speakers at our events, the idea was proposed that we enforce a 1:1 ratio of men and women for our speakers. Yes, finding 15 qualified women is basically impossible, so why even try? /s
1. Find the 30 best speakers that are available and can speak to a relevant/interesting topic to your event.
2. How many of them are men? How many are women?
3. If there are less than 15 women then it means that whatever metric you used to pick "best" didn't select a 1:1 ratio. Now you have to decide which do you consider more important, your "best" metric or 1:1 gender ratio?
4. If 1:1 gender ratio is more important than best than you have deliberately excluded male candidates for reasons that are fundamentally unfair to them.