

New Rails workshops to bring more women into the Boston software scene - telecaster
http://www.railsbridgeboston.org/blog/2012_aug_recap

======
johnleppings
I don't understand why the gender of a programmer is relevant to anything. You
are concerned that there are no enough women. Why? Why do you want more women?
Why is the particular sexual organs that someone has of interest to you?

~~~
jacobian
Well, I could talk about social justice and basic fairness, but the tone of
your question implies that you don't see it that way. So instead, let's look
at the question from a coldly calculating point of view.

Let's say I have a open source project, and it's got 100 contributors (or
community members, users, whatever -- the it's all the same). If my project
follows today's averages, that group will be on the order of 98 men and 2
women. Let's say we work to increase our diversity such that now 50% of our
community are women. How big is the community now?

That's right -- 200 people. It's not like adding 50% women _removes_ 50%
men... if we increase the number of women in our community, we increase the
number of _people_. Now I've got twice as many contributors, twice as many
users, twice as much activity, etc. Open source projects live and die on the
strength of their communities. Increasing diversity is often actually the
easiest way to increase membership, full stop.

[Now, in practice, _I_ work on diversity because _I_ care about basic
fairness. But the point is that even if you don't give a shit about those
sorts of ideals, there are _still_ coldly calculating economy-of-scale
arguments for why diversity is important.]

~~~
typicalrunt
_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't because IT IS NOT
IMPORTANT. Just to counter any downvotes, when I say it isn't important, I
mean the gender debate, not women in general. For some reason, this topic has
been rehashed so many times on HN and each time someone tries to look at the
argument from a gender-less perspective, people like you -- jacobian -- jump
out from the bushes to make statements, charging dissenters with misogyny.

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].

~~~
king_jester
> 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 important. If projects are systematically excluding
people of certain races or religions, we have a discrimination problem.

> For some reason, this topic has been rehashed so many times on HN and each
> time someone tries to look at the argument from a gender-less perspective,
> people like you -- jacobian -- jump out from the bushes to make statements,
> charging dissenters with misogyny.

Nobody called anyone a misogynist in this discussion.

> 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].

This is absolutely true. However, why there aren't more women in tech isn't
just about project maintainers. Women in general are not going into or are
finding spaces in which they can participate as developers and programmers.
This is the whole point of this particular RailsBridge workshop.

~~~
typicalrunt
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]

~~~
jacobian
> 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.

------
shimon
This is an important effort with a powerful effect on the Boston tech scene.
This and similar outreach efforts (like the Python workshops) have increased
diversity not just in the Python and Ruby groups, but more broadly in all tech
groups. This was most noticeable at BarCamp Boston 2012, which had a lot more
women participants than the previous 6 years. It's great to know that the tech
community can be welcoming to all sorts of people.

~~~
telecaster
Boston Python really led on the diversity outreach front in 2012, and now we
(the Boston Ruby community) are very gratefully following their lead. Boston
Python is so awesome.

------
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.

~~~
telecaster
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.

------
zampano
I've heard murmurs of a RailsGirls workshop here in Austin and I know a few of
my female friends were very interested in attending when I talked to them
about it. I think it's great to try to get more women involved in the
industry, and while Rails is complicated enough that you can nearly guarantee
most people won't walk away with any true understanding of programming, I
think workshops like this can help undo some of the negative
misconceptions/stereotypes that surround the programming community. Just like
the misconception that "math is hard and/or useless" is under assault, I hope
the idea that programming is only done by "geniuses" or "ultra-nerds" can be
broken and the barriers for entry and for learning are broken down for the
benefit of us all.

I am also a little reminded of my first forays into learning Rails with no
prior programming experience. I think one of the biggest turning points for me
was when I realized the concepts for massive services like twitter were not
only understood by crazy math ph.d geniuses untouchable by the common man. It
is really empowering to realize you can create real software that can actually
do things people need without decades of experience under your belt. I think
workshops like this and RailsGirls which have you create an actual (albeit
simple) application are great for just that reason.

------
vimota
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.

~~~
kookster
It's a wonderful thing. Folks should make this happen everywhere, in whatever
language. It also was a great experience to help out with the event.

In Boston there was a python workshop for women which provided much
inspiration for this Ruby one: <http://bostonpythonworkshop.com/>

There was a similar event some years ago also sponsored by the Berkman Center,
with some TAs participating in both:
[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/genderandtech/2009/10/20/post-w...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/genderandtech/2009/10/20/post-
workshop-news/)

And then there is the Ada Initiative, which I think is fantastic:
<http://adainitiative.org/>

------
icelancer
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? Absolutely. Have most of the
women coders I've worked with been above-average? Indeed - actually, now that
I think about it, women overall have been better co-workers and employees.

But targeting them directly seems strange, and like I said,
patronizing/condescending. I dunno. A weird duality that maybe only exists in
my mind.

~~~
jacobian
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-white. The Rooney Rule
took the league from seven — total, all time — to 25% — right now — in a
decade.

In my mind, the Rooney Rule is a good policy to model after. Strict
affirmative action is complicated, controversial, and... yeah, I'd feel
"weird" just like you implementing hiring quotas. But an _interviewing_ quota
(or just a rough goal) seems perfectly legit.

The key is to focus on _interviewing_ more women, not _hiring_ more women. Do
your best to get more women into the top of your hiring funnel, and you'll
likely see more women come out the bottom. And you'll have a wider pool
(because this'll force you to interview more candidates, total), which you'll
have a better chance that whoever you hire — man or woman — will be awesome.

~~~
icelancer
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.

~~~
jacobian
Well, part of that I'd just file under "hiring is hard" (right now, at least).

I do think you need to start further up in your hiring funnel than the phone
screen: were I in your shoes, I'd be trying to get more minorities to submit
resumes in the first place. One of the problems identified by those studying
diversity in tech is a self-selection bias: minorities, and women especially,
seem to send out fewer resumes and less ambitious about the positions they
apply to. Perhaps consider reaching out to groups like RailsBridge, Python
Boston, PyLadies, Ladies Learning Code, etc., and letting them know you're
hiring and want to talk to candidates from their communities? Drop me an email
(and let me know where you're located) if you'd like me to try to help make
you some connections.

Re-reading the above, I'm hoping it doesn't come across as critical; it's
clear you're taking this very seriously, and that's awesome. Just hoping I can
help more!

~~~
icelancer
Hmm, the idea of reaching out to women-oriented groups sounds promising. Our
Chief Architect has made it very clear he wants to interview (and hopefully
hire) more women. As for minorities, we probably need more white people, if
anything! (Not uncommon in software development / data science, I'd guess -
I'm a minority.)

There's a local hackerspace that has women groups, I think. I'll start there.
Thanks for the advice!

------
danso
> _A good percentage of the attendees had some exposure to HTML/CSS and
> several had experience in PHP, Java, C and Python. Two of our students had
> worked as developers for mainframe computers, writing PL/I and IBM
> assembler._

Cool initiative and I'm all for introducing more programming to everyone...but
I wonder whether Rails is the best way to do it. There are many, many moving
parts, least of which is the concept of MVC and then the interaction between
each part of MVC...nevermind, for those who just know only HTML and CSS, the
fundamentals of programming (variables, the difference between "1" and 1,
loops, etc), and even how to use the command line.

~~~
telecaster
I share those concerns & agree that MVC is a lot to swallow in an introductory
workshop. But it's also very motivating! A lot of people want to build real
websites instead of toy programs. We're trying to harness that awesome source
of motivation & it seems to be working despite the drawbacks.

~~~
danso
Yeah, it's a difficult line to walk between teaching what is comprehensible
and enabling people, with magic, to do something concrete, even if they know
nothing about how anything works. The former bores people because it's too
abstract, and the latter...well, I feel there's the risk that when there's too
much magic involved, the students feel as if being a "wizard" is an inherent
trait, rather than something you eventually build towards after plugging away
at the fundamentals.

I've toyed with teaching a workshop that entails: teach enough programming to
turn a non-flat-file dataset (maybe a json of their tweets) into a decent
visualization (by plugging into Google Charts, perhaps) and uploading a static
page, with Twitter Bootstrap, onto a free hosting service, or even a blog
service such as Wordpress.

But even that is a lot to teach in a day:

1\. Command line and file system basics 2\. Fundamentals of programming
(enough to open a JSON file, parse and aggregate it on some conditions, and
spit out HTML) 3\. Basic HTML and DOM, including what you need to know to 4\.
Basic webserver/uploading stuff

Most workshops struggle with getting 3 and 4 done. #2 is not easily achievable
over even several days.

