…to encourage mixed gender collaboration
October 1st, 2009
So the controversy over whether or not the Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women is sexist has made for an unproductive week. I do have a full time programming job here people! Nevertheless, it’s resulted in some very interesting responses. Check out the conversation on Hacker News.
The focus of the event is to encourage women to participate in open source development. So workshop coordinators made the request that men who wish to attend find a woman to sign up who might not otherwise have considered checking out a tech event. There was never any intention to exclude men from the event, but rather enlist their help in broadening the community.
What happens when you want to encourage mixed gender collaboration but your female friends and family are already annoyed with the amount of time you spend on the computer? And I suppose it’d be rather creepy to troll the highschool for geek girls. What’s a boy to do?
MINSWAN everyone. We’re opening the event up to anyone who would like to attend.
Entry Filed under: Personal, Professional, Ruby on Rails
2 Comments Add your own
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
1. Beth | October 2nd, 2009 at 1:12 pm
This makes me kind of sad. The men calling it sexist were probably right; they were excluded, but not because they were men. Rather, they were excluded because they weren’t willing to support the goal of the workshop enough to do anything to further it.
Hopefully the people who had already registered will still be able to set the tone, and make it clear to anyone who is unsupportive of that tone that they really aren’t welcome, and that it has nothing to do with their gender and everything to do with them.
2. Andrew | November 5th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
I for one am glad to see such workshops being conducted and I applaud you. Ruby on Rails is a terrific thing to learn and shouldn’t be just for the boys. I think we might be a little uneasy about a gal knowing a tad more than us, hey it’s a male thing. Keep up the great work