Here’s some of the feedback received:

So cool that folks travelled to Boston from as far away as PA to attend Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women!!

…it makes a huge difference to be able to ask someone stupid ?s.

I like being able to say that I deployed my first Rails application today before lunchtime like running a half marathon.

Totally impressed with the amount of Ruby and Rails info the students absorbed.

I want to thank the teaching assistants at #rorw4w. You were never judgmental and always patient.

You know what’s a lot of fun? TAing at #rorw4w.

It was indeed entirely attitude-free, as promised – unique in my experience! I appreciated that so much, and I had a lot of fun, as well.

I was truly impressed with the number of ror rockstars in the Boston community who were willing to give up their weekend to help some newbies.  I have a new mantra:  MINSBRAN – Matz Is Nice So Boston Rubyists Are Nice.  I will never fear going to another boston.rb or hackfest event again.

Sarah mentions all the awesome volunteers by name in her blog post, so here I’ll thank Berkman folk for their support in making this happen: Urs Gasser, Colin Maclay, Amar Ashar, Carey Andersen, Seth Young, Catherine Bracy, Jason Callina, Brandon Palmen, Dharmishta Rood, Daniel Jones, and the Gender and Technology committee.  I should also thank our CRCS supporters, Margo Seltzer and Salil Vadhan.

Tonight we gather again at the Open Source Code Crunch event at the Berkman Center. This is going to be a monthly event promoting mixed gender collaboration. Programmers will meet monthly and use their skills towards open source projects in a welcoming, collaborative, attitude-free, newbie-safe environment.  Looking forward to it.

I would like to personally thank all of our generous sponsors who are making this weekend’s Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women possible. Thanks to them, attendees needn’t leave the workshop in search of coffee and food. But more importantly, we will be webcasting the event live! More details here.

While all our sponsors were enthusiastic about contributing towards childcare costs, Julia Ashmun was our sole individual contributor earmarking her donation to waive referral fees for attendees in need of sitter services.

Our first sponsor Hashrocket has got to be one of the coolest dev shops on the planet. (I am such a fangirl!)  If only because Desi Mcadam works there, founder of DevChix. Thanks for all your support, Desi!

Congratulations to EngineYard who just raised 19 Million with new investors. Nice to hear good karma coming back to good people.

We also send thanks to GitHub, the most popular Git hosting site. Brought to you by Logical Awesome. Don’t you just love that name?

And lastly we are grateful to RailsBridge for inspiring these workshops and reaching out to individuals and groups who are underrepresented in the community.

Thanks so much!! Can’t wait to meet everyone tonight!

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.

The majority of the response to the Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women has been encouraging and supportive.  EvenDHH himself tweeted about it:

Rails workshop for women at Harvard University on October 16-17:http://bit.ly/2pglhW — very cool!

Folks are really excited about it.  In fact, response is so great that I am seeking a larger venue for the THIRD time.

One of the reasons I love Ruby on Rails is because of its community. One of its treasured tennants is MINSWAN (Matz is nice, so we are nice).  This is what working in Open Source is all about.

I’m proud to say that many of the local ror rockstars will be at the workshop to TA.  And many of them are interested in pairing up with newbies of all genders at the monthly open source events we plan to host.  Why?  Because they believe that reaching out to folks who are underrepresented in the community produces better code.  And who doesn’t love better code?

You gotta be nice to be a real ror rockstar.  And there are a lot of nice people of all genders involved in this event.

Thanks so much for organizing the workshop. I hope to attend. I love the idea, think these workshops are necessary, and would love to help out in the future if you need.

Personally, however, I do feel that the following, “Men are warmly welcomed when they find a woman who wants to learn Ruby on Rails who will register and bring a guest.” is exclusionist.

I have been in scientific software development for many years. I am also a wife and a mother of two. I agree full-heartedly that women in technology and certain areas of science face many struggles, discrimination, and blatant sexism. We might bridge the gap better though with more welcoming attempts that seek to include, but educate men in our struggles. We can’t do this though if they cannot join our events – outright. Perhaps in the future, you could just sell the event as simply women-in-technology focused, but leave the door open for men as well?

I understand the need, but the registration restriction is illegal:

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance…”

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972

Folks, I do not consider this workshop to be exclusionary especially considering that the current ratio of women to men is 2:1.

The point of the event is to encourage women developers. So the caveat that a man is asked to encourage a woman to sign him up as her guest feels entirely appropriate.

Besides, there are many many other tech events that are primarily male driven. And sadly many of these events do tend to be exclusionary to women through subtle competitive atmospheres and in some cases not so subtle sexist comments. Just check out the geekfeminism wiki regarding recent tech events for more notable examples.

Starting in November, we will be having a regular Wednesday evening event pairing newbies with ruby on rails rockstars to work on open source projects in a welcoming, collaborative, mixed gendered environment. (Meaning that men are very welcome to attend on their own.) The idea is to encourage learning rather than the competitiveness found in other tech events. And “educate men in our struggles” by working alongside them.

No. I will not rescind the “come as a guest” request for this ONE event. It is my understanding that making a “request” is entirely legal.

p.s. Boston ruby group is a lovely group of people and I do not include them as part of the exclusionary tech events referred to above.

How can it not be exclusionary when you advertise that a man is only allowed to attend if accompanied by a woman, but a lone women is fine?

It most certainly IS illegal, even just to advertise it in that way.
Consult a lawyer unless you wish to risk Harvard losing federal funding:

Title IX is administered by the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education (OCR).[3] It applies to an entire school or institution if any part of that school receives federal funds; hence, athletic programs are subject to Title IX, even though there is very little direct federal funding of school sports.[4] The regulations implementing Title IX require all institutions receiving federal funds to conduct self-evaluations of whether they offer equal opportunities based on sex[5] and to provide written assurances to the Dept. of Education that the institution is in compliance for the period that the federally funded equipment or facilities remain in use.

The intention is admirable, but the implementation is legally flawed.
Just because it “feels entirely appropriate” doesn’t make it legal!

I appreciate you pointing the legalities of the event. I’ve contacted our clinical office to confirm.

But I won’t allow you to ignore the more important part of my message regarding the exclusionary tactics of other “open” tech events.

Rather than welcoming men as guests, perhaps we should simply make sexist comments and harass them into not attending. Apparently, that must be completely legal since it happens regularly.

This evening, the announcement was sent out via the internal Harvard ABCD group list which emails all the techies working at Harvard. And I have to admit to being flabbergasted at the following responses sent to the entire ABCD community:

This is blatant sexual discrimination. Are women considered too fragile to learn technical subjects in the same group as men?

For whatever it’s worth I think XXXX is right.
Can you imagine the reaction if there was a technical conference for men only – and a women could only attend as the guest of a man?
There are far too many grants/scholarships/opportunities that are explicitly only open to women or minorities (I’m a minority and it still bothers me). A hypothesis of implicit discrimination against group A does not justify explicit discrimination against group B.

This women’s Ruby workshop exists for the same reason this men’s knitting retreat exists  http://www.menwhoknit.com/community/?q=n…). I have never heard a woman knitter complain about a men’s knitting class.

Well, to be fair, I think a male-only knitting group is just as bad an idea as the women-only RoR workshop

This was my response:

If anyone has concerns about this workshop, please email me directly as I am the coordinator.
But I feel that I must add that for those of you who don’t understand the need for this sort of workshop, you might want to read this keynote talk by Kirrily Robert.

A lot of people, still just don’t get it.  Folks don’t want to believe that there are still sexist jokes, pornographic presentations at conferences, harrassment, and all kinds of subtle discrimination going on in the tech community every day.  And the only way to combat it, is to encourage mixed gendered environments so that both sexes can learn from one another.

This workshop happens to be very male friendly.  At present, the women to men ratio is 2:1.  If you can’t find a mother, sister, daughter, friend or stranger to sign up with you for this class, then you have more problems than a one day programming course is gonna fix.

It’s 50% friend-finder, 30% social cityguide, 20% nightlife game. Nightlife, for a Geek Mama? Ha! Still, seems like the type of online gaming I could get into since the time investment is equivalent to posting a tweet.

Foursquare is a location-based social network where you periodically update your location via your smartphone to gain points. The app rewards you for checking in whenever you arrive at a new location. It’s surprisingly competitive since you can receive badges for special achievements like being the ‘mayor’ of a certain place (the player who has checked in from this location more often than anybody else).

Are you playing?

I’ve always worked very closely with my colleagues, and I’ve always wanted to try pair programming. After reading Obie’s article I start to understand why I haven’t had much success pushing this idea with employers. But as I was reading, I was reminded about how awesome the concept truly is.

This October, I’m putting together an event at the Berkman Center. I’m working with the RailsBridge folks to create a free ruby on rails one day bootcamp for women to encourage women developers.

Going forward, I was hoping to bring these women together monthly to contribute to open source because I was inspired by a brilliant keynote talk by Kirrily Robert.  And I’m thinking about encouraging our newbies to pair with experienced programmers.

I can’t think of a better way to get up to speed quickly than mentoring in this way. While I can’t invest in the right hardware, I figure there’s still a lot to be gained from working on one laptop for an hour.

Are there any other events in Boston where folks pair?  How easy it is for a newbie to jump in and join in the fun at these local hackfests? Since I’ve been in maternity land for the last two years, I haven’t had the opportunity to get involved with the Boston rb community as much as I’d like.

Anyone got any insight into the local Boston events? Anyone pair program in their current work environment?

Grahame-Smith began with the original text of Austen’s novel, adding zombie and ninja elements. But what bothers me about his fan-fic rendition is that he rewrote large sections of the plot. To me, it would have been infinitely more fun to have found the zombie elements within the orginal text.

Instead, we have the Wickham plotline completely changed and savage beatings that seem out of character. I guess that it was supposed to be funny that Darcy beat Wickham into a bowel-releasing mess. But it made me pity Wickham and that’s just so wrong.

And while I enjoyed the idea of the ninja fight between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth, it was kind of two short to be fun. I wanted more. How about her daughter, Anne, versus Jane?

I also was troubled by the Mr. Collins and Charlotte Lucas storyline. Sure it made sense that the only inducement to marry Mr. Collins would be being infected by the zombie plague, but it was odd that he chose suicide after Charlotte’s beheading. It made me mourn the character rather than laugh as the original text intended.

In addition, I expected a huge zombie attack at the end to be vanquished by the newly engaged Darcy’s that never came. Why not save all of England in addition to improving its most cherished novels?

So, it was a cute idea that was poorly executed. Still, I find myself looking forward to the next published fan fic novel, Mr Darcy, Vampyre. Call me a sucker for the blood suckers.

Now I live in Boston. I waste productive time driving to work instead of taking the train. And since I’m a mother, my free time is no longer my own.  So an iphone hasn’t been a necessity.  But now at last, there is a reason to satisfy my inner geek with a smart phone.

Baby Brain to the rescue.  Rather than tracking my baby’s daily poops and eating habits on notepad… or god forbid, pad and paper, this cute little iphone app helps new moms keep a log of their child’s vitals.  This info is easily shared with caregivers and doctors as well.

God, I love technology!