Sarah Allen

Thanks for addressing this head-on and in a professional way. Nothing you said was particularly offensive. Sex sells, and that is a part of life.

Do I think that you're a misogynist? No. Nothing you did was even remotely as offensive as the CouchDB talk at GoGaRuCo last year.

As a result of the hoopla around that talk, Martin Fowler wrote a fantastic piece that discusses the interaction of gender, programming, professionalism and humor here: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html I highly recommend you give it a read.

It's one thing to make a comment about sex selling, it is another to make it a theme to talk about how you can see that visitors are spending a lot of time looking at the woman's breasts. Once again, I don't think that your approach was overtly offensive, but there is some great writing that the GoGaRuCo incident inspired. Articulate and measured (as usual,) Sarah Allen's post talks about the difference between a comment and a theme: http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-at-gogaruco/

My thoughts about feminism changed in college when I went to gay clubs and was aggressively pursued for the first time. It was weird to think that I had to be on the defense against people's advances and question their reasons for having an interest in me -- that's an experience that many men in our society never have. I can't claim to understand the struggles of feminism, but I do put more thought into how I approach women that I may be…

We don't cause a fuss just when the proportion is not exactly right. We cause a fuss when the proportion is way out of whack and obviously wrong. When like less than 3 percent of Boston Ruby programmers are women, something is blatantly wrong. There are probably more factors at work than mere spontaneous career preference that are causing this seriously skewed distribution.

This is not just an abstract inconvenience either. Whenever you are part of a historically marginalized minority -- whether by color, gender, or nationality -- it will likely be more uncomfortable for you to enter fields where you are the only person from your group. This is particularly true for women.

Not only are sexist comments more likely when there are not a lot of women at events (see http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-at-gogaruco/), the women will also likely feel more uncomfortable because of the disproportion. Let me quote a posting on our outreach mailing list thread from a woman to elaborate:

"I have definitely never experienced anything threatening or offensive at a Ruby group meeting. But, you show up at an event where there are 50 men or more to 3 women, and you grow to expect some double-takes. Some women, like me, are okay with that. A lot aren't. And it makes it hard to show up alone or when you don't know anyone if you know you're going to stick out like a sore thumb. A man can show up at boston.rb for the first time and not have anyone pay the least…

This person meant to insult me. There is really no positive spin you can make on that comment. I didn't bring up feminism, nor did I make anything like a claim that men and women are biologically identical. He made up some things, and then he painted me as a member of some bizarre cult. If he revisits this thread, it will likely be to insult me again. Perhaps he will not. That would be nice.

And you may not have meant your comment here to be dismissive and condescending, but you are basically telling me that this is all in my head, and I should be quiet. I counter that I am far from the only woman with this opinion, and you have not paid close attention (because why would you? you aren't a woman, this doesn't generally affect you).

In any case, this is not the place to debate that topic. I spoke up, and I got insulted for it, but it's all good. If you are truly interested in learning more, please refer to the following links, and feel free to contact me by email if you have questions. Otherwise, enjoy your day.

Recent issue at a Rails conference:
http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-at-gogaruco/

A PDF of slides about women in FOSS you may find interesting: http://valerieaurora.org/review/flosspols.pdf

The usual story (as told in Nathan Ensmenger's "The Computer Boys Take Over") has the change earlier than that. He says in the late 1940s to early 1950s lots of women were hired for "coding" positions, which at the time was seen as a a fairly unskilled, clerical work. In the 1950s, the division between high-level "programmers" and route "coders" disappeared, leaving just programmer-coders who did both, and as a result there was quite a few female programmers. Then in the 1960s the computer industry grew dramatically, but at the same time the image of what a programmer was, and what kind of characteristics made you a good programmer, also shifted a lot, and by the end of the 1960s it had become a very male field.

The personal computer revolution is usually mentioned in connection with a different trend. Throughout the 70s the proportion of female computer science majors was steadily climbing, then somewhere around 1984 this trend broke [1]. It's often said that this has something to do with video games becoming popular toys.

[1] https://www.ultrasaurus.com/2008/11/declining-number-of-women-studying-computer-science/

All I know about this is what I learned from Giles Bowkett:

http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-at-gogaruco/#comment-555

who sounds dead-on correct to me:

I put huge slides with four-letter words on the screen when I give presentations, but it never makes anybody feel uncomfortable. But that’s because there’s an art to these things, and I know every time I do it that I might go too far and have to eat my pride and apologize. You did it wrong. The fact that anybody blogged about it means you did it wrong. So you have to just accept that and be a man about it instead of arguing with her. If a woman tells you that putting giant sexually suggestive images in front of her made her uncomfortable, you don’t get to bicker about that.

It's not so much that the Rails community has a particularly unusual problem with women. It's that, when one tone-deaf guy lights a match at a Rails conference, apparently nobody knows how to put out the fire before it burns down the community. It's a shame.

Wow -- go read the presentation (available http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-at-gogaruco/ ). The kindest thing that can be said about Matt Aimonetti is he simply has no class. Or, apparently, a grownup relationship with women.

I was going to criticize the blog hugothefrog linked to for indicting the whole Ruby community because of one asshole, but then I thought about it a little more and really? Nobody organizing the conference looked at his title and said hold on a minute? Or asked to vet the slides beforehand? Or in the audience stood up and said, "Matt, you're an asshole."

This might have been funny in 6th grade. Now it's incredibly tasteless and probably actionable.