When Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson put out a call to get more women interested in the Web application development framework, he caused a bit of a stir. Now it appears some in the community are moving to bring more women into the Ruby on Rails camp.When Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson put out a call to get
more women interested in Rails, he caused a bit of a stir. Now it appears that
some in the community are attempting to bring more women into the Rails camp.
In a couple of posts in April and May, Hansson asked why there are so few
women coding in Rails. One post in particular, "Alpha
male programmers aren't keeping women out," caused an uproar, and
Hansson followed that one with a post asking, "So
how do we get more women into Rails?"
Well, leave it to Harvard for an answer.
"The Berkman Center
at Harvard University
in coordination with the Center for Research on Computation and Society is
putting together a Ruby
on Rails workshop for women on Oct. 16 and 17," a blurb on the event
posted on the Berkman Center's
Website said. "We are seeking to create an attitude-free, newbie-safe and
mama-friendly tech event to encourage women to join the Ruby on Rails
community. Men are warmly welcomed when they find a woman who wants to learn
Ruby on Rails who will register and bring a guest."
Moreover, to help attract working mothers to the event, the center is
arranging child care for attendees who need it.
A commenter on the Berkman site, identified as Molly Ruggles, said:
"This is a great idea! I'm 60%
sure I could make it and (surprise surprise) the problematic variable is what
would I do with my 9 y.o. daughter."
In a comment on Twitter, Hansson called the Berkman
Center workshop "very
cool."
However, the workshop is not focused on increasing the number of women not
only working in technology and in Rails, but also on open-source projects. The
description of the event continued:
"Women are a minority in most
technical communities, but in open source communities the numbers are even
smallerby a factor of about ten or more. Moving forward, we would like to
encourage our newly empowered programmers to meet monthly and use their skills
towards open source projects in a welcoming, collaborative, mixed gendered
environment."
In a July 25 post about her recent keynote at OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source
Convention), Kirrily
Robert, an open-source developer and community director at Metaweb
Technologies, cited a survey that said only 1.5 percent of open-source
contributors are women. Robert also said:
"In 2007, my survey of the Perl
communityboth contributors to Perl and users of Perlfound about 5% women. The
Drupal community is doing even better, around 10%. And in technical professions
and in computer science in universities, reports vary: it can be anywhere from
10% to 30% depending on who you ask and how they're slicing it. Let's say
20%."
However, Robert went on to list some open-source projects where women are in
the majority, and shared her own tips for getting more women involved.