On 10/16/13 11:13 PM, Owen Jacobson wrote:
3. How can we reach out to the Ruby community and help *them* get past the current crop of gender issues, and help them as a group to do better next time?
The Ruby community seems to be a singular example of "brogrammer" culture: mostly young men, lots of drinking, lots of sex humor, extreme work intensity, arrogant intelligence, and a tendency to view women as people to get laid with, and a distinct lack of experience with working with women as equals or superiors. It's frat life transplanted to startup culture. I have no idea why this seems so endemic in the Ruby community; it probably has something to do with the huge popularity of Rails and the resurgence of tech startups over the past several years: both have created a "gold rush" environment that has attracted huge numbers of young programmers with technical chops but who are shockingly undeveloped in other ways. It's immature men meeting an immature business environment (i.e., a startup) without procedures in place to set an appropriate tone. Such behavior in most other fields would get them fired so fast it would make their heads spin, if not getting them drummed out of the field altogether.
I suspect that Python doesn't have these problems because it's an older, more established language, and the community is comprised of older and more mature individuals who have outgrown such shenanigans, or never embraced them in the first place. Python has grown steadily but never had the boom that Ruby on Rails had. I'm sure the Python community has its issues with institutionalized sexism, not least because computer fields in general have so few women, but I have seen no evidence of the overt, sexist hostility that pervades "brogrammer" culture.
As to what the Python community can do, I'm not sure what, apart from calling out the idiot "brogrammers" who perpetuate such hostility to women, and refusing to associate with it. The real opportunity to address this lies with the startup founders and executives who tolerate this kind of behavior, and don't send its perpetuators packing. Losing a job because you're a sexist jerk might get you thinking about the importance of treating all people with respect. If you're a startup founder who tolerates such behavior because you're afraid of losing your developers to other companies, then you're a coward; and if you simply don't see a problem with such behavior or deny that it exists, then you are worse than a coward, and you are worse than a jerk.
Let me reiterate: the overt sexism and hostility toward women that emanates from "brogrammer" culture is shocking to anyone who works in a more established field with a better balance between men and women. I've worked in marketing, editing, technical writing, and development, and at no place I have ever worked would such behavior be greeted with anything but immediate termination. Even the software startup I worked at did not have such issues; while the developers were all men, the company was founded by a husband-and-wife team, and the women who worked there (in technical writing and sales support) were treated with respect, because the founder would not tolerate anything else.
It would be great to see more leaders at big tech companies speak out against such garbage. What impact would it have if Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Meyer, and others say, "If you do that crap here, you won't be here"? Or what if venture capitalists said, "We won't fund you if you don't provide an equitable work environment that puts jerks out on their rear end." Nothing short of some hard, painful experience is likely to have a large-scale change on the sexist culture that pervades so much of tech.
A bit off-topic perhaps, for which I apologize, but I've been following the whole "sexism in tech" subject with increasing disgust and dismay, and I wanted to strongly protest against it.
--Kevin -- Kevin Walzer Code by Kevin/Mobile Code by Kevin http://www.codebykevin.com http://www.wtmobilesoftware.com -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
