How I Stopped Worrying and Started Loving PyLadies

http://hynek.me/articles/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-started-loving-pyladies/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hynek+%28Hynek%27s+scribbles%29

by craigkerstiens • 14 years ago

46 47 14 years ago

hynek.me

goodside2• 14 years ago

"So first of all, let’s get one thing out of the way: Diversity is good for a community.

"If we can’t agree on this fact, the rest of the article is futile. There are many studies that support this point and if you’re not convinced, this article isn’t for you."

I'll bite: What real-world measure of goodness (that isn't tautologically identical to diversity) has been shown to increase as a function of an open-source community's diversity, whether gender, racial, or otherwise? I'm very skeptical there is strong enough evidence on this point to justify dismissing the question as quickly as you have. Honestly, I'd be surprised if the total number of studies on gender balance in open-source projects was higher than single digits.

sp3322• 14 years ago

A tiny bit of Googling would answer this for you. There are several studies showing that diverse groups are much (much much) better at problem-solving than homogenous groups. e.g. http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full

Also, having more diverse groups of open-source developers makes it more likely that the product will appeal to more end-users, and also attract more developers :)

krakensden2• 14 years ago

I'm doubtful the link actually shows what you think it shows. Besides, it takes "identity diverse means functionally diverse" as a given, while the parent is asking if that is true.

roguelynn3• 14 years ago

"We have created this diversity statement because we believe that a diverse Python community is stronger and more vibrant. A diverse community where people treat each other with respect has more potential contributors and more sources for ideas."

Source: http://www.python.org/community/diversity/

Universal Design, the idea that produces "buildings, products and environments that are inherently accessible to both people without disabilities and people with disabilities" is the same idea when in the context of diversity in programming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design

Think about it, if Apple had a woman's input, do you think it'd be named iPad?!? For f*ck sake, it's the most ridiculous name ever, reminding half the population of the embarrassing trip to the drug store.

Plenty more on Diversity just within Python: http://wiki.python.org/moin/DiversityInPython

jff• 14 years ago

> Think about it, if Apple had a woman's input, do you think it'd be named iPad?!? For f*ck sake, it's the most ridiculous name ever, reminding half the population of the embarrassing trip to the drug store.

I'm sorry, what? Do women get "embarrassing reminders" every time they pick up a note PAD, or use PADmapper, or discover that someone has PADded their resume?

jmduke• 14 years ago

I'm not criticizing your broader point, but I'd love to see your source that the entire marketing department at Apple is male.

goodside2• 14 years ago

These are all policy statements and intuition-based speculations. I don't doubt for an instant that many people have speculated about why diversity might be good for software. What I doubt the existence of are empirical studies showing that diversity benefits open-source software in some measurable way. The original article seemed to be under the impression that such studies are common, and that their interpretation is so thoroughly beyond dispute that the point needn't be considered further.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

I have never understood why buying tampons or pads was considered embarrassing, for either men or women. It's like being embarrassed because you're buying toilet paper, or kleenex, or condoms, or bandaids.

Maybe it's awkward when you're a teenager, but once you're an adult?

batista4• 14 years ago

>Think about it, if Apple had a woman's input, do you think it'd be named iPad?!? For fck sake, it's the most ridiculous name ever, reminding half the population of the embarrassing trip to the drug store.*

Really? Because women in the eighties for example didn't seem to have any problems with, say, shoulder-pads, on the contrary, they were VERY popular.

That lame argument was played a lot in some news sites when the thing was introduced. It died in like 1-2 weeks, as 99.9% of the people don't make the BS mental connection between the two things.

Not to mention there isn't much of a connection in the first place. Not much more than notepads, shoulder-pads, launchpads, trackpads or touchpads have...

Plus, wasn't one of the most popular laptop brands the ThinkPad from IBM?

(Oh, and that said, it's only "half the population" of US (and/or UK). In Europe, L.America, Africa or Asia the name doesn't not mean anything at all).

waterhouse2• 14 years ago

I think this is intended as a general fact--I'm inclined to say "theorem"--about communities, and there was not much of a notion that you would need specific information about a particular community to say that the fact applied to it. Anyway...

One advantage of diversity is automatic specialization. Different people have somewhat different strengths and problems, and they develop different skills that are best in either leveraging their strengths or solving their problems.

This has the specific benefit that if some threat to everyone in the community suddenly becomes much worse, then (in a diverse community) there will probably be some people who are already specializing in solving that problem, because they or their friends (employers, customers, whatever) suffered from that problem in the past.

To take the case of a community that does open-source programming: If, suddenly, a lot of people start caring deeply about performance, it would be a good thing if there already were a couple of people who had figured out techniques to increase performance. Those people might be people trying to run a large business on a low budget, people who hate or suck at multi-threading and worked hard at making primitive operations go faster, people who hate low-level stuff and worked hard at learning to parallelize tasks, and so on. All of these people would have specialized skills that would now become valuable to the community, which could now pick up those skills more quickly and with less pain than if no one had those skills and they had to invent them from scratch.

pnathan• 14 years ago

When a group is more gender-equal, in my experience, it's more polite.

ajross• 14 years ago

I'll bite too: state that theorem as its inverse and dare to argue for it: Demographic uniformity is a good thing.

"Lack of diversity" means that people are excluded from a community, either actively or passively. That's a "bad thing" pretty much by definition. You're thinking about the metric ("how many women?"), while the author is thinking about the mechnism implied ("something is keeping women out").

The former is data, and I guess you can argue that it's neither bad nor good. But surely you agree that the latter is bad, right? If there were something keeping women out of the community, you'd want to fix it. Right?

streptomycin• 14 years ago

> "Lack of diversity" means that people are excluded from a community, either actively or passively. That's a "bad thing" pretty much by definition.

Why?

lmm2• 14 years ago

>I'll bite too: state that theorem as its inverse and dare to argue for it: Demographic uniformity is a good thing.

Ok, I'll dare: per the mythical man month, the biggest factor limiting the success of programming teams is communication. A demographicly uniform team can communicate more effectively with each other (due to having a larger shared vocabulary of common experiences) and this reduced communication overhead greatly increases their productivity.

>If there were something keeping women out of the community, you'd want to fix it. Right?

This metrics vs. data thing is precisely why hearing people go on about the lack of women in programming makes me nervous. It reminds me of my manager going on about how our unit test coverage is only 60% and why isn't it 70%; if you define low test coverage as the problem rather than the symptom, we could easily write some terrible tests that would increase the coverage but make our codebase worse.

So likewise, if you start thinking about "only 4% of open source developers are women" as a problem /in itself/, it's very easy to jump from there to doing something that increases the number of women in open source, while actually making things worse (e.g. "let's offer a load of bursaries for female CS undergrads to work on open source projects"; quick, easy, increases that percentage, but could quite possibly backfire by giving women in open source a reputation for low-quality code - and more to the point, does absolutely nothing to address whatever actual problem you're referring to)

batista4• 14 years ago

>I'll bite too: state that theorem as its inverse and dare to argue for it: Demographic uniformity is a good thing.

Well, if you have it, demographic uniformity is a good thing indeed. If anything it translates to less racial tension, more intra-community trust etc.

That doesn't mean that it's good to expel people, minorities etc, to achieve it if you don't have it. But if you do have it it's translates to fewer problems along the way. In the end, you either struggle FOR integration (ie towards "demographic uniformity") or different groups struggle to exclude the others (ie towards "demographic uniformity" again, but in their favor).

Just ask any African country that has been plagued by different ethnicities and cultures into war for power / control...

lolcatstevens3• 14 years ago

Typed like a rich white guy. There's a real barrier in our profession -- how many women are in your office? How many black people? -- and why do you think that is? How comfortable do you think your workplace is to a minority or woman? So how are we to study the effect of minorities on open-source when minorities don't want to work in open-source. It's not the money that's holding them back.

Real-world measure of goodness? Come on man. Do you hang out with women are colored folk or folks who came up differently than you did? It's nice, right? It's interesting to hear other folks's points of views, right? Maybe you even rethink some things you took for granted.

Have you never been around brogrammers? Have you never seen a group of dudes spiral into 4chan?

This is common sense, yes. Being a person and interacting with people is my real world measure of goodness.

batista4• 14 years ago

>how many women are in your office?

Speaking for my previous company: 3, for a 12 strong team.

>How many black people?

>-- and why do you think that is?*

For black people it's because my country never sent slave merchants to bring black people to work here as slaves, so we haven't artificially built a black population like you did.

For women it's because we never get any competent candidates to hire, if we ever even are approached from a woman applicant.

Mid-nineties, in my university for CS, women were 1/6 to men. In the Math and Applied Math departments it was 1/1. In biology and medicine it was 2/1. In Literature it was 3/1.

And, no, it wasn't about "geeks" being sexist, and that BS.

The notion of the "computer geek" wasn't even known at the time, the jobs most of us expected to work were normal office jobs alongside other office workers, and all the students in the campus (from all departments) were more or less the same (kids just out of high school). Women just weren't interested enough to put CS in their application forms for college.

So there you have it.

ajdecon• 14 years ago

Honestly, I'd be surprised if the total number of studies on gender balance in open-source projects was higher than single digits.

This is probably true, because open-source development doesn't seem to be a well-studied phenomenon in social science; but the effects of diversity on group dynamics in general have been studied extensively. While you may disagree, I'm willing to make the provisional assumption that working and personal relationships among open-source developers are not substantially different from groups which are more commonly studied.

(I currently don't have much in the way of academic access, but a few Google Scholar searches and reading some abstracts will at least reveal a large volume of research on these topics. i.e., http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=group+diversity+positive...)

More interesting, I think, is the idea that there must be some "real-world measure of goodness" (market share? lines of code?) which is improved by diversity, in order for pursuing diversity to be worthwhile. I'd be willing to argue that even if better diversity led to a persistent decrease in technical quality, it would be worthwhile in terms of positive external effects on society. While "low barriers to entry for all demographic groups" might not be an advantage to the group looking for developers, it could benefit society in the same ways as wheelchair ramps, good employee working conditions, regulation of animal medical testing, and other things we encourage in spite of their cost.

In other words -- diversity and fairness can be valued for their own sake, just as much as code quality is a value.

(I actually don't think increased diversity would have any negative effects on technical quality, in the long term: instead I'd expect a null effect or a slight positive. I wouldn't be surprised by a short-term negative blip as potentially-biased education and training learns to cope with different people, but I don't see that as a real barrier given the societal positives.)

edit for grammar

jps359• 14 years ago

Honestly, I didn't gain anything from reading this. The PyLadies announcement is awesome and it really doesn't take a big writeup to understand why.

roguelynn3• 14 years ago

yet some still need to read it.

KirinDave• 14 years ago

To anyone who's devoted a reasonable amount of thought to the subject, it should be obvious that it is a Good Thing.

However, this crowd is full of entitled young men who don't like the implication that they somehow had any advantage or are (accidentally or purposefully) discouraging anyone from doing anything. I have literally heard this argument leveled as I tried to explain this to one such rich young white male, "I don't see why women need any [extra consideration] in our community. Nothing stops them from going to school then getting a job, just like I did. ... I never saw a no-girls-allowed sign on the door."

Outrageous, isn't it? The response to the declaration of a problem is to deny the problem exists because it is still strictly possible for a woman to press through the constant stream of discouraging media, denigration, and implicit unfair treatment.

Which just goes to show how incredibly out-of-touch some people can be. And so articles like this serve as reference points during conversations like the one above.

briancurtin• 14 years ago

Good on you.

Unfortunately male privilege, usually white male privilege, doesn't allow a large portion of the audience to "get it".

jnoller2• 14 years ago

Other Python/Outreach/Education Resources:

Python Core mentorship: http://pythonmentors.com/

PSF Outreach and Education committee: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/outreach-and-educati... - this is meant to help identify groups/etc for the PSF to help fund. Via the http://www.python.org/psf/grants/ program(s) (see also resolutions: http://www.python.org/psf/records/board/resolutions/)

Boston Python Workshop: http://bostonpythonworkshop.com/ (as a side note, see this great post on Boston Ruby: https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/the-steps-boston-ruby-is-tak...)

PyStar: http://pystar.org/ (https://twitter.com/pystarphilly/)

OpenHatch: http://openhatch.org/blog/

Women who code: http://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Code-SF/

Python Sprints projects: http://pythonsprints.com/

Software Carpentry: http://software-carpentry.org/blog/

PyLadies Main: http://pyladies.com/ (groups are popping up all over the US)

I'm probably forgetting a few.

jnoller2• 14 years ago

Missed:

http://opensourcebridge.org/

http://www.blackgirlscode.com/

http://www.girlswhocode.com/

kingkilr• 14 years ago

Since it's not linked from the PyLadies main page (AFAICT): PyLadies SF: http://www.meetup.com/PyLadiesSF/

hynek3• 14 years ago

I have added them (and the ones you and Alex added) to the article. Feel free to send me more.

lizzard• 14 years ago

That was really lovely. Thanks.

nonameisfinetoo• 14 years ago

It is quite sexist to think that women write software as women, is it not?. Talk about counterproductivity ...

krakensden2• 14 years ago

Do you think they remove their brain and insert it into a male chassis before firing up Eclipse?

How I Stopped Worrying and Started Loving PyLadies

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