A Painful Decision

http://afreshcup.com/2009/04/28/a-painful-decision/

by ph0rque • 17 years ago

59 73 17 years ago

swombat2• 17 years ago

For some context, Mike Gunderloy (author of this article) is an extremely prolific rails activist and community member. This is not some random unknown making a fuss, it's a very well respected, very active, very productive member of the rails community making a pretty pointed statement and putting his money where his mouth is.

Some further background:

http://dyepot-teapot.com/2009/04/25/dear-fellow-rubyists/

http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/39-im-an-r-rated-individua...

http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/40-alpha-male-programmers-...

And, the slides themslves (NSFW): http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr...

michael_dorfman• 17 years ago

...and before becoming a member of the rails community, Mike was an extremely prolific and valued member of the .NET community. Whoever gets him next should consider themselves lucky to have him.

russell2• 17 years ago

Unbelievable. What kind of idiot makes a soft porn presentation in an age when nude calendars are banned from auto shops. I grew up when off color stories were ok with professionals so long as ladies werent present. It was ok to call women 'honey' and make suggestive remarks. I was glad to see that go, along with racist jokes.

Women belong in every enterprise. If the screening process is passing women by because they are not technical ninjas or dont want to work 80 hour weeks or dont do so well in alpha male interviews, the group is going to suffer because it is going to miss out on a diversity of skills and viewpoints.

jrockway3• 17 years ago

Unbelievable. What kind of idiot makes a soft porn presentation in an age when nude calendars are banned from auto shops?

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Seriously, not everyone is that hung-up about sex.

Anyway, it is amazing how much damage the community is doing to itself over a 20 minute presentation by one guy. If you resign your positions and spend pages and pages talking about it, you're just going to encourage others to do the same. This guy has power now.

cjbos• 17 years ago

"If the screening process is passing women by because they are not technical ninjas or dont want to work 80 hour weeks or dont do so well in alpha male interviews"

Except for your last point there the others are pretty bad stereotypes. For example women have no trouble finding employment as lawyers or doctors which comes with 80hr work weeks... yet they are still vastly underrepresented in IT.

hvs3• 17 years ago

I'm not a member of the Rails community, so I'm curious as to why this "Women in Programming" issue seems to focused solely on that community. Women are underrepresented in almost all development communities and it seems odd to focus on one specific community. It would be strange to talk about "the lack of female representation in the C++ community" rather than the development community in general, so why is this different?

I'm not trying to stir the pot or anything, I'm legitimately curious.

swombat2• 17 years ago

Actually, just last week there was a panel on "women in technology" at Geeknrolla, so it's definitely not a rails-only issue.

More info here: http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/04/23/just-a-girl-why-we-put-o...

hvs3• 17 years ago

Oh, I definitely don't believe it is a Rails-only issue, it just seemed odd that the loudest discussion going on right now seemed to be focused on Rails. It just feels odd to attach it to a specific technology.

decode• 17 years ago

I'm not in the Ruby community, but here's what I've gathered:

There was a talk at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference called "CouchDB + Ruby: Perform Like a Pr0n Star", which featured an extended porn-industry metaphor and what some have described as softcore porn in the slides. This talk created a lot of discussion in the Ruby community, in particular about the effect this kind of talk has on the female attendees, and the general atmosphere of the conference. It also caused the Ruby community to introspect on what kind of environment they are creating and how it affects people who are not heterosexual males who may wish to participate in that community.

See the links posted above by swombat for some of the discussion.

hvs3• 17 years ago

Huh. Yeah, I could see how that might generate discussion.

As a heterosexual male, I would be uncomfortable being at a presentation that used pornographic imagery throughout. Call me a prude, but certain things simply don't belong in a professional environment.

dkarl2• 17 years ago

Wow, and some people think the "social skills for nerds" links are off-topic for HN. Clearly many people in computing are ruled by their adolescent impulse to make people uncomfortable, at great cost to the community. Worse, they congratulate themselves for it. For the general good, here's the Cliff's notes for making people uncomfortable:

1. Gratuitous transgression is easy.

2. Necessary transgression is art -- intrinsically critical and enlightening. It's hard to pull off.

3. Compulsive transgression with no regard to the difference between #1 and #2 is juvenile.

Tichy10• 17 years ago

Found it on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr...

So it was one guys idea of a joke - big deal (and no actual nudity).

mechanical_fish3• 17 years ago

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

http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-...

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.

joecode5• 17 years ago

"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."

Isn't this a sexist viewpoint itself? As if a woman's reasoning doesn't matter, just that you have offended, oh my, a female?

Tichy10• 17 years ago

What if that woman happend to be a member of an ultrareligious sect and has no humor whatsoever. What if other women don't mind at all? Don't know what incident happened (was there an incident?), but is it not yet another cliche that women in general have to be offended by certain pictures? What about the women IN the pictures, would they be offended?

I don't want to recommend to use offensive pictures in presentations (some men might be offended, too), but I am pretty sure that such things are NOT the reason for "underrepresentedness" of women.

lucraft• 17 years ago

Vote up if you're part of the silent majority that is not interested in this discussion.

Zoe_Brain• 17 years ago

There's a number of issues here.

First, men and women tend to think differently, and have talents in different areas, just as men tend to be taller. This is a matter of biology, and on that basis alone, a reasonable mix in IT would be biased towards a greater proportion of males, depending on the exact developmental role. About 2:1.

Except it's more like 8:1 or even 12:1, rather than 2:1.In open source, 50:1.

It's no accident that there are more women in interface design, project management and architecture within IT either. Remember though that this is all statistical, just as there are short men and tall women, you should always look at individuals as individuals, not as stereotypes. Talents between the ears are what's important, and chromosomes are a poor guide to those.

Part of the problem is the discouragement talented girls experience at school because IT is a "male field". Part of it is that businesses are set up with men in mind, with stereotypically male aspects of bonding after work, of stakhanovite hours with no concession for having a Life, with hierachies and competition for "fastest gun in the west" rather than teamwork. The latter is particularly important in Open Source development.

Part of it is straight old-fashioned misogyny and the glass ceiling, but I think that's not as important as the other issues. It can get pretty bad though as a consequence of the other causes, trust me on that one. I invite all the straight guys to imagine what it would be like in a gay-only environment, with gay porn posters and bitchy jokes about "breeders", plus the occasional overt sexual harrassment and almost universal attempts to flirt. That's what it's like for many women in IT, all the time.

It's not as bad as it was. I'm 51, and can remember when things were a lot worse. Female medical students are no longer required to sign a pledge not to get married if they enter med school, as they were when I was in grade school. But Blacks don't have separate drinking fountains either, as they did then. "Better" does not mean "Good" or even "minimally acceptable".

A Painful Decision

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