Sarah Mei and I felt that we could change the ratio simply by teaching more women Ruby on Rails, we would have more women in our community, and we were right.
We agreed to make our first workshop open to people with any level of programming experience. (Men could come if they participated in the outreach and found a woman to sign up.)
We thought it would be hard to find women to attend our first workshop. We brainstormed for weeks about how to connect to various women's groups and corporate organizations. Then after two tweets and and one email, we had a waiting list in less than 24 hours. Over the last 3 years the pattern repeats itself, no matter where we have workshops, we consistently have waiting lists of women who want to attend. In SF, we have workshops every month, and routinely have 60 people (mostly women) on the waitlist.
Women do want to write code. We usually have 20% who have never coded before, but typically 50-70% self-identify as non-programmers. Are you a programmer if you just write SQL? does bash count as programming for a sys admin? does it could if you did COBOL 20 years ago, but you can't do any of the modern stuff? maybe you got a CS degree, but have never done more than a toy app? From a teaching perspective, if you answered yes to any of those questions, you are way ahead of the total beginners -- you understand variables and expressing logic in words and symbols.
We have diversity issues in tech, and it isn't just about gender and race. I believe those are just the most visible outward symptom of a problem where we have fairly homogeneous work and communication styles, as well as background and patterns of thinking. If we are going to solve the very real problems we have in this world (and many of those solutions will be facilitated with tech), we need all kinds of people. We need diversity of thought.
If you only have one kind of people on your team by a visible metric, you are likely to have much deeper diversity issues. Just because you have a woman or a person of color on the team doesn't necessarily mean you've solved your diversity problems.
I applaud the Boston folks for their success in their recent workshop. If you think that the language you develop in would be great for anyone/everyone to learn, you should do the same.