Boston Ruby Community grows by 47 women in one weekend | Hacker News Reader

Boston Ruby Community grows by 47 women in one weekend

railsbridgeboston.org

37 pointstelecaster7 comments

For those who are curious, since there isn't any information in the blog posting, this event is one which is targeted directly at women. I think it's a great event, and it's even better that they can make arrangements for mothers to participate as well. The Software Engineering community could definitely use some diversity, and doing things to strengthen that is a wonderful thing.

More specifically — assuming the rules were the same as for the first such workshop, linked in the article — "women were automatically allowed to apply for a spot, while men were allowed to apply if they knew a woman who was going to attend."

FTA: "We also had one unfortunate incident where a student started saying disparaging things about transgendered people at the same table where one happened to be sitting. "

Good for them for calling this out...but it's a weird statement where its vagueness just makes things weirder...either an awkward attempt to downplay a really horrific show-stopping comment, or blowing out of proportion someone's attempt at a joke.

edit// I think my problem is with the word "unfortunate" incident and "where one happened to be sitting"...as if it were unfortunate that such comments were made inadvertently where a transgendered person could hear them. Either way, "unfortunate" doesn't seem like the right adjective here when "unacceptable" seems more like it. (i.e. it's strange to describe "disparaging" remarks towards African-Americans/women/any-other-group as "unfortunate")

Thanks for your remark. I agree with you about the seriousness of this, and I am sorry if our language was imprecise.

Please do not mistake any oddity in how this was written with the clarity of how we reacted at the time, our commitment to inclusiveness, and our complete agreement that this was unacceptable.

It wasn't even an attempted joke. The person made explicitly transphobic remarks based on their own intolerant beliefs.

What the person said was offensive and unacceptable, and I personally used those words, and I believe I made that clear to all involved at the time. Rather than mionimize this, sweep this under the rug, or ignore it, I escalated this to all the other organizers immediately after I heard about it, and I am glad we wrote about it in the wrap-up.

I also apologized to the students that this happened at our event, and asked what they would like to see happen, and what we could do. As the transphobic person had already left, ejection was unnecessary (though would have been the next step), and they immediate suggested putting a better policy in place for our events - which we are doing. We also 'blacklisted' the person from all future railsbridge events.

We agree that transphobic/racist/sexist/homophobic remarks are simply unacceptable, and it was not about who happened to be sitting there. I would say this about the students who happened to be sitting there - they stood up for themselves and each other, and are the reason the maker of the transphobic remarks left even before the organizers found out about it.

- Andrew Kuklewicz

I thought being an assistant was a good experience. I'd do it again. This was a great deal for participants too. A similar class at a professional training center or college could easily cost between $1000 and $2000. In my opinion people got enough information to continue learning on their own, or evaluate if they want to they want to continue with paid training elsewhere.

I'm sorry this is only for women and their guests. The Boston software scene needs more gatherings like this in general. I see meetups and talks in other cities all the time, and very few in Boston.

Boston Ruby (bostonrb.org) has a monthly project night open to all levels to learn and hack together, and a monthly meeting with great talks - and that is just for Ruby. Pythonistas are active, and have their own things happening, the Java User Group also has similar events - and those are off the top of my head.

On the weekend we did this workshop, there was a Start-up Weekend event up the street at the Microsoft NERD center, and directly above us at MIT Stata center was Music Hack Day. My problem is choosing what events to go to, not finding one.

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