I'm not trying to stir the pot or anything, I'm legitimately curious.
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.
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.
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?
After which you back carefully away and hope they don't come to your next talk.
You should not respond with a passionate defense of free expression unless the person who approaches you is a cop trying to arrest you. [1] In general, nobody is trying to deny you the right to advertise your beliefs out loud. When they complain, you should assume that they are merely inviting you to walk back what you said before they commence avoiding you like the plague.
Of course, if you really hate cats, you can always just respond with "good, I'm glad I offended you, you terrifying feline monstrosity!" Because very few Rails consulting customers are cats, that might not cost you much. Although, come to think of it, some Rails customers probably do employ cats, or people who love cats and care about their feelings. And there are many others who will feel mighty uncomfortable when the managers of the framework that lies beneath their million-dollar website become more concerned with aggressively asserting the universal freedom to hate cats than with keeping people like Mike Gunderloy on the team. What kind of priority is that? Enough with the sophomoric flamewar, already!
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[1] In which case, of course, you still shouldn't respond with a passionate defense. You should call up your lawyer and let her respond.
Not at all. The apology -- which one should issue immediately and without hesitation -- is full of meaning. Very important meaning. Just not literal meaning.
What is the apology saying?
"I hear you and I understand that you were really offended."
"I am trying to listen to you."
"I am not trying to hurt you on purpose."
"I am not trying to deliberately start a giant flame war that tears our community apart."
"I am open to reconsidering what I said, and the way I said it, in light of your interpretation of my words."
"I have basic social skills and recognize the role of Apologizer when I see it." (See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240170 )
What the apology is not: An admission of guilt, an admission that you did something illegal or even something wrong. You do not have to break down in tears. You don't have to agree with the complainer. You don't have to change your mind.
What you have to do is signal some sympathy: That you're a civilized person who is open to "trying to understand" the offended person. That you want to de-escalate the situation rather than start a fight. That you're not a troll -- that is, someone who (a) deliberately introduces a topic that is likely to be offensive and then (b) continues to push the buttons of any offended people until a giant flame war breaks out.
Which method works better all depends on the circumstances, I guess.
I discovered this the hard way when I repeated a joke about Jews to a Jewish friend. As she put it, "Jokes are all in the delivery, and you have to be Jewish to deliver that joke."
In fact, there are cases where using that word in a presentation would be perfectly legitimate, i.e. in a presentation about racist epithets. If someone objected to that, I would bicker with them, regardless of their skin color.
By way of conversation, not argument, I will share that at the time, her explanation was unsatisfying. I felt that she was saying "You Can't Say That" arbitrarily. Why was it ok for one person to tell that joke and not another? I didn't feel she was explaining the reasoning behind the rule, just telling me the rule.
But time has passed, and now I understand that a joke about cultural stereotypes often means one thing when told by an outsider, another thing when told by an insider to an outsider, and a third thing when told by an insider to another insider.
And of course, outsiders are sometimes oblivious to the nuances.
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.
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.
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.
Porn is not edgy. Walking into Oracle's Head Office and shitting on their conference table is edgy.
I can ignore religion when I want to, and I can destroy an illogical belief system with the best of 'em, but, I'm much more likely to just find somewhere with less barriers to the subject at hand. It was unprofessional of them to disallow discussion of religion with wishy-washy rules, and it's unprofessional to plaster coding in porn, soft or otherwise.
So it was one guys idea of a joke - big deal (and no actual nudity).
More info here: http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/04/23/just-a-girl-why-we-put-o...
One reason that Rails seems to be the loudest right now is because Rails attracts (and was begun) by very outspoken, opinionated, people.
While I would prefer to have more female colleagues, I don't believe men and women can be compared just like that.