juridatenshi

Their argument was that there were only white guys available from the list of popular ruby presenters. I'm saying they may not have tried very hard to reach out if they didn't even ask a closeby popular presenter (yet they asked a ton of white guys from the US). There were others that also weren't approached - I mentioned Keavy specifically because she spoke about it publicly.

I'm kind of skeptical that they even tried to reach out to diverse people. For example, Keavy McMinn indicated on twitter they never asked her. She's a very well known and liked speaker in the Ruby community and lives relatively close by. If you largely reach out to white guys, of course that's who you'll end up with.

Someone clearly let the straw feminists out of the closet again. HSSSSS!

http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=341

Yeaaaaah. MRAs aren't exactly known for their even-handed and rational evaluation of anything involving women or women's issues.

I want to create physical copies of Derailing for Dummies just so I can throw them at most of the commenters in here. You are hitting so many of the points. :(

http://derailingfordummies.com/complete.html

There are definitely studies that show this is why some women leave the field, even after overcoming the hurdles to get into it in the first place.

http://www.lpfi.org/sites/default/files/tilted_playing_field...

Some certainly are. It's important for us to have diversity in a variety of areas (and intersections of areas), not just women. That being said, this specific article is focused on a woman's experience, so it makes sense that it would focus on gender.

Diversity is generally good for the industry. There have been many studies showing that diversity improves teams on a variety of different dimensions. Increasing interest from underrepresented groups can help increase the number of available programmers (there's only so many white men in the world with the skills and interests necessary to be a programmer). Diversity also makes a lot of sense for meeting the needs of the consumer population, which is incredibly diverse.

That's not been my experience. One of the local papers recently changed their site to have FB comments. I can't believe the bigoted garbage and trolling I've seen people post on there with their name and picture attached to it.

It doesn't sound like the commenter is offended. I think they're asking for clarification. If the OP means gender, then they would hopefully be welcoming of trans women. If they mean sex, they may only be looking for cis-women.

This project sounds like an awesome idea if executed properly. The fact that you're already taking constructive feedback into account in a positive way makes that proper execution sound pretty likely. :)

On the note of constructive feedback, the "hounding women in tech until they meet with you" bit could definitely be misread. I know it isn't meant that way, but it sounds a little bit like you're going to harass women who may not be interested until they agree to be involved.

As the blog post author I'd like to add some clarification here. By "seeing" I meant see them speak at the conference, not necessarily that the things they share in common are things you can see. Commonalities can cover a very wide range of things including, but certainly not limited to, sex, gender, and race. That being said, people who fall into some of these visible minority groups often have a hard time finding role models in the programming community. I think it is awesome if conference organizers can help with that, and do not feel that it is in conflict with also providing the best speakers possible.