gistfile1.md

Note: This comment was in response to Lynn Root's discussion on women in the Django / tech community at Djangocon Europe 2012.*

The issue of women in our community has been very prominent recently—mostly due to negative situations where something went wrong, but sometimes because of thoughtful discussions about how to actually improve things. Your talk is one of the latter—thank you for giving it!

Like any sensitive topic, most attempts to discuss the issue end up going nowhere good. Sometimes it veers into “women tend to,” sometimes it veers into a lot of self-congratulation on how enlightened we are to be even discussing it. It’s been my experience that none of these are really helpful in getting actionable things I can do.

Obviously, having a safe environment for women is a precondition, and I don’t think it’s a solved problem, but what else should we be spending our cpu cycles on? Say we have a conference code of conduct which is properly enforced. What should we be figuring out solutions for next?

I think it's not true that "most attempts to discuss the issue end up going nowhere good". Maybe the discussion itself might not amount to much, but as long as people are not simply dismissing it, if they are reasonably sincere intelligent and thoughtful, they will have something to think about. Which is a start at least.

@evildmp I mean that the discussions don't end up being productive. I find myself feeling like there's no way for me to avoid hurting somebody in some of these discussions, which reduces my communications bandwidth to bland, uncontroversial genialities. I hate that because I feel like it is a waste of time—it doesn't actually help anybody.

I'm not Lynn, and I won't try to channel her, but here's my 2¢:

This is a hard problem, seemingly intractable sometimes. Our community has ways we can combat it, but the causes are rooted deep in society, and in education, and in culture… areas we can only influence tangentially if at all. We won't fix diversity in tech soon. Sadly, I doubt we'll see fundamental change in my lifetime. It's easy to get demoralized.

So I just do what I can. I can't change the world, but I can use whatever influence I have to make the world around me a little better. Discrimination propagates through a million little insults, so I try to balance it by a million little improvements: I treat women as peers. I call out sexist jokes, even inadvertent ones. I remove exclusionary language from my writing. I try to help others do this, too.

I listen. I listen a lot. This doesn't come easy (anyone who knows me knows that I find talking easier than listening), but every time I listen, really listen, to someone who's not white, male, straight, middle-class, able-bodied, a US citizen, ... Every time, I learn something valuable. Every. Single. Time.

I do what I can. It's probably not enough. But I do it anyway.

+1's all around.

(this IS Lynn)

I hate getting asked some variation of the question, "What can I do to get women involved?" I've ran into folks that are pro "MOAR WOMENZ", and it's great to have that enthusiasm since it does permeate. But if you want to actually do something to increase female involvement, my solution: involve them.

My story: a couple of weeks ago, myself and two others were tweeted from an acquaintance from PyCon about which interpreter to use, IPython or bpython. This seemingly innocent question had a huge impact on me; I was sought after for my knowledge. This is how to involve women... Scratch that. This is how to involve people. This interaction made me feel like a peer, not the token female/statistic.

@econchick - since you're here, I wanna dig in a bit to this idea. Someone you said in your introduction (that's echoed above) is this thought of looking at getting people involved instead of focusing on women. So, following that idea, should we maybe steal a page from the women in tech movement and start creating PyNewbies meetups? Noobs Who Code? Noobs + 1 events?

I like the idea, but I wonder if it would work -- people self-identify as women, but I don't know how many people like to self-identify as newbies. It's... intimidating to admit you don't know anything. And how do you do outreach? New users, by definition, aren't in our community! We can't offer "new attendee" scholarships to PyCon 'cause the people who're eligible don't know that there's a Py to be Con'd!

But... I do really like the idea of a more general focus on "outreach" rather than "diversity" -- the former leads to the latter, and has other attendant benefits to boot.

So... thoughts?

(And I hope @idangazit doesn't mind me hijacking the thread!)

@econchick What ways can we involve novice women who aren't yet experienced enough to be sought after for their knowledge?

@jacobian thread exists to be hijacked.

I'm still trying to figure out solutions to:

• Convincing conf organizers to offer financial aid to all first-time women attendees who apply for it, and protecting them from backlash from the media/public for doing this.
• Protecting conf organizers from negative press/backlash that they might get for publicizing a women's breakfast/meetup. These things have to be publicized on the official conf websites, otherwise few attend. Handing out flyers to women one on one is weird and awkward, and tweeting is not enough.
• How to encourage women acquaintances one-on-one to submit talk proposals without sounding awkward.

Do these things, and dramatically increase the number of women who attend. I can provide proof/evidence privately of what has/hasn't worked for conferences, but I'd prefer not to single out individual conferences publicly.

Re "new attendee" scholarships: I knew about DjangoConEU last year and wasn't sure whether I wanted to attend - wasn't sure it would be good for me. My company would pay for me (probably/partially) but I didn't want to ask them to spend that much money on something I wasn't sure would be good. To be honest, if my colleague hadn't gone to PyConUS this year and enthused about it so much, I might well not be here now. Newer developers (more than a few weeks but not 4 years) may know about conferences but may think "it's not for me"

I like the idea of having events like sprinting on the django tutorial, or study groups surrounded by Udacity's free online courses. I suggest a couple of things:

I self identify as a n00b and feel comfortable about it. I of course know fellow n00bs, whether they'd identify with that or not. Rather than calling out newbies with specific group (since I agree that not a lot of people will come forward), build events in established communities (e.g. the monthly SF Django Meetup, or the Boston Python User Group, etc) that invites new folks. How will you reach out to the new folks? relationship building. You know me, I know over 100 people learning to code in the SF area.

Want to get more new people to PyCon? Have talks geared towards truly novice folks. Publicize such events through building those relationships from self-identifying n00bs to those ones who aren't self-identified.

I LOVED PYCON even though I was the least-knowledgeable person in every room. I bet I got more out of it than some people. I think it'd be a nice initiative to invite specific folks (and their fellow newbie friends) to join events, to make your tutorial better by doing it themselves and ask questions, or to read through your documentation and then that in itself involves them in the community. Seek people out for their knowledge, even if it's their lack of knowledge that you want.

@jacobian

how about "mentored projects"? Projects forgiving and easily accepting contributions. People learn best and fastest when having a practical goal, collaborating and having non condemning code reviews. Like code dojos large scale. Maybe it's too theoretical but maybe with some polishing it could work as an idea - I would love to organise something like that.

PS Sorry this is a bit "irrelevant" to the gist topic :O

@mjtamlyn - I think that you're right that PyCon/DjangoCon/other dev conferences don't seem like they're for new developers. Why not look up previous videos that are published if you're aware of these dev conferences? PyCon videos for 2012 are up on pyvideo.com somewhere, are those talks interesting for you? If so, plan to go next year.

I would also highly recommend submitting a talk proposal for the next PyCon/DjangoCon etc if there is a talk (beginner or otherwise) that you would like to see. Maybe it's on a subject that you're not comfortable with, but the act of preparing the talk, then speaking about it, will help so much in your education process.

@Geekfish - I think mentored projects are great; many open source projects need all sorts of people to help the project grow. New to the development scene? Offer to help with documentation for a tool/library/project that is of interest. It's not uncommon for people to loathe documentation, so I'm sure there's work available.

I feel like this should be a reddit thread. I'd like to upvote people all around here.

my $2 cents:

Integrating "minorities", either gender, racial, economical, or social based, has always been a challenge. I These are problems with an infinite amount of variables that normally require a very specific interdisciplinary approach .

Changes in or to our social environment constantly influence and change the specifics so these solutions also have to adapt to these constantly changing dynamics.

And even though there have been situations where certain problems seem to have fixed "themselves" (i.e. due to change in the economical environment), they are extremely rare.

What I want to say is:

a) These problems don't disappear by pretending that they are not a problem
b) The solutions to these problems tend to be complex, multidisciplinary, but at the same time very specific (in time, place, nature).

Let's talk about this, and let's call things by their name. The django community might or might not have a problem with introducing new people, but it also has a gender problem, that requires a gender oriented solution(s).

@auredyry

There are some simple solutions to the problems you are trying to think about. For the second one, is for the conference organisers to allow anyone to mention events that are outside the conference hours. e.g. what will happen after the panel? Anything?

For the third issue, even guys have a problems doing talks. I've found the best/simplest way is to simply "volunteer" people. It works remarkably well; firstly people are flattered that you think they have something to say. Secondly when other people see their peers in the community talking - who agreed to be volunteered - they realise they can talk to.

For the first issue, I really think it is up to the conference to decide if they want to publise grants. What I know has worked is for them to be silently granted for a year or two, and then to make it public.

All of this said with my ex-linux.conf.au organiser hat on.

@jacobian — “But... I do really like the idea of a more general focus on "outreach" rather than "diversity" -- the former leads to the latter, and has other attendant benefits to boot.”

That is one of the best things I have read on this topic, and it puts into words something that I have always felt but could not express. As a straight, white, American male, I know that there are a lot of obstacles that I don’t have to deal with, and I am grateful for that. I hope we can make it that way for everyone, eventually. (Though, like you say, probably not in our lifetime.) Yet, though I strongly support including everyone, a focus on “diversity” can often feel like “We have too many people like you. We don’t need more people like you. We will do nothing to help you individually, because the classes you belong to are the majority.”

But a focus on “outreach” can help anyone and everyone, and leads to diversity (as you said).

A key to removing lines that separate us socially is, in many cases, to remove the lines that separate us socially. Focusing on diversity just retraces those lines. The backlash that @audreyr and others experience over creating opportunities is disheartening, and inexcusable. But I wonder if it may simply be a negative expression of the feeling that the majority can get from a focus on diversity — “We don’t need you.” While it may be true of a class of people, I am not a class, I am an individual. I want to contribute. I want to be wanted. And sometimes I need help and opportunities.

I support groups like PyLadies, and hope they continue their good work. Like @ashwoods says, we may need some pointed solutions for specific issues. But for those to work we need everyone to feel wanted. So let’s keep having group meet-ups at conferences: runners go running, women’s breakfasts, gamer’s nights, etc. And let’s try to figure out a way to include new people through outreach.