I don't know whether to be amused or sadden by the way this thread has veered off topic from a list of notable women to a discussion of whether the topic should even be discussed.

Whether women or any other group should be singled out is an important question, but discussing it here muddies the thread and makes it hard to read for those who are interested in the question originally presented: "who are the notable women?". I, for one, do not know enough about my female colleagues and would have liked to keep that topic front and center.

I truly wish that Anonymous Monk had had the wisdom to post his or her views on a separate thread rather than this one. And I also wish that the first monk to respond had chosen to gently redirect Anonymous Monk back on topic rather than take up the bait and argue the point. But sigh... the debate is here on this thread and not elsewhere, so I'm going to, with reservations, add my two cents. So far, this discussion seems to be by men about women and I'm finding it uncomfortable.

For the record. I DO NOT REGRET (loud enough?) having had the opportunity to go to a college that once upon a time admitted only men, hold a highly skilled job, get a business degree from one of the top schools in the world, start my own company, or all of the other things that the women's movement has granted me both the courage and the opportunity to do.

Over 70 years ago my grandmother graduated third in her class with an MBA from NYU (1933). She went on to teach accounting at a vocational school, despite previous experience as chief perfume buyer at Best and Co. Her husband, who graduated in the same class with less significant work experience, went to work on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic advisory committee.

I once asked her why she didn't pursue a more aggressive career. Her explanation? All the women she knew who did never found husbands - apparently in the 1930's it was a rare man who wanted to marry a high powered career women.

Most men would say "do it anyway", but women and men are different. When social structures force women to choose between family and personal development, most women will find a way to compromise so that they can have a family. In my grandmother's case that meant forgoing a professional management career. Instead she donated her considerable management skills to community organizations and eventually was awarded the prestigious Clara Barton award by the Red Cross. During that same conversation she told me that there were many women like her. Many of the social service organizations started in New York City were started, organized and managed for free by women who today would be highly paid CEO's.

Women in the 1940's liked to go to college and run organizations as much as men did - they just had to find different outlets. Today it is the same for women and programming, I suspect. When you change the teaching methods and the social context to fit the interests of women, then the interest in programming becomes apparent.

At lower grades the EYH (formerly the Math/Science network) has sponsored several successful programs aimed at getting young women more involved in maths and sciences. At the university level, Carnegie-Melon has dramatically increased the number of women Computer Science majors by taking this into account. For more information, see:

• "Culture and Environment as Determinants of Women's Participation in Computing" - academic paper, covering the Carnegie-Melon initiatives among others
• Celebrating 30 years of effective change! - retrospective article discussing the work of the EYH and what makes for successful programs.
• Edu-sig: Girls, women, and Programming - someone who has taught Perl programming to kids shares some personal observations about differences in male and female learning styles.

Part of that context is giving people the vision to say, "People like me do..." - hence the discussion of group-specific role models. Men see "People like me..." more often when they look at men than women. Women likewise see "People like me..." more often when they look at women than when they look at men.

Best, beth

I think I can confidently say that the thread veered off of the original topic largely because Perl doesn't have a good story to tell when it comes to notable women.

Why not? Well for a start I'd guess that there are 10-20 male Perl programmers for every female one. This is not to say that there are no women, but when you start with that many less, if all else is equal you'll have fewer all of the way up the ladder. So you have fewer virtualsues out there. And then you get even fewer when you get to ones who do a lot of open source work, like liz.

But it gets worse. If you look down a list of well known women in Perl, what are they known for? Well we have Allison Randal, who is known primarily for organizational work for The Perl Foundation. We have jarich, who is best known for her work helping organize Perl Monger groups and conferences. We have kudra who organized YAPC EU. These three are all good programmers, but you'll note that they are not known for their programming.

Let's continue on. We have women who are better known for their husbands than themselves (eg Elaine -HFB- Ashton and Vani Raja). We have Audrey Tang who was already well known before becoming a woman. I would guess that a significant number of Perl programmers would name Abigail if they were asked who the most prominent woman in Perl was. The number is less than it was a decade ago since there is more awareness that Abigail is a man. And so on.

The more you look, the more obvious it is that Perl doesn't have a community that winds up valuing women for their programming expertise. Why not?

Well let me give one reason. When I tally the male Perl programmers that I have worked with, I can immediately think of 3 whose behavior is offensive to any woman around. When I tally the female Perl programmers that I have personally worked with I can only come up with one. And she was a junior programmer who I was training. That isn't great for women who want to stay in Perl. And that isn't exactly a great ratio of bad apples to decent role-models.

That isn't to say that there is no hope. There are well-known and respected women in Perl. Judging by your Perlmonks contributions, I'd say that you're likely going to become one of that number. There are people who care. Things do change over time.

Moving on, I'd like to make a comment about your grandmother's reasoning. While things have improved since the 1930s (at which time there was a significant backlash against the first women's movement), her comments still have justice. Success and dating have become like height and dating - most people (male or female) would prefer to be in a couple where the man has at least as much of it as the woman. (There obviously are exceptions, but as a general rule...) Which means that successful (or tall) women are competing with a large pool of women for a small pool of men. As a result I've known a number of women who are successful and attractive, but are having trouble finding a guy. While many don't want kids, some really do and I feel sad for them.

But things do get better. My impression is that today most people are willing to consider an equal relationship. Not very long ago most men would only date women they felt superior to. (And that was really not long ago. In a class my wife was in back in the 80s the professor did a poll of this. Most of the women wanted a man of equal or greater intelligence. But 70% of the men would only consider dating less intelligent women!)

Mkay, so Abigail is a guy despite the appearance. You are a guy despite what some people may think. I am a guy despite what some people tend to think and what some version of (I think) Mastering Perl 5 wrote. How do we know there are not quite a few well known members of the community that just use a gender neutral (or male sounding) nick and are female? :-)

Jenda


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Perl monks have been well-known to argue everything into the tiniest particles of the original argument or thread. Consider it equality that no special treatment has been given to this thread in addition to what has been an overall appreciation of female Perl programmers. I haven't seen anyone rally this community as a men's club, and most of the time no one really knows a person's gender anyway because it's the internet.

Spotlighting a demographic can increase interest, which can increase equality. How many 12 year old girls are thinking about becoming programmers? Not enough. Raising the topic raises the chances they might consider it. Turn on the TV or go to the movies for a day to see what else is being offered as natural choices.

Raising the topic here increases the chances young women will, rightly, see the Perl community as an open place which generally welcomes all regardless of appearance, affectation, politics, etc. Talking about differences is right and good. Pretending there are no differences is the *real* PC horse shite and it only hurts those it pretends to protect.

There is of course a fine line between "raising a topic" and "attempted social engineering".

I've had more than a couple of 40-something women intimate to me their late-life anger at the realization that they felt goaded by women's activism into professional lives they would not have chosen for themselves if they had been left to really listen to their own hearts. What they really had always wanted was to be a stay at home mom, but the sheer volume of women's activism around them made them feel they could not take that option without somehow being poorly seen. The old pigeon holes had simply been replaced by new ones, this time imposed on them by activist women and their new brand of social engineering.

As you say, pretending there are no differences is Pc cow poo. How many girls just naturally turn to thoughts of programming as their ideal life? Some, for sure, and that's all fine and well, but apparently "not enough". Not enough for whom? Not enough as would suit the social engineers. Why? Because, as you point out, there are diffrences that should not be ignored. Boys and girls are made differently. This isn't an old wive's tale - educators, psycholgists, scientists agree, gils and boys are wired differently and so are bound, if left to explore their true natural selves, to have different interests in life. But rather than accept that, the new social engineers get out there and organize girl-re-education programs, raising topics, to convince another generation of girls that they have to fit their new stereotype - "and it only hurts those it pretends to help".

I think you have a valid point there. But you also have to be very careful; the chances that the purely biological differences explain the extreme gender gap in programming are very slim.

I recommend reading these two articles about the social and environmental aspects (both found from the Debian Women project)

Not enough for mem. With you, I am for raising awareness, not quotas. At least a couple of the best hackers in Perldom are female and I think highlighting that is great. Showing young persons of *any* persuasion things for which they can be admired that don't involve theft, binge-drinking, luck, violence, or any of the manifold things the world at large pushes at them... It can only be good. Young people need to know there are options and achievements and money out there to be made in places other than the grotesque roads painted by Hollywood and pop-culture.

(updated ambiguous sentence structure.)

If we were not to talk about the difference, then how could we improve the situation?

Sure, it is a sign that human race isn't perfect, (for some values of "perfect"), but who would believe such a thing anyway?

If you talk about improving, you are saying there's something wrong with the current situation. How so? What does it matter what's the proportion of women in the community?

Actually ... how do you know it's actually not the other way around ... due to reasons out of our reach we should have even more men in proportion with the women we have and we don't. Maybe we deter men somehow :-)

Jenda


Support Denmark! Defend the free world!

I can't know that we do anything wrong, but the (felt, not measured) numbers feel like they are too large to be explained by purely biological reasons. (Yes, is this by no means scientific. And that bothers me; but I just don't know any numbers).

Also the articles I linked to here mention things that deter some women which I've observed in Perl community, for example endless discussions that sometimes end in insults (seen on p5p and on some IRC channels) and the very competitive nature of XP here on perlmonks.

I'm not saying that we're doing anything wrong a priori, but assuming that we do everything right because we haven't measured that we're doing anything wrong is too easy, IMHO.

If you want a laugh and you're in geek company with mixed genders, make a reference to how someone needs to tell ESR that he's not God's gift to women. After the laughing dies down you'll likely be shocked at how many of the women have personally been hit on by him.

OK, he's obviously not a Perl person. But you'll also find no shortage of women complaining that they don't want to hear about Randal's memorable visits to prostitutes.

Just consider that when the web took off, a lot of women got involved as graphic designers, and working with HTML. A lot of men did as well. Many of the men followed an upgrade path which went from HTML to mixing in some dynamic behavior to becoming Perl programmers. Virtually no women did that. Based on personal interactions, I am confident that plenty of women were interested in doing so then chose not to. So yes, our community definitely does deter women.

An incidental note that I need to make because it has caused confusion in the past in discussions like this. tilly is my last name, not my first. Like Abigail, I'm a man.

Firstly, I am not in favour of positive discrimination or quotas, or giving someone of a particular gender/race/whatever a job because it fulfills some kind of social engineering criterion.

However, speaking as someone who seems to have been 'hardwired' (or whatever the reason is, I don't pretend to know) to enjoy a lot of things which are typically male dominated, and speaking from some (limited) experience of the recruitment procedures of a few of these fields, and experience of currently working in a very male dominated software/hardware/systems engineering group, these are some of my thoughts:

I have come round to the idea of 'positive promotion' if I can call it that. What I mean by that is "the promotion of a particular career choice to groups which are currently under-represented within that career."

Why? Because regardless of whether you think there are 'too few' or 'too many' (for example) women in (for example) perl (how you would ever measure that I don't pretend to know), it can be intimidating and off-putting to enter a job where (as someone earlier said better than I will) you look around and don't see people (superficially?) like you. You might (even subconsciously), or perhaps due to stereotypes/discriminatory opinions which haven't died yet, start to think

• 'Why aren't there more female/black/male software engineers/firefighters/nurses?'
• 'Is there some kind of bias that I don't know about?'
• 'Is there something that might make me less good at this job because of my gender/race/whatever?'

There are, I'm sure, people confident enough in their own abilities not to ever worry about these issures. But there are also at least some who are not. Of course, you've got to take care not to go too far and discourage the people making up the typical demographic of your career by making them feel no longer welcome and this can be a difficult balance to get right.

As a concrete exmple, in my opinion, the UK fire and rescue service (at least some brigades, I won't mention specific ones) have a good attitude to female recruitment. They run 'positive action' days for women, which are designed to show interested women what the career is about, to show them that the infrastructure is in place to make a very under-represented group (female firefighters currently make up afaik ~2-3% of total firefighters) feel 'welcome', and to show that it is possible to make a success out of a career in a field which many girls would never consider 'open' to women. It also made very clear that female firefighters had to pass the same strength, fitness and aptitude tests, do the same training, and do exactly the same job as a male firefighter, but that these things were all possible.

When I was looking into careers in the military, I got more of an impression that females were grudingly accepted rather than welcomed. This is not because at any point someone went 'oh but you're a woman---why on earth are you thinking about doing this?' but rather an accumulation of little things: someone saying 'oh you won't be interested in engineering, you need A-levels in maths, physics, etc. for that' (they were aware I am educated to degree level and for the record I have a degree in physics, all of which was on a sheet in front of them. I can't prove that he assumed that because I'm female, but I can't think of any other reason.); the fact that height requirements are biased towards men's average heights; the fact that women aren't allowed in some branches.

Now, I have always felt that all this 'positive action' stuff was a bit namby pamby and uneccessary, and if I think about it logically, there's no reason for me not to follow either career should I want, but when I think about it purely emotionally, I have a positive impression of the fire service, and this slight niggling feeling that I might not be welcome in the military.

Here's an interesting twist though: as I understand it, the fire service is suddenly interested in getting women involved in the fire service because of government quotas. If it is making it easier for women to get in compared with men (which I doubt is happening strongly (at least I really hope not) because most of the tests are objective---strength, fitness, multiple choice tests) then I think that's wrong. But the result at the 'front end' i.e. raising awareness and making women feel comfortable is, imo, good. So does this mean that quotas are needed to force people/organisations to face up to the issue of discrimination/under-representation rather than just paying lip-service to it? I don't know. I still don't agree with quotas, although in this instance they seem to have had a positive outcome (the good awareness campaign).

This thread already seems to have deviated from both perl and its original topic so I hope you'll forgive me for being somewhat off-topic..

some_bird

I'll even go so far as to refuse to treat them all the same. I'll treat them differently. They are different people who expect and deserve different behavior from me. I may even treat them differently based on some of those factors. What I won't do is treat one better or worse than another because of those factors.

A light-skinned person I'll be more careful to offer sunscreen. A man I'll be much more likely to follow into the bathroom to continue a conversation than a woman. Someone who speaks my language better than others I'll expect to grasp what I'm saying more easily. These are not wrongful discrimination. Wrongful discrimination is when you try to push people forward or hold them back for no good reason.

To celebrate examples of a minority often discouraged from an activity who persevered isn't discriminating in favor of that minority. It's pointing out that you disagree with the discrimination against that minority. Women in programming are in fact an extreme minority. That's not a problem if no other women really want to be programmers. It is a problem if they really would like to be programmers but find the pressure to stay away from the profession too much hassle to go through. I know which explanation I expect to be the case. Maybe there is a natural male majority in the field, but if not for social pressure it shouldn't be so pronounced as the actual numbers are.

What I want to see isn't women placed before men in recruiting programmers. I would like to see every woman who wants to do the work given every chance to train and work in the field as a man of equal ability. I say this as a white man who was passed over for certain scholarships because I was white, while others with lesser scores got those same scholarships because they were awarded points for skin color. When you discriminate for one group, you discriminate against another. Don't advance anyone or keep anyone from advancing for the wrong reasons. Punishing people in 2009 for things that happened decades ago doesn't help anything, but making sure there's a truly level playing field does.

All that said, I'm all for people being allowed to remain anonymous or gender-unknown if they choose. Please don't "out" people who don't want their personal data known.

The fun is that by discriminating for a group in schools/universities they ruin the prospects of those they are allegedly trying to help. Because even those that would be accepted and complete the school under fair conditions are expected to have been accepted or allowed to complete thanks to the "positive discrimination". Which means the same paper from the same school is understood to mean something different if owned by one from the "discriminated for" or the "discriminated against" group.

Jenda


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