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 :-)

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.

Go watch a predominantly female staff somewhere and then come back speaking about competitiveness! Not speaking about insults.

The "less competitive nature" of women, their lower tolerance to or lower likelihood to inflict verbal abuse is pure propaganda.

Jenda


Support Denmark! Defend the free world!

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.