Comments on: What I brought home from Scottish Ruby Conference

By: Sean Cavanaugh

Sean Cavanaugh — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 07:20:17 +0000

Sandra, (Comment #7)

You said, “Perhaps conference organisers should give more consideration to delivering their conferences are more female friendly mode like Web conferencing?”

Perhaps some women find it hard to attend due to child care, but isn’t that a little assumptive. To assume that child care is a major issue assumes that most of these women have children.

Two points:

1. Would web conferencing not also be beneficial for men? They would have less travel expenses and far less time away from their families if they have them.

2. Isn’t a huge point of conferences to interact with others. I think a huge part of the learning process is being around a collective body of individuals all focused on the same goal. This not only allows for the building of ideas, but the forming of business relationships.

By: Ben Stoves

Ben Stoves — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 11:46:33 +0000

Hello, thats a really interesting post. The part about 28 out of 400 women attending the RubyConf caught my attention. The attendance rate seems greater than in other countries.

By: Wanda

Wanda — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 22:15:08 +0000

The more females in programming at these conferences the better. I think you should begin a group especially for women and co-ordinate conference attendance.

By: Jenny

Jenny — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:58:33 +0000

Do you have any statistics from the most recent conference on the west coast? I would be very interested to see if the numbers have come up in favor of women…would be nice to see more of us taking over this industry

By: Arpey

Arpey — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:45:54 +0000

Interesting take on the conference.

That’s a great tip about how tog et round data problems when overseas, by taking another phone and getting a local sim. Definitely going to try that, as got hammered on data charges last time I was overseas.

By: Sandra

Sandra — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 06:10:31 +0000

I wonder, if the proportion of female attendees at the Scottish Ruby Conference, actually reflects the proportion of women who are engaged in Ruby On Rails programming? I doubt it.

It is probably more a reflection of the percentage of programmers who are in a position of power at their employer to enable them to get off to a conference and, as Andy says, the fact that some women might find it difficult to go to a conference when they might not be other find someone else to take over their child-care role.

Perhaps conference organisers should give more consideration to delivering their conferences are more female friendly mode like Web conferencing?

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:16:47 +0000

Interesting comments about last years conference David. I found your post when looking for information on the 2011 conference that took place last week…did you attend?

I had to smile when I saw the other comments here about the lack of female attendees, because one of this year’s talks was in fact “Where are all the women?” by Erin O’brien

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 03:40:21 +0000

@Sarah: I dare say your guess is the same as mine. I, for one, would hate it too if there were too few women in my industry.

But I think the reason why there were very few female attendees in conferences is that (and this is a sad reality), while there are more of them in the industry, the people who take care of their kids when they leave home for their everyday jobs are unwilling to watch the kids so that mommy can go to a conference.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:43:05 +0000

Re: “RubyConf India had 28 female attendees out of 400 total; Scottish Ruby Conference had slightly less, I think. I wonder what we can do as a community to raise that percentage. I wonder what we can do as a society. I wonder what I can do.” I am curious to know where this huge concern on the sparseness of the female attendee population stems from

By: Wendy

Wendy — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 18:04:49 +0000

“Ever since I read about ticgit in Scott Chacon’s Git Internals I have wanted to do something with git besides source code control but I always thought I’d need to learn 100 git plumbing commands. ”

I was fortunate enough to attend Scott’s Git Ninja Training at rubycon2010 – learned some new tricks. Guy is an amazing speaker and gets his points across in a fun and entertaining way.

By: Kate

Kate — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:38:04 +0000

Hey,

Interesting stats about the women attending RubyConf. I see that Sarah Allen and Sarah Mei are giving FREE Ruby on Rails programming workshops for Women and their friends through railsbridge.org.

The sessions are aimed at introducing more women to programming and apparently are working really well.

Things are looking up and I certainly hope that she can help to break the male programmer stereotype.

By: Daniel Lucraft

Daniel Lucraft — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:38:38 +0000

Hey,

what went wrong when you tried to install Redcar? Email me and I’ll see if we can get you sorted.

thanks,
Dan