Sexism in the Ruby community: how does the Python community manage it?

[Kevin Walzer]

On 10/16/13 11:13 PM, Owen Jacobson wrote:
> 3. How can we reach out to the Ruby community and help *them* get past
> the current crop of gender issues, and help them as a group to do better
> next time?

The Ruby community seems to be a singular example of "brogrammer" 
culture: mostly young men, lots of drinking, lots of sex humor, extreme 
work intensity, arrogant intelligence, and a tendency to view women as 
people to get laid with, and a distinct lack of experience with working 
with women as equals or superiors. It's frat life transplanted to 
startup culture. I have no idea why this seems so endemic in the Ruby 
community; it probably has something to do with the huge popularity of 
Rails  and the resurgence of tech startups over the past several years: 
both have created a "gold rush" environment that has attracted huge 
numbers of young programmers with technical chops but who are shockingly 
undeveloped in other ways.  It's immature men meeting an immature 
business environment (i.e., a startup) without procedures in place to 
set an appropriate tone. Such behavior in most other fields would get 
them fired so fast it would make their heads spin, if not getting them 
drummed out of the field altogether.

I suspect that Python doesn't have these problems because it's an older, 
more established language, and the community is comprised of older and 
more mature individuals who have outgrown such shenanigans, or never 
embraced them in the first place. Python has grown steadily but never 
had the boom that Ruby on Rails had. I'm sure the Python community has 
its issues with institutionalized sexism, not least because computer 
fields in general have so few women, but I have seen no evidence of the 
overt, sexist hostility that pervades "brogrammer" culture.

As to what the Python community can do, I'm not sure what, apart from 
calling out the idiot "brogrammers" who perpetuate such hostility to 
women, and refusing to associate with it. The real opportunity to 
address this lies with the startup founders and executives who tolerate 
this kind of behavior, and don't send its perpetuators packing. Losing a 
job because you're a sexist jerk might get you thinking about the 
importance of treating all people with respect. If you're a startup 
founder who tolerates such behavior because you're afraid of losing your 
developers to other companies, then you're a coward; and if you simply 
don't see a problem with such behavior or deny that it exists, then you 
are worse than a coward, and you are worse than a jerk.

Let me reiterate: the overt sexism and hostility toward women that 
emanates from "brogrammer" culture is shocking to anyone who works in a 
more established field with a better balance between men and women. I've 
worked in marketing, editing, technical writing, and development, and at 
no place I have ever worked would such behavior be greeted with anything 
but immediate termination. Even the software startup I worked at did not 
have such issues; while the developers were all men, the company was 
founded by a husband-and-wife team, and the women who worked there (in 
technical writing and sales support) were treated with respect, because 
the founder would not tolerate anything else.

It would be great to see more leaders at big tech companies speak out 
against such garbage. What impact would it have if Larry Page, Mark 
Zuckerberg, Marissa Meyer, and others say, "If you do that crap here, 
you won't be here"? Or what if venture capitalists said, "We won't fund 
you if you don't provide an equitable work environment that puts jerks 
out on their rear end." Nothing short of some hard, painful experience 
is likely to have a large-scale change on the sexist culture that 
pervades so much of tech.

A bit off-topic perhaps, for which I apologize, but I've been following 
the whole "sexism in tech" subject with increasing disgust and dismay, 
and I wanted to strongly protest against it.

--Kevin

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin/Mobile Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com
http://www.wtmobilesoftware.com