On Thu, 1 May 2008, Andy Lester wrote:
Imagine if every time you logged on to IRC someone got all excited and said
"There's a Jew on #perl". Would that make you feel comfortable? Would you
want to come back? Would it make you feel included in the group?
This analogy is beautiful. It also points my annoyance with the entire
topic. We never talk about "Jews in Perl" or "Jews in open source".
"How can we make Perl more inviting to Jews?"
This would be a reasonable question if for some reason there was a
noticeable disparity between Jews in Perl vs Jews in programming or Jews
in open source. This disparity does exist with women and open source, I
think.
The answer to the question is simple, at a certain level. Simply put, we
need to make sure that the Perl community is a comfortable place for women
(and Jews and everyone else).
Part of that means not making a big deal of their presence. However,
overall, I think it's less about doing specific things to cater to women,
and doing more to simply be less repellent (to everyone). That's asking a
lot of #perl, of course.
Outside of #perl, I think the Perl community as a whole does a decent job
of being less repellent, and has been doing a good job for the past few
years. There are some exceptions, but overall I think things have improved
in the time I've been involved in Perl (9 years or so).
-dave
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