Thank you Sarah and Sarah for starting all this & paving the road for us. The workshop team loved doing it, and we feel very proud be to furthering the mission you gave birth to.
We don't cause a fuss just when the proportion is not exactly right. We cause a fuss when the proportion is way out of whack and obviously wrong. When like less than 3 percent of Boston Ruby programmers are women, something is blatantly wrong. There are probably more factors at work than mere spontaneous career preference that are causing this seriously skewed distribution.
This is not just an abstract inconvenience either. Whenever you are part of a historically marginalized minority -- whether by color, gender, or nationality -- it will likely be more uncomfortable for you to enter fields where you are the only person from your group. This is particularly true for women.
Not only are sexist comments more likely when there are not a lot of women at events (see http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-...), the women will also likely feel more uncomfortable because of the disproportion. Let me quote a posting on our outreach mailing list thread from a woman to elaborate:
"I have definitely never experienced anything threatening or offensive at a Ruby group meeting. But, you show up at an event where there are 50 men or more to 3 women, and you grow to expect some double-takes. Some women, like me, are okay with that. A lot aren't. And it makes it hard to show up alone or when you don't know anyone if you know you're going to stick out like a sore thumb. A man can show up at boston.rb for the first time and not have anyone pay the least attention. A woman cannot.
"There's some critical mass that needs to be reached before that's not true anymore, and it's just hard work to get there. There needs to be enough women who don't care if they stick out, so the women who do care don't stick out so much. And you need to make plans to meet the women you know there, so they already know someone. That could be a component of any project night, outreach, or mentorship effort -- encouraging people to come to the meetings, and affirmatively planning to meet them there."
I hope these points carry at least a little weight for you. Thank you for raising the challenge.
Boston Python really led on the diversity outreach front in 2012, and now we (the Boston Ruby community) are very gratefully following their lead. Boston Python is so awesome.
I share those concerns & agree that MVC is a lot to swallow in an introductory workshop. But it's also very motivating! A lot of people want to build real websites instead of toy programs. We're trying to harness that awesome source of motivation & it seems to be working despite the drawbacks.
Yeah, it's a difficult line to walk between teaching what is comprehensible and enabling people, with magic, to do something concrete, even if they know nothing about how anything works. The former bores people because it's too abstract, and the latter...well, I feel there's the risk that when there's too much magic involved, the students feel as if being a "wizard" is an inherent trait, rather than something you eventually build towards after plugging away at the fundamentals.
I've toyed with teaching a workshop that entails: teach enough programming to turn a non-flat-file dataset (maybe a json of their tweets) into a decent visualization (by plugging into Google Charts, perhaps) and uploading a static page, with Twitter Bootstrap, onto a free hosting service, or even a blog service such as Wordpress.
But even that is a lot to teach in a day:
1. Command line and file system basics
2. Fundamentals of programming (enough to open a JSON file, parse and aggregate it on some conditions, and spit out HTML)
3. Basic HTML and DOM, including what you need to know to
4. Basic webserver/uploading stuff
Most workshops struggle with getting 3 and 4 done. #2 is not easily achievable over even several days.
