Women in IT - The Gender Battle Continues
April 30, 2009 · by Kacie Conroy
A friend of mine who is very involved in the Rails community shared a very interesting story. We talk often about the numbers of women in IT and are both committed to helping raise awareness of IT in women. A few weeks ago a Ruby Rails conference held in San Francisco had a presenter which used very suggestive images of women. I’ll post the link of the presentation below and ask for comments. Both sides are charged. Many women, as well as a fair number of men, are upset that these images were used. It objectifies women and certainly makes them feel alienated amongst their male co-workers. However, there is just as strong of a reaction from the other side. They range from “everyone else is stupid”, “let it go and move on”, to “this is an over-reaction”.
http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/?p=46&cpage=1#comment-6
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html
The conference was all male minus about six women. I wonder what the reaction would have been if the images were suggestive pictures of men? I am sure many who posted comments like, “let it go and get over it” would have a polar opposite response questioning how the photos applied to programming. I know many woman, myself included, who have experienced degradation while in IT. This is just one of the areas that we need to progress in to help other women get into the field. Hopefully soon the future women of IT will have a different, more positive, experience.
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Comments
- #1 - Steve Alvarez said on May 13, 2009:
- I’ve never really encountered any harrassment against the women I’ve worked with, but then again, I’m a male and probably not exposed to it as much as a woman might be. Regardless, I was only able to get through a few of the slides of that presentation before closing it down, since not only was it not appropriate for viewing at work, but wasn’t really appropriate for viewing by anyone who wasn’t looking for what I would consider “porn”.
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Commenting is not available in this section entry.I’m not very familiar with the author of the presentation or the Rails conference where it was shown at, but I would think that those images were not appropriate at all for a work conference, let alone a presentation made to a public group. Just looking at those slides made me picture the author as a person who is probably not very familiar with the female population, has a small group of male friends who find these types of pictures entertaining, and probably has little to no respect for women at all. I could go on painting the picture of this author, but plain and simple, I’m a male and even I was offended by the pictures in that presentation. Basically, the author is an idiot and a coward for hiding behind what he thought would be entertaining pictures that…, nevermind, who knows what that dumb*ss was thinking.
It’s too bad that some people have to use cheap and tasteless tactics to try and get people’s attention. The content in the presentation might of even have been intellectual, but unfortunately was probably overlooked based on the pictures. While instances of this type of scenario have probably happened in the past, and probably will happen again in the future, I would like to think that it’s not the norm in the IT field. Hopefully someone spoke up during the presentation, because I know I would have said something about this crap. People are just going to need to speak up for what’s right, because this shouldn’t be allowed to happen again.