[Chennaipy] Diversity in Chennaipy

[Shrayas rajagopal]

Hi All,

Sometime earlier in the day, Karthik, who is also part of our
community linked me to Jacob[1]'s keynote at PyCon 2015[2].

I just got around to watching it and it left me thinking about a lot
of things. Before you go ahead with reading the rest of this message,
I urge you all to go and watch the keynote and come back to this when
you're done.

One of the things that has been in mind for a very long time for me is
the imbalance in our community. I've attended almost all meetups since
October last year and I find the amount of women attending these
meetups as compared to the amount of men is startlingly low. I've only
found Sharmila stepping up to give talks and I found her talk about
intro to pandas outstanding.

The question I want to ask all the women on the list and to everyone
else as well is if there is anything that we, as a community can do in
order to start bringing a change in this imbalance. Do you think that
the expectation around being a "women programmer" is too much? Do you
think that we could have a Code Of Conduct for our community that
would help our women counterparts feel more comfortable? Could we help
set up some sort of a PyLadies chapter in Chennai?

I want to know if, as a community, we are fundamentally missing
something that doesn't encourage women from participating.

I feel we need to fix this because we seem to be missing out on some
great people. I've been influenced by so many great women in the field
of tech. I feel our community (and largely even our country) has no
lesser talent than anyone else. We should take an *active* step
forward in making this happen.

I look forward to all your thoughts and suggestions on this.

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Footnotes:
[1]: https://twitter.com/jacobian
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJdFxYlEKE