[Inpycon] Tutorials

[॥ स्वक्ष ॥]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 12:21, Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> any clues as to how the gender balance has improved? We get some amount
> of women students who come for meets - and for conferences. But
> professional women attending conferences is very rare here. And devs
> seem scarce on the ground - like django has just *one* woman in the core
> dev group - although there seem to be a fair number on the mailing list
> (and practically none on the IRC list)

The short, *hire* more female python developers and/or provide more
python training internally at company cost.

The long,
[o] Attending conferences (i'd wager the same for local meets) are
expensive -- in terms of time *and* money, both of which are essential
for traveling to attend a conference. Being granted (paid) leave by
your company so that she can take time off from family
responsibilities to attend a conference in another city is yet another
factor. Usually, employees from the Marketing/Sales and PR department
can easily justify attending conferences than, say, a junior dev. I'm
not aware of Indian companies with any policies regarding conference
attendance and higher training mandatory for their dev's, much less
female dev's[0].

[o] Women (or men, fwiw) dont drop off the sky into any CS community
or company (gee....someone had to say it :)), so unless there is an
initiative from: the community/companies using python/<add your choice
here> , more technical meets in a variety of CS topics, a friendlier
local community that can champion Python, etc.. its an uphill battle.
Secondly, its harder to justify attending a meet in a far-flung area
if the topic is not of interest, either personally or professionally.
This is true for meets of any kind, LUG or Python meets -- I recall a
female devel mentioning that she isnt interested in a social meetup or
meets that start late in the evenings as traveling is an issue. This
is something I can totally relate with. Besides, if women attending
meets are in single digits, the conversation isnt exactly kosher and
its _very_ easy to feel unwelcome or feel like an outsider imposing
onto a group of close friends, hence unwelcome.

[o] Another cyclic pattern, Universities need to teach python and
unless there are companies employing python dev's the transition from
University to python developer at her workplace to core dev is
(light)years away.

Besides these, I heard someone mention that some companies hire women
to save money. Ouch, see, Women Don't Ask, negotiation and the Gender
Divide[1]

[0] http://www.devchix.com/2011/01/23/what-makes-the-best-workplace-atmosphere-and-culture/
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Women-Dont-Ask-Negotiation-Gender/dp/069108940X

HTH,
-- 
vid ॥ http://svaksha.com ॥