SCALE 8x: Moving the needle

There are lots of ongoing efforts to increase the number of women participating in free software, but reports on how those efforts have fared are few and far between. Sarah Mei spoke at the Women in Open Source (WIOS) conference, which preceded SCALE 8x, to report on what she and other members of the San Francisco Ruby community have been doing to bring more women into that community. Her talk, Moving the Needle: How the San Francisco Ruby Community got to 18%, looked at the goals that were set, the methods that were used, and the results.

Mei had been involved in various communities over the last 15 years, including Java, PHP, and Linux, and she had never really thought about why there weren't very many other women active in those communities. But, when coming back into the Ruby community after not being a part of it for a few months, she attended the Golden Gate Ruby Conference (GoGaRuCo) in 2009, which was infamous for a presentation that featured soft-core pornography in its slides. That conference, with around 200 attendees, five of which were women—including, in an amusing coincidence, three named "Sarah"—became something of a turning point for Mei.

She started out by posting about it to her blog, but soon realized that the presenter didn't really mean to be demeaning and was, instead, just a "socially awkward computer programmer". She didn't think she could change the person, so she started thinking about changing the community. In particular, if you could "change the audience at these events" such that it was 100 women and 100 men, she believed that inappropriate presentations would naturally fall by the wayside.

So she got together with one of the other Sarahs (Allen) to come up with ideas on how to get more women into the community. What they came up with was workshops to teach Ruby and Rails to women. But they also set a goal of 50% participation by women in two separate community events. The monthly Ruby "meetups", which had about 2% participation by women in January 2009, and the 2010 GoGaRuCo, which will be held in September, were the targets. As of January 2010, they are already up to 18% women at the meetups.

San Francisco is the "center of the Ruby universe", Mei said, with 1600 people on the meetup mailing list. In contrast, the Silicon Valley list has just 25 people on it. In addition, Ruby is "trendy", so people are interested, which made them think that free workshops for women covering Ruby would be popular, and "we were right". For other communities, other kinds of events might be better, and anyone targeting those communities needs to figure out what the right kind of event is.

So far, they've had three workshops attended by a total of 250 people. But events aren't all they do. There are three things that need to go together: setting goals, doing events, and cultivating people. Many efforts at community building focus on the events and "fail to set goals and cultivate the people that they get".

Goals should be very specific and should focus on something that you can fix. Mei had not gotten involved before because it seemed like such a huge problem to solve. By focusing on specific, achievable goals, like getting more women to come to each successive monthly meeting, they reduced the problem considerably. Now, that success with the monthly meetings can be used to assist the longer-term GoGaRuCo goal.

For the workshops, they decided to target very specific audiences. Targeting all women is not specific enough, nor is targeting all women developers. Their focus was two groups: women who had been out the workforce for a bit (often due to having a child) and women who work at companies that use Ruby, but aren't programmers. They used the Meetup.com infrastructure to organize the workshops, not because they liked it particularly, but because it tied in well with the existing monthly Ruby meetings.

The workshop logistics were not the hard part, she said. Finding a room, getting enough food, and getting sponsors was fairly straightforward. Sponsors were in fact the easiest part; they told people they wanted to train more women in Ruby and sponsors "threw money at us". One thing she suggested as a way to help people attend was to offer child care. They got a few husbands of attendees to volunteer and "locked [them] and the kids in a room with a Wii". Part of their target was moms, but even if that's not the case, offering child care can help as it may well be that both parents want to attend.

Attendance is not limited to women, as each women can bring a male guest. In addition, men are welcome as volunteers to help teach the workshop material as a TA. It's important to remember that the idea is to integrate women into the wider community, so adding men from the community to the workshop is important, she said. She also suggests having an after-party for all the participants and volunteers. Giving free drink tickets to the volunteers is a good way to get them to stick around for the party, which also helps with community integration.

Cultivating people is the other part of the puzzle. You need to "cultivate people at both ends of the pipeline", first by getting them in the door, and then, once they leave the event, by helping them continue in the community. Sending personal email—not mass email—to participants or potential participants is a good way to connect. They have also been successful in getting participants to volunteer to help with the next workshop, which is another way to keep the connection going.

Mei noted that it is much like sales. You need to get the word out to everyone you meet that might be interested. Printing up business cards with information about the workshops, posting information to a blog, and going to related meetings and conferences to talk about it are all things that can be done to attract more people. It is a "winnowing process", as some small percentage of those you tell will come and a small percentage of those will actually become Ruby developers. Getting five new developers out of the 200 women that have attended the workshops so far would make her happy.

Many women don't like to be visible in the community, but it is essential. When an organizing committee for a conference or event is not all-male, it says something about the organization. Women need to be willing to put their names on events, contribute on mailing lists, and ask questions after talks. She has noticed that it is mostly men who ask questions after a talk—"change that".

One of the interesting outcomes of the workshop effort has been higher attendance by women at the monthly meetings, some of whom hadn't come to one of the workshops. A critical mass effect has been achieved, so that "once the stigma was removed", more women started showing up.

Some unexpected things have happened, which may not be directly attributable to more women being involved, but they are correlated in time. The mailing list has been more active and lively, the talks are more varied and interesting, and more women are volunteering to give talks. She thinks that the influx of women, especially some asking more basic questions, has made the men feel more comfortable on the mailing list because they now "have permission not to know everything". They are more comfortable "not knowing all the answers", she said.

So, why is increasing women's participation so hard? Why haven't things like what has happened in San Francisco happened everywhere? Mei said that it really requires a woman or two to be willing to be visible. Their presentation materials are available if other people want to try the same kind of workshop. The problem is social, not technical, and, while we are "really good at solving technical problems", anything that is "a little more touchy-feely doesn't go so well".

What Mei and others have done in San Francisco looks promising as a model for other communities in other regions. As she pointed out, looking at the community to be served is important, as that will help focus the efforts in a productive direction. She is now evangelizing two things: the Ruby workshops in San Francisco along with using workshops as a tool to bring more women into the community. One can only hope she succeeds with both.