jennstrater

Note: I'm publishing this now, even though I wrote most of it over a year ago when I was working on the Diversity 101 series. At the time, I was really burned out. I was struggling with issues at work and in the community, and the feedback I got from some of my readers was that they felt there was nothing they could do to help improve the conditions since they weren't doing anything wrong and every time I brought up the numbers, it was just depressing. The sentiment is still true today, but perhaps we can revive the effort and work together to change it. Introduction In short, it shouldn't be. The purpose of diversity organizations isn't to create an unfair advantage but rather for equality. In fact, I get rather annoyed when individuals or articles claim "Girls are better at .. X". I fall outside many of the generalizations about my gender and find that most stereotypes have little to do with that and more to do with personality traits or confounding v

After many recent announcements about the abuse of women at different companies in our industry, I saw a thread on Twitter about encouraging and supporting women in tech.  There was one aspect of a tweet though that got me thinking about the percentage of women applicants at several companies who use Groovy and related technologies.  My first thought was that maybe it was a lack of applications in general or perhaps even an HR screening problem so I started to look for how many women might apply for a job based on prior knowledge and contributions to open source projects. For each project, I looked through the list of top contributors on Github. As I searched through the list, I saw a depressing pattern.  My prior work with company data shows that only about 5% of Groovy developers are women. That number is consistent with conference attendance at Groovy conferences. I also know that when we look at other programming language communities, we typically see an even smaller number