tanglisha
Google has been doing a bunch of research on this lately.
1. Do you trust the government that will be in place 20 years from now? Most of those people are now teenagers. 2. We don't know what law changes may happen in the future. The data gathered can make you look like someone who will break one of those laws. Ex post facto (protection for someone who broke a law before it was in effect) has been overturned by the Supreme Court in specific cases in the past.
There will always be a certain portion of the populace that cannot receive a specific vaccination because of allergies or a weakened immune system that cannot handle it.
The whooping cough epidemics that have been sweeping through anti-vaccination areas in recent years are an example of how a decision that you make for your kids can result in other people dying.
Just be sure to write lots and lots of tests. You'll thank me later :)
Everything so far has been about punishment/vindictiveness. Nobody is interested in trying to address the problem, move forward, and make the world a better place. I don't see how the outcome could have been worse. Everyone handled this badly except PyCon itself, yet PyCon is who will be remembered as the problem.
There are times when I am new to a group, that I will be constantly told how very valuable to the group I am, how awesome I am, how happy they are to have me, etc; often before I've been in the office for an hour or written a line of code.
After this sort of thing, I tend to be suspicious of praise from that group of people. Do they actually mean it? Did they even look at my code?
As for the developer argument, the problem is that there is no hard line. How big of a project must one complete before they're a developer? You said even a small one, but Hello World is a small "project" and certainly isn't enough.
I completely agree that there is a difference between learning to code and calling yourself a developer. One problem here is that the industry uses developer, coder, and programmer interchangeably, although programmer seems to be currently falling out of favor. (I was once at a party where someone thought that I meant I was a "party programmer" or something.) Obviously they don't mean the same thing, but it's kind of like arguing over the difference between a geek and a nerd at this point.
The problem with this kind of thing is the the people that got in solely on merit assume that people who fit into any of those categories got in without having any merit. This is rarely true except in the case where it is extremely difficult to find that particular set of things.
When that assumption is there, people are treated differently. It's often not even on a conscious level. It's going over to help the new female that showed up at a meetup assuming she needs help getting started with Python - while ignoring the 5 new males that came in before her. It's assuming that the black woman over there got her job because who ever heard of a black coder? She probably sucks at it.
Discussing it is different than dismissing someone's accomplishments because they appear to be privileged.
"I think I would be a great fit for this company?"
Most of the issues are fairly unconscious bias. Some people just assume women aren't as good at tech jobs as men are. Some people assume pretty women are stupid. Some people are simply uncomfortable around women, so don't put themselves into a position where they will be around them.
Issues with actually getting women into tech jobs range from their manner of speech (for example, raising their voices at the end of sentences) to being overly modest about their job skills.
In my opinion, targeting a message makes more sense than trying to make it overly broad to cover everyone, that only dilutes the information. You, of course, are welcome to disagree :)
We chose women because that's what we are and because we wanted to target some of the issues specific to women. A LOT of the information we will be putting out will apply to both genders.
Aside from childbirth itself, women are far more likely to be single parents than men are, and are normally the ones to stay home with sick children, especially when there is a long-term disease involved.
Many women end up dealing with multiple name changes, across degrees and sometimes projects.
Of course not all women lack these skills, we would never pretend that to be the case. But the ones that do are at a distinct disadvantage, and there are more of them out there than you realize.
Who would you turn to if you didn't even know that your handshake felt like a dead fish and you never once made eye contact with the hiring manager? That kind of feedback doesn't exist after interviews.
The point of this project is not to convince women to go into tech, that is completely out of scope. The point is to help women that are qualified but don't interview well or know how to deal with some of the issues unique to women that either raise eyebrows or can cause confusion in an interview.
The women we're targeting include recent graduates, those who left the field for a few months or years to have babies or take care of sick family members, and women who may have been driven out of other positions by sexual harassment (nobody wants a troublemaker, and they do always ask why you left your previous position).