It’s no secret that software and technology are heavily male dominated fields. However, unlike some other male dominated fields, we have not done a very good job at embracing gender diversity. As exemplified by presenations at the Flashbelt and Golden Gate Ruby Conference, women in technology are frequently put into offensive and objectifying positions. This is completely unacceptable.

Gender equality issues have been a recurring problem in the workplace, but I think that the current state of technology is a little different. In technology, we not only have a huge percentage of males, but also a much younger average age and much looser social restrictions than other industries. Finally, the software and web fields have developed a kind-of street cred based heirarchy. In the past, the equality issues have been largely intentional, wheras the current situation in technology is ignorance driven.  This is less of an old-school “women should stay in the kitchen” mentality like you see in Mad Men, but more like elementary school boys that hit girls because they don’t know how to cope with gender differences.

I’m not trying to justify any of these behaviours. The reasoning doesn’t in any way validate the actions, but it does affect the solution. 

We need to make this negative behavior unacceptable in all areas. Part of the reason many of these guys are under the false impression that this behavior is ok is because it’s been perfectly acceptable in other situations. Our own industry leaders, especially in many of the open source communities, make a habit of publicly trash-talking and bashing others.  The whole “If you’re offended, fuck off” mantra has been a staple of prominent developers like David Heinemeier Hansson for years. The community tolerated and in some cases embraced this attitude.

I seriously doubt that either of the presenters at these conferences intended to offend women. They probably didn’t view it any differently than other situations where they’ve picked on somebody else’s differences or used stereotypes to get a laugh. As an industry that has tolerated this community dynamic, we can’t really be shocked when it translates from differences of opinion to differences of gender. We can also expect this to continue on to differences of race, religion and sexuality if left unchecked. 

We need to grow up. We need to work as an industry to stop attacking each other, because as these presentations show, it can quickly escalate. We need industry leaders to step up and stop supporting this culture, because if we don’t start now, this will likely continue to escalate. We run the risk of creating a field rife with prejudice where the hate speach of forums and internet flame wars becomes acceptable.