[LRUG] Ru3y Manor diversity

[Jordi Noguera Leon]

>
> > Here's the thing: we can't choose whether a group of individuals are
> intimidated by us. We can only choose if we care.
>
> I certainly think I care, but I also count myself as one of the people
> that's baffled about how to improve the situation. It seems a lot of
> emphasis is placed on having more women attend and ultimately speak at
> conferences. From my admittedly limited and anecdotal experience I've found
> the gender balance at most tech conferences to be roughly inline with the
> gender balance of developers at most places I've worked over the past 15
> years. I feel like that has been somewhat confirmed for me at other
> conferences like DIBI where the inclusion of a design focussed track seems
> to pull the balance closer to norms and at Cloudforce last week where
> integrating tech with project/product management and marketing type content
> had it very close to 50/50.
>
> I think the number of people who pay money to attend such conferences
> without already being employed in some capacity in that space is incredibly
> small. So is the problem here actually "we need more women employed as
> developers?" and not "we need more women attending tech conferences?".
> Again, I'm naively assuming that the former would naturally increase the
> latter.


It's going to be difficult to have more women working as developers given
that not many study computer science (or other technical degrees). For
instance, when I started uni there were something like 6 girls out of 100
(or 150 don't remember) who started CS. I studied maths and for us it was
more like 30 guys / 20 girls, although I know at least 10 girls dropped
off...
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