I think the issue is the lack of consent. The data is freely available and anyone who wants to use it to compile lists of Perl developers can do so, but if you're going to put up a list of female developers without a) asking them first and b) presenting it in a context that anticipates and avoids the gender-politics objections to doing so, then you're going to get a negative reaction. It's probably something that <i>shouldn't</i> be creepy even without consent and carefully-honed context, or at least no creepier than a list of Russian Perl developers or Perl developers who use Windows or whatever, but that's not the world we live in.<p>It looks like an honest enough mistake, but I guess we're going to have to listen to another bunch of white male community guardians parading their feminist credentials and belittling the original developer for his backwards lack of understanding anyway.
What about Twitter lists? I have created all sorts of lists without asking people first. No "women who do x" lists, but still - the idea was I think people creating lists of people who fall into a common category of their interest.<p>It doesn't seem so strange that people might be interested in female developers. For all I know, that list could have been compiled by another female developer who wants to feel less lonely.<p>In another context people will rush to present such lists to entice more women into the field. Also, the argument "there are almost no female developers (in OSS)" is common, so such lists might be handy to answer those arguments.<p>I was just considering how I would feel about a "black developers" list - sure it is a double edged sword, but I think it could be interesting/valid for the same reasons. People will gather those statistics anyway, and I believe public data should be as accessible as possible.
It is not creepy in all fields. It is creepy in computer programming/science.<p>The problem is the culture in this special field with a lot of allusion to pornography, sexual abuse, etc. When you have well known figures in the Ruby community explicitly telling that it is good to use porn to sell software technology, you have a problem.<p>In my field, process engineering and biotechnology, even if some groups are extremely male dominated, I have never experienced such behavior in more than a decade of going to workshop/conferences and working with 100's of people all over the world.
Wow. This thing is totally inappropriate and extremely creepy in all contexts. Out of "sheer curiosity"? Jeepers.<p>I hope this gets removed.<p>Great message to send to the women in the tech industry: come join our community and we'll single you out in a git repository like a museum exhibit. Even better, the whole thing is a perl script, so anyone can programmatically do whatever they want with your personal information! It's all for curiosity's sake!
I don't think it's necessarily creepy. There is a whole list of classes depending on what 'type' of developer one is, found here: <a href="http://search.cpan.org/~ishigaki/Acme-CPANAuthors-0.19/lib/Acme/CPANAuthors.pm" rel="nofollow">http://search.cpan.org/~ishigaki/Acme-CPANAuthors-0.19/lib/A...</a><p>But I know that I'm not known for my extreme sensitivity, so maybe I should withold judgement on this one.
Wikipedia has lots of lists of female X: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=list+of+female" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=list+of+f...</a><p>Is that considered creepy too? In any case, I don't think "creepy" is the right word. It implies a sense of stalking, which I don't think this is.
I think that if you are female developer and you want to encourage other female developers and support the transition to a world where gender of the developer isn't important you should brag about your femaleness everywhere and encourage others to do the same.<p>You have to see something a lot and often to get used to it, tolerate it and finally accept it as norm.
I think it is only creepy when you consider that no benefit can be achieved based on the sex of an author. For instance, your enjoyment levels of a piece of software bares no correlation to the sex of the developer who created it.<p>This is in contrast to works where the sex of the author can have an impact on the overall enjoyment.<p>For example, I have playlists with over 100 female artists... because sometimes I do just want to listen to a female singer. My "database" of female singers in the form of a playlist isn't creepy, but a database of female developers could quite easily be considered so, since for the most part it's hard to think why anyone would need this information. (Aside for research purposes?).
I have seen this in every culture. So as long this is for fun, its OK. But it isn't uncommon to have and list 'y who do x'(y being a set of people who do x). I've failed to understand the reasons for this. Is it because you feel a particular field x is is dominated by non-y people and want fellow y's to get motivated?<p>If that is so, I don't see anything wrong in it. But if this is to prove that y's are strange and are atypical of regular y's and then stereotyping them from there is on is creepy.
You could look at it in a positive light if you want - as a list of inspiration. (I can't actually see the list, so I'm going by the description as a list of female developers.)<p>Personally I don't think the developers gender matters - who cares if a developer is male or female? That's not the context in which you are interacting with them.