So I started programming (for real) about two years ago. I spent about four months teaching myself coding PHP, JavaScript and CSS. I was able to secure a job after four months. I wasn't really good enough for the position.<p>My wife is doing the same. She is following my path. She have me, I teach her and she is learning much faster. After a year, she is still looking for a volunteer job! Nobody believes she can do anything.<p>This is extremely sad. My wife is far more advanced than me when I got my first job. We are immigrants and we are not white, I believe those adds to our problems.<p>Everyone who says women don't deserve this kind of attention never saw a women struggling get in tech world.
I disagree with everyone saying, "Why create something separate for women? Isn't that further separation?"<p>For the most part, women don't take up much space in the tech industry. Women look at the big names in tech, and they don't really see people who are "like me." This can be intimidating and disheartening. Creating more spaces for women to connect with other women, and share their experiences and encouragement is much needed. Of course, let's also not forget women of color and trans women, who obviously face additional challenges in finding people like themselves to look up to in tech. I hope that GitHub makes an effort to include a wide range of women with different backgrounds to include in this series.<p>Also, there's no reason why any women's group should have to admit men to appease the "I promise we're not sexist against men" line of reasoning. I probably shouldn't be surprised that some of the first comments on something oriented towards women is, "But...WHAT ABOUT MEN?!" Get over yourselves! Let this be a reminder that the world does not revolve around you and people like you.
As a female developer, I would intuitively feel glad when seeing this kind of events/groups being formed, but thinking about it I am not sure why. I don't even think I feel like going to them for any other reason than, well, I am female and they're also female so I should probably check it out.<p>After reading the reasons Github wrote, I find it hard to relate. For me picking up coding has nothing to do with seeing some other women do it, but perhaps seeing some human beings do it. And I don't think seeing female developers would inspire me further more than male developers. But I could be completely false and it might be that turns out I don't know what I really feel...<p>Perhaps it's because I have not yet noticed any serious injustice around where I've been, could be that I just didn't realised what they were or I haven't spend enough time in the tech industry. The most unfair thing in tech I've ever encountered was interviewing at a company where there is no ladies restroom...<p>Anyhoo. I don't personally know any other female developer and I've been coding since 11, that's 10+ years, I guess that's ought to be wrong. And since there are no samples around me, I don't really know what inspired other female developer to learn how to code. Is there anyone here who cares to share her experience?
Thanks Github, it's great to have your weight behind making tech more friendly to women, and spotlighting female role models so that more of the young might pursue a career in the field.
I think this is an excellent initiative by GitHub. It's well-acknowledged that there is a lack of women in tech, for what I'm sure is a wide variety of reasons, and celebrating the successes of women in that field is a noble endeavor.<p>Personally I believe that these women are capable of being a role model to both men and women, as they presumably have achieved their successes through their own merits and not by virtue of their gender, so I'm sure the wisdom they have to share at these meetups would benefit everyone. To that end I would be disappointed to hear if, while the meetups may encourage or advertise to a female audience, they chose to exclude men.
To those saying that "this is discrimination is it is morally wrong" (and I don't think this event constitutes discrimination, but here goes):<p>1. Should we then do away with gender segregated sports teams?
2. Should other minorities (e.g. LBGTQ groups) no longer have support groups that focus on issues relevant to them?<p>Having groups that cater to certain minorities feels to me both necessary and useful. We are not all identical. You probably don't want to live in a world without exceptional and different people in it; it would be boring.<p>That means there are times when some of those people who are like-minded want to get together and support each other. In some cases, that means other groups need to be discouraged (because that minority would otherwise be overwhelmed, drowned out in a sea of majority voices).<p>Why are so many voices in our industry constantly fighting events like this?
This is really neat! Kudos to github.<p>Here is a question: as one of two engineers at a 6-person seed-round startup, what could we be doing to contribute to the ecosystem of people who support women in technology? We don't have the office space - much less the money - to find or sponsor a monthly talk. So within the context of running our business, what can we do?<p>Sometimes I fear that, until we have a successful and profitable company (with spare conference rooms, clout to find people who would like to give lectures here, or an otherwise large audience), there isn't much we can do to contribute.<p>What can smaller companies or even individuals within organizations do?
This is how you get more women involved in tech, by actually taking action. I hope that we see more initiatives like this rather than hateful articles, which we've seen so many of recently.
It is brilliant to see a move forward to recognising that there are women in technology and they provide as good a contribution as everybody else,<p>BUT,<p>Is creating a specific, segregated, event/group really the way forward or is it just creating a greater divide in the tech community along gender lines? What would really need to be done is look properly into why there is a disproportionate number of men versus women who go into technology, rather than introduce yet more segregation.<p>I do not believe that there is an event/group out there currently that would place any sort of restriction, intentional or otherwise, on female entry.
Very cool!<p>Not too far off topic: I worked for a good tech company for most of the years between 1973 and 1996. The only major negative thing about the company was a 'glass ceiling' for women engineers (we did have some very high profile women on our board of directors though). I found that situation embarrassing.<p>So, yes, special events featuring women engineers are a good thing.<p>BTW, my granddaughter can program fairly well using the Scratch game platform :-)
Tech should be friendlier to women.<p>However, segregation isn't the way forward, IMHO. I'm always sad to see gender-focussed events and groups. I'd much rather see women and men -integrate- than congregate within their own gender.<p>And just to pre-empt, please don't give me the disingenuous "men are welcome too" line. This is, by definition, a women-focussed group.