Christefano posted to Drupalchix about where Drupal Camp LA 2010 bought their women's tee shirts. And it gave me a perfect segway to say my piece, which I copy below.
You must have lost money on any women's tee shirts you bought for DrupalCamp LA 2010 -- the camp was a sea of men. I only saw about 10 other women. There was one point where all the participants were outside in a area, and all you saw were hundreds of men.
The Westside LA Drupal meetings are almost 100% men. The women that are involved, and they are very few, are either girl friends/wives of active members or like Rain who I've only seen in a helping "female" role (organizing/administration). I've tried on numerous occasions to talk Drupal with active members at the meetings and camps, and I've been snubbed/ignored each time. I even sent a job request to Christefano last summer, and he didn't even give me the courtesy of an acknowledgment of receipt let alone a call. How many women are doing Drupal development in the Los Angeles Drupal shops???
Well, women are just as capable at Drupal as men -- sorry, men, it's true. If you guys want to lead your all-men groups, go ahead. I'll just go elsewhere.
Susan aka Joyseeker -- now seeking my joy in development frameworks other than Drupal
Comments
Wow, sorry
Susan - I am sorry this was your experience. I would advise you to try your hand in LA DRUPAL again. Please consider attending our Drupal Design Camp LA this weekend, and maybe even volunteer for that event and/or the LA DRUPAL booth at the SCALE expo. Being a volunteer at any of our events really helps us get to know who you are and what you want to get out of our group (and Drupal itself).
Some members are really shy, and maybe you were too Drupal-awesome for them to carry on conversations with. Come hang out, we'll enjoy your company.
As for the shirts we did great with the women's shirts, they essentially sold out - men purchased them as well as support. We love our community.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
Historically Common Experience
Hi Susan,
I suggest you give Drupal Design Camp and LA Drupal another chance. Also there were 4 women the last LA Drupal meetup in Pasedena.
I'm male, and a long time computer software specialist.
What you ran into was observed in the late 1980's and early 1990's as well. IEEE and ACM both had articles on in back in those days because the woman coming into computer and electrical engineering fields would leave after only a few years. They were leaving the industry because of how they were treated. The computer industry is getting better. When I worked at Citigroup there were nearly as many women as men in software development, and you're correct, they are quite capable of performing as well as or better than a man.
I can't say that I have found an equal number of women in Drupal as men, but I can say that I was surprised by the number of women (about 33%) at Sand Camp in San Diego the first week of January. I have also met one of the key figures in Drupal, webchick or Angie Byron who definitely a woman. You could have met her if you went to the Drupal 7 release party on the first night of the Drupal 7 training program. I also know that Christefano's partner is a woman who is very involved in LA Drupal.
Also keep in mind, if you are an attractive woman, you may scare a lot of computer geeks into silence (true, I was scared)!
Paul
Paul Chernick
CEO
Chernick Consulting
(310) 569-2517
Hi Susan, Last month's meetup
Hi Susan,
Last month's meetup in Downtown Los Angeles had a much higher ratio of women to men than I've ever seen at a Drupal meetup. I counted 8 women out of 41 people. That's about 20% (yes, I actually counted!). These details are really important to me personally and to the health of our community.
You're right about the message you sent me. I looked in my email for your username and found it. It was sent via my Drupal.org contact form, though, which I treat differently than my work address. I get a lot of messages every day from *.drupal.org and yours just slipped through. My apologies.
Regarding women being just as capable as men, I definitely believe this to be true. My co-founder is expert at budgeting Drupal projects and has way more insight into business than I do. Our director of Drupal training is organized, capable and brilliant. My take on this whole issue is that men and women are equally capable when given the right conditions. I've been to a lot of private workshops and trainings where the gender balance was 1:1 by design and it's no mistake that half the title-holders in my company are women.
Did you go to the Drupalchix mixer at DrupalCamp LA 2010? I don't know the exact number, but I thought I saw about 30 women there. Maybe Rain or Nicole can comment on that.
I am sorry that you had a bad experience
I am sorry that you had a bad experience, but I do not know why you think Rain is only a helper. As far as I can tell she is a real leader in the community and has been a go-to person on many L.A. Drupal projects. Further more I have received great technical advice a couple of times from her. She and Nicole Bluto gave a great season at the L.A. Drupal Camp on back up and migrate, I still use the notes every time I need to migrate a site.
Susan, do you realize how that sounds to the women reading this?
This is a post about T-SHIRTS! How did it get from t-shirts to this defensive posture in one post? Without understanding the baggage you're bringing to the table on this, and there seems to be a lot of it, it's very difficult to address what you really want or were expecting from this community.
Frankly, my first reaction was to take offense, both for myself and for Rain, whom I consider to be a leader in this community, and whose initiative and dedication earned her a seat as a Drupal manager. Really, the first time I read your post all I could think was "F*CK YOU, BEEY&TCH!" Your sentiments were something I thought I'd left behind since coming to Drupal. They were all too familiar, and since coming to this group, an anachronism that I'd hoped would stay in the past. It got my dander (and my own baggage) up.
Then I remembered how challenging the boys' club felt when I first encountered it as well, and I remember being overwhelmed by the testosterone, especially when there were differences among the ranks or management. There are loudmouths everywhere. I can say without hesitation that many of them in the Drupal community are women.
If I have something to say, I get listened to. It's been profoundly easy to float ideas and then gather enough support to follow through on them, like when I wanted to explore health insurance for LA Drupal freelancers or get a hackerspace together. (Okay, the barnraising idea was met with a resounding silence, but it wasn't because I was female. :-P) It's been even more exciting seeing how kind people are to each other and watching the community rally around people who are facing challenges.
I can say that as a community, it's different than the others that I've encountered, in that I've felt that I've gotten a fair shake with the people here. I've seen my ideas get incorporated into Ubercart. I've architected and put a good hunk of code into a virtual world in Drupal. It's a lot easier to achieve really cool things with this group than with just about any other group I've encountered. (I've worked for the physics department at Harvard, as an engineer for Greenpeace and also for NASA in physics.) But I had to learn the Drupal Way first. It seemed like it was about gender, but it wasn't. It was about open source and the code and the way that information gets shared and the way you have to find it. This community is the closest I've seen to a meritocratic utopia (Yes! I really typed those words) that I've ever seen.
I've found that with most of the women in the community, the defensive edge that you're displaying never had to develop. (Or they have all agreed to put it away.) And that's both refreshing and wonderful, and a hell of a lot more pleasant to deal with. It means that the crap I had to take when I was the first girl taking shop in my hometown, or the first girl on the computers, is beginning to pay off. It also may mean that I've been hanging out with techie guys for so long that a lot of the crap has become invisible. With that being said, I've been in a lot of technology groups and this one is fundamentally different.
Communities are tribal, and each has an unspoken code of engagement. I have a harder time operating within the unspoken rules and process obsession that I've found in many women's groups than I do within the Drupal community, but it took some time and a lot of patience to get comfortable with the way this community at large works, and time to believe that often they really are as utopian as they seem.
With that being said, as with any tech group, you're also going to have a percentage with outright Asperger's, and that wonderful ability to focus comes at a price of really really bad interpersonal skills. If you're unlucky enough to try to strike up a conversation with one of them before they get to know you, they may be more defensive than not, because whatever baggage you're carrying, they've got it doubled. Early on in my Drupal experience, I ran into many and took their behavior as being snubbed, and there are a few people on the autism spectrum here in the LA user group.
Snubbing is an act of defensiveness, and is exacerbated by exhaustion. People are busy, scared, got yelled at, got up on the wrong side of the bed, hit bad traffic, or are frustrated by Angry Birds. Given opportunities for kindness, people will respond. If you showed up with even a whiff of entitlement, those people who got beat up by the entitled cheerleaders in high school are going to hit back first. I've never seen outright cruelty from anyone in the Drupal community ever, and when it came close those people didn't last.
The Los Angeles Drupal group is full of very kind and dedicated people, both men and women, who have been welcoming and warm. The world that I see Drupal people trying to build is one where people are very kind to each other, and treat each other fairly and ethically. Within the Drupal community, I've seen more breathtaking acts of generosity than I've ever seen elsewhere, even in the nonprofit sector - both from individuals and from companies.
Drupal at large, and LA Drupal is at a subtle tipping point, and a lot of creativity is being unleashed. There's a lot happening that's going to be a lot of fun, and much of it will be led by women. There is room for many leaders here, and many styles of leadership - especially Rain's. Just because you're not hogging the spotlight at a meeting doesn't mean you're not a leader.
Now, about those t-shirts...
Founder
http://www.larks.la
Robot Coordinator
http://droplabs.net
Organizer, Dragonslayer
http://drupal.la &n
I'll answer all...
I'm at work and working on litigation rushes for a law firm -- the job I took when I couldn't get Drupal work -- I'll answer all late tonight.
Lee, please calm down and let's look at this as a discussion about bringing in and accepting more women to Drupal.
And, Rain, I apologize -- it was only what I saw, not, perhaps, what actually is.
Susan
Just to give a little
Just to give a little context, this is a fork of a conversation at:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/118459
joyseeker's first post that started off this thread above is in response to christefano's post saying:
This post is intended to be informational, not snarky, as the context here, I believe, is important.
Founder
http://www.larks.la
Robot Coordinator
http://droplabs.net
Organizer, Dragonslayer
http://drupal.la &n
How women can best 'join' discussions at LA Drupal meetings
I've worked for many years, over a decade, encouraging women to join the over dozen open source user groups I have helped create in that time. I've helped with LA Drupal. Which from meeting One has had a higher than normal number of women attendees, and long term volunteers.
So, to hear this type of criticism, I realized something did not happen that should have. What I can not say, but I know how to make it go better in the future with these two things.
First, I have personally approached most women in attendance and indicated to them the easiest way to break the ice is to talk directly to any of the six leading volunteers, that run the meeting. And ask to be introduced around to others. All LA Drupal leaders and meeting volunteers are devoted to increasing the women attendance, and making it easier for them, in anyway needed. It's been that way for 5-6 years... since the beginning.
So what went wrong at this one meeting? Better, I will address how to correct it.
Rain, I'm going to volunteer you, or Lee, or any other woman of LA Drupal, at each meeting, at the beginning, get up front for a special announcement. Include going to the DrupalChix web site, and about LA Linux Chix web site. And the best way to get into discussions is to talk with one of the volunteers running the meeting, there are six of us, or more now. To ask one of the volunteers how to get the best experience from meetings as a woman. To ask several of us is best, I think.
My recollection is for years this type of announcement was made at each meeting. By Chris, our full time MC at the beginning, for years. To avoid burn out as MC, Chris has let Mike, Christo, Rain, and John MC the meetings. And with this change, it's likely, the full range of announcements Chris makes, taking more than 30 minutes, has been reduced to 15 minutes in some cases. And one of those reductions was, unfortunately, about women involvement with LA Drupal and Drupal, as I do not recall it for the last 4-5 meetings. Which have been at new locations, not Causecast, likely another contributing cause.
That said, I know women attendance at MediaTemple might decline due to the parking lot situation, being too dark, and lonely. I'm thinking we might do some things to make it more friendly. Perhaps a note for women to come earlier, to get a closer space near the entrance doors. I'll make a map of parking and how to get inside.
As always, escort service is available back to your car late at night, for women and men. Just ask me, and I will be glad to provide this, or find you a group of trusted men who are leaving to go with.
That's how I see it. Comments?
Peter
LA's Open Source User Group Advocate - Volunteer at DrupalCamp LA and SCALE
DrupalChix rock! If there
DrupalChix rock! If there are any creative Drupalchix support/wish-i-was-a/whatever t-shirts out there for males I will definitely buy one. doesn't necessarily have to have the name Drupalchix on it. I like funny, creative and pink. Proceeds could then go to DrupalChix to help promote the group. Just an idea. I hope there is support for this because I really want one now.
A Digital Entrepreneur and Technical Consultant.
Founder, CEO of FoggyTrail
Wonderful that I've opened up an awareness
At the LA Design Camp this weekend, talk and network with as many people as you can. Work at creating an inclusive community. Make it so women, and newbies, are comfortable and can walk away saying I met a lot of cool people this weekend, and I can go to anyone for help, discussion and encouragement.
For me, I got some positive feedback tonight on the Android app I'm developing in Java, and that is where my joy lies for now. I'll be back to Drupal when I'm ready to create an Drupal connected mobile device "app" with Sencha Touch, but for now I'll stick with creating Android and iPhone apps.
Susan, joyseeker
People always come back to Drupal
Hi Susan. I'm glad you've seen some immediate replies supporting a choice to rejoin LA DRUPAL. We'll see you at our events. Thanks for voicing your thoughts.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
All the responses in this
All the responses in this thread have striven to be informative and helpful and as far as I'm concerned the real victory here is seeing how many members in our community are already sensitive to and do care about these issues.
I don't see how hijacking a discussion about T-shirts and then insulting other people in the community (accidentally or not) is either "wonderful" or a good way to "open up an awareness" ...
Sorry you had a bad
Sorry you had a bad experience, but I also just wanted to say as someone who has been around the LA Drupal community (I'm in San Diego) pretty often I've had the complete opposite experience, and I find it to be a very welcoming group who has gone above and beyond in making women (and everyone) feel welcomed and dealing with issues when they have occurred.
I generally avoid the whole women blah blah conversations; because, quite frankly, it comes with the territory when working in a male dominated field and hell if I want any special treatment because of it. What I can say, though, is while no community is completely free of these types of issues-- the Drupal community is not the one to snub for them. It has graciously dealt with these issues many times over and there are plenty of highly respected women in this community, whatever their "role" may be.
This had to have been a unique encounter
Hi Susan. I'm really sorry to hear you had such a bad experience.
When I first read your post, I couldn't help but take umbrage. In no way am I diminishing your experience, it's just that to even intimate that the women in LA Drupal are just "helpers" or wives/girlfriends of active members is WAY off-base. Rain, aside from being hella cool people, is one of the brightest Drupal developers I know & was the Project Manager for the www.ladrupal.org project. Trust me when I tell you, that was no small contribution to LA Drupal. Lee is one of the smartest people I know, hands down, & has contributed significantly to both LA Drupal & the Drupal community at-large. Others like Nicole Bluto, for example, are also quite involved & she co-produces the LA Drupal Podcast. I could keep going but I think you get my point.
As far as feeling "snubbed." I can understand feeling that way but I love talking to LA Drupal folks. I enjoy talking to new faces I see at meetups because it's been my experience that going out of your way to make people feel welcome when they might no noone is a great way to foster friendships, relationships & make them feel at home the next time they come back.
Allow me to explain why I took umbrage. I'm the oldest of 6 & have 4 sisters & was raised by parents who taught me to love, admire & respect women & to treat them as the equals that they are. I've always championed women's causes. I studied at USC in the early 90's & 2 of my friends were young ladies in the Engineering Dept. so I heard many horror stories about feeling excluded & looked down upon. I always encouraged them to push on as it might've been just been a few jerks who did this to them but not everyone would (maybe this was your case?). This is one of the reasons that I swell with pride when I hear that open source projects usually lead in the inclusion of women. There's usually a very conscious effort to do so. I was especially proud & announced it to the world when the stats that the female Drupal community, at-large, was nearly 20% strong! So in the future, please don't go around making false claims about a community you might not understand. Especially when those claims couldn't be farther from the truth. If the LA Drupal community was the way you claimed they were, I definitely wouldn't be having anything to do with it.
But I can empathize with your plight. Being Latino, I can tell you straight out that if you think women getting excluded in technology's an issue then I'm here to tell you that Latinos/as & African-Americans being excluded from "the old boys network" have it just as bad, if not worse. So much so that a few years ago, I had plans to start a meetup for others like myself who always felt so alone. I want to be a part of the solution, not just complain & walk away. To that end, there's plans in the works here at LA Drupal to provide access to even more people (that's a great thing, not just for LA Drupal but for the Drupal community, at-large). So I ask, given your unique experiences, what do you think can be done to improve?
We'll be here when you come back.
Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu
I'm really late to comment,
I'm really late to comment, but I also wanted to apologize if you haven't felt welcomed. In addition to the fact that tech is male dominated - please also consider a portion of the community is in some ways simply socially inept... and we don't always pickup or respond to normal social cues.
be the change you want to see. if you leave, we all lose.
--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
to a strong community...
I very much appreciate all the comments made here. Miguel and Mike, you've given me much food for thought. Yes, I hear you loud and clear, especially "be the change you want to see." Be who you are and not bend yourself to be in the group. Ah, a huge relief. Miguel from the first westside meeting you attended, you stood out. Christefano and Lee, sorry, if you feel I "hijacked" the t-shirt issue, but I still think it was an excellent segway...
As soon as I'm back working days and can attend the Drupal meetings in the evenings, I will. Some suggestions to make the meetings/get-togethers more inclusive: (1) At the last meeting I was able to attend in August, I loved that we broke up into 3 groups on specific topics, and it was excellent to get to know others and participate. I'm not sure if you continued this, but it really worked. (2) Also, for the organizers to sit within in the group not on a side together so as to meet as many people as possible. (3) Have a 15 minute break in the middle for mingling amongst the people sitting around you. (4) Instead of asking FOR presentations, maybe a week before the meeting ask this list what topics people would like to see discussed and then ask if someone could present it. If it's a simple topic like the uses of taxonomy in Drupal, a larger group of intermediate people may volunteer to lead the lightning talk. (5) Maybe have more specific topic get-togethers on a weekend afternoon, maybe once or twice a month. "Pop-up trainings"? I went to a specific training outside of the user group, and met one Drupal person that I now always connect with at meetings, so these things do work.
Just as a starting point.
Surprised
Hi Susan,
I'm sorry you had a bad experience with the group. I have been out of touch for a while but will rejoin the group this month. It is true that Drupalchix make up about 10% of Drupal but numbers aren't everything. I hope to meet you when you come back.
"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try spending the night with a mosquito"- African Proverb