Name: Anonymous 2012-02-17 8:00
Geek Chicks: PyLadies, a Gang of Female Computer Programmers
It's not that the PyLadies are intimidated by the men who dominate computer programmer events and workshops. It's just that they got tired of feeling like outsiders.
Katharine Jarmul, 29, remembers the day they first identified the problem. She and three other women found themselves chatting in a circle at a meet-up in March last year. There were 30 or 40 people there, all discussing Django, a website framework built on the Python programming language. But, looking around the room, Jarmul realized that their little circle contained the only female programmers there. The few other women in attendance were recruiters or product managers, not the people who actually write code.
Still, if you ask Viklund, 37, to conjure up an imaginary computer programmer, he admits that he sees "a big, fat guy with a beard, who might smell" -- the kind of "classic Linux nerd" who might have trouble socializing but who loved computers long before geek became chic.
It's not that the PyLadies are intimidated by the men who dominate computer programmer events and workshops. It's just that they got tired of feeling like outsiders.
Katharine Jarmul, 29, remembers the day they first identified the problem. She and three other women found themselves chatting in a circle at a meet-up in March last year. There were 30 or 40 people there, all discussing Django, a website framework built on the Python programming language. But, looking around the room, Jarmul realized that their little circle contained the only female programmers there. The few other women in attendance were recruiters or product managers, not the people who actually write code.
Still, if you ask Viklund, 37, to conjure up an imaginary computer programmer, he admits that he sees "a big, fat guy with a beard, who might smell" -- the kind of "classic Linux nerd" who might have trouble socializing but who loved computers long before geek became chic.