The past week has seen some discussion on the mailing list for a local Ruby Meetup about this weekend’s Rails Outreach for Women workshop. One message from the workshop organizer, requesting a wireless hotspot accessible to Windows users, prompted a strange but revealing departure from the subject when people responded. Those of us lurking on the list didn’t find out who provided the hotspot, but we did find out what other subscribers think is the point of this workshop.
The point of the Rails Outreach for Women workshops
…is not, despite apparently common belief otherwise:
- to give participants incredibly detailed information about the Ruby programming language
- to give participants deep instruction in computer science topics
- to convince participants of the superiority of open source software
- to shame users for their reliance on GUI clients
- to berate the people Sarah Mei wryly terms “operating system minorities” for using something the rest of us find inconvenient.
The point of the Rails for Women workshop is to make a cultural exchange.
It’s like going to a country where you don’t speak the language. You prepare by learning basic phrases which will help you ask directions to the train station, order food from a restaurant menu, and be polite in that country’s etiquette. You don’t start with the pluperfect tense, historical study of that language’s divergence into regional dialects, or intensive scrutiny of the country’s avant-garde poets. Your goal is to enjoy your trip to that country, and, if you do, you might return and gain more facility in its language.
The stated goal of the Rails for Women workshop to increase gender diversity in the Ruby community by helping women learn Rails. By the end of the workshop, however, what’s happened is a lot more positive and enduring than fifty or sixty people inspecting http://localhost:3000 on their laptops.

image © okhiroyuki
Instead, there’s an exciting, contagious mood of self-confidence in the participants and volunteers. People might not remember how to generate a scaffold the next day, but they will remember that they did it once before–so it can’t be that hard, can it?
Anybody who believes the tech industry is egalitarian should spend time working in it as a non-programmer. Only a few moments on the job as an admin, HR person, marketing person, or designer will quickly reveal how the people in these roles are consigned to the lowest castes in tech companies, while programmers are encouraged to swagger like feudal lords.
Many of the participants in the Rails for Women workshops identify themselves as this sort of tech-but-not-techie, in that they’ve been around the artifacts of programming culture, but not able to make sense of them. Once in the workshop, they handle things like–the command line! Version control! Databases! Maybe at the end of the day they don’t have every concept mastered, but they do have a greater self-regard that is moving to observe. They might go on to volunteer at the next workshop, or even attend a Ruby Meetup. They feel entitled to learn more.
The cultural exchange isn’t one way. As the participants work through the workshop curriculum, they discover where the Rails Way isn’t clear. Install Night is especially revealing: every volunteer helping gets exposed to at least one error message he or she’s never seen before, at least one bewildering installation problem for which no amount of Googling can provide solutions, and at least one nonsensical incompatibility nobody bothered documenting.
The Rails community gains from these frustrations. It gains when a workshop participant points out the inadequacy of a tutorial, README, or wiki page. It gains when installing an upgrade or gem becomes simple. Consider how friendly Rails could be for a programming novice: there’s so little futzing and configuration to do (once past the install hurdle) before you get to see something display in the browser. Why not make the Rails community as accessible?
The San Francisco Rails Outreach for Women Workshops are organized through the SF Ruby Meetup.



