Once upon a *me…
By Sarah Allen

Once upon a *me,
I went to a technical meetup…

Seeing only a few women wasn’t
unusual at small gatherings.
The year
before, I
went to a JS
Meetup
where there
were only
two women.
I had hoped
that it was an
off night.

Both meetups had only two women
About 70 aFendees
2 women
= 3%

I expected to see more women at a
larger regional conference

No luck.
200 aFendees
6 women
= 3%

Two of us started to talk…
…and did some math:
If we held a workshop to teach women Ruby,
with 10‐20 women / month,
12 months = about 200 women
Assume that 10% s*ck around
= 20 new women in the Ruby community

We decided to do something.
Conserva*vely, we thought we could triple the number of women at the conference….
but my personal goal is to reach 50/50 by 2010.

With a lot of help…

We put on a workshop

Next we are having a hack session

and planning another workshop
If you want to help organize, teach or volunteer in any way, join our google group:
hFp://groups.google.com/group/railsbridge‐workshops

Anyone can do this. Anywhere.
All of the workshop materials are open source
hFp://wiki.railsbridge.org/projects/railsbridge/wiki/Workshops

We don’t need to wait *ll next year…

for things to be different