RailsGirls is an activity to introduce Ruby and Rails to women, ranging from beginners to programmers familiar with other languages. This presentation shows the current situation of women in engineering, and then introduce activities to improve the situation, including Rails Girls. The speaker contributed Rails Girls Tokyo.

1. Rails Girls:
Not only for Girls
RUBYKAIGI 2014, 19 SEPTEMBER 2014
HARUKA IWAO

2. Who am I?
 Haruka Iwao (@Yuryu)
 Solutions Architect at Red Hat
 Interests
 Distributed Storage
 Operating Systems

3. Part 1 - Gender Diversity

4. Do you know what this
graph shows?
0
60
Men Women

5. Number of Speakers at
RubyKaigi 2013
0
60
Men Women
Data from http://rubykaigi.org/2013/speakers

6. World Population, 2010
3.5B
3.4B
Men Women
http://www.geohive.com/earth/pop_gender.aspx

7. Where does this
difference come from?
RubyKaigi 2013
0
60
Men Women
World Pop. 2010
3.5B
3.4B
Men Women

8. Women Speakers Rate
0.0%
2.0%
5.2%
11.1%
9.9%
6.8% 7.2%
0.0%
4.7%
N/A
34.7%
9.5%
40.0%
35.0%
30.0%
25.0%
20.0%
15.0%
10.0%
5.0%
0.0%
RubyKaigi PyCon JP LinuxCon JP RubyConf PyCon US LinuxCon NA
2013 2014
Estimated by names and photos of the speakers

9. At Tech Companies
https://gigaom.com/2014/08/21/eight-charts-that-put-tech-companies-diversity-stats-into-perspective/

10. How about students?
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/09/female-graduation-rates

11. Two questions arise
 Why do women choose other fields
than computer science?
 Why do we have fewer women
engineers compared to
graduates?

12. Why do women choose
other fields than
computer science?

13. “Be a good girl”
 Girlish and boyish thingy
 Playing with dolls
 Railfan (Railway enthusiast)
 Sewing / Needlework
 Driving
 Study / Research
 Search with Google Images and
you will see

14. Scientist

15. Florist

16. Computer programmer

17. Housekeeper

18. CEO

19. Executive secretary

20. Video – Always #LikeAGirl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQBjWYDTs

21. Gender gap still exists
 These search results are from 2014
 not from the 20th century
 The gap comes from our culture
 We need to change, respecting
our culture

22. Why do we have fewer
women engineers
compared to graduates?

23. Question
 Do you take into account
candidates’ gender when deciding
hire or no hire?
 Do you ask candidates to submit
resume with their gender written?

24. JIS Resume format
JIS = Japan Industrial Standard

25. JIS resume requires…
Birthday(YYMMDD), Age
Gender
(M/F)
Photo

26. JIS resume requires more…
Number of dependent
family members
Martial status
(Married / Not married)
Does your spouse need to
be covered by your health
plan / pension / etc?
(in other words, does your
spouse work fulltime?)

27. Resume and gender
 Most Japanese companies use the
JIS resume format
 collecting gender, martial status, etc
 Web entry forms, recruiting agency
referring papers also require gender
 Why?
 Because they use such information
 Google “女性面接質問”

28. At RubyKaigi 2013

29. http://peterevjan.com/posts/rubykaigi-2013-great-conference-but-i-probably-wouldnt-go-next-year-if-i-was-a-woman/

30. http://blog.rubykaigi.org/post/52064582345/we-apologize

31. So what can we do?

32. At work
 Ask candidates not to write gender
 Or ask HR to hide it
 Consider interview questions
 Respect everyone as individual
professionals

33. Make our community fair
 No discriminations or harassments
 We attend conferences because
 It is interesting and fun
 Proposal is accepted
We want to learn
 Not because
 Someone is beautiful or kawaii

34. Join local activities
 Rails Girls is looking for
 Sponsors
 Volunteers(coaches, organizers, staff)
 Participants
 Encourage your colleague or
children to join
 Contact me or any staff!

35. Activities to change the
situation

37. Part 2 - Rails Girls

38. What is Rails Girls?
 A Rails tutorial for women
 “Our aim is to give tools and a
community for women to
understand technology and to
build their ideas.”
 Founded by Linda Liukas and Karri
Saarinen

39. History
 November 2011
 The first Rails Girls in Helsinki, Finland
 September 2012
 The first Rails Girls in Tokyo, Japan
 Now
 150+ cities, 220+ events worldwide

42. Rails Girls Curriculum
 Guide to install Rails
 Build your first app
 Push your app to GitHub
 Put your app online
 Apply a modern design with
Bootstrap
 Add Authentication with Devise

43. Rails Girls Cirriculum (2)
 Add profile pics with Gravatar
 Test your application with RSpec
 CD with Travis
 More advanced topics available!
 See http://guides.railsgirls.com/

44. Rails Girls in Japan
 Held in Tokyo, Kyoto, Sapporo,
Nara, Osaka, Nagoya and Matsue
 Staffed with volunteers
 Sponsored by various companies

45. Rails Girls Youth
 Rails Girls “Youth” in Krakow, Poland
 Focuses on teenagers before
making important decisions
http://blog.railsgirls.com/post/85521955069/9-surprises-of-rails-girls-youth-krakow

46. Rails Girls and Me

47. My First Rails Girls
 Rails Girls Tokyo 2nd - March 2013
 Participated as a “Girl”
http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/ait/articles/1303/04/news119.html

48. My Second Rails Girls
 Rails Girls Tokyo 3rd - October 2013
 Participated as a “Coach”
http://blog.railsgirls.jp/post/65614128686/railsgirls-tokyo-3rd

49. “
”
In learning you will
teach, and in teaching
you will learn.
PHIL COLLINS

50. At RubyKaigi 2014

51. I’m here

52. It’s your turn now

53. Thank you!