Fostering diversity in Golang community

Just a quick blog post to flush out my thoughts on diversity in Golang community.

I'm not really a big fan of associating human attributes such as races, religions and genders to programming languages or any kind of work. However, from my own experience in attending technical events. One thing that is obvious was... most of the events are overwhelmingly dominated by males. i.e sausage-fested

(not going to touch on skin colours, but you should make your own observation).

My question was... where are the females?

After asking around. Couple of "things" that put the females off from attending programming language meetup are:

• "Bromance" or brotherhood lingo dominated the tech talk events, making them isolated or hard to fit in.

• Not enough female programmers nearby to attend the tech event together. Females tend to stick together for safety reason or "afraid" of sending the wrong "signals". (I'm husband and a father to a girl ... so I know what I'm talking about)

• Afraid to be ridiculed by their technical peers. This might not be 100% true, but I reckon men have a higher threshold of tolerance to be ridiculed by strangers than women.

Some people blamed the lack of female programmers because of the way society places women via childhood toys. Not quite sure how true this is, but I'd seen talented female programmers in CS classes and in my former work place. It would be great if they can contribute or present their work in tech events more often.

There are a few initiatives to encourage more women to participate in Golang community such as GoBridge and Women Who Go. However, at this moment ... these meetups/events are isolated in the West.

Golang community needs diversity and I would like to point out the meaning of this 做 character/rune to foster diversity in Go worldwide.

Hope that each time when you organize event related to Golang( or any programming languages ), please remember about this 做 character/rune and do your best in calibrating the atmosphere to promote/foster/accomodate diversity.

UPDATE: Someone pointed out the error in Golang Facebook group. In his own word -

  Source: A Compendium of Chinese Characters (字解 by 顾建平)

  会意字。 从人，表示人做事；从故，故有原因义，人做事总有一定的原因。本意是从事某种工作或活动。

  This is a terrible misquote. Not good!! There's not any hint of carrying any sticks!! "故" has the meaning of "reason", "purpose". The radical on the right is not "women" either!! Radical for women is "女".

See there are Chinese version of grammar Nazi too!

Let's just pretend that it is not character, but rather ... a picture and you will get the meaning. ;-)