- Men can attend?
- How to accept students of under-represented groups only? Say, only women?
This document provides guidance on whether we should accept men as students for ClojureBridge workshops. Also, this document provides suggestions as to how to avoid accepting attendees who aren't members of an under-represented group. For example, how to accept only female students.
What follows is guidance. Workshop organizers are free to choose their workshops' attendance policies. When organizers can't decide whether they should accept men for the workshop, this document will help them to make a decision.
ClojureBridge was started to increase diversity in the Clojure community. ClojureBridge is for people who belong to under-represented groups such as women, trans**, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming. There may be other groups we should identify as under-represented in Clojure community.
Given that, please do not accept men simply because there are available seats.
Success of a workshop is not measured by the number of attendees but by the satisfaction of those who attend.
We have heard positive voices from female attendees of women-only workshops. They liked the comfortable atmosphere. They weren't afraid to ask questions during the workshop. This shows that women-only workshops worked as a safe space for them.
Please be very careful when organizers accept men. The workshop may make female attendees uncomfortable.
ClojureBridge suggests accepting male attendees as guests of female attendees. A female attendee may bring a man who is a Clojure or programming beginner.
Or, on the contrary, male attendees must come with female guests, would be another rule.
In any case, ClojureBridge wants to avoid decreasing the ratio of attendees from under-represented groups.
Please do not write for women in anywhere of the workshop announcements. There may be subscribers because the workshop is for women. What if such attendees see men in the workshop? This could be considered as betrayal.
Once the announcements said for women, please don't change the policy.
Organizers decided they would accept only female attendees. But, how can it be possible?
Guessing from name is very tricky and never works perfectly. Especially, a foreign name is hard to figure out whether the subscriber is he or she.
Some workshops added a checkbox to a registration form, which required "yes" to the question, "I identify as a woman, trans*, genderqueer, and/or gender non-conforming person." The organizers said this worked well.
Be prepared beforehand.
This document is created based of the discussion done on the ClojureBridge Workshops mailing list. Here's a link to the thread:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/clojurebridge-workshops/7TE0HEJ1jxg
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Thanks to those who participated in the discussion.