Women in tech: the GoGaRuCo incident

The issue of misogyny faced by women in tech has gone up the agenda recently, not least because of Ada Lovelace Day.

Here’s another bit of evidence to add to the pile: at a conference on the programming language Ruby, a man called Matt Aimonetti gave a presentation. In order to liven up said presentation, he thought it’d be fun to use porn to illustrate his points. Here’s one of the tamer slides, to demonstrate, but should you really want to see it, the full presentation is up here.

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Virginia DeBolt at BlogHer has a breakdown of the whole sorry affair, including Aimonetti’s non-apology.

DeBolt says:

There weren’t many women in the audience, but there were women in the audience. This was a national conference, not a gathering of teenager boys in a smelly upstairs bedroom. The women in the audience found the slides objectionable. Quite a few of the men in the audience did, too.

The creator of Ruby on Rails (an open source web application framework for Ruby developers) was not one of them, and quickly Tweeted that it’s “absolutely” appropriate to use porn in a business presentation.

But one of the men who did find it objectionable was Mike Gunderloy who has resigned as spokesperson for the Ruby on Rails community subsequently.

I really recommend checking out this post bringing together many of the comments on this fiasco.