It looks like an honest enough mistake, but I guess we're going to have to listen to another bunch of white male community guardians parading their feminist credentials and belittling the original developer for his backwards lack of understanding anyway.
Now, if you don't want to listen, please don't feel you're forced to. There's... exciting... frontpage articles here about PHP, something Steve Jobs said, a boat which flips vertically...
[1] (http://blogs.perl.org/users/michael_g_schwern/2012/07/how-no...)
"This Is What A Computer Scientist Looks Like" is exactly the wrong way to "empower". It's a photo. Who cares what you look like? You are a programmer - the only thing I should care about is what your code looks like.
> [from the blog] Maybe give them the reigns to make the big decisions and you handle the grunt work.
Are you kidding? I should do that because they are female? That's terrible. You should not care what gender, or anything else, they are - except their ability.
If people need to see that there are others like them in a community (do they though?), then this module list is exactly right.
It doesn't seem so strange that people might be interested in female developers. For all I know, that list could have been compiled by another female developer who wants to feel less lonely.
In another context people will rush to present such lists to entice more women into the field. Also, the argument "there are almost no female developers (in OSS)" is common, so such lists might be handy to answer those arguments.
I was just considering how I would feel about a "black developers" list - sure it is a double edged sword, but I think it could be interesting/valid for the same reasons. People will gather those statistics anyway, and I believe public data should be as accessible as possible.
The problem is the culture in this special field with a lot of allusion to pornography, sexual abuse, etc. When you have well known figures in the Ruby community explicitly telling that it is good to use porn to sell software technology, you have a problem.
In my field, process engineering and biotechnology, even if some groups are extremely male dominated, I have never experienced such behavior in more than a decade of going to workshop/conferences and working with 100's of people all over the world.
They only care about lack of women in management and engineering positions and the salary difference. Or how to better manage the maternity leaves in the company to keep interesting jobs for the women while potentially working only 80% while have small kids.
I hope this gets removed.
Great message to send to the women in the tech industry: come join our community and we'll single you out in a git repository like a museum exhibit. Even better, the whole thing is a perl script, so anyone can programmatically do whatever they want with your personal information! It's all for curiosity's sake!
But I know that I'm not known for my extreme sensitivity, so maybe I should withold judgement on this one.
Is that considered creepy too? In any case, I don't think "creepy" is the right word. It implies a sense of stalking, which I don't think this is.
You have to see something a lot and often to get used to it, tolerate it and finally accept it as norm.
This is in contrast to works where the sex of the author can have an impact on the overall enjoyment.
For example, I have playlists with over 100 female artists... because sometimes I do just want to listen to a female singer. My "database" of female singers in the form of a playlist isn't creepy, but a database of female developers could quite easily be considered so, since for the most part it's hard to think why anyone would need this information. (Aside for research purposes?).
If that is so, I don't see anything wrong in it. But if this is to prove that y's are strange and are atypical of regular y's and then stereotyping them from there is on is creepy.
Personally I don't think the developers gender matters - who cares if a developer is male or female? That's not the context in which you are interacting with them.
this cpan module - http://search.cpan.org/dist/Acme-CPANAuthors-Female/ - included this file - https://github.com/sharyanto/perl-Acme-CPANAuthors-Female/bl... (some data also visible in cpan synopsis - http://search.cpan.org/dist/Acme-CPANAuthors-Female/lib/Acme...) - which was later dropped by the author, steven haryanto - http://blogs.perl.org/users/steven_haryanto/2012/07/so-appar...
the file in question lists 10 (or 11) female contributors to cpan.
