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The lack of women bothers me... (Score:1)
because they are about half of the population and so naively I would expect them to be about half the programming population.
The lack of homosexuals does not bother me unless you can provide information that homosexuals are in programming at disproportionately low rates compared to their incidence [wikipedia.org] in the general population. Given that homosexuals, transgenders, etc tend to cluster, a large fraction of your friends may fall in those groups, but unless you can convince me that under 1-2% of programmers are gay, lesbian, bi or transgendered, there isn't really a significant discrepancy. Certainly on Perlmonks I've known people who are gay, lesbian, and bi. (I'm not sure how open they are so I won't name names. But I've known them. Also I don't go around asking random people about sexual orientation, so I assume that for every one I know about, there are many I know that I don't know about.) I've known none there who claim to be transgendered, but Audrey is a well-known Perl hacker who is.
That said, I deplore the fact that Perl has its share of homophobes. However I don't see evidence that this homophobia drives people of different sexual orientations away to an undue amount.
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You raise a valid point (Score:1)
Even though I started with the GLTB piece, I guess my main concern is the involvement of women. As you put it, the percentage of bisexuals, homosexuals and transgenders in a society is a relative small fraction which could explain not noticing that fraction in programming communities. Also, there's the whole "not going around asking people for their sexual orientation" which I couldn't agree more on.
I was surprised to hear that there's a share of homophobes in the Perl community. I don't know a lot of peopl