[Loic]

It is not creepy in all fields. It is creepy in computer programming/science.

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.

[anextio]

In what field is it not creepy to have a man keep a documented list of all the women contributors for purely 'curiosity' reasons?

[Loic]

The fact is, in no other fields you would have people thinking about doing this. It is just that they do not care. It is not part of the culture to focus on women from a sexual/stalking point of view.

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.

[peteretep]

I will note purely that CPAN has quite a lot of similar modules categorizing authors by several attributes, most notably country of origin. From that perspective, it's very easy to believe the author acted entirely in good faith and from a non-creepy perspective, without having to invoke the idea that it's some kind of sexual/stalking thing.

[jack-r-abbit]

You are forgetting one thing: If any given situation can be seen two or more ways, there are people that will naturally see it in the worst possible way. It is no different when it comes to people really determined to find examples of The Man crushing all women.

[anextio]

Oh, okay, I misunderstood. That's fine.

[bsphil]

What about Acme-CPANAuthors-Indonesian?

[spindritf]

"Sex sells" is the big indictment of Ruby (and programming in general) community?

[Loic]

Yes, with respect to the situation of women in your community this is a problem. When you have highly visible people having such behaviour, it cripples down. It is always easier to cripple down bad behaviour than good one. More about it: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/04/silicon-valley-brog...

[PeterisP]

Can you name a single industry where "sex sells" isn't an accepted marketing consensus ? It is a fact about how homo sapiens works, and marketers have been using it for millenia for selling everything from medicine to wholesale building materials. Ignoring a true fact would be a problem, and an irrational action not worthy of anyone who claims to be an engineer or scientist. Not using "sex sells" in advertising would be suboptimal and simply stupid, of course, it has to be done with taste and (at least attempted) respect in order to be effective.

[cloudier]

Firstly, I'm going to assume that by 'sex sells' you're referring to the use of sexualised (e.g. through sexy poses, clothing) females or males with little or no relevance to the product, to sell a product.

How about any industry where females make up a large part of your customer base? I think it is pretty hard to argue that, say, the iPhone would be more successful if it's marketing department decided that it would be better to use the idea that "sex sells" to sell their product compared to the type of marketing that it actually uses. "Sex sells" is never tasteful nor respectful: it's only useful when you're selling your product to a sexist audience. (Obviously this doesn't apply if you're selling sex toys, porn, body image, etc.)