[Jemaclus]

I'm not sure this has anything to do with attracting women to web development. These women were already attracted to web development -- or they wouldn't be in Girl Develop It or any of those other groups, right? This is about DevBootCamp patting themselves on the back for meeting their quota.

And regardless, this whole "invite women first" thing doesn't really address the basic gender imbalance problems in the industry.

In my experience (and I'm aware that this is perfectly anecdotal), the problem with getting women to be professional web developers has more to do with the industry's attitude toward women and less to do with inviting them in. It does no good to invite 60% women to a conference if they're all going to be treated badly or like sexual objects the entire time.

I have two female friends that I am mentoring in web development, and they are super ecstatic to have this extra skill, and they're actually pretty good at it (better than some of my male coworkers, if I'm being honest). But most often they go to conferences and get dismissed because they're women or get harassed because they have boobs (even though some of these men have bigger man-boobs).

I hear this over and over again: they don't feel comfortable at industry events or even in the workplace

TL;DR - I don't think it's about "attracting" women so much as making the industry gender-agnostic. It shouldn't matter whether I'm male or female, so long as I put out good code.

[mnicole]

Great response. At RailsGirls PDX they asked how everyone had found out about the event. I'd found out through a female dev mailing list I'm a part of, but I was really happy to learn that many - if not most - of them had been encouraged by male co-workers, friends and significant others who knew the girl had an interest in dev or just tech, but were intimidated (even by other female developers) and thus didn't take part in existing communities.

[redsquirrel]

There's definitely some "patting ourselves of our backs" going on here. I was surprised and proud that we surpassed the ratio that we set for ourselves. I figured I'd share what worked for us.

Getting more women to show up may be the easiest part of "changing the ratio". We have lots of other work to do in order to make this stick, which includes working with employers to ensure our students, regardless of gender, are successful after they're hired.