Sarah Mei posts about teaching Ruby to high school girls. Good stuff.

While searching for some GHOP info from way back, I ran across this post asking "where are the girls among the GHOP winners?" (The statistics mentioned in the post may have been posted since, although I haven't seen them.) We asked the Python mentors to "rate" the students, and the hands-down winner was someone who had worked closely with several different mentors and performed very well. Perhaps next time we should highlight everyone who did well; there were several women in the group, too.

In general it's tough to raise the visibility of minority groups, though. Do we engage in affirmative action of some sort, and if so, how do we do so without being unfair to others? Or do we simply rank people in a presumably gender- and color-blind way and see what happens? I've talked several times in various venues about trying to run a female-oriented GSoC derivative, like GNOME's Women's Summer Outreach Program, which would at least call attention to one minority in OSS... and if GHOP ever happens again, we could work on getting younger women involved.

--titus