Jessica McKellar | Founder @ Pilot

TL;DR

Jessica McKellar, founder/CTO of Pilot.com, describes how running introductory Python workshops to address gender disparity in a user group led her to realize deeper societal inequalities around education, access, and representation.

Key insights

• The gender disparity in the Boston Python user group was a symptom of fundamental societal inequalities in education, access, and representation, not just a Python-specific problem.
• Running introductory programming workshops had an unintended transformative effect: one participant (Risa) who had been out of the workforce went from no programming experience to a software engineeri
• The signaling effect of diversity initiatives can be as important as direct impact; the user group quadrupled in size and became the largest Python user group in the world partly due to outreach and t