I used to attend a friend's women's coding club. There were usually a few men in attendance, and generally three behaviors tended to occur: 1. The dude in ques

I used to attend a friend's women's coding club. There were usually a few men in attendance, and generally three behaviors tended to occur: 1. The dude in question would quietly work on his own project, and occasionally ask if anybody needed help, and otherwise be unobtrusive. This was generally the most helpful behavior. 2. The dude would (as an older techie, and an abrasive one at that!) hold court and fast-talk and denounce other languages and help-but-butt-in and be loud and act like he was some ancient wizened wizard handing down carefully guarded pearls of wisdom. This behavior was disruptive and annoyed everyone regardless of the practitioner. 3. The dude would kibbutz and babble with the women trying to work, and many of them would socialize instead of writing code. The dude was passionate and friendly and outspoken and not very knowledgeable about code or software engineering. But, they went to a lot of meetups, continually proclaimed their novice status, and thus they were able to perpetually distract attendees. Of the three types, 2 & 3 were actually tied for obnoxiousness and toxicity. ~ If people want to learn a new thing, especially a somewhat introverted activity like development, I find it most helpful not to be super excited and energetic and scare them off. Shy new people will be turned off, unshy new people will feedback off of them and continue the group disruption. Calm, friendly, and helpful is the way to approach this, and without badgering to give assistance. Further, talking about things not related to coding and development serves to undermine the learning and practice process for everyone. Things that fall into this category are: talking about your ex-spouse, talking about how hard it is to find a job, talking about how cool it is to be a minority in tech, talking about how hard it is to be a woman in tech, talking about how tech isn't something you grew up with, talking about how tech was something you grew up with, talking about the weather, trying to pick up men, trying to pick up women, talking about your children, talking about how great the last meetup was, talking about how great the next meetup will be, etc. None of those are bad per se, but they distract and prevent people from getting maximum utility from the gathering. If they want to talk about non-tech things, they should do so elsewhere--if they want to reaffirm the industry biases against, say, women and technical ability, they should certainly be elsewhere. I stopped attending these meetings after it was clear that there wasn't really anything of technical substance occurring there.