Repository Name

[tastycode]

Every time I refer to this library in code, I'm tempted to alias it to Factory.

I'm curious as to where the name came from?

[Ross-Hunter]

Duplicate of #849

[marisawallace]

@tastycode Thanks for bringing this up.

What does "factory girl" really mean? Simply put, it draws attention to a woman's gender because she happens to be in a male-dominated environment.

Unfortunately, the software industry is also a male-dominated environment, and it's widely acknowledged that tech has a serious diversity problem.

One symptoms of the problem is judging people based on their gender rather than their character-- which is what the idiom "factory girl" does. So, I think the name FactoryGirl makes it slightly harder for women to feel welcome in our profession. I'd love to see it changed.

This opinion is based on personal experience-- at one point, I was going through some code with a female engineer, and noticing the name FactoryGirl led to an awkward exchange. Since then, I've always aliased it as Factory, but that doesn't do much to solve the underlying problem.

[joshuaclayton]

The library FactoryGirl uses the "factory method" design pattern to define ways in which developers can construct data for a test suite. Because Factory itself was somewhat ambiguous (since it's also a design pattern), we looked at a handful of pop culture references and landed on Factory Girl, which has ties to both Rosie the Riveter and a Rolling Stones song.

[joshuaclayton]

Related: here's the announcement post on our blog, Giant Robots.

[tute]

At one point, I was going through some code with a female engineer, and noticing the name FactoryGirl led to an awkward exchange.

I'd like to know more about this. How was it awkward? Did you feel discomfort because of the name? Did the female engineer express discomfort because of the name? Thank you.

[marisawallace]

@tute Another guy in the vicinity made a joke about the [factory girl] "doing the work for you". The woman I was working with didn't explicitly say that she felt uncomfortable (people almost never do), but my subjective impression was that she felt uncomfortable. I also felt uncomfortable.

[tastycode]

I personally found this issue when cleansing a code-base of unnecessarily
gendered class and variable names.

Regardless of the original intent, I do think that people working in
code-base using this gem have to be conscious of why this is an explicitly
gendered reference just because of the name.

Given the desire to not create ambiguity with the pattern, maybe
FactoryMachine.

Or even better, since it comes from ThoughtBot. FactoryBot

[tute]

I used the Factory Girl gem with colleagues of different genders, and the question of the name never came up. I never cared enough about the name, either, but today I found myself thinking about it, and learned about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter. Now I love this gem's name.

[quangv]

Just coming from a male perspective, It's seems like a pretty sexist name to me.

Regardless of the original intent, I do think that people working in
code-base using this gem have to be conscious of why this is an explicitly
gendered reference just because of the name.

I couldn't agree more. I wouldn't want to depend on something called YellowWorker.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7757667 <-- reference

[joshuaclayton]

I want to thank you all for your feedback, and I appreciate the honesty and candor here.

Regardless of the original intent, I do think that people working in code-base using this gem have to be conscious of why this is an explicitly gendered reference just because of the name.

I wholeheartedly agree.

I'll be working with the rest of the thoughtbot team to understand what the best next steps are and what a transition process might look like to a new gem name.

There's some inherent amount of "Google juice" with the current name around blog posts and other content that, while the gem may have changed, still follows the same patterns and guidance.

I'd consider a positive outcome to be one where a name is chosen for this (and for the factory_girl_rails gem to follow as well) that includes the previous name in the readme, as well as redirects to point developers to the correct resources online. A significant amount of credit goes out to everyone who's used, written about, and contributed to this software and I believe we as a community can help make this better with a more inclusive name going forward.

Again, thank you all for your feedback.

[jferris]

I opened #942 to explain the origins of the name while we discuss a potential rename.