Want More Geek Chicks?

pb writes "Freshmeat has an excellent editorial about geek chicks. A lot of free software projects these days could really use that woman's touch. "

Comments

My gawd!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Read your comments, guys. And you honestly wonder why there aren't more of us "linuxchix"?

It's just like those offensive daemon babes *BSD saw fit to subject us to at LinuxWorld.

We're [female Linux hackers] not here in force because we get the (both implicit and explicit) message that we're not wanted.

Ironic...

[itp]

The /. fortune at the bottom of this page for me reads "We're all looking for a woman who can sit in a mini-skirt and talk philosophy, executing both with confidence and style."

--
Ian Peters

Re:Ironic...

[elfbabe]

Actually, miniskirts really help when you're talking philosophy. They make it much easier to win, at least.

Enough of the "female-specific" organizations

[Valur]

While I can respect their goals, I do not believe that groups such as LinuxChix are really doing anything useful.

The solution is to make the open-source community accessible to women, rather than making "special" organizations for them. Many things suggested within this article are good ideas, especially fostering an analytical mindset.

The solution is complete integration into the community, not "Linux girls clubs" such as LinuxChix

-V

Re:Enough of the "female-specific" organizations

[Lemmy Caution]

There's a problem in the current environment with simply encouraging women to focus on QA, UI, management, and the other less low-level aspects of open-source development: how much of the Red Hat and VA Linux share offers went to people who did that sort of work? I think that winding up in the CREDITS files for work on device drivers was a lot more well rewarded than participating in the mailing list with bug reports - it is questionable whether the last category was rewarded at all.

In general, there's a self-perpetuating cycle, in which the activities in which men excel are rewarded more generously by the well-rewarded men who excel at them. It's the tendency that is at the root of the difference in pay for men and in comparable jobs. It is very natural for people to think more highly of the things they are good at than those they are not, and most of the people who control compensation and investment are men.

The "let's be gender-blind" argument is an ingenuous one, I think. It doesn't realize some basic facts:

1. that there is a natural tendency to translate the probabilities which we internalize through our past ("I don't see a lot of female geeks") to expectations ("I don't expect women to be good at this;" "I don't expect *this* woman to be good at this."). The very adaptive inductive shorthands we use to make a lot of quick decisions, by their very nature, perpetuate discrimination.
2. Hiring always involves taking a bit of a chance on someone, and we are always much more willing to take chances on people who resemble ourselves.
3. Even if 75 percent of men are completely equitable and fair and gender-blind, the other 25 percent can make women's life a living hell.
4. We are hard-coded to think in terms of gender difference: it takes conscious effort to compensate for our predisposition to discriminate.

It's just that fewer girls are religions loons

[Junks Jerzey]

It's not not the female hackers are needed on open source projects, but people who are outside of the religious circles that are so common among Linux programmers and users. Being inside such a circle is a primary cause of design errors and business mistakes. How many times have we run into people who:

have some beef with RedHat and put a note in the documentation along the lines of "RedHat users will have to fix this themselves because RedHat doesn't know how to set things up properly."

refuse to work on a decent UI because the Emacs interface is all anyone needs.

write APIs that won't support languages other than C++ because anybody who doesn't realize the benefits of OOP has rocks in his head.

write APIs that don't support C++ because Bjarne is a flaming idiot who should be shot on sight.

don't understand that not everyone is a student with massive amounts of free time who'd like nothing better to do than dink around installing crotchety software.

think that providing hundreds of customizable options is much more important than anything else.

think that people will settle for second rate software simply because it runs under Linux rather than using something better for Windows.

Gay male hackers?

[Chris Johnson]

Yes, absolutely.

I think one reason is very simple- someone who's ended up 'unusual' in one way will be less prone to fall into usual patterns in other ways. In other words, if someone is straight because that's something one doesn't think about, they probably also (at this stage in history) use Windows exclusively on a PC, as that too is something one doesn't think about. (They may well have very strong opinions on trucks or cameras or skis, tho :) )

Frankly, sexual orientation has zilch to do with geekness, except that gay geeks comparatively don't get any either ;) this is more significant of geekness than the actual orientation. It's like priority levels that constantly rate 'debugging this bit of questionable code' over 'going out and flirting or socializing or meeting people'. Naturally, the result is a general lack of sexual fireworks- though not necessarily the _capacity_ for fireworks (remark paid for by the Take-A-Geek-To-Bed Foundation)

As for me? I take pleasure in knowing that, while I am a Linux user and a Mac user and a CLI sympathiser who likes handling linux through xterms and a cordial KDE basher, on slashdot people don't even care or consider my sexual orientation- they are much more interesting in my Mac-ual orientation, or CLI-ual orientation, all the intellectual pursuits that seem much more _important_ than meatspace.

And this is good. It's only when well-meaning people inquire "Are there _any_ gay geeks?" (answer- why no, they're all hairdressers in Greenwich Village! _Everybody_ knows that thilly dahling) that I figure it's worth even mentioning. Oh, and I know of some pretty darn stereotypical (well, more like 'in your face') gay geeks who are also emphatically 'real' geeks. Again, there's no real correlation except for maybe people who are gay are somewhat more likely to also be geeks if they deal with computers. It's not the computers, it's a matter of people conforming to the norm or not. Geekness isn't the norm either.

Sexual Power Differentials Matter

[Baldrson]

Of the "larval stage" the author writes:

The simple answer to this is that it is those who are less attached to the idea of "having a life" who are prepared to spend weeks at a time glued to their computers.

The larval stage typically hits during youth, and there is a very clear reason why males and females assort at that stage:

Young women are at the peak of their sexual status, and this means "having a life" inflicted upon them by horny men (via every subconscious mechanism imaginable ... and then some). This occurs whether the young women are prepared to spend weeks at a time glued to their computers or not.

Young men, on the other hand, are at the nadir of their sexual status even as they are at the peak of their sexual drive (since the women they typically desire are young and are therefore interested in men with status -- something that frequently comes with age for males), so that means not having a life inflicted upon them -- whether the young men are prepared to spend weeks at a time glued to their computers or not. The fact is that young men are at the peak of their sexual drive at the same time all this is happening. This tends to debilitate the young men even as they enter "larval stage", which is a primary reason cultures have a need for "sexist" adaptations.

Since the youthful "larval stage" is, as the author correctly asserts, critical to becoming an "ubergeek" it should be unsurprising that there are few female ubergeeks. Those few who can make even modest claim to being a geek are frequently paraded around as sex goddesses, such as Kim Polese and Natasha Vita-More even after they hit middle age. This is a good deal for said middle-aged ubergeekettes at the peak of their sex drive since they are surrounded by desperate and incredibly horny young men -- but it is far from clear that this is a good deal for civilization overall.

One ancient adaptation continues to be practiced by many Dravidians even after they migrate to Silicon Valley, and it seems to work fairly well (so long as the couple doesn't become too "Americanized"):

Arranged marriages.

A woman's place...

[FigWig]

A woman's place is in the home!!!!

In front of her computer.

Hacking better NFS support into the next Linux kernel release.

Re:whats the dif ?

[sinator]

/* i think we should worry about being accepted before we worry about accepting specific groups of people. besides, i have yet to see an article on how current opensource projects could use a native americans touch. */

"The white man wastes the malloc(). He takes it for his own but does not release it for future generations to use. We of $TRIBE use every part of the stack, and free() it for the future of our children."