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Want More Geek Chicks?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the check-this-out dept.

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. "

2 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. Ironic... by itp · · Score: 5

    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

  2. Re:Enough of the "female-specific" organizations by Lemmy+Caution · · Score: 5
    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.