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GNOME Reaches Out to Women
Dominic Hargreaves writes "This year GNOME received 181
applications to Google's Summer
of Code program, yet none were from women. As a result, they've
decided to address this imbalance by launching an outreach program to
sponsor three female students to work on GNOME-related projects this
summer." Most any science department will tell you that the amount of interest and involvement of women pales next to men of similar age and background. Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?
Women make up 51 percent of the population, and because of this, Linux
should be banned in government. Operating Systems like Linux discriminate
against women because of a built in difficulty compared with Windows and
Apple's OS X.
Women pay taxes, and therefore shouldn't be discriminated against in
getting employment with government agencies. If these agencies had used
Windows or OS X, more women would be able to persue dreams of a full time
job in government. Linux is by its nature a man's domain. Women are
designed to use social interaction and emotions to deal with complex
tasks, things the command line are ill suited.
OS X, and Windows have
friendly and female-intuitive designs that take into account a woman's
understanding of objects,ie. folders, desktops, Clippy, the XP search dog.
These help women operate the computer by giving her a relationship with
these icons, and helpful animated pets. It makes a woman feel at home
with her computer by allowing her to relate to it.
Linux, on the other hand is designed for command line and programming.
Sure, it may have a fugly GUI to hide its true being, but to get any
serious work done you must know a bunch of archane commands with hundreds
of options that change with every command. Something like this: chmod
a+rwx. Only enginners can understand this. And most engineers are still
men. This puts the female population at a great disadvantage when
appliying for work. Men know this, and that's why they delibratly try to
install linux in the workplace.
How would womens groups react when they read the studies that are being
commissioned by industry on this very subject? Surely, women, when they
learn of this, will outvote men and ban linux from the government.
...or the rest of the male coders?
Apparantly I have to be female even to read the post... :(
Honestly though, I would love to see more women in my work place.
-Bill
..that's why they prefer KDE
me sexist? that's unpossible!
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Speaking of sexist, that comment is uncalled for. Contrary to what the (former?) President of Harvard thinks, women are indeed capable of participating in math and science fields. It is merely social structure that "guides" them away from these traditionally "masculine" enterprises.
but as a private entity, they can (morally, maybe not legally) discriminate for any reason that they want.
A simple litmus test to see if an action is *ist is to imagine the response if an arbitrary decision was reveresed. Would people be mad if Gnome was hiring only men for a position?
(ducks)
"Any disparity of gender, of any kind, that works against women, is enough evidence of sexism to get sued onto the street." So, in short, neither. They're just covering their asses.
seems like my theory is correct. Women hate IT geeks :P
...desperate. I know getting a date is hard job(almost as hard as taking a bath....), and summer is a hard time for us to get dates, but do we have to go this low???;o))
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Most women aren't interested in computers.. In my class in software engineering, there were 3 girls.. one is going into management style stuff, the other one is doing a masters in UI stuff (from a human perspective) .. and the other one has no clue what she wants to do.. so she is doing an aeronautics master... Even after being given scolarships, etc just because of their sex. Giving money is dumb and does not work.
Why doesn't the GNOME foundation hire women for non CS work (dont they have a mangement job?) Or maybe for documentation or other stuff that they might find more interesting. And please please please hire based on merit, not sex. I find this horrible to say that you need to make special reservation for women since they can't compete with the boys.
Danny DeVito joke?
While it's a far cry from misandry, it is a sexist way to get women interested. How can you specifically target women without descriminating based on gender (i.e. being sexist)?!
... then they just aren't. What's the big deal? If women largely aren't interested in programming, then they simply aren't. It's not like you can't write software without a balanced group of men and women.
traditionally "masculine" enterprises.
Of course, as long as you ignore the fact that early computer science was a traditonally mixed gender group, and before the dawn of computers came the Computers, a legion of women who sprung into action in wartime to compute firing tables for artillery.
http://www.dun-na-ngall.com/kay.html
Okay, given the chance (and a little more notice), I probably would have done something for this.
The imbalance of Women in CS, let alone Women in CS interested in LINUX, should have clued these guys into the idea that few women would be among their soup.
The CS community at large needs to get the word out that 'Mars Needs Women', so to speak. GNOME is nice, but you've got to correct the balance in general before you can get them interested at the fringes!
Thank you kind sir for answering for us the question that years of social sciences research still hasn't proved, either way.
Care to show us how you've come to this grand egalitarian result?
The president of Harvard said absolutely nothing like women can't participate in math and science fields. Most of the discussion on that topic was ridiculous hyperbole propagated by people who for some reason decided to be upset by it. His speech was given in the context of empowering women, not belittling them, and most who report on this issue seem to have missed his point.
All he said was that it might be worth our time to look into biological causes that draw women away from math and science. He did not say anything to the effect that women aren't as good as men. Saying that men and women might be different seems about as shocking to me as saying that, OMG, women are so much better at giving birth than men. Shocking.
If you don't believe me, read the transcript and tell me what he said that's insulting.
Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?
/I'm sure we've all witnessed some truly creative sexist behavior in our lives. Hell it was probably 10% of college.
Are these two mutually exclusive for a reason? Just because it's creative doesn't mean its not sexist, and vice versa.
To be fair, college was far more sexist, but far less creative in execution....
I play a 16 year old girl on irc - does that count?
Why not, oh, I don't know, GIVE THE JOBS TO THE BEST PEOPLE FOR THE JOB? Who cares if that's a man or a woman, a black or a white, or anything else. By giving it to the best women instead of the best applicants period, the people in charge are working to the detriment of the whole project.
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
--Ronald Reagan
So who are the three males who won't be getting the scholarships because the money will go to three less qualified candidates?
Perhaps they're just trying to reach out to expand the pool of applicants to give opportunities to those who otherwise wouldn't be included in the applicant pool. That's call smart hiring, not sexism.
I reach out to women all the time.
It's them letting me touch them that's the hard part.
Speaking of sexist, that comment is uncalled for. Contrary to what the (former?) President of Harvard thinks, women are indeed capable of participating in math and science fields. It is merely social structure that "guides" them away from these traditionally "masculine" enterprises.
Im tired of hearing this bullshit argument. The reason there is a vast imbalance of men vs women in math and science fields is not because of a social structure that "guides" them away from these fields. It's because they just aren't interested.
Women are more social than men. Math and Science fields many times requires no social interaction. Coding away for hours at a time alone may be interesting to a lot of guys (including me), but not women. There are of course, exceptions.
Why can't we just conclude that men and women have different goals and ambitions in life rather than trying to push everyone along the same path? On the flip-side, there is a large imbalance of men and women in the nursing and elementary school fields. I don't see many groups getting up and arms over it.
Summers didn't say that women weren't capable of participating in math and science fields. He said that they were less likely to participate, that there were fewer capable women. That's not to say that there aren't capable women.
And I doubt you'd be saying "it's just social structure" in disciplines that are skewed towards women (with the exception of domestic skills). In fact, my guess would be that you'd say, or have said, that women would ipso facto make better world leaders than men, which is further than Summers went in regard to mathematics and heavily analytic sciences. Why is it acceptable to state an inherent difference when women are favored?
Ugh, have you seen GNOME? That beast could certainly use a women's touch.
When I was an undergrad majoring in Mechanical Engineering, there never were more than 2 women in a class of ~30 men, and usually the two women were from overseas. Yet in high school, about half of the class in AP calculus were women. Could a lot of the women in my high school AP calc class do Mechanical Engineering? Sure. Were they interested? Hell no. That self-selection is a big part of the equation, but there's still sexism--I knew one woman who was discouraged from taking calculus in highschool because women were allegedly inferior to men in math, or so said her misogynic coach/math teacher. I ultimately switched to biochemistry, and went on to grad school. About 30-40% of the grad students were women. That gender gap at least in some sciences, especially the life sciences, is shrinking. In some cases there's actually more women than men.
..does this mean women don't like short old guys with beards? I guess that explains my bad luck.
> I don't think that women are genetically built for programming
And I, for one, would like to know what human genetics has to do with slogging together some crappy Perl code?
These days if a man expresses interest in teaching elementary school, he'd probably be labeled a pedophile.
Did anyone else read the headline and imagine a pink theme? With ponies for icons?
Please don't do this to me again.
Also, additional info for the Gnome devs who are apparently living our dream of space travel:
-Women like to go shopping
-Women can't park cars to save their lives
-When women think technology, they think microwave ovens
-Women like to yell at sexists who make generalisations about women
I have been running some verision of linux (red hat, suse, ubuntu, gentoo) for about four years now. It is amazing the number of heads that turn when you mention that you run a dual boot of linux and you are a girl. I like linux and I think everyone should try some flavor. One of my favorite memories was when I was discussing what distro was best with a girlfriend of mine and her roomate came into the room and said "I never thought I would hear two girls yell about which distro is best". But I think that is what happens when you hang out in the CSci building too long.
It's just the outreach guys' way of trying to get to know a few good women.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
PINKER VS. SPELKE
A DEBATE
The above debate hosted at Edge is now a bit dated but it does a good job of looking at gender and science. Our patriarchical history in the west has given us science as envisioned by men like Sir Francis Bacon. It led to a reductionist deterministic heritage that we've only recently begun to break free of. Women in general in the west are only a century or more free of being chattles to be disposed of by their fathers. I hope we'll see women bring to science a different mind set and new insights.
just my loose change
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I have *NEVER* met a male nursing student, and I know quite a few nursing students. Nobody gives a crap about that?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Seriously. Women? This is silly.
Concentrate on writing a real Photoshop like program, a real video editing program on par with Avid, Final Cut, Premiere, or Vegas.
Keep hacking at OpenOffice
Get a 3D accelerated UI before Vista, and make it the standard gui.
Make it easier to adopt linux period. Easier install methods, less dependency hell.
Image is a good start, i agree with that but not just for women... try the Apple approach. Make it cool for all.
The problem is Mac OS has REAL applications. Shake (linux version thank god) Photoshop, Final Cut etc.
Linux still needs get over that hill i think. Its close, but its not for everyone, and its certainly not for women who arent IT brainiacs. And those women dont need any help with linux.
They could run around me in the dam thing i'm sure... but i wont use linux until it gets a little neater.
It looks like most of the comments so far are about whether or not its sexist.
I think its more interesting to think about how things would be different if designed by women. I don't think they will be adopting the Slashdot April 1 theme, but to the other extreme, I'd imagine if that there was a 'Linux for Women' it would be different in many respects. So diversifying the gender of the developers might have a positive effect.
Also, I would think that this would attract some fairly talented women. So maybe the most beneficial aspect of this will be the quality of the people it attracts, regardless of their gender.
Troll Like a Champion Today
Gee, I wonder why, DUMBASS.
A hundred years ago, we thought that Snow White interfacing with seven dwarfs was pretty risque.
Is GNOME Unique in its lack of female...popularity, for lack of a better word? I was under the impression that it was mainly because few girls major in computer science and the like; in that case, sponsorships don't make sense because it's part of a larger trend. Maybe, on the other hand, that's completely wrong, and the comp sci classes are FULL of girls, and they all hate GNOME. I doubt it, though. I would have seen these girls in class, probably.
"Just because you're eloquent doesn't mean you aren't a fucking crackpot." -Wavebreak
Can you imagine how bad it would smell if 188 geeks were in the same place?
Having a woman may convince 25% of them to take a shower.
Sadly those 25% are going to be the ones who already have the ability to get a girl, and they'd smell the best in the first place.
Why does everything have to be balanced? Obviously there shouldn't be extra barriers for one sex over the other, but I have a problem with the attitude that all professions need an equal amount of each sex. Do men that go into nursing get a preference because there's more women than men? (An honest question). There seems to be this hypothesis that bias can be eliminated by giving the group that's not equally represented a preference. But we seem to ignore the idea that the hypothesis has never really been shown to be true. I guess I believe in equal opportunities and equal treatment, but I don't believe in more than equal.
I've never been a big believer that bias can be cured by more bias. Affirmative action only leads to people thinking that a miss-represented group of people were only hired because of affirmative action. That kind of defeats the whole purpose. The article brings up issues like women not having same-sex role models. What I think the problem is that we feel the need to have to have a same sex role model. Why can't a Finnish woman look at Linus Torvalds as a role model? A woman from Finland probbably has more in common with him than me, a man born and raised in the US. If you ask me, that's the root of sexism. Trying to fix it with some patchwork of giving a few extra slots to women really won't do much of anything except maybe make some people at Gnome feel a bit better about themselves. If they want to do it, great, but don't try to tell me they're helping solve the problem, because they ain't.
AccountKiller
a few of the writers on the AP Computer Science list serve suggest, that it is genetics that make white males far more interested and effective in the computer science arena ... Blah blah blah... We've got a problem in computer science education and it's two fold. First, we are the only curriculum area where, as Ed Lazowska said at this year's Computer Science and Information Technology Symposium attached to NECC stated, equity between young men and women is actually going in reverse. ... Since computer science is almost throwing away half of its potential enrollees by not attracting young women, many school districts are simply shutting down their computer courses. ... Now most teachers have not been just sitting on their hands and letting this situation continue. There are many groups from Carnegie Mellon's 6APT to the Northwest Girls Collaborative Project that have offered well reasoned suggestions for ways of improvement that many teachers have take to heart. ... blah blah blah
Infiltrated dot Net
In my experience, I have found truly competent software developers, men or women, to be in the minority. Most appear to be the equivelent of semi-skilled workers, putting together the cogs as directed by an outside supervisor. This is only to be expected as the demand for reletively low paying developers has increased, vis a vis the MS temporary contract labor model. I have also found that men in particular get very upset when women are competeing for the jobs, especially men that are not themselves extremely good at what they do.
I have worked with women in many different technical. Like men, women have different perspectvies and long term reasons for working. These reasons affect the type of work done. I know women how have gotten degrees, so as to be women of letters, and then do something that requires much less skill becuase it fits thier lifestyle better. I have known men to do the same thing.
At the end of day, I think there is a norm for each field, and the dominant players in the field consider that norm the only possible reality. It does not take that much creativity to realize that changes in norm is what has driven technological growth, but most people just want to go to work for 8 hours, do as little as possible, and draw thier pay. It in only the special few that will uspet the apple cart in hope of achieving something new and exciting.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They'll get some girls to pose for the wallpapers right :)
Preferential treatment (i.e., discriminating against those not in the preferred group) should be avoided in all forms since there is always a way to find an imbalance or perceived defficiency between job cagegory X and the general population.
Equal treatment and fairness are good things to which to aspire.
Any such effort is a step in the right direction; I don't think suggesting it may be 'sexist' really serves to add anything other than fodder for stimulating discussion. That's just my opinion, though. In any case, it's an uphill battle unless schools start to foster better science programs for kids in elementary and junior high school - gnome as an organization isn't responsible for providing the money to do this, but their userbase (us) has the power to do so. Call your senators! Getting even more OT, there are a lot of women entering into science and tech fields, but too often it only happens when there's a dad who is in science too (or for the current generation, a granddad)...
What it clearly isn't, is supremacist.
Racism and sexism and all these other discriminations are perfectly acceptable, and even commendable in many cases, such as this one.
The problems these kinds of integration efforts solve are:
Most any science department will tell you that the amount of interest and involvement of women pales next to men of similar age and background.
It's always nice to have some unsubstantiated flamebait in the story summary. How about reporting what's happening instead of inserting dubious sociological commentary?
So, most women do not care about participating in OSS projects. As a result, even if there is one female that is mildly interested, she'll get the job over a more qualified male just due to the fact that females are less interested in the industry. Anytime you make a disparity between men and women, then you're being sexist.
There would also be some real practical value to figuring out why (structurally speaking) there is so little female participation.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I'm a woman in IT. I'm a developer. And I think it's sexist. If I were in the USA, I might have applied, however i'm not, i'm in New Zealand.
Regardless, programs like this miss the point entirely. The main problem is not a lack of female applicants, its the lack of women in IT. This does not stem from a lack of funding or information - we all have access to the internet.
It stems from the basic belief that computers are a mans domain, and that even if a woman is a programmer extra-curricular activities concerning programming is taking it too far. The solution to this problem is to change peoples attitude toward technology-related sciences, not to throw money at it.
When I first showed interest in computers as a child, it was frowned upon by most of my family in a big way. Change it there, and there will be more openly geeky girl IT grads that will participate in the community without the need for extra money being thrown at them.
In Canada, equal-opportunity programs are specifically mentioned in section 15 (2) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as being a justified exception to section 15(1), which prohibits discrimination.
While I understand that this only applies to government programs, the fact of the matter is that in 1981, a heck of a lot of educated, elected white men had to agree on it for it to be included. So as I see it, either you agree with the judgement of rich white men, or you disagree with them (in which case you're probably not one, and would ironically be better represented through equal opportunity).
Kudos to Google for noticing that there were no women applicants, and acting on it. In my job and where I volunteer I often find that the best positions are usually held by straight white men (myself included) and at every opportunity, I try to improve representation.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Women don't know about linux because Linux users don't have girlfriends!
That would only be true if women knew nothing about computers on their own. This proves that you know nothing about women and even less about Linux users.
Neo: I thought you were a man
Trinity: Most men do.
Adda Lovelace, Jean Sammet and Rear Admiral Hopper would probably be Linux users today. My wife and daughter are.
Thanks for playing the double insult. I enjoy small minded prey.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Why do people (maybe just Americans) find it so hard to believe that there are things that women in general don't like. Men in general don't like getting hit in the groin: but if you do some Googling you'll see that there are a few guys who like it. Maybe women in general just don't like that sort of things. I see absolutely nothing wrong in that. Women are _not_ equal to men. If you believe in religion I believe no maintream religion shows women to be equal. If you believe purely in evolution, then you can most certainly see that men and women ae not equal. BUT I do believe that men and women are equivalent, and so have equal right, etc. They genders can be unequal but still equivalent...it's okay...no one will die.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Grace Murray Hopper Born 1906. Instructor, Vassar. 1928. PhD in Mathematics. Yale 1934. Midshipman USNR. 1943. Admiral USNR. 1946. UNIVAC. 1949. The Compiler, 1952. COBOL. 1959....
I could go on, but you should get the general idea.
What's insulting about it is that this research has already been done and Summers simply ignored it. There's a large body of literature that has examined the question and found again and again that gender makes zero difference when it comes to ability in science. Summers' comments were just plain intellectually lazy.
from Command Line Interface to the Command Line Interface Terminal.
Just to make the ladies comfortable and the OS a bit more feminine.
Women were used in those roles because the men were considered better at killing and being killed though and in war, unsurprisingly, people have to be kill and be killed.
I would suggest that killing and being killed are considered 'more masculine enterprises' than playing with numbers by the general public.
GP would seem right(?).
don't think that women are genetically built for programming - and I don't mean to sound like a chauvinist, scumbag, etc, but I don't believe that they're cut out for it which is probably why there is a shortage of women in the industry.
I don't believe you are cut out for programing either; it requires logical reasoning. Did you even read the article you quoted? Women have simply underestimated their programming ability and have not pursued a career in CS despite their good grades. Blame idiots like yourself who can't figure out why women might be angry about being treated like they're not cut out for programming.
Why then, back in the 1960s in England were women were being preferentially recruited as programmers? It happened to my aunt. Back then women were thought to be better set genetically to be programmers & I've encountered a few of the old school female programmers in my time. Remember, coding back then wasn't glorified pixel pushing like VB it was hardcore stuff for real programmers and women held their own.
On a different thread I'm pleased to find I've got this far down without anyone claiming that Gnome has become so dumbed down only women would want to use it anymore - oops...
(Dons flameproof costume)
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
Does anyone else see irony in an article where there is an apparent attempt to bring more women into the OSS community being tagged "Gnome, Chicks, Women"?
Oh, wait - I just reloaded the page and the "Chicks" tag is now gone!
Guess that means I'm not the only one who noticed...
Women were used in those roles because the men were considered better at killing and being killed though and in war, unsurprisingly, people have to be kill and be killed.
And because (at the time) it cost less to hire a bunch of women to do menial work.
I've heard it argued that women would be better soldiers because women (on average) have a higher pain tolerance - but men still feel the need to protect women, and letting them go to war doesn't fit with that.
i've worked with women for 30 some odd years, and for every quality female worker i've met there've been dozens, if not hundreds, of complete losers...just earning a check. incompetent. don't get me wrong...plenty of men are losers too, but the rate seems a lot higher for the ladies.
when i say "quality" i mean they are gutsy, take chances, do cutting edge things, speak their mind, get things done.
the rest are just "sheeple"--half sheep, half human. great for sex but little else.
there is something of a "pandering" personality in many women. the average woman seems willing to let stupidity enter a given task if it makes people "feel better"...reduces tension...whereas a lot of men will just say "that's not the optimal way to do it, redo..." -- even if someones toes get stepped on or an ego gets bruised.
i figure its an inbred trait, the result of generations of women helping whiny little people who have a lot of growing up to do (aka children) feel better about themselves. It a great trait for someone working at a daycare center, not so good for a project leader or technical person who needs to stick with the facts, not feelings or emotion.
most of the high quality women i've met were very strong personality wise...a few owned handguns, were pilots, ex-military officers, and usually had a strong father in the house when they were growing up.
>A simple litmus test to see if an action is *ist is to imagine the response if an arbitrary
>decision was reveresed
Not really... just because someone recognizes the existence of race or sex and treats someone differently based off of it, does not make them a racist or sexist. Strangely enough, many people do seem to think that prejudice is constituted in acknoledging the existence of differences between groups, which is patently rediculous if you think about it. Color blindness is not a morally or socially good any more than sex blindness is. Frankly, if you failed to acknowledge my sex, I'd be pretty offended.
If acknowledgement of distinctions between groups were the the actual definition of prejudice, prejudice would not be a morally bad thing (depending on how you define morality, but we won't get into that. Let's just say that particular screwed up definition of prejudice would sit fine with utilitarian and deontological definitions of morality).
A better definition of prejudice, that actually makes it morally and socially reprehensible, is the idea of falsely identifying characteristics with a group, or overgeneralizing characteristics of some members of a group to all members. This kind of prejudice clearly has both poor reasoning behind it and bad consequences in front of it, thus making it immoral in most systems.
It should be noted, the various "isms" suchs as racism and sexism seem to be stronger than mere prejudice. Sometimes I use them interchangeably, but it would be most accurate to describe a racist as someone who acts on prejudice, whereas someone who merely has prejudiced ideas, but does not act on them (if that's possible) is merely prejudiced, but not racist or sexist.
I think that it's revealing that people have these poorly constructed ideas about what sexism and racism are. It shows that most people, even so called moralists, don't really think about what it means to act morally, but rather just act on their intuition and prejudices, which are a pretty poor guide to proper action in many circumstances.
What sense is there in calling yourself a moral person, or urging people to some moral action, if you haven't even taken the time to think about what morality is and how you determine what is moral? What sense is there in getting on a high horse and proclaiming the evils of sexism, when you doesn't even know what sexism is?
Who says the ladies will be less qualified. For all you know it'll attract 3 superior candidates. *This* is one of the reasons many women don't want to work with the guys, silly comments like that (that also get modded insightful?!)
Oh, the desktop environment.
Nothing was preventing anyone from signing up, other than not knowning about it.
Taking other applicants just because of their sex *is* sexist... I mean, if there were more qualified applicants, and they are being passed up that does a disservice to everyone involved, especially GNOME itself.
Since the invention of prostitution (the worlds oldest profession) some thousands of years ago, women have been to smart to give anything away for free...
Only guys would be stupid enough to work on something where there was no money in it at all...
Calling it Gnome was the first mistake.
Gnomes are way down on the man scale with
trolls and hobbits.
To attract women to the window system, you need
a name that emotes tallness, security and
wealth ( which are things that women are attracted
to in men). Something like "Fireman 8.0" or "RichBastard 7.5"
or "Warrior 11 Extreme Edition".
Who says the ladies will be less qualified. For all you know it'll attract 3 superior candidates.
Indeed, the article says that everybody who *applied* was male. If the ~10:1 male:female ratio in CS holds true, then they could hire 18 women and still have them be equally qualified.
It's not free, it's not open, but it's for linux and it works. It's a very good non-linear video editor.
The problem, according to the fine summary, is that the women didn't apply.
How many of the 181 applications where for men?
Is Firefox for men or for women. Scuze me, but I think this is plain silliness.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
You have to be a white, land-owning, male, preferably with blond hair and blue eyes, to write computer code?
That sounds a bit fucked up to me.
It's not genetics, it's culture. Boys are given guns to play with as children. Fake plastic guns that shoot little colorfull discs, water guns, whatever, they're still fucking guns. And then people bitch and complain then they start using real ones.
Little girls on the other hand are given baby dolls to play with. It's not uncommon in the United States to see little girls still in diapers carrying around a baby doll. They're preconditioned to be subjective to men.
I think it's wrong, but that's society for you, not much I can do but point it out .
Some shit is genetics, such as fucking to save the species, I'll give you that much. But a generous portion of behavior is cultural, id est, environmental.
You're a Nazi! This flame is complete! woot! huzzah! foshizzle!
So Gnome's section of Summer of Code is a sausage fest? Kudos to them for the correctional treatment!
a girlfriend of mine told me not to get involved with that little Gnome leprechaun, apparantly one drink, one rohypnol and she ended naked chained to a python with a hell of a VI headache in the morning, and the only thing he left in the room were a bunch of old 'getting the best out of visual basic 1.0' manuals... little rat b4stard.
-Magdalene --"there are 10 types of people in the world, those who read binary, and those who don't"
I think, ultimately, the problem is that people can't see that equal does not necessarily mean 50 / 50.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
why didnt these superior candidates apply for the google summer of code in the first place then? 181 male applicants and zero female applicants. I have no problem with them getting the positions if they really are the superior candidates, but if that were the case wouldnt they have at the very least applied and (all things being equal) probably been accepted in the first place?
TIAEAE!
This is a typical racist/sexist troll. Women don't particularly want to be software engineers, and if they go to the trouble of learning they get extra handouts like this one from gnome, but still there's only about 5% women to 95% men.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I reach out to women all the time. You know, to grab their boobies and whatnot.
Christopher Culver is a spammer.
someone had to ask...
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
That is an interesting comment. I have noticed for a long time now that women do like kde better than Gnome.
morcego
Everyone knows that Real Women use FVWM with ridiculous custom configurations that only they understand.
Sponsoring people based on gender is prejudiced. I didn't like apartheid in South Africa and I see this in a similar light - it's discrimination based on something that cannot be changed. Next they'll be sponsoring blue eyed people because not enough blue eyed people work on Gnome - as if it even matters what colour your eyes are, or in this case what your gender is.
You can be a woman, a man, a human being of unspecified gender, a green-blue tentacle from the planet XF-WQR-13, I cound't care less. If you have interest in computer programming, fragging, making guild raids, pwning n00bs, etc. that's just great. So? What's the big deal?
There's nothing like an outdated stereotype... (from U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, via here)
I would say the former. When you get a women far less interested than their representation in the field, its an indication that its quite likely that your existing visibility is skewed, and that you are missing exposure to a substantial portion of the talent pool.
Desire to do something does not have a direct correlation with skillfulness at it, especially if those skills can be applied equally well or better to other endeavors.
Funny, I would find anyone not saying "it's just social structure" in disciplines that are skewed towards women rather odd.
Women don't usually care about what OS they use or if their computer is secure. What I see that women want to do are...
1. Look up pics of hot guys, save them to their hard drive, and liberally sprinkle them on their desktop.
2. Chat
3. Email
4. Browse the internet
5. Buy stuff online
6. MySpace
As long as they can continue to do these things, they don't give a rip from what I've seen.
I'm a woman, and the so's the person who got me into Linux in the first place. In fact, she manages a set of packages for Debian and is a sysadmin in a major educational institution. If you believe women aren't into Linux, you should take off your blinders.
I think the photographer deserves some credit for taking this.
;))
Two girls in the beach reading a UNIX book!!! Summer 2005 in Crete, Greece
Took me a bit of time to figure out how to get the link to the user's profile from just the link to the static picture. I found the flickr API. The rest I leave as an excercise to the reader.
Trivia:
* Taken with a Sony DSC-P73.
More properties
* Taken on August 11, 2005
* See different sizes
* 4 people call this photo a favorite.
* Viewed 4,810 times.
There is one comment.
(I'm just curious to see how these numbers change after a slashdotting
What they really should have done to garner support is a swimsuit calendar featuring women coders.
/.'s, I'm sorry to both of you; it was a utilitarian jab I felt worth taking.
Just kidding! hahahah.
what they really should do is a swimsuit calendar with gorgeous models pretending to be women coders!
If I've offended female
ôó
The latest version has menu's that are much more organized and consice than KDE. Also some apps in KDE such as Kdevelop have poor menu UI issues and the fonts are lacking since kde 2.x.
I used to be a former KDe enthusiast but as of recently been switching to gnome. Ubuntu shows off gnome 2.12 which is the most UI and user friendly version to date.
Kde 4.0 will have a totally redone UI and menu system so this may change.
Also if you go to www.kde.org you will see a section called KDE for women with the cute dragon wearing makup and a dress.
Kde does have a much bigger color contrast so I wonder if that could make a difference?
http://saveie6.com/
For whatever reason, some women are just more comfortable with documentation (technical writing), UI design, or webpage development.
For example, it's obvious that this little girl has a knack for graphic layout rather than programming. Sometimes that's just the way it is.
Sponsoring 3 men will get you just that: 3 men.
Sponsoring 3 women will give you 3 women and 300 geeks who fancy their chances at 1:100.
And I've read through a few of the comments posted here, and I think that many of you are misunderstanding programming as much as you're misunderstanding the ability of women in IT.
When I first started working professionally in IT I was an arse to men and women alike who didn't agree with me about matters of IT. In other fields I generally kept my mouth shut, but when it came to IT I was always right, even when I was demonstratedly wrong.
Over the years I've seen many people in IT who underestimated their own skills, who didn't think they could do tasks set out for them until they actually tried, and who realised later that maybe what they were afraid to do before wasn't so hard and gave them experience they could use in other areas.
When it comes to IT no assumptions should be made because IT is sexless, emotionless, and lacking in illogical thought. It is us, the people who use our computers, who project human characteristics onto our computers, and often show a glimmer of our own attitudes towards the opposite sex.
The best developers I've met and seen their work don't do this projection. Their computer is never a he or a she, it is a computer, simply a tool. They're not fazed by someone asking for a "feminine" colour to be put into a project if the colour scheme matches. They're not unwilling to take advice or constructive criticism from men or women if it is valid or helpful.
I used to be an arse to everyone who had a differing opinion, unsexist arrogance and obstinance were part and parcel of my ethos. I've grown up quite a bit, and I no longer automatically assume someone is a know-nothing jack-hole when they say they like Windows, or suggest an idea that seems questionable on the surface.
Women and men are different in a number of ways - women tend towards softness of aesthetics, comfortable styles, warm colours, quiet words and small clean messes, while men tend to be big and brash, hard lines, stark colours, loud words and louder anger, and dirty tidiness - and at the same time men and women are also alike - we all want to be respected for the knowledge we have, we don't like to be excluded just because we're short or tall or black or white or male or female, and we don't like to be stereo-typed and fitted into a box that supposedly tells the world what we are because those boxes are never quite the right size and shape.
If there is a lack of women in IT, so be it. There's a comparitive lack of men in nursing too.
I think it would be nice if we could just stop anthropomorphing our PC's into extensions of ourselves and realise that they're just a tool. Having a pink background or a picture of a blue skyline on the desktop doesn't automatically mean the owner is male or female.
If there are sexual characteristics in IT, programming is probably one of the most androgynous areas. It can be squiggly messes of bad code that puts out a rigid, stark interface, or it can be neat, tidy code that outputs a clean and tidy interface of warm colours and legibility, or it can be a blend of both.
We don't need more women in IT, or less men, what we need is more people with a sense of style and a willingness to ask other people "does this look good or not?"
Gay, lesbian, straight, bi, man, woman, or three-armed alien from Alpha Centauri doesn't matter. Style matters, willingness to learn matters, an ability to realise your mistakes and fix them matters.
It's nice that the people running the Gnome project are trying to encourage women to join in on the project, but I think it's a misplaced, though well-intentioned, effort on their part. The Gnome project, KDE, XFCE, Windows, and Mac OS X too, don't need more women, they need more people with style and the `nads stand up and say when something sucks.
As for the commenter who mentioned seeing the little diapered girl with the doll baby, I think you should have at least given the parent or parents a hard stare. No small child should be thinking about being a parent, they sho
Te Quiero, Puta!
i look at things this way. if 181 applications came into the summer of code, and they were all male, ANY effort to bring in female participation cannot, on its face, be rightly considered "sexist".
the easy thing to do would be for GNOME to shrug its shoulders, and sigh: "well, that's just the way computers are." they aren't doing that, and they should be applauded for not doing so.
They've all applied to work on the KDE Desktop.
;)
Sorry guys, women want something bigger than a gnome.
I find that any initiative that targets people based on something they can't control (gender, race, nationality, etc) does nothing to further equality but remind us of the differences. Why do we need to encourage women to join gnome? If they want to join, won't they join? Any woman I've talked to does what she's interested in. There are just natural inequalities in certain things, thats life and not everything is going to end up balanced. We should be focusing our energy on furthering projects and not pointless attempts at appearing PC.
OMFG!!!1111111111111111111111111111111
thank heavens! it's about damn time!
One person is irrelvant. The claim is not that no woman is 'genetically built for programming' but that women in general aren't. Now it seems much more likely to me that this is cultural and not genetic, but a small number of very successful famous people are not much use as evidence.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Gnome already has OMG PONIES. What do they need women for?
Maybe it's because women are smart enough to like KDE?
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Maybe all 18 have already committed to high paying summer jobs.
"Call us when the New age is old enough to drink" Beck
punch it up your arsehole cuntface
Fuck you for targeting women GNOME. May the best (man or women) get the project.
Most any science department will tell you that the amount of interest and involvement of women pales next to men of similar age and background. Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?
As even the most basic scholar of Disney can tell you, there's almost always a ratio of one woman to every seven gnomes.
Of course, Smurfologists would argue the situation's even worse. No wonder the little buggers are blue.
"So who are the three males who won't be getting the scholarships because the money will go to three less qualified candidates?"
Well, my dog won't be getting one for a start.
I think you mean "men" there, and not "males". Feminazis just love to de-humanise men by referring to us as "males". Don't legitamise their hatred by helping to promulgate it.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Amen. What such studies habitually fail to control for is the perpensity for women to enter these professions versus men. The assumption is that since 51% of the population is female, 51% of any given group should be female. That obviously falls over. It fails to acknowledge that men and women are psychologically and physiologically different, and therefore might personally prefer different professions as a matter of society-wide statistics.
This just smacks of an excuse to get email addresses of ultimate fantasy women, those who can code.
actually, I don't know how good Gnome documentation is. but you get it, right?
So who are the three males who won't be getting the scholarships because the money will go to three less qualified candidates?
Whoah hey, is that Mitch "Death to Women's Rights" O'Brian?
Well, let's see, he assumes that women are automatically inferior and unable to code.... but no..... It's only one sentence, and good ole' "mikeusa" can't possibly post something without rambling on about how sexism is good for men, and how women are worthless whores, and that he hopes the Debian Women are wiped out in a car accident, etc. So I guess the above AC is just J. Random Douchebag instead.
- the other AC, officially dubbed a "traitor to his own sex" by mikeusa
We're out there. Sometimes it's just hard to suck it up and walk into a sausage fest (even if it's online). Having guys realize that you're a somewhat cute girl who knows how to code several languages and talk shop usually gets their attention. That can be flattering or rather creepy depending on who's giving you the attention :-).
I applied for the SOC last year but I've been too busy this year to code very much. I have several ideas in my head and sketched out on paper for enhancements to projects I already participate in but it's just a matter of setting aside time to do it.
Yes, girls are discouraged from participating in the maths and sciences. However, there are also broader gender role issues that keep the numbers of women coders at a fraction of the number of men.
Google's move, along with projects like Debian Women, Ubuntu Women, Gnome Women, KDE Women, etc. is just an attempt to get a more diverse group of people participating in coding and in the broader development (e.g. graphics, UI design, etc.). It's not that no women were qualified, it's just that there are other issues in play here. The impetus to get over the hurdle of being the only woman in the room is great.
For the record, I am 21 and have used Linux exclusively or almost-exclusively for the past 8 years (primarily Debian). I have been coding since I was 6. One of the main projects I work on is the Gnome music player muine.
I deal with things and my wife deals with people. This has worked out so far (20 mumble something years).
My wife has zero interest in upgrading the computers, fixing cars, doing yardwork... And I have zero interest in minding our relationships, e.g. remembering to send assorted greeting cards at the appropriate time, calling folks "just to chat", etc.
If some kid comes to the door selling something for a fund-raiser, she'll buy it to be nice, I'll tell them to pound sand.
Maybe females are different... Vive la differance!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Four days ago, after a problem in windows, A virus all over the partitions, I persuade my sister to replace her system with a GNU/Linux distro, Kubuntu. She told me, if I want to do this she wants her windows too because she don't want to ask me every time she want to to something and she knows windows well. I told her that the gnu systems are changing so fast and her new experience wont be like the previous ones and for bonus I will teach her 1 hour of how to operate her regular tasks in this system. I knew she didn't like the terminal experiences from the past
:).
I have and idea this time. I strongly resist to open a terminal while she was watching, and never ever let her see what i am doing there and did all my favorite terminal based task for her system remotely from my own system. And with an hour of teaching she started to play with the system and found many interesting features herself and is really impressed with it. This time with no fear from that black page, maybe she like it and will stay with it!.
It seems she liked it when there is no terminal around any more.
OMG Gnomies
Free Software movement is about ideological regurgitation and thuggery.
RTFM and RMS. Free software, Free drugs, Free reinventing the wheel.
Why waste precious life in useless things ?
Ever wondered why the participation of women is higher in KDE ?
But Gnome is stripped down, simple and utilitarian. It seems to me like the type of desktop that appeals to a man. KDE is curvy, sexy, robust, customizable. It seems to me like the type of desktop that appeals to a woman.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
And this affects me how?
Why should I care? How exactly does this matter. While it could possibly be "news for nerds", I'd hardly call this "stuff that matters."
It's time to stop pretending that there are wonderful abstract principles at stake when people try programs like this: it's a bit like passionate cries of 'racist!' every time anyone attempts to do anything to rectify the grossly asymmetrical situation of many U.S. born blacks. Computing has been a quite sexist discipline for many years, even if the situation has changed for the better recently. As a result, there's a pretty steep shortage of senior women in most CS faculties that I've ever seen.
As a undergraduate, in 1990-1993, in addition to hearing tales of acts of substantial sexual harassment that went largely unpunished, I also got to see first hand a lot of horny nerds 'helping' the women in their classes by basically attempting to do all their work for them, as well as a few tutors spending an inordinate amount of time trying to score with students rather than teach them. While the situation has improved, the environment of 10 years ago influences the current supply of women with (for example) 12 years of experience.
So can the 'sexist' talk. Go read Stanley Fish's 'The Trouble With Principle' and see if you can still keep a straight face while pushing your abstract principles...
Personally, I suspect that the absence of women from projects like GNOME represents good sense, more than anything else. I have met many incredibly intelligent, hardworking and successful women in serious academic 'systems' research (there seem to be a number in compiler research, for some reason), but far fewer in the sort of hobbyist open source sphere. Perhaps they prefer to be formally recognized and paid properly - if you felt that there was the prospect of lingering sexism in a field, one might prefer a area where there's a solid audit trail for success (e.g. 'why did you hire a man with half the number of first-rate publications as me?') as opposed to the rather nebulous world of success in the open source world (e.g. 'I wonder why other developers didn't flock to my project?').
....take a good look at the comments by some in this thread, it almost sounds like a bunch of Farkers looking at a boobies picture.
Once upon a time, I dabbled with Linux and considered making a place for it on the network that I managed, but putting up with a bunch of horny dorks trying to hit on me in the communities got a little old after a while. Why the heck would I want to get involved in a group that is predomantly male and have to deal with all that crap all over again?
The majority of western countries have laws enshrining equality between the sexes, why do these dullards think that women have 'special needs' or is it that they dont understand the term 'equaility'. How about we have another group, we could have a 'reach-out' program for those people who cant code or even better for those people who cant be bothered. Equality means just that.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/wsop/
Nice of the GNOME project to send 3 people to the 2006 World Series of Poker.
They might find three superior candidates, or they might not. If they only get a small number of female applications after this announcement, they may end up doing the best with what they have just to fill a quota.
Think about it this way: if only three women apply at this point, all three are guaranteed to get the positions. Their combined intellect could be the equivalent of a doorknob's, and they'd still get in, but qualified men wouldn't even have a chance.
Besides, if they're confident that they can find three or more "superior" candidates, why not just put out a call for female applicants and let them compete with the men? If the women are superior, they'll win, right?
Incidentally, I'm female myself, but I hate discrimination of any sort. Giving a woman a job or a scholarship purely because she has a vagina is just as bad as giving a man that same position purely because he has a penis. Encourage all genders to apply, and let the best candidates win. Hell, I don't even have a problem with putting out a call for female applicants or even refusing to make a final decision before X women have applied, just as long as gender is ignored in the actual application evaluation process.
erroneous on all accounts! who cares if there arent any women programming gnome or for linux(rumor has it chicks dig unix anyway) all i care about is that bugs are fixed, features are made, and the job gets done.
From my very minimal experience, women tend to not involve themselves in affairs from which they tend to have no social gain; this includes projects from which one canot gain much status or power.
This is not a negative critiqe of women, it's just that they are more socially intelligent than most men are.
-- Don't seek confirmation of a woman's intentions from her mouth, but only from the logic of her actions. (Anon)
It hurts to do this.
;)
It is important to have a clear view on the world, yes? Unless we risk going into roadblocks here and there, and feel sore and numb after a while
Using our mind can certainly help understanding and put things in perspective. However, too much of it, and we tend to get stuck in our own mind, instead of seeing things as they really are. With too much disturbing thoughts and emotions, we are only seeing our own mind, not the world around us.
In the news, there is lots of statistics every week, but we also know the world is much larger than a written report on it.
What do we really know about a person we have never met? Suddenly, we are to start to believe the statistics, to describe a person standing next to us?
That is discrimination, and the root of both that and racism. It's a trap in our mind, to be stuck in such superficial judgements.
Nobody has 1.2 kids, or 0.4 cars. It is impossible or silly. Reality is much more diverse than statistics and our crude models of the world.
To include groups and genders of people that would otherwise not join/enroll, is judged as a good thing for the whole. Because it creates opportunities for those people, _and_ shows others from the same group that it is indeed possible and they will not be alone. It is an effort to get the ball rolling, to include everyone, so that we will realize that we are all really the same.
Sure, black people usually run faster that white people in the Games, and white people dominate swimming. However for individuals, the statistical differences are negligible, and having a diversity of people in every social setting, far outweights the benefits of monoculture and speciality-breeding.
You give people an opportunity, and they will shine.
Everything that can unity us more is a good thing. You can be sure that whatever idea you have, if it will bring everybody more together, it is a good one.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Thanks, Slashdot, for getting to the 21st century and updating the GNOME icon. =)
As for the topic... um, I have nothing against the idea, and it's a pretty good one. Just be careful not to hire Paula, who's undoubtedly out of work right now. =)
*Interest* is the place to start. If no women are interested in a subject, it follows that no women will be involved.
Now if women had applied for GNOME projects for summer of code and been denied, we could talk about why that is. But there were 181 applications, *none* of them from women. Therefore, the obvious question is why no women are even interested.
This is the same in computer science programs, too. IMO it's putting the cart before the horse to ask what percentage of internships should be taken up by women. We ought to first find out why women aren't even interested in computers in nearly as large numbers. Look at what middle school kids do in their spare time. Why are fewer 14-year-old girls than 14-year-old boys puttering around with PHP? Why, for the most part, do they get their male friends to help them with computer problems, instead of vice versa?
If you figured that out, the rest would follow.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
> I don't see many groups getting up and arms over it.
Do you know when women in the US attained the right to vote? Do you know when women in the US attained the right for higher education? We all know that women were (or have been) discriminated by males (or male-controlled society). Not vice versa. That's why fields with small share of women are watched more closely than fields with small share of men.
BTW, I'm not a feminist.
Actually my wife has worked with Linux for about a year with Linux in a dual-boot environment because her computer wasn't fast enough under Windows. But after she got a new one she switched back to Windows-only because of the following reasons:
My wife uses exclusively the following applications:
- A browser (Mozilla/SeaMonkey)
- An office (MSOffice, Excel/Word)
- A mailer (Outlook)
- A music recorder/editor (Audacity)
The reason my wife used the dual-boot Linux was, Audacity under Windows couldn't then record music with a sufficient acceptable quality. After this limitation was lifted she dropped Linux in favor of Windows because there isn't a mailer like Outlook on Linux. She didn't object using OpenOffice albeit the 1.1 version wasn't a real match to MSOffice at that time. You might wonder why my wife insisted on using Outlook. Simply at office she is pressed to use Outlook and didn't like using a second mailer.
To make Linux more attractive for my wife I don't suggest to build yet an Outlook clone on Linux albeit this would help. Yet the real solution would be building a cross-platform mailer which outperforms Outlook on Windows. Outperforms not in the eyes of a Linux-Fan but in the eyes of an ordinary business worker doing his job.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
The other day I saw the fiance asking her laptop how it felt. When I asked about it, she said she was "sending an email". Having read your post, it makes perfect sense.
barack to the future?
...women plan to do something better in their summers than code code and code again.
HEYYYYYYYY PONIEEEES!...
They're just not interested; when I was at Polytech/University, almost 1/2 my lecturers were female; one worked for Digital, another worked for Databank with the original design of the system which enabled all the banks computers in New Zealand to communicate with each other.
Sorry, the issue isn't about 'encouragement', females already know that these things exist; the thing is, females tend to be more, how can I say, balanced in their approach to life; they work in IT, but it doesn't mean that their whole life and interests revolve around IT; heck, I work in sales, but it doesn't mean I actually enjoy tinking with what I sell (selling wine was the exception though), same goes for women.
There is a difference between being a programmer, and being a programmer who also sees it as a hobby; for a large number, they programme as a occupation, but when they get home, they're mothers, wives; they have interests that at external to their occupation. If anything, I think men need to rebalance their life, between their employment and interests.
GNOME is not reattributing Google scholarships to women! The GNOME foundation received money from Google for participating in Google Summer of Code, this is a bonus which is not related to money given by Google to the students. Now the GNOME foundation decides to use its own money to create new "scholarships" for women, similar to Google SOC. See http://mces.blogspot.com/2006/06/gnome-summer-of-g als.html.
Would you honestly say that a girl who's a 7.5 or greater out of 10 would make running your programming project easier if she were doing the same work as you? Would the obvious tension be so easy to ignore and surely you wouldn't be the only guy in the office to notice. No, it should be allowed but how are we ready to interact equally with someone who lowers our IQ just when we look at them (studies say that bla bla bla) because of their good looks. I can see how communicating over e-mail and AIM and sharing code is more productive if you guys telecommute you may never realize how she really looks.
You make it sound like women know how to read....
The reason there is a vast imbalance of men vs women in math and science fields is not because of a social structure that "guides" them away from these fields. It's because they just aren't interested.
In my undergraduate mathematics degree, there was just about a 50% split between men and women, and this continued throughout the duration of the course, roughly speaking. However, in the very same university, the proportion of women doing postgraduate research or learning, in the mathematics department, is only about 25%, if that. That's a big drop off.
You say the drop off is probably a result of the females in the class simply not being interested. I was in that class, and people's level of interest was totally unrelated to their gender. On top of that, the proportion of females in that very same course 10 or even 20 years ago was probably less than 10%, if there were any at all? Is it the case that somehow the female population spontaniously became more interested in mathematics in the intervening years?
The answer is probably; yes, they did become more interested. But not from some "innate" mathematical ability somehow emerging in one generation. Rather, it was as a result of changing social mores and expectations. In the 1950's, if a girl had said that she even liked mathematics, let alone wished to study it, the reaction would have been surprise and bemusment at best, and outrage and ridicule at worst. Today, such a girl is just about in the same boat as any boy who expresses an interest in mathematics.
Girls are told, from numerous sources, that "Girl's just don't do science." The message may never be overtly stated, but the irrefutable fact of its presence is a miasma that chokes the desire for science out of young girls. In the same way that someone can be encouraged to enter science via science fairs, presentations, practical work, etc; so too can someone be discouraged from entering science via uneasy support, social mores, outright skepticism, etc.
May the Maths Be with you!
Im tired of hearing this bullshit argument. The reason there is a vast imbalance of men vs women in math and science fields is not because of a social structure that "guides" them away from these fields.
I'm not sure I agree. In the UK education system, one chooses GCSEs at age 13/14. The number of science GCSEs (1, 2 or 3) you choose will control what A-levels (chosen age 15/16) you select (i.e. unless you did 2 or 3 science GCSEs you will have a lot of difficulty). And the A-levels you select will dictate what subjects you can do at university (i.e. it would be hard to get into CS without an a-level in maths, hard to get into engineering without an a-level in physics....).
If we're letting 13 year old kids (or even 15 year old kids) choose what they want to do for the rest of their lives, you can bet peer pressure is going to come into play.
I am reminded of something I read in an article some time ago. One year a group of school children were taken on a tour of a hospital. At the end of the tour, all the boys were given doctors' hats and all the girls were given nurses' hats. The parents complained to the hospital; why were the girls given hats corresponding to lower-paid, lower status jobs? The hospital promised to do things differently the next year. A year later the group toured the hospital again and, once again, the girls came home with nurses' hats and the boys with doctors' hats. The parents complained again. "We did things completely differently this year" the hospital said; "last year we gave all the girls nurses' hats and all the boys doctors' hats. This year we asked them what hat they wanted, and gave them that."
Anyway, here's my point: Demanding specialisation at a time when peer pressure is rife is an example of a social structure that could believably be keeping women away from the sciences.
Personally I think biology also plays a part, but I think it's short-sighted to discount the effects of society all together.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Nice. You assume that the 3 women who get the job will be less qualified.
As a female developer having worked with both male and female developers alike I cannot see how you could justify that reasoning. Ability is not lost across the male/female divide. There may be different styles and interests perhaps but there is no lack of intelligence when it comes to code/design/solutions.
The lack of applications for these projects most likely comes from the lingering perceptions of women being less technical, ambitious and logical - all of which are untrue - but are believed by men and women alike. Who knows - a scholarship program such as this might break some of those old thinking patterns and give the girls a bit more confidence to apply and succeed in the future.
As for the post above which suggests that women need windows and that bloody paperclip and the like - I've never heard anything so patronising. Women don't need to relate to PCs any more than any non-techy guy. I'd prefer to work in Linux given a choice.
> GNOME Reaches Out to Women
I am appaled by the amount of sexual perversion found on Slashdot. Gnomes, werewolves and kentaurs raping women and other sick fantasies. This is the result of wicked Lord of the Ring books, a fictional world populated with heresy, witchcraft and half-breds. Nerds should read Harry Potter instead, which carries valuable moral tract as opposed to the mere carnage phantasies of Tolkien.
Maybe if the geeks brushed up on their social skills and personal grooming more women might apply. But I suppose that is part of what makes them geeks :)
I really hate that everybody here is assuming that ALL women are dumber than ALL men in these types of courses! I have done half a mechanical engineering degree and I passed EVERY damn course! My next door neighbour is doing the same course and he has failed subjects! I knew another man who failed a subject as well! Why does EVERYONE here think that women MUST be dumber than men for! I am certainly NOT stupid! I just got my forklift ticket yesterday, and I am going to do a pre mechanic 6 month course next month too! Attitudes that persist on this website will NOT do any good for any women considering entering those fields! I can pull apart electronic things and tvs and cars too! Whoopie BLOODY DO!!! It's not hard you know! Stop your egotistical MEN ARE BETTER AT EVERYTHING attitude, and then you might ALL wake up to yourselves!
http://www.psychopanic.com
!?
Sexism: Prejudice or discrimination based on gender. Like other "isms," sexism can be personal, as when someone tells a joke or makes a remark that demeans a woman because of his or her gender, or institutional, as when women are paid less than men doing the same work.
For this to be sexist, you first need to know how sponsoring a group of coders who didn't submit any code is prejudical or discriminating.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
and because Mac users only have boyfriends...
(ducks with his MacBook...)
Does this mean that the next release of GNOME will come with dress making software ? and the ability to interface with irons and microwaves/cookers ?
I have this idea where everyone gets the same opportunity to shine, without regard to race, gender or age.
:-) Nothing bad in that, in fact, males have been getting more and more aquainted with that over the past years.
That is a commendable idea, and we're working towards that goal. However, think of the geniouses born in the gutter today, who have miniscule chances to develop their talents compared to the wealthy. Some people just never get the incentive or chances, that other do, and statistically and almost by definition they often belong in minority- or repressed groups.
Stipends, grants and special-selections are means to get them up from the gutter and mix with all of society. It is both a social benefit, as well as an untapped resource for society. The point being, if we do nothing, status quo will be preserved - there will be little or no movement. Minorities tend to group together, while others may look at them with suspicion and ignorance. Anything bringing the fences down is of good.
Likewise it is between genders. A male dominated industry will lack certain qualities that women bring in. I really want more women into political leadership, to bring down number of wars and power-games for instance.
The same in a "women industry", having some males will bring a balance on the oestrogen. Some more direction, less infighting and intrigues. Women and males have a bit different balance of male-female energy, and striving for a balance will improve many matters.
You are not gay for being a nurse, or being emotional. It just means you are more in touch with your "feminine side"
Affirmative action gives more opportunity to particular individuals because other individuals share irrelevant characteristics with them. It is ugly, nasty and not an idea that creates unity. It creates suspicion and drives people apart.
Maybe your emotional reactions to it for being "imperfect", like the world, is what disturbs your mind? A "big mind", will see the greater benefits and let it go, but if you're stuck in the "rat-race" and "every man for himself", then you will only see injustice and injury.
It is wise to save ones own mind, regardless of the world.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Male or female, geeks and nerds will be geeks and nerds. I think they need to bring in real outsiders to the project. Get some insight on what Joe Sixpack wants, or grab a panel of Mac users and ask them how GNOME should be. Things will never work if they're only designed by engineers, male OR female.
Gnome isn't for women, it isn't pro-choice.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Women have better things to do with their spare time than write code?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
If a science project was full on nuclear physicists, and low on laser professionals, would it be PHD'ist to want to bring in more laser professionals?
Most does not mean almost.
Most any science department will tell you...: Wrong
Most science departments will tell you...: Right
Almost any science department will tell you...: Right.
A picture is often worth more than a thousand words, etc. - here is a piece of the puzzle:
p g
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/Brains_resize2.j
Bad show, mods. This post expresses an honest, important, responsive opinion, and you slap Flamebait on it because your own political correctness alert went off. For shame.
I agree with the parent in completely disagreeing with the grandparent - it is easy for anyone, even a person who realizes that people are created equal, to consider the practice of accepting applicants based on something other than merit and be suspect of the merits of anyone accepted.
Also, I'm not sure if I understand how the standard AA dialogue got brought up, it doesn't seem entirely relevant to the matter at hand. It's not saying 3 shitty applications were accepted because they were the only ones from women, it's saying there were no applications from women, which either indicates a problem in outreach or a complete lack of interest on the part of 51% of the population. These guys are trying to fix the possible outreach problem; if the female interest is not increased for this reason, at least they tried to fix what they could.
We just need to market it right.
"Give Aways" - bi-annual Volkswagen Jetta (or any chick car) give-away to first 100 women
"Sweapstakes" - chance to win a trip to Cancun
"Code Club" - female only club to talk about technical books, hosted by _insert_famous_geek_chick_here_
"Women's Weekly" - weekly magazine targeted toward women between age of 18 and 40 to spread useful info and geek gosps and dirts
"OMG!11!! Brad Pitt is cheating on Angelina Jolie with GNOME girl!" - use ugly rumors to spike the interest
If all fail, "Life time supply of Tampon". Yes, it's nasty, but it turns away most guys, resulting in smaller gap to fill for women.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
No wonder, they're back in the IT shop... WORKING!!!
my guess would be that you'd say, or have said, that women would ipso facto make better world leaders than men, which is further than Summers went in regard to mathematics and heavily analytic sciences. Why is it acceptable to state an inherent difference when women are favored?
Because men already proved that they are terrible world leaders (just look at Bush). Because even though we don't know for sure that they would be better, we do know that they would be at least as good. Because it can't get any worse.
There are just NOT that many women programmers out there. This is just a fact - women mostly don't like math and science. It's not a hate crime and it's not sexist. It's not because there's some conspiracy 'keeping the woman down' - it's just the way it is. What IS a crime, IMHO, is wasting time FOCUSING money/time/etc trying to CHANGE that part of human nature (and this isn't just about women - there's lots of places where the level of stupity occurs) So WHAT if 90% of programmers are men? Does it matter? And good gosh you KNOW the percentage of LINUX women programmers has got to be nil - Linux pretty much requires you to be a geek to be involved with it. (Yah yah, flame me, you know it's true - you can't wish it away)
The point is - it doesn't matter and it's stupid to focus time and money on it.
------
God gave us the intelligence to chose between right and liberal - you just gotta use it.
...and your reference is?
9 D-879D-1D06-8E49809EC588EEDF
There is such research, of course, and it mostly falls into a few broad categories:
- Gender "science". Gender science presupposes biological factors are irrelevant as a matter of doctrine.
- Sociology of various stripes. Rarely uses biological controls of any kind. No standardized or generally accepted methodology exists.
In short, the research you are referring to is pretty close to worthless. It is also often obviously driven by a certain (egalitarian)utopian ideological mindset, that is aggressively intolerant of any dissent from the party line whatsoever.
Unfortunately for these "sciences", real science in the biological fields is constantly pushing back the veil of ignorance that psuedoscience has been hiding behind. There is a plentora of articles discussing the phonomena - here is one:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00018E
...she just happens to be in beta.
Indeed - the jocks get on top of the dating game by their "respectfulness"... *giggle*
But yes, the dominance of (male) nerds and geeks is one factor that further drives women away from nerdy pursiuts - the problem is just that this pales in significance to the fact that female nerds is a terribly small group compared to the number of male nerds.
There is no such thing as positive discrimination.
On the other hand, I'm always in favor of more women in my environment :)
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
Note to self: Don't comment on
Open-source developers are not merely your average IT graduate (or student) - they are so passionately devoted to programming and IT that they are prepared to work for no wage.
That in turn makes the population from which candidates are selected even smaller, and further out to the right on the "nerdiness" bell curve. The resulting change in candidate population size as we move to the right, from "IT grad nerdy" to "Open source nerdy" is not proportional, rather it will always produce an extremely male-biased sample.
GNOME Reaches Out to Women
Bad Gnome, BAD!
As I understand it, Bush actually has already defined his exit strategy:
- Train and establish the modern Iraq military and security forces and establish a strong democratic government in Iraq (the cabinet having been completed within the last week), which leads to...
- Empowerment and growth of the Iraqi economic middle class, which leads to...
- Weakening of the influence of radical Islamist* clerics, which leads to...
- Decrease in and elimination of Islamist terrorism and a more stable Middle East, which leads to...
- U.S. troops leaving the area.
The problem for many countries in the Arabic world is a distrust that true democracy and Islam can co-exist, which is why Egypt looks a little like a police state and other countries remain monarchies (bin Laden's #2 was implicated in the assasination of Egypt's Anwar Sadat).
One modern model of democracy and Islam co-existing peacefully could be Turkey, but if I understand correctly, some countries such as France have been reluctant about Turkey's inclusion in the European Union. (In fact, when Bush issued a statement encouraging the E.U. to include Turkey, Jacques Chirac actually said to the press that Bush should "shut up", so the emotions are pretty strong.) So I don't understand what that problem is...
*"Islamist" specifically refers to radical militant Islam, not moderate Islam.
What is important to remember here is that, contrary to some beliefs, these tendencies are not arbitrary. They have a certain variability (as pointed out elsewhere, huge resources are devoted in various fields to chasing imbalances), but they are very predictable and constant in time and space. Short and rough guide:
Professions relating to gadgetry: Male-dominated.
Professions related to caring for children and the elderly: Female-dominated.
There are some professions where a mix of talents is beneficial - such as PR. Here, we see a mix of sexes. Also, this does not make social factors irrelevant - it just makes it very hard to eliminate them.
If they wanted more women they would have painted the gnome 'foot' pink. (ps I am joking)
So do you peel the banana before or after you lock it?
I know you were trying to be funny, but nine times out of ten, being sexually attractive gets you what you do not want: getting harrassed by digusting losers, getting patronized by the stupid losers, and attracting unwanted envy by insecure losers.
Sexy women have advantages- they get their pick (to some degree) of the dating pool. But as Sharon Stone once said- "You can't sleep your way to the top, you can only sleep your way to the middle."
The best thing about women in software company is that they make you think differently. I still don't understand why Nautilus does not have tabs and ...recursive permission changing.My sister noticed that instantly..And their coding is really clean.In a way more practical and well commented :)
It is not "male supremacism" that keep women out of engineering and IT. There isn't any female subculture of "outsider nerds" out there, shut out from the IT world. Indeed, even in nearly completely non-social fields such as hacking (or open-source), where formal credentials often mean squat, male predominance is even more overwhelming.
In real cases of supremacism at work, such as anti-jewish university quotas in the US, there formed an outside diaspora (for instance City University in New York), and when discrimination was lifted there was a huge jewish influx into the university system.
In the case of females, there is also hardly the same social cost to bear as with, say, nursing and men. Women who go into IT do not risk their reproductive or social success (hardly, there is a large supply of potential mates, albeit of second-tier attractivity). Rather, it is just a fact of life that women aren't that nerdy on average. Live with it.
When a taboo is present, the watchers of the taboo take any sign of questioning as heresy. They (correctly) anticipate that people who in any way question the taboo, while not directly challenging it, are most likely attempting to shield themselves from reprisal. This in turn leads to the taboo watchers acting in a very touchy fashion. Game theory.
In short: (Taboo -> People cloak their opinions - > Taboo guardians have to be more sensitive in order to penetrate the cloaking efforts of dissenters - > and so on)
I think US laws forbids Gnomes from looking up women's skirts!
Just don't want to see a big "chain gang" of these guys picking up litter on the side of the road.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Huh Huh, She said vagina, Huh Huh.
All apologies, I couldn't pass it up.
Now let's all get back to our intellectual pursuits and forget I wrote this...
Are we perfect? No. But where I should move when I renounce my U.S. citizenship, North Korea, Libya, China, or Iran?
My humble guess is that our daughter would have great fun and make excellent contributions working on GNOME-related projects. She is, however, working such long hours in her development job that her free time already keeps approaching zero.
Sitting here with many millions of dollars worth of open source code at my disposal, I often wish there were good ways to compensate the many thousands of people who make it all happen.
Would it be inappropriate to suggest that at least one woman might make "Gnome Bob", where tasks are divided by "rooms" so you'd play games in the parlor and do finances in the "den", and with animated helpers like "Scuzz the Bastard Operator From Hell"?
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
Now we shall have gMyLittlePonies!! Take that KDE suckas!
it would be one thing if they were rejecting application on the basis of their gender but because they didn't get female applications if must just mean not so many women would be interested. And really then who cares? Sponsering only women to participate is discrimination. If people want to participate they should apply and then be judged on the quality of their application. If less people of a certain group apply then it's their loss for not even trying to apply. Some might argue that they're discouraged from applying somehow based on where it's advertised etc but that's relly a bunch of bs.
As a female in the IT/CS world, it's not that there aren't women and it's not that GNOME excluded women; they just didn't reach women with their advertising for the positions. That's all, they just need to talk to their marketing department and say "hey, we need to reach out to this untapped talent" and then it's done. And it sounds like that's what they are doing.
As for the nursing issue, I think we don't know much about their outreach to men because, well, none of us are really interested in becoming nurses. I don't know about the rest of you, but I became an IT person because I prefer Computers to people. Not a good trait in a nurse.
"Just call me Girly Blank"
I believe the logic behind the assumption that the three women will be less qualified is not gender-specific. At least, MY logic behind arriving at the same assumption isn't. See, the problem is as follows:
Step 1: Gather a large quantity of candidates.
Step 2: Select the best however many out of them, which wind up being the top 10% (or 5%, or 1%, or whatever).
Step 3: Bring in three that were NOT the best Whatever% of their group, because they are the ONLY in their group
Step 4: Profit!
Selecting the best out of a large group means you've got a strong chance of actually having very good ones. Bringing in three who were not obtained via a screening-out process, who were not better than 90% (or 95%, or 99%, or 100-whatever%), results in unknown quality (given the data presented here), and most likely average quality.
The same principle applies whether you're displacing 3 merit-selected male coders with 3 gender-selected female coders, 3 white merit-selected college applicants with 3 black race-selected college applicants (ooh, I'll get modded troll for that), 3 survey-selected coffee blends with 3 charity-supporting coffee blends, or 3 successful national chain restaurants for 3 local eateries. You can safely assume that the replacements in all of those cases are not as good as the "best" ones they replace, until you see actual individual qualifications.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
That anecdote sounded interesting, but I have to admit I thought it smelled a little of BS.
Anyway, found a reference to it here (it's a ways down the page, like 4/5 of the way down)... Hofstadter 1986, page 156:
Hofstadter, Douglas R. Metamagical Themas: Questing for Essence of Mind and Pattern. New York: Bantam Books, 1986.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
What about the average IQ? When are they going to get that back to 100 where it belongs? I really hate intelligists.
Let me get my point out of the way so everyone in a hurry can move on - girls don't like coding competitions. They like coding. They are competitive. But competitive Linux programming? I dont think so.
So what do girls like?
Well, over here in Blighty, there are loads of lovely male nurses, but not so many female CS graduates. I'm one of the few - doctored and an ex-CS Lecturer - and can report that undergraduate CS programmes aren't designed with girls' minds in mind There aren't enough women involved in course design and it looks like this is going to remain the case for some time.
No matter. Snuggle up. I want to talk to you about evolution, the birds and the bees.
We girls are wired differently (you knew that already). There are whole sections of our brains dedicated to spotting men who'll make good fathers for our children. Other bits are reserved for looking good/ hair and shoes and stuff. And then there's the house and social life to organise. Load this up with all the modern aspirations (sporty car, career, good salary, pets, sports, hobbies, exotic travel, etc). Phew!! No room left in there for competitive programming! :)
Amongst our social brain soup however, women have a long tradition of coding and have been designing, sharing and modifying domestic codes (weaving/ knitting/ stitching patterns, recipes etc) for hundreds of years. With these, then hard-wired, code-based traditions in mind Ada Lovelace conceived the first computer programming language. We've still got the wiring, and technology has reached a point where we've now also got the motivation.
Lots of women are naturally good at many of the things directly relevant to the evolution of Web 2.0 (I'm sorry, I hate the term too).
In addition:
And so, finally back to Gnome's competitive programming.
There are girls who understand and use the computer coding systems/ the languages and rules. Generally-speaking, though, girls don't have that need to be admired as programmers.
We're wired to seek out good fathers for our children, both biological and technological.
Dr_Bliss xxx
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
If you follow the neo-left (socialists) then it doesn't fail. And a majority of those writing these papers are socialists (and I am not saying the right is better by ommission. However the subject is women (and education), and that's a leftist issue)
Basically under the doctrine of tabula rasa we are all the same. The differences between us are due to how we are raised and culture. The viewpoint is taken to extremes (so a 110 lb woman with a gun is watching a 280lb man on multiple charges of murder, or a woman has a job that her physical limitations are an ignored problem), in its most extreme form, its used to mathematically PROVE discrimination (in one direction).
If we are all the same, then there should be no variance in our interests, but since there is variance in our interests, there must be discrimination and cultural bias inhibiting us. to question the concept of whether we are different at all inherently is to assail tabula rasa, and it appears to confirm that genetics IS destiny. Which to some point it is).
And politically correct speech (cultural Marxism) is what keeps you from permitting yourself or at least many of them, from seeing the large pink elephant in the room. Whatever you do, you can't mention anything that logically will point to this elephant. Hence summers problem (follow along his reasoning, and you might start "seeing" the elephant). you ask for "social" programs, because if you say "socialism" they might start looking at the goals and actions your taking rather than the words your saying and the names your taking (like the institute for social research).
People are a funny lot. They think that there is some 'special' quality that allowed a democratic government like Germany to become a totalitarian state, but it wasn't. They voted it in. the accepted the correct speech as protected speech, forgetting that it's offensive speech that needs protecting. Just as we here today have forgotten john Locke, and Patrick Henry, as well as others. No longer are we to consider them because of critical thinking which is only directed at the regime you live in.
It was ben franklin that said those willing to trade freedom for safety, deserves neither.
Those words are becoming more and more true everyday. The problems of the gulags and things did not come out of some heinous persons dreams; it came out of having to impose lies beyond everyone knowing the truth. When the paper says it's productive, and yet you see that we are losing things, that's the lie, and anything that will get you to look at the elephant is a crime against the promotion of the lie, and is a crime against the state. So as lies upon lies were foisted, more and more extreme methods of control had to be used. The most effective, is confusion. The laws don't make sense then the people are afraid to move at all. They can't predict what's legal or illegal and so they can't stay out of the way if they act in any way. Punitive methods backing up, like taking your kids to foster care, peonage laws, and more are what back up the confused fear.
It is our individuality, our talent, our comparative advantage that gives us opportunity. It is our jealousy that others do better that keeps us from accepting how much we do have. our envy will and is making us trade freedom so that our spite can be appeased by the wealthy being in chains WITH US. the horrible things that a state that is like this can do comes from the fact that when we are no longer unique. When equality defines us as the same not rich and varies in who we are. then we are interchangeable, and have no value. who cares if 10,000k die? They are not unique.
Few noticed in the ipod sweatshop propaganda that the women being paid lived in work camps barracks. Not in apartments with families and such. They think they are being free market but they are not, these workers cant leave and go elsewhere, their living space is tied to their work. This is not capitalism; this is the exploitation of the workers by socia
Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?
It is a non creative, sexist way to get women interested in GNOME.
I set myself free of signatures. If I could, you can do it too!
BTW, yes you are...
feminism is not defined by wether you paint yourself with a name. its defined by the ideology you accept. feminism has lied as to who and what. it has redefined the class struggle in terms of sex, its perpetual discord means that the state is taking control of your life (since when your at war all the time you cant handle it). they have made the "private public", and its only a matter of time before they knock on your door, or your short changed because you support some ideology that claims that too many men make women inferior by their presence.
what you dont see here is that this is redistribution of wealth and means of production. the people of unknown ability added to the group of those of competitive determination, makes the group more important than the individual. those bleeding hearts like you that think this is true, do not understand that for the "greater good" is socialism, and "individual rights" is what america WAS built on. get it.
your right to be you is what america is built on. however, when your right to be you is forced on everyone for the greater good, then that takes away the groups rights of individuality and difference of expression. it takes away your uniquenes. those that think that women were not allowed to be great are living the lie. read about noester, and the irish female pirate, and all the history out there. you will find that most of the really great things women did were when they competed against men AS EQUALS, not discompeted and appointed as equals. so noester gives us symetry in physics, and tons of othe women. the best we can say of what modern women ahve strived for is the destruction of culture, and the reshapment of utopian socialism (which meant no one is around to also oppose the facism of the right). both are ideologies that stress "the good of the people", while the america that the feminsits hate, and you do to (you support their ideology and either use the past as an excuse for future ills, like affirmative action, rather than an end to all of it), is something that valued the uniquness of the individual.
you are selling your life and freedom away for a handful of beens and a meaningless adventure
I have a CS degree. I am female. I've been in the industry for 25 years. When I 1st started out there were not many women and there still aren't. Back in the 80's there was a push to make us feel welcome. But when you're the only girl in the organization it IS tough. I'd say for the majority of those 25 years the male:female ratio has been like 10:1. I will also step up and say those guys were not all (or even mostly) socially inept nerds.
... his reply: his wife. And that was the breaking point for me returning to "programming". As a woman I wanted a life outside the office. I'm not saying all men don't or that all women do. But it sure made a differnce to me.
When I had my children I had to get 4 levels of (male) management approval to take a leave of absence. 4!!. At 1 point I asked 1 of these males "who takes care of your kids"
IMHO: women don't generally feel welcome and we want to have a life. Fixing it is tougher than offering 3 female only opportunities.
You know, nobody has any problem saying "White men can't jump" or "White guys don't know how to dance", yet if you dare suggest that maybe...women aren't really cut out for programming, your are a sexist bastard.
Look, society can't keep you away from your passions. When I was 10 years old I learned how to program in basic off of computers at other people's houses. I wrote a text adventure game that year. That's what someone does when they are driven by a passion.
Women don't constitute a noticable percentage of programmers because most women don't care about programming. It doesn't interest them. They don't have the passion. They aren't cut out for it.
And no amount of government grants, or hippy-dippy activism is going to change that. In general, women aren't cut out to be computer programmers. (And I don't care about the Asian chick in your CSCI class...yes I know SOME women are good programmers. That doesn't change the fact that they are a rarity)
The president of Harvard was a victim of the feminist movement which has been working for decades to eliminate any distinction between men and women whatsoever. These are the same people who claim that lesbianism is the highest form of feminism, and that hunting is really an outlet for men to impose sexual violence on helpless animals. Their world view lacks any understanding whatsoever of reality. Of course the Harvard faculty was more than happy to throw him under the bus since they'd had disagreements with him before. They were just waiting for something un-PC to come from his mouth. One woman even said she felt so oppressed that she almost fainted. This is the mentality of these people - someone stipulates that perhaps there is a biological difference between men and women and a woman nearly loses consciousness. I guess she has never looked at herself without her clothes on before.
On a side note, has anyone noticed that there seems to be substantially less interpersonal drama in jobs dominated by men? Men just go to work, take care of business, and leave their personal bs at the door.
...Only Gets Up to Ankles
During the period that you say men have made bad leaders... our whole civilization was created and gives yout the chance to use critical theory against it.
in fact, since women have influenced the world... we have lost most of our civil rights. we are electing either socialist or facists, capitalism is blamed for corporatisms excess through deals with the state, and generally there are no families, and no population replacement.
to make it short... the women have sold us into a totalitarian state in a deal to get their way... they did it before and it was the reason for wwii... looks like worldwide, their tolerance in intolerance has put us on the brink of a religious war (do you think muslims would be happy with feminists doctrins of athiesim, polymorphic sexuality, and other stuff. their hating us is them hatnig the feminine ideals that we now hold).
bush may have invaded iraq, but you better count which women voted for him to go there!!! women have a higher need for safety, and until they were on the scene we had morals enough not to invade a country preemtively!!! but to most women this is ok... the same is true of searches in public like the SS did...
they are two sides of the same coin.. except it took the feminist decondstruction of blackwells morals and the morals of this country in order for us to not stand up to the right!!! all ideals are relevant, and if its ok for government to enter your bedroom and life, why isnt it ok for the government to enter other countries and change them? after all the left supported bush because they thought that it would free women.
women are so much better off... no? no families.. many are barren... whole histories of familes are dead forever now... overworked... no one writes odes and poems to the glory that is women any more... the music women today tend to write is nasty abusice, and vengful... all this by desing of the feminists...
right now you have women hooking up... as detailed in an article in rolling stone, they have never had dates. never had courtship... no all they have is kinky sex they dont want with the top 10% of the males as if they were the gods (the other men are not good enough till they are over 35 and desperate for their last chance at family). they catch deseases in record amounts (and the men suffer less scine the women are trading the few men and leaving the others alone). they are depressed, they are alone, they are barren... they are now dying of the conditions that were mens reward for working for their families... they are hurting their children in greater numbers, killing them and such... they are now committing rapes against children they watch in school...
in the days of men women were not wanted for their sex. the overwhelming force of sex was sublimated (just as when you save you put off todays expenditure for tomorrows greater fortune and freedom), women were selected by their demeanor, personality, smarts (which is why the wealthy educated their daughters - and why ada lovelace invented programming of a sort - though arguable, her contribution still stands even if it doesnt have that exact moniker). how she was with kids, what her family was like... all this was what we decided adn thoguht were the qualities to be judged by...
now with feminism.. its how many men you can do in an evening to score points in the social melieu of women, and its how high up the man you ocan bed gets you status (not if you can marry him, but if your worth spending a night with over other choices!). pornography with gorgeous women is common... (in the past there was porn, but it was the disenfranchised and mental, not the smart and entruprenurial explotative... many porn companies are run by women, and such!). and we are closer to legalized prostitution than ever before...
women run the world... its a fucking mess more than its ever been... we are near being controlled everywhere we go... national ids, and all manner of restrictions.. and this is the product of women in the mix.. the original ideals of this country would never ahve let the rights of the individual be broached for the public good!!!
I completely agree with the parent post. All affirmative action programs should be abolished. People against affirmative action are not fighting against the benefits it provides to the minority race/gender/etc... They are fighting against the negative affects it gives the majority race/gender/etc... The world is filled with economic scarcity, and whether they will admit it or not, trying to promote one group of people over another will always discriminate against the people on the margins of the majority party. These people who would have been good enough to get in on merit alone are discriminated against. They would have otherwise received a job offer from you except you decided to favor group x and they are a member of group y. How can this be classified as anything but discrimination?
Anyhow... thank goodness Sandra Day O'Conner has retired... maybe we can get a sane judgement from the supreme court (read 9 person oligarchy) now regarding the legality of affirmative action.
It's not men keeping women out of science and technology. It's women. The opportunities are all there, ready to be exploited. Women simply aren't applying themselves in that direction.
...But it is sexist. Women need to look past traditional gender roles and start applying themselves towards ALL directions, because if they continue to ignore some of the highest paying jobs in the world, the average income of men vs. women will never reach parity.
I'm in no position to speculate as to the cultural imperatives which cause this phenomenon, though I could theorize to some extent...
It's been a long time.
Sorry, but hear me out.
As a woman myself, I find it utterly irritating to think that my gender has ever had or will ever have anything to do with the opportunities presented me in my life. I know people of minority races (and the handicapped) who feel the same way.
I taught myself how to use Photoshop and code HTML back in the 90's, and got jobs based on my inate design talent and willingness to work hard. What a slap in the face it would be to go back and find out that I was hired because they were trying to fill some gap in their demographics!
You can't legislate tolerance or equality. By giving preference to people because of what they are instead of what they can do, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Let those of who can excel, do so. The illusion that humanity is divided and that only some will ever reap the benefits of progress is what makes us assume we have to be overly inclusive.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Ma-an, did I ever ROTFLOL as I am ROTFLOL right now or did I ever ROTFLOL as I am ROTFLOL right now?
I always laugh histerically when amidst all vacchanalia of gender correctness in capitalist media I hear the voice out of nowhere that actually speak what is on the mind of every person with a sandlet of a common sense (take ex-Harvard president, for example)...
"The king is naked..." or "Does anybody see an elephant in the room?".
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I just started my fourth gig as a software engineer, and once more I'm surrounded by misogynist assholes--all married to fluffy ultra-feminine women who give up their daycare and hair-styling jobs once they marry a man with a big salary. I ended up leaving my last job because after awhile, neither the paycheck nor the adrenaline rush of making something work outweighed the dread I felt every morning on my way to sit in my cube and listen to yet another discussion about how to raise daughters who will want to be good wives when they grow up, instead of *gasp* using their minds outside the home. My cow-orkers were pleasant to my face, but it was clear they didn't respect me. My current gig is shaping up to be the same...engineers have to be somewhat conservative to build safe products--I'm fairly conservative myself, other than possessing both a vagina and a mathematical mind--but holy shit, this is unreal.
...and since men are afraid of me, I haven't been able to marry to make babies, which really limits having women friends. Women with husbands and children to care for want to spend time with other women who "understand" and can bitch about similar things; they want nothing to do with women who can go home after work and do whatever the hell they want. They especially don't want to talk to women who can think logically instead of "feeling" everything--they want empathy for their "he always leaves the seat up" ranting instead of "you need a seat with a spring so that down is the default..."
I used to date, but men stop calling when I tell them what I do for a living. I'm competent, but not especially brilliant, but "I write software" scares the shit out of men who don't want to look less "prestigious" than a woman.
So why the hell would any woman who isn't 100% completely enthralled with computing want to take a job as a programmer? No love, no friends, miserable work environment. It's not worth it.
The idea that men and women on average interact with each other differently, and build social networks differently, and maybe even think and problem-solve differently, whether as a result of biology or social conditioning, ought to be pretty plainly obvious to anyone who's worked in a mixed environment for any length of time. However, the current climate discourages consideration of such factors to an almost comically ridiculous extent.
People are so afraid of ostracism, that they deny what almost anyone, male or female, knows is probably true: at the heart of most stereotypes is a small kernel of truth.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
One of my mates printed a few (iirc 10) of exemplars - two hang now on the pinboard, other 8 are handouts in our Uni :)
:P
Hopefully he wasn't the only one.
Go Gnome, go power puff girls.
As a KDE developer, I can tell you bluntly that GNOME should seriously cut down on the crack-smoking monkeys
As someone who spends much of his time developing for Windows, it seems that Microsoft has the corner on the crack-smoking-monkeys market--it seems they even picked a crack-smoking monkey to be its CEO (the best one they could find--it can even dance and throw around furniture!).
Therefore, if the goal is to put a dent in Microsoft's dominance in the PC software market then GNOME has the right idea--so get out there and build up your arsenal of crack-smoking monkeys and kick some arse!
All? There's another one?
You jest, but among members of certain intellectual circles (particularly in the "gender studies" and social anthropology disciplines at many universities), it's quite accepted that there are more, perhaps many more, than two genders.
If you accept on premise that gender is a social construct, rather than a binary biological one, then it is not hard to expand the definition out to include various flavors of transgendered and 'queer' people not as 'sexual orientations,' but as distinct genders themselves.
The usual line of argument in favor of this begins by considering other cultures which have believed in more than two genders: e.g. the Berdache people of some Native American tribes, and using this as justification for a socially-constructed view of gender.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I agree with you completely. There are many talented women that do not even consider engineering fields for reasons such as lack of education/motivation and social stigma. There are also many men that don't consider engineering fields for the same reason.
I see a huge problem with engineering education is that we continue to label everyone geeks, nerds, etc and often times even embrace that ourselves. Look at Slashdot, news for NERDS. Many people would find the depth of the conversations on Slashdot interesting but that's for nerds so why should they care? Then there is the "Geek Squad" at Best Buy. Yeah I really want to work with computers so I can be part of the fuggin' geek squad.
I think getting rid of these social labels would be a bigger step in the right direction than people realize.
Doesn't 181 seem like small number of applicants for a program like Summer of Code? I looked at the faq for summer of code, and it looks like it's really demanding of your time.
Wait...Are you talking about women, or the Jews? I kind of lost track around the time you went completely apeshit and started accusing part of the population of various wars.
It's been a long time.
But it DOES happen, all too often. So a story of my last workplace:
There was a woman, who also happened to be a minority. I could not understand how she'd got to her current position because she was totally unqualified. She did an abysmal job, basically you just had to work around her since she just screwed everything up. She actually actively resisted learning anything new. You'd try to teach her how to not have a problem and she'd just whine.
Well the story was she was hired on to answer the phones for trouble tickets, essentially the lowest job there was there. She wasn't even really qualified to do that, but they get plenty of people who are hardly qualified to tie their own shoes in that position so nobody cared. She worked that for a few years, but new people kept getting permoted past her. This is, of course, because they were smarter and good at what they did. So what did she do? Filed a discrimination suit of course. Claimed it was because she was a woman and a minority she was being kept down. They instantaly capitulated and promoted her.
Since then she's been given steady raises to keep her happy, while she's utterly failed to accomplish anything in her new job. According to my friends who still work there, she's agitating for another promotion. She wants to work for network operations now. She's convinced she knows networks. Hell she'll tell you she has a CCNA. She doesn't , she took the classes but couldn't pass the test, but she'll tell you she has one all the same and won't hesitate to dispense with incorrect advice about networks.
Well, that's a wonderful example of what is being talked about. The woman was not passed over because of her gender, but because of her lack of competence and social skills. However because of her gender and minority status, she's had to be promoted anyhow. Have to keep it "fair" and all. You can see why things like this might give some people a bad impression of affarmitive action.
We discussed this at length in a class I had at college a while back, it was supposed to be an english class but it mostly ended up being a bunch of us debating "the issues". Our general conclusion was that the people who have people affirmatively stuffed into a job position (or class, or...) are the ones who benefit the most because they're exposed to people that they normally wouldn't encounter. This is most significant in school, before people become habitual bigots.
Forcibly (heh) putting women into technical jobs will benefit them, yes, but they will benefit the rest of us more, not least because actually being in the presence of the opposite gender occasionally is helpful to one's chances of pairing up with one :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
or PERHAPS it was because those mathematics courses were REQUIRED for undergraduates. The women had no DESIRE to pursue it further, and as they were no longer REQUIRED they CHOSE not to. I guess you wanted to ignore that aspect to make it look like men and women aren't different though.
Most people go post-grad to further there career. There's plenty of classes I was interested and quite good at in undergrad that I would never pursue down the road because they have absolutely nothing to do with my career. I don't have the time or money to pursue courses for the sheer enjoyment of it, and I would be willing to put money on the fact that most people in america are in the same boat as I am. If I do pursue post-grad it will be nights and weekends, and will most likely be hell.
Nice small sample set, but you did a piss-poor job of actually reasoning why it might be the cause and effect.
MOD PARENT UP!
The reason there are no women in CS is because they aren't interested in it, period. Fiddling with faceless, soulless, emotionless machines does NOT appeal to a group of people that are driven by feelings and emotions.
Boys play with trucks because they like to imagine they're driving them around, making them work, controlling them, dominating them. Girls play with dolls because they like to pretend they're people, with feelings. They talk to them, care for them. It makes them feel good, to be interacting and interfacing emotionally with others.
Men like programming computers because they enjoy forcing a machine to do their will, telling it how it's going to act. Women don't take pleasure in this. It's the same reason there are so few female gamers, in general. It's not an emotional two-way street. The exception to this, of course, is MMORPGs. There are lots of girl gamers playing these, because they like to talk, to empathize and interact.
I'm really kinda tired of hearing it's "a lack of education" and "sexism" and "peer pressure" blah blah blah...
Yeah, I'll say it: women ARE NOT AS SKILLED as men in many technical areas. You know why? Because they SIMPLY DON'T CARE. They never BOTHERED to gain the skills, because to them they're NOT IMPORTANT.
All this propagnda aimed at getting women involved in shit like this is so insulting, it makes me sick. Women are human beings too, they don't need to be led around with carrot sticks.
-Some soon-to-be-called-sexist guy
Oh - I can die a happy woman. I've seen the word vagina on Slashdot!
I've been in the IT sector now for 14 years and have encounted far too few women. It should be getting better, but I've identified elsewhere where I think the problem lies. Personally I've thoroughly enjoyed working with many very smart and creative male colleagues, who've treated me with respect and have generally been delightful to work with. Our different ways of thinking are highly complementary. The industry can only benefit from increasing diversity.
Dr_Bliss xx
p.s. Negative generalisations about any identifiable group is lazy thinking. I comfort myself with the knowledge that unless the few hostile individuals responsible can discover a way to gestate their offspring in a box, their lazy thinking will die with them :)
I was thinking the other day, I really wish more women did interesting stuff, more interesting hobbies...
Skateboarding, BMX, DJing -- all of these are completely dominated by men. There are hardly ANY females doing these things. As for skateboarding and BMX I guess athletic/extreme/grunge is associated with male, so maybe it's social. But DJing? I always thought music was pretty neutral.
Body modification. There's hardly any female tatoo artists/piercers. Every time I hit up a studio, it's always guys running the show. OCCASSIONALLY there's a female artist. Very rare though.
Programming/web design/hacking/playing video games. I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I actually consider these things to be COOL. They're cultural byproducts of the new generation that are chic. Finding girls that play the truly dope games of the past couple decades is awesome. I know this one woman who actually plays/played Xenogears, Street Fighter, Rez, Mario, Counter-Strike, Shining Force -- a generally cultured sense of good video games, and that is very much a turn on. It is very much something that leverages me respecting the things she says, her opinions.
Fencing/kendo - I have only seen two females doing kendo, ~2% of all players I've seen.
I think women need to stop buying into all of this social bullshit that they should be weak little creatures. They need to get some sense and make a concerted effort to do interesting things. Quite frankly I'm SICK of a dating pool full of women who have no interesting/similar hobbies, or expect to be coddled. I'd like to have interesting discussions about the current state of the world that show considerable insight and thought from beforehand.
Women, yes I know you are out there. I do know it. And I'm trying to find you but DAMN it is hard to find needles in the haystack, you know? To those women, keep on keepin' on and influence your fellow females. I commend ya for it.
The furore over Summers's comments had much to do with the background at Harvard and in academia as a whole. Many studies have been done to find out why bright women tend to drop out of the sciences after they get their BS degrees. It wasn't their brains or their desire - it was usually that the male graduate faculty discouraged them, ignored them, pushed them to seek other fields. Women who fought through these barriers to gain their PhDs found horrible discrimination for lab space, research assistance, grants -- even _offices_ -- the stuff that make careers, once they gained a position. When Universities try to make their programs more welcoming to women -- that is, when the professors treat them seriously and equally -- the women begin to enroll and stay enrolled. (And they do just fine, too!)
With this background, Harvard, like many universities made concerted efforts to make their science and math programs more welcoming to women students and faculty. After all the efforts that it made, Summers bounds in and says, "well, maybe they can't." With that speech, he completely showed his cluelessness. The thing is, [i]even if women in general might not be as good at men at science and math[/i], at the university level, EVERY woman has proved (and will prove) herself individually. NO woman should have to face disparagement or doubt by her male professors or classmates because of stupid, insignificant gender differences (assuming they even exist, which I doubt.) Summers's words foolishly told all the bigots it was open season again, and THAT is why there was such a flap. (Background: I was an attorney for the University of Washington for 9 years; my female partner is a tenured faculty member at the University of California, San Diego.
Dear my. Have you never heard of Margaret Thatcher? She went to war with Argentina, urged George Bush to fight the first Iraq war, got a law passed to allow birching...
If anything, the power games are worse. You think Hillary doesn't do power games? I think you underestimate women. That's quite some innocence you have.
Should we require the NBA to hire more basketball players with European and Asian ancestors? Perhaps the quota should be about 70%, so that the population is properly represented?
If not, how to you justify your inconsistency?
but men still feel the need to protect women
*I* think that all males feel this and those that don't are broken. Maybe in some parallel universe where our freedoms are protected by overall wearing, hairy 'pitted, militant lesbian, pain tolerant, female super soldiers men wouldn't need to feel this way at all. I don't know if my neanderthal/reptilian brain would fit in at all.
There they are a conga line of suck holes. On the conservative side of Australian politics. - Mark Latham
As a female
Thanks for the clarification
There they are a conga line of suck holes. On the conservative side of Australian politics. - Mark Latham
> BTW, yes you are...
You, are wrong. I actually hate feminists, as they are mostly biased and zealots. You should learn to distinguish between a person who tries to be balanced. Any normal man would agree that women should have the right to vote and receive higher education and be admitted to public libraries -- not only feminisits, but any NORMAL BALANCED man. This came to be true only relatively recently. Wake the fuck up you moron.
How many applications were from paraplegics?
...
How many from red-heads?
How many from alcoholics?
The SoC is surely discriminating against these groups as they weren't proportionally represented verse the population as a whole.
Why aren't all the women here up in arms about such blatant sexism?
Oh wait
[I think I lost track of which bits were sarcastic!]
The parent suggests that women are rare in "most any science department", but that's not true unless you think "science" means "Physics". Visit any undergraduate Biology department and look around -- you'll see that male students are as rare as women are in Physics departments. You'll also have some fun arguments if you claim that science=physics.
Not if they didn't have to take on the same responsibilities as men, namely being eligible for the draft, which was still actively in use then. You don't see feminists pushing for the draft to include women, do you? YOU wake the fuck up, dipshit.
Does this happen to you ? ... never happened to me after I was done with the "hello world"s. There is always a team lead to persuade that your solution might be better, a client/suit to negociate features with, a team mate to coordinate with ... not to mention office politics etc. I think the argument that women are more social so they could not, by their nature, be interested in IT does not stand.
From another perspective: why should women be necesarily interested in IT ? So what if there are very few women in this line of work ? Does it mean that there should be no smart analytical women in other lines of work? Or it means that there is more glory in "computing" than in "accounting" or "housewifing" ? Does it matter what you do more than how you do it?
Interesting. There are some characters in Jean Auel's books similar to the people described in your links, but I thought she'd invented them.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Looking for biological causes that draw women away from math and science is even more dubious than looking for biological causes for inferior ability would be. Should we start looking for biological reasons why some people prefer Star Wars to Star Trek?
Of course a biological cause would relieve educational institutions from any responsiblity, so I suspect that's the motive for making the comment.
43% and the number continues to drop. That's a good thing, man!
In a decade or two, men will be relegated to sitting around all day playing video games and/or working on open source software. All you'll have to do is get up from your chair around 5pm and give the misses a nice sensual massage. And maybe cook dinner. (C'mon, dinner's easy to make.)
I for one welcome our bacon-bringing-home businesswomen of the future.
"On a side note, has anyone noticed that there seems to be substantially less interpersonal drama in jobs dominated by men? Men just go to work, take care of business, and leave their personal bs at the door."
Actually, I haven't found this to be true at all. I think it's just a myth that some men would like to believe.
From another perspective: why should women be necesarily interested in IT ? So what if there are very few women in this line of work ? Does it mean that there should be no smart analytical women in other lines of work? Or it means that there is more glory in "computing" than in "accounting" or "housewifing" ? Does it matter what you do more than how you do it?
no, this was my point