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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.
..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"?
(ducks)
I play a 16 year old girl on irc - does that count?
I reach out to women all the time.
It's them letting me touch them that's the hard part.
As a developer on a gnome project, I can tell you bluntly that additional women would help. Additional men would help. Heck, additional crack smoking monkeys would even come in handy, as long as they could tell the difference beween a semaphore and a banana*.
[*]The semaphore and banana requirement also applies to women.
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.
They'll get some girls to pose for the wallpapers right :)
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...
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 have some anecdotal evidence to support that claim. A (straight, male) friend of my brother tried to apply at a place such as you mention. This franchise hires almost exclusively women, and when he went in and asked for an application, they refused to even give him one. It is for this reason that I am boycotting this store. The next time I need some new undergarments, I will not go into Victoria's Secret. I suppose that it doesn't hurt them much, as I never shopped there anyway. Perhaps my actions will inspire others, where it might hurt their bottom line.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
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
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.
> You would get some mod points if I had them, alas, they expired yesterday. Very insightful post.
We need a plan to help people who don't have mod points!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Actually, there's lots of stuff being done by nursing schools to bring in male students. Partly to address the nursing shortage, and partly to achieve gender equity (or at least get closer to it) just for the sake of doing it.
And the real reason, more staff capable of moving fat patients. As the general population gets larger, so must the carrying capacity of the average nurse.
Rod Taylor
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. =)
Why are men exempt from the semaphore and banana requirement?
As a KDE developer, I can tell you bluntly that GNOME should seriously cut down on the crack-smoking monkeys, they have too much influence on your desktop.