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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)
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
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunatly a lot of women arn't interested in programming (although, in this specific case I think it's more to do with women not being interested enough in programming for any Gnome stuff than just not being there).
In my entire CS degree course I appear to be the only female student who will happily do a coding project on her own time. It feels like a real shame. The girls just don't seem to realise that it can be fun to sit down and scratch an itch once in a while.
Rather than offering plain old money to get more girls interested, maybe Gnome should be thinking of more interesting problems for us to get going on and saying "hey look! This isn't all that mundane or time consuming AND you earn money for it!". Once they get a few girls working on various bits of Gnome it'll be easier to keep them doing jobs.
Silly rabbit
"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."
This may be true, but sometimes a project can benefit from another angle. Gnome really seems like its trying to be the desktop top that is accessible to everyone. By having women participate, there is a possibility that they will bring in ideas that male centric project would not have had. The truth is though, many of the female developers I know about tend to be just as shy as your average male coder.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
You have to remember that they are hiring women-only because everyone else is male. If there were 180 (or however many) women here and they tried to bring in some men, I think almost everyone would find it acceptable.
I think it's generally better to maintain some sort of gender balance than not to do so, just like I think it's better to support some sort of income/economic equality rather than having landed gentry with inherited fortunes and serfs. Of course, taking away some priveleges from the lords in my theoretical situation would be "classist," in a sense, but it would also be "good."
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
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
They'll get some girls to pose for the wallpapers right :)
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:
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.
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...
I don't like these gender balances because they tend to have tunnel vision. We are greatly rewarding mediocre women in engineering fields due to their low numbers, but we aren't doing the same for men in other fields.
How many men get special seats in programs for nursing, education, etc., where the field is dominated by women? In fact, of the people who get college degrees, only 43% are men. Why doesn't this get the same attention that the lack of women in science and engineering gets?
All that we can accomplish by trying to perform gender balances is to promote mediocracy from the minority gender.
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!
I have *NEVER* met a male nursing student, and I know quite a few nursing students. Nobody gives a crap about that?
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.
For one of my classes last semester, we were supposed to pick an area where there was a huge imbalance in gender representation and explore the causes. I picked nursing, interviewed 100+ male nurses and nursing students and asked them why they picked the field, what issues they ran into etc. - almost all of them pointed out that it was so *incredibly* dominated by women that they felt uncomfortable in the environment. Further, many expressed concerns that they'd be percieved as less masculine by those outside their profession - basically "People will think I'm gay!" By the time I'd finished my report, several of the male students hd dropped out of their programs.
For women in technology (of which I used to be one before I went back to school to study psychology), a huge issue is the "swinging dick" factor. Women and men tend to have different priorites and needs in order to be happy in a workplace - one of the big ones for many women is the social sphere. I know that, for me, the deciding factor was that I wound up feeling as if I was spending a third of my life around people I didn't particularly like, didn't find to be particularly able to have small-talk with, and generally just left me feeling pretty cut-off from the world.
(And, for anyone who says "Work is about work, not socialization, silly female!" let me just say: Men tend to also have certain needs from a workplace that seem just as silly - that whole alpha monkey/competitive thing is pretty goddamn funny and sad. Isn't work supposed to be about work, not establishing who's dick is bigger?)
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that yeah - women and men DO have (in the US, at least) the same theoretical access to whatever workplaces (with some exceptions) - but that doesn't mean that in practical terms a given professional space will be equally hospitable to both genders. Guys don't do "girl" jobs because they're afraid they'll look gay, gals don't do "boy" jobs because they they'll wind up in testosterone central. That kind of atmosphere presents a barrier to opportunity that a lot of people don't really see until they run right into it. So, from my point of view, a plan to address some of that stuff would be a good thing, regardless of the industry.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
This isn't about the ability to compete. The problem is that females didn't even try to compete.
I find it hard to believe that there are no women who would be able to do this sort of work. There must be other reasons for it. The reactions to this story provide a few clues.
Let's look at the comments so far--how many of them are from opinionated males who seem to like making judgments about the abilities of women to cut it in programming? How many comments have lamented the fact that some fields are dominated by women (last time I looked at applications for nursing scholarships the number of male applicants was > 0%)? How many comments refer to porn, lesbians, cunnilingus and/or dating?
I strongly suspect that the reason women are staying away from this field is the people they find in it. Perhaps if IT were a field where women could find a little respect they may be more likely to apply for positions. And yes boys, if you want to find a date, respecting the object of your affections may be a good place to start!
Cogito, ergo sig.
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
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?').
I don't like these gender balances because they tend to have tunnel vision. We are greatly rewarding mediocre women in engineering fields due to their low numbers, but we aren't doing the same for men in other fields.
The tunnel vision is the ignorance of social stigma and associated fear. Typically such programs don't reward mediocre candidates, they identify talented candidates and try to recruit them. For example a colleague of mine was originally working to become a veterinarian (a job more socially accomodating to women), but was recruited into ChemE (and had a 4.0 GPA). She was not a mediocre candidate, what she was looking for was an environment with social support, and encouragement.
How many men get special seats in programs for nursing, education, etc., where the field is dominated by women? In fact, of the people who get college degrees, only 43% are men. Why doesn't this get the same attention that the lack of women in science and engineering gets?
As others have pointed out there are similar programs for the recruitment of men into traditional female occupations such as nursing.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Fairness is indeed fun.
Do you truly think that attempts at gender equality can only accomplish the promotion of mediocrity (I think you meant mediocrity, not mediocracy, although in either case my response is the same), and nothing else whatsoever?
Are you certain that:
- Currently, women's positions in the field accurately matches their skills and qualifications?
- Girls and young women are given adequate education, motivation, and acceptance when it comes to even considering entering the field?
Given that you don't know, for a fact, that the answer to both of those questions is 'yes', then how can you possibly know that addressing those issues cannot help, but can only promote mediocrity?Now, be honest. You don't actually know the answer to those two questions. You know there are other possible outcomes besides the promotion of mediocrity (or mediocracy). So why--truly, honestly, why--did you make the statement above? What beliefs, assumptions, prejudices or predilections do you have which lead to such a circumvention of logic and rationality?
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.
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.
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
I may be nitpicking but I didn't read a single comment stating that women are unable to program. There are, in fact humorous comments about dating (missed the lesbian cunnilingus joke though) but in general I would say that most male developers do not consider the present situation as a good one and wonder (because they know there isn't a thing as genetical predisposition to computer science) why, oh why ?
And the people one finds in IT doesn't explain it all. There are more women in the Navy than in CS schools... I even think that despite their lack of women (or maybe because of it), IT departments tend to be the less sexists in most companies
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I don't know if things are different now but I do have to say that 25 years ago, it wasn't the men that were trying to keep me out of a career in computer science, it was the women. It was the female teachers at my middle school who couldn't understand why I wanted to take shop instead of sewing class, nuns at my all girl's school trying to talk me out of advanced math classes and into the humanities and older female relatives who on hearing that I was going to engineering school congratulated me because I'd find a husband there.
I never really saw a lot of "real" sexism from the men in my college. Yeah, I got good-natured ribbing from the guys but it never felt malicious, more like I was among friends. I only heard malicious stuff from women who resented my pursuing a job that could be construed as earning a living.
My daughter who is 7 now, will NEVER hear that shit from me.
But, that said, if she's interested in geeky stuff, great. If not, then that's okay too.
JoAnn