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Fedora Welcomes Women to FOSS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the ladies-first dept.

nman64 writes "The Fedora Project, the project behind the Fedora Core Linux distribution, has introduced Fedora Women, a program to reach out to women who are interested in using and contributing to Fedora Core. This follows in the footsteps of LinuxChix, Debian Women, and Ubuntu Women and is part of a larger trend to support women in the FOSS world. At present, women are believed to make up only about 1.5% of the FOSS community. Is that finally set to change?"

2 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. how is that 1.5% determined, anyway? by plate+of+felt · · Score: 2, Informative

    Unless someone indicates otherwise, on the internet, we are all gender-anonymous. There could possibly be more women involved in F/OSS than is assumed (none?). The default assumption here, anyway, is that everyone involved is male. Somehow every comment I post with any sort of gender reference is replied to with the assumption that I am male. Last time I checked, I was fairly certain that I was a woman.

    Personally, I am detracted from Women-specific IT/programming/OSS/etc groups, if only for the fact that because they exclude men, it is allready a guaranteed smaller base for information. That just does not make sense. There are other factors making me wary of such groups, but after much thought on it, I have not been able to come up with a specific description of what bothers me about it. Most likely it's allready been ingrained in my head that things designated toward women are somehow of a lesser status, or dumbed-down.

    Anyway, us women are amongst you, maybe you just have to stop assuming that we are guys.

  2. THIS IS NOT ABOUT "PUSHING WOMEN INTO FOSS" by Guy+Harris · · Score: 4, Informative
    RTFWiki. The Fedora Women page on the Fedora Wiki says:
    A large portion of the Fedora userbase is made up of women. They are often under-represented within the community, with many people not even realizing how big a share of the community they are. The Fedora Women program aims to improve that representation and to provide a forum for the women of the Fedora Community.

    Note the "is made up of women". That's not talking about getting women to use Fedora. It's talking about women already using Fedora.

    It also says:

    Lady contributors to the Fedora Project can add their wiki homepages to the CategoryWomen category. The CategoryWomen page can be used to locate them, along with other Fedora Women pages.

    Note the "contributors". It's not talking about pushing women into contributing. It's talking about women who are already contributing.

    It also says:

    Women who are interested in working with the Fedora Project can work with Fedora Women to get started. They can also work through the Fedora Mentors project to get assistance for every step. For more information about working with the Fedora Project, see these resources:

    Note the "who are interested in working with the Fedora Project". It's not talking about pushing women into getting interested in Fedora. It's talking about women who are already interested in contributing.

    So this is not the project to get the girls away from their cooking and sewing, haranguing them into instead developing driver patches even though they'd rather be knitting baby booties, that all too many of the responses seem to be treating it as.