Slashdot Mirror
Fedora Welcomes Women to FOSS
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?"
This thread is useless without pics.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Why exactly do they need a set of nude photos?
There are in fact a number of female kernel developers. They tend to go by their initials rather than revealing their first names. There is no bias if people can't even tell.
Not that it should matter! If they like being developers, cool. If not, oh well.
There is also Andrea, who is male. It's an Italian thing, OK?
The underlying assumption of programs such as this is that women are too insecure or too intimidated to do something they want to do unless somebody sets up a program to cajole thing into feeling comfortable. That's nuts. Women do whatever they happen to enjoy -- as individuals -- and men do the same. Some people just can't get over the fact that vastly more men than women want to develop software (or create hardware or whatever). Why is this so threatening to them? Because it goes against their deep-seated belief that everyone is born identical and it's only culture that makes us want different things. That's bull and it's always been bull. Men and women are different in some key ways -- on AVERAGE. There are some very brilliant women who care deeply about IT work, but the vast majority don't. That's not going to change, even for the ones who are plenty bright enough to do it.
If you think you need to set up programs to beg certain segments of the population that other people do because it's fun and exciting and rewarding to them, you're out of touch with reality about what makes people tick. Let the people who WANT to do technical work do it, whether they're men, women, black, white, pink or purple. It's about individual choice, not about counting numbers of certain groups.
David
Women are working on stuff? Holy cow!
Am I the only one sick of this kind of 'news'?
This just in: two more female workers signed up for oil drilling, bringing the total population of female oil drillers to 4, of the total population of 20,000
Why does it matter what sex they are? The reason this is 'news' is because people want to hear stories about how women are being treated equally in the workplace. Women's rights are always easy news. You say, "Women have lagged behind men in [insert job] but are catching up thanks to [insert bullshit here]" and you sell newspapers/ad-space/FreeIPodsAndViagra.
If you single out women for working in a specific job for no reason other than 'they're women' you aren't treating them as equals to men. You're treating them like freaks, like a sideshow.
Whoo, signature!
DesireCampbell.com
This may not catch every woman in FOSS, but it provides them with a community. And if this is run by men, it is probably doomed. Then again, anonymity is something that women might value even more than men, for any reasons you can think of. And you're spot-on about FOSS progress coming from the obsessive streak in many men.
There are some intangible benefits to contributing to FOSS which might attract some women, like developing a better resume or making professional connections. However, I don't think women will contribute under much of the rationale that men do: scratch an itch, bragging rights, altruism, or even stick-it-to-the-M$.
These programs won't have a major effect on the percentage of women contributing to FOSS. (Is there even a good way of measuring that?) If men wanted to attract women to contribute, they would advertise. There are a lot of businesswomen in marketing. QED
Unlike some other fields, women aren't being kept out of programming through any sort of imposed discrimination. Anyone can learn to program and anyone who writes good code can participate, especially in FOSS. I've known female coders for more than 20 years, from the COBOL whiz when I was a sysop at the Department of $US_DEPT to a few people in my department at $MegaCorp today. Yes, they're a minority, but only out of choice. No one is telling women not to code. Code doesn't have genitalia. As long as it works who gives a rat's ass whether code was written by a man or a woman or even by Hugo the Incredible Coding Marmoset?
The numbers aren't going to change easily. Not as long as the FOSS world is dominated by men (and yes, this is where the snake bites its own tail).
/. - very male communication patterns, enough to make it tricky at times to know whether to be insulted or not or whether to take something the way it is written or with a grain of salt. Women will often think more and also interpret communications in very different ways at times. So when being into FOSS means 1) getting into a stereotypically male area of interest and b) interacting with almost only men who on occasion seem to speak another language, I have to applaud those 1.5% for sheer guts.
One example: my university classes used to overlap with those of CIS students a lot, and what I heard from the few female students there was that they found it hard to communicate with the men at times and often didn't really want to. Simply take a look at
I asked a work collegue 'why most women don't have hobbies?' She gave an answer I have heard many times - 'Woman don't need hobbies, we can create with our bodies. Men have hobbies to make up for their inability to give birth.' Then I stated 'But then why do any women have hobbies at all?' The answer stunned me 'Because they are barren, old, or gay.' So apparently, Open Source runs on testosterone. Never think women are more enlightened than men - they just disguise their stupidity better. ;-)
I'm looking at the comments so far and they seem to be broken up into two groups:
Hasn't anyone ever thought that these two viewpoints might be related? That maybe the reason more women don't go into tech is cultural - not in the "women are more interested in nail polish than hard drives"-sort of way, but in the sense that they sick and tired of dealing with all the "oohh, titties!" comments that we men think is good natured humor, but gets old with women? Maybe, just maybe, if women (or minorities or the handicapped, etc) can be provided with a supportive environment, we'll find that women are interested in tech. Maybe we'll even find that some women can be really good at it.
Let me put it another way. Everyone once in a while, a sports-related story pops up on Slashdot, and the comments inevitably drift toward stories of posters who have been pushed around by jocks in high school, so they now have a dim view of sports. Like us men making "titties" jokes, jocks would consider their messing with geeks to be good-natured humor. Imagine for a second that your exposure to sports came in a supportive environment (think affirmative action for geeks)- is it possible that this might have resulted in a more positive outlook towards athletics (especially sports like American football and basketball that involves a high degree of strategy as well as athletic talent)?
It's not a matter of discrimination or taking something away from men. It's all about providing a supportive environment so that women can concentrate on the matter at hand, rather than dealing with all the 'good natured' 'non-PC' crap that men throw at them.
This is a special case, however. A community being less than 2% female is more than natural self-selection. I suspect that a number of women have tried to get involved, but been repulsed by the community. Look at this Slashdot article; the first post was a comment asking for pictures. Now, as someone who has been around Slashdot for a while, I can be fairly sure that this was meant in jest, but this is exactly the kind of thing that would make a woman interested in joining the community leave.
There are, secretly, at least two women[1] who post on Slashdot. If you look at any thread where they make a reference to their gender, even indirectly, then you will see a huge number of 'wow, look! A girl!' posts. These are often followed by a load of accusatory posts ('you only hang out here because you have low self-esteem and you want to be fawned over by geeks'). It's small wonder that most of the female population of Slashdot tries hard not to draw attention to the fact.
This kind of program is not intended to encourage women to participate in the geek community, so much as to prevent the ones who want to become involved from running away. This, I think, is a sensible objective.
[1] Or FBI agents; it's difficult to tell on the Internet sometimes.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Axiom 1: People do what they want to do.
Axiom 2: It would help to have more people doing X.
Corollaries of Axiom 2: (i) It would help to have more women doing X. (ii) It would help to have more men doing X. (iii) It would help to have more people from $ethnic_community doing X.
From these, it follows (among other things): It would help if more women wanted to do X. In other words, it would help if women were encouraged to do X.
Encouragement is never bad. If you (or enough people) feel that it would be good/useful to encourage men too, go ahead.
Also, have you ever considered that "natural" inclinations may depend not only on biological/genetic/evolutionary factors but also on societal/psychological/community factors? Since we can't change the former, we try to change the latter and see if it makes a difference. Every group that decides it wants more women (or $ethnic_community, or whatever) is free to encourage more women (or
(In summary, maybe "natural" isn't so natural after all? Also, somewhat offtopic, see this and then this for something that would be "natural" once but seems very out-of-place today
Wikileaks, no DNS
To account for all the brainwashing of women by the society over time making them believe that their only job is to take care of the household and satisfy their men.
Take a look at all the jokes, the discrimination is still there and will remain until any affirmitive action is taken.
Once you actually get into the industry, your coworkers are pretty good folks (at least the ones I've had). But there are way, way too many places like
While I generally don't like separate spaces, because they're a form of discrimination, sometimes it's nice to have a place to go that doesn't put up with the general level of assholishness that seems to be accepted/fostered by male geeks online, and that has women you can vent with when you get sick of having to put up with it.
Man, this crap is old. One can hardly wonder why there are so few women around. Try reading what some women have to say about their experiences in computing. But don't expect too many to out themselves here. And don't point out that Spertus's paper is old and things have changed. This thread just demonstrated that it hasn't.
Well, reading the first 182 comments posted here it's pretty clear why women still need dedicated users'/developers' groups. The stereotype humor appears to be alive and well:
- ponies
- pink
- periods
- pedicures
As a woman in IT, I have actually found the majority of men in IT either don't care about women in IT or else are actively interested in broadening diversity in the field. (Mind you, that applies not only to gender but to ethnicity and other criteria as well.) Then there's that minority, the stereotype bitter socially retarded geeks with chips on their shoulders, doomed to eternally relive some perceived rejection from a woman or girl that dates back to elementary school...
To those (whose postings I found so typical of their group) I say, what do you care if there are specialized programs targeted towards women? You are the majority participants, are you really that threatened if a bunch of girlies with sub-par technical skills (as you like to describe them) sit around, do their nails, doodle ponies and contribute to FOSS? I am flabbergasted to imagine how such an activity would have any impact on you whatsoever.
If you are really concerned that the quality of FOSS will somehow decline, may I remind you of the peer review system. Even supposing any of the women's groups were to promote something that was of no use to the larger user/developer base, it would be critically reviewed and sent back for revision or else shot down completely. My point is that it shouldn't be an issue how people arrive at solutions; let them gather, support each other, brainstorm and develop in the forums that suit them best.
Users/developers form specialized groups all the time, whether it be because of their gender, location, belief system or what have you. The news here is not so much the groups -- it's whether the percentage of women in FOSS may be higher than is popularly understood. All the hogwash about women not being interested in IT, not having the innate skills etc. aside, we're here and we're working away on the same projects men do. This may come as a horrible shock, but there are women who excel in the field.
Personally I'm all for it. Let there be women's groups, gay groups, blue collar groups, Hindi groups, what have you. Let people work and network in whatever ways increase the brain trust. It's the results that count.
Science is about what is, not what we believe or hope. -- Dr. Lonnie Thompson, glaciologist, Ohio State University
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:
Note the "contributors". It's not talking about pushing women into contributing. It's talking about women who are already contributing.
It also says:
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.