Tackling Open Source's Gender Issues

angry tapir writes "Women's participation in open source development is at a far lower level than women's participation in proprietary software development. One of the groups that aims to change this is the Ada Initiative: A non-profit organization formed last year. I recently caught up with its two founders, Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora and comp sci PhD student Mary Gardiner, to discuss the project."

Comments

Re:Community resistance

[HBI]

And just as I don't get to decide what people and what language you are comfortable with in your spare time, you don't get to decide for me.

But women want to! Enough bitching and we'll be mandated to 'accomodate' them in leisure time activities as well as the workplace. Which means bending over backwards, always. Females are (almost always) insecure in all environments where being the alpha female isn't worth much. So they call it gender bias and try to create an environment where that kind of petty cutthroat competition is somehow a plus. I can't think of many places where hating your coworkers and refusing to talk to a significant percentage of them is useful, but that doesn't stop the attempt.

All-male workplaces work better but run afoul of regulation. The only way to make adequate sense of it is to realize that most jobs are make-work and efficiency isn't very highly valued. Therefore, creating an inefficient bitch-fest is not that much of a negative.

Women who try to swim in a man's world and do so by rejecting the stereotypical female role in business as outlined above have my undying respect.