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Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source
New submitter Jason Baker writes "It seems like a perennial question: 'How do we get more women involved in tech?' The open source community, like any other part of the technology industry, is grappling with finding solutions that are more than just talking the talk of diversity, but actually make some demonstrable difference in the numbers. While there have been numerous success stories, the gender gap is still rampant. The answer, at least to one freelance entrepreneur, is providing strong role models of women using open source to have fun and make money. But is that enough to make a difference?"
I too would like a strong role model for someone using it to make money. Anybody? Anybody?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
1. Add a question mark.
...
2. Hell yes.
3.
4. Profit!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
To be quite frank, a lot of the reason why you don't get many young women in STEM - and Open Source projects - is you insist they have lots of experience.
Open Source used to be mostly rolled out by students and people between jobs, but nowadays a lot of Open Source coders have full time jobs at various tech firms.
Those tech firms tend not to hire women with non-tech degrees and without extensive experience.
There's your problem.
Originally, you only needed some form of 2 year or 4 year degree, of any type, not tech, to get hired. And experience came on the job.
Fix that.
Then you'll get young women doing Open Source coding.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's Nixie Pixel:
http://www.nixiepixel.com/
She's very articulate, and the technical depth is there, if you can keep yourself from getting distracted.
What kind of lechers are these people??
...we could just let people do whatever the fuck they want to do.
I don't even know what to think of this quote from the article:
"For years, I've been wishing somebody like Wired Magazine or Opensource.com would do an annual "Sexiest Geek Alive" issue, like People magazine does."
As an actual woman programmer, I gotta tell you, most of the guys I encounter react really weird to me at first. There's the assumption that I must be an idiot (I'm not) or I can't POSSIBLY know how do this (I do) and of course all the off-color jokes (which I happen to find funny). Basically the environment isn't always friendly to young women. I've worked plenty of places as the only woman. One of my first jobs, the sales guy came up behind me, stared, and said it was "SO COOL to see a chic crank out code!" Um, creepy.
I do it because I like it, and I have learned to just laugh off most of this stuff as harmless cluelessness. But it does create this barrier to entry.
You can easily get more women, blacks, homosexuals, Muslims, special needs people, and any other left-wing "diversity" loved group by simply making harder the lifes of the people that can do the actual work - the question is why you should do that...
Why must you have more women involved in tech?
Seriously, "not this shit again."
You're weird.
I think you're daft.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Same way we get young men interested interested in the cosmetics industry?
Spending 8+ hours a day isolated at a computer, forgoing human contact to spend most of your free time researching and learning, interacting with machines and electronics at the lowest and least intuitive levels, willing to be on call almost 24/7--takes a certain constellation of personality traits. For whatever reason, these traits skew male; not entirely, but heavily. You can debate about whether this is cultural, environmental, genetic, or some combination. Open for discussion is even the question if we should be concerned at all. You don't hear the same kind of panic about the lack of men in early education or nursing.
There are probably as many women in tech as want to be there. What's really stopping them other than themselves and their own preferences?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
open sores.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Oh, wait... wrong gender.
I am just old enough not to be interested in sex anymore so why should I care about relationships? If you call me retarded because I do not want to waste the limited time of my life on something so stupid like sex...
Why should we try to pursue women to work in tech? We have to accept they are different and the majority doesn't like working in tech.
I cringe every time i see something being specially tailored for them. In Venezuela, they even have their own bank. It's stupid, what happened to equality?
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
I think you're inadvertently making another important point. Attractive women aren't just distracting. They can completely disrupt many men's brains for long periods.
I recognize Nixie as smart and insightful. I also can help spending 80% of the time I see her daydreaming about sleeping with her.
If I had to work with her, this would be a serious problem for me. I'm not saying that's grounds to not hire attractive women, but it might be why I'd have to look for another job myself.
the word you are looking for is 'misogynist'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
All it took was somebody to reach out to me, present me with the ideal, and tell me I could learn how to contribute. Numerous Ted talks and a vision of a better world :) Right now I just don't think enough people like me have heard about it and even if they have, why should they care?
Get us interested by showing us its interesting, in a personal way.
How to get women interested in some geek shit. We must have a quota on slashdot for crap like this.
First, who cares about gender. We are all equal.
Second, most women are just not interested in geek shit. And that's ok. They like long walks in the park, they like dudes that listen to them and leave love notes in their purses. So go try that approach.
.
I think everyone on Slashdot has a story about women just feigning interest in coding because they want a one night stand.
How are they being excluded?
The STEM industry is bending over backwards to get them into the business, organizations in college and professional organizations and they aren't biting.
Maybe they aren't biting because the majority of them don't want to be nerds!
Treat them like humans, and if they're interested in being nerds fine and if they're not they're not.
As for the whole sexism in engineering, have you seen the pigs in sales? The nerds have nothing on them, and yet that doesn't seem to be a problem.
Stop forcing shit and let the person choose what he or she wants.
It's not "open source" that I'm looking to get them interested in...
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
No you're probably right. A book called "The Manipulated Man", written by a woman, even suggested that women only go to university to meet eligible men, and not necessarily study. Additionally women perform better than boys in junior school, but this academic excellence enters entropy later in her life when she hits puberty and discovers that by being stupid and cute, boys will buy her things that she would otherwise work for.
So yeah, you could say that they show up to technical conferences for other reasons.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
If I had to work with her, this would be a serious problem for me. I'm not saying that's grounds to not hire attractive women, but it might be why I'd have to look for another job myself.
What the hell is wrong with you? If you are over the age of 18, you have serious self-control issues.
(captcha: handsome)
I think everyone on Slashdot has a story about women just feigning interest in coding because they want a one night stand.
I certainly do not. I work with many women who are programmers, and none of them act like that at all.
I don't know whether to ask where you work to avoid it like the plague or to go there for "spring break".
There is no glass door, ceiling or anything, anyplace or anywhere. You don't even have to give your real name to be involved in a project. If you cant stand working in a boys club open an account on one of a open project 100 sites, write a doc, compile and make a installer and you can be the top of the FOSS world if you its useful to 20 million people. Write the next app everyone needs, wants and uses daily and then give it away for no reward but complaints from everywhere, then perhaps be the one of hundreds of free products that make a jump to commercial success.
I think everyone on Slashdot has a story about women just feigning interest in coding because they want a one night stand.
I certainly do not.
Avoiding ascii graphics to avoid lameness filter, but you get the point (i.e., it's way above parent commenter's head).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
According to the BLS 95% of workplace deaths are men, even though men make up only slightly more than half of the workforce. So how come there is no push to get women in high risk jobs, like oil wells, private security companies, mining, etc?
It's got nothing to do with gender balance. It's about feminists finding things to rail against.
If only young women would use my technical presentations for such purposes. Unfortunately the few I've met are generally interested in the subject matter and not the old guy talking about it.
I was married to a fellow engineer for ten years. Hands down best relationship of my life, even if we had divergent goals at the end. I've spent the last eight looking for someone understands what I'm thinking about most of the time and haven't even come close, but no engineers in the last eight years either. Unfortunately, embedded software and electrical engineering have a very low percentage of women overall, and a minute (almost undetectable) number of single ones.
lol I've had that problem too. Thought the girl was really interested in learning to program. But she wasn't.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sure, just as soon as this bright spark also puts some money into getting more men into nursing, human resources, and primary education, all fields as dominated by women as IT is by men. Maybe more so. I don't think my kids' elementary school had a single man on the staff other than the janitor.
You want your daughter to be smart, but more well-known for teasing men with cleavage shots?
If I have to choose a "tech role model" for my daughter, I'd rather see her choose someone like Grace Hopper, who didn't have time for any of the "selfie" bullshit, what with contributing to the invention of an entire field of science.
Are you really that eager to see your daughter marginalized and treated like a piece of meat? Who the FUCK thinks men are being sold Nixie Pixel's "tech skills," rather than her tits?
... to enjoy programming (without exchanging the whole second X chromosome with a Y). But I doubt that many would opt for such a semi-gender-change. People can deny the influence of genes on brain functions as long as they like - reality will continue to not care about such wishful thinking.
Use SRAM. As long as you keep the lights on, everything's stable. :)
So... how was it that women's brains were "wired" for programming from 1940 to 1985 [1], but suddenly around 1990 they stopped being interested in "coding" and "IT"?
sPh
[1] From 1940-1950 approximately 100% of programmers were women; from 1950-1980 the percentage was still very high and probably a majority. 1984 was the peak year for women graduating with engineering degrees since WWII and a large percentage of those women took CS degrees.
Why does society feel compelled to force the population of a profession to have 50-50 split, or generally a 1/n * n split with n groups involved. From an algorithmic standpoint, having such equitable fits across a large number of professions is extremely improbably, and the effort required for society to do so correspondingly large. It is comparable to the class of hardest problems out there.
The intuition here is this - imagine that you need to come up with multiple parallel activities to engage a group of children. It's easy when you give the children the option of which activity to join. Now imagine if you had to make sure that every single activity had an equal split of boys and girls. It might be ok to come up with the first few - you would attract relatively open-minded boys and girls. The problem becomes harder as you fill activities, to the point that after going through enough activities, differences in tastes have grown so much that it is nearly impossible to fit people from both groups into the same activity.
Women and men are epistemologically different. This doesn't mean that women can't do tech - the most capable person in tech I know - my role model - is a lady, and there are a good number amongst the best people I have encountered. Correspondingly it doesn't mean that men can't be good grade school teachers, because they make up the smaller fraction. It's just the way it is, and from a statistical and social standpoint, it is unsurprising.
Really tired of hearing the same "but it's their choice" rhetoric about women in tech. The fact is, women's brains aren't more or less "wired" for anything, and most preferences are learned through socialising. I'm sure plenty love tech, programming, gaming and everything, but simply can't stand the "community", where misogynistic bullshit is unfortunately the norm rather than the exception. And I'm not just talking about outright exclusion, but harrassement, sexist joking around, stereotyping, etc. But don't take it from me, ask any group of women already involved in open-source about the challenges they face daily. In fact, that's just what most everyone in tech fails to do : listen to them and take them seriously (including the criticism).
So let me see if I have it straight: "Women aren't interested in tech, because they're just naturally wired differently, have a completely different way of viewing the world, and simply don't want to do tech work." That right?
But then, you claim it's sexist to say that women bring something different to the table than men? Why?
The first statement is just as ludicrous as the second, yet you seem to accept that as an article of faith.
The solutions a team develops benefit from a variety of strong and well-argued viewpoints. If women are, in fact, "wired differently," then we should want MORE of them on our teams, so we can take advantage of their "different wiring," which may well carry with it the seeds of novel solutions to previously intractable computational problems. So yes, if you argue that women are "wired differently," they do bring something to the table that men don't: a different way of viewing the world. Why would it be sexist to acknowledge that?
Now, if they're NOT wired differently, then you're left having to explain why so many of them actively avoid the industry in favor of other industries. And you have to explain it in a way that somehow also ignores the fact that the relatively small number of women in the industry who do tough it out will overwhelmingly report that it's full of overgrown man-children who often see women as nothing more than "something to fuck," which creates an unpleasant, hostile, or even toxic atmosphere for women who try to succeed at it.
So you want your daughter to be a tech blogger that quotes press releases from the latest cell phones and tablets and throws out occasional tech tips or howtos for a living? Regardless of gender, the whole gizmodo/engadget type of profession doesn't really qualify as a STEM career in my mind. It's like saying that someone assigned to reporting on local crime for the local paper is in the law enforcement career.
If people really need role models (I don't really know why they do, but okay), then maybe someone like Jeri Ellsworth would be a more compelling one? Someone who doesn't make her living regurgitating current tech news and subjects for a crappy blog or youtube videos, but actually -- you know -- makes stuff. Using a strong engineering and mathematical and science background to do so.
I'll admit, we've all probably known the girls who go to college and use it as a "find my future husband" utility and then never actually do anything with their education or career as soon as they graduate, marry the guy they met in college, and have kids -- but they're hardly representative of the whole and I've *CERTAINLY* never heard of, say, girls attending the local linux group to score some hot rich sugar daddies.
I'm going to play the safe bet and assume your comment was sarcastic.
I am just old enough not to be interested in sex anymore
So you're posting to slashdot from the grave.
"It seems like a perennial question..."
per-en-ni-al
adjective
1. lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up occurrences of this topic on Slashdot recently.
from Latin per, meaning "through", and annus, meaning "year"
I wish it were only once per year...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Your inability to control yourself is really more of a reason to not have you around, not avoid having her around.
Why are we worried about getting a portion of the population that largely has no interest in a field of study to get into the field of study? If they don't want to participate, why waste valuable resources trying to get them to?
As a hiring manager, I have deliberately tried to hire women into technical roles. There simply weren't any candidates applying.
As 6 foot 5 inch American male, I had little interest in playing basketball. While my father saw that as a problem, society, as a whole, didn't care. Nobody wasted a dime researching why I, and others of my ilk, did not play basketball, nor did society, as a whole, incentivize me in an effective way to pursue basketball. How is this any different?
How about focusing on grooming the ones that are interested, who do want to pursue technology as a career and investing in them?
Well, that may be the most unintentionally ironic statement I've read all day.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Yeah, DoofusOfDeath is the reason we can't have nice things! (erm, I mean, nice human beings with feelings)
I thought that was a very self-aware and considerate comment, actually, and showed an appropriate response by saying that he would remove himself from the situation instead of trying to drag her down. I thought that's how adults are supposed to function - be aware of and accommodate your own weaknesses.
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
How do we know women aren't contributing to open source? Open source outside of the Linux kernel and a few other corporate-supported projects is primarily done at home as a hobby. Open source has a very long tail in that respect.
So for projects done entirely at home, people publish their results by creating an account on SourceForge or GitHub or Tigris and upload their source. A good many of those account names are gender neutral, and regardless, neutral or not, the account doesn't contain the data concerning the gender of the owner. Male, female, or any of the other possibilities, most of the systems don't even ask, and for those that do, people can pick whatever they want. So how do we know women aren't contributing?
If anything, I'd say it's likely there are more women contributing to open source than is generally known. Open source publishing is exceedingly friendly to anonymous and pseudonymous contributions (with the exception of projects with paranoid copyright assignment requirements). How do you know fyunkclick783 isn't female? The default assumption is a developer is male, so any woman wishing to avoid notice as a female open source contributor need do nothing at all to maintain that assumption.
Perhaps you're asking the wrong question. Maybe you'd like to ask, why would a female open source programmer choose to conceal her gender? I can answer that question with a question. Why would a male open source programmer choose to explicitly assert his gender? You realize that rarely happens? Pick any random project on SourceForge. Odds are it's a sole maintainer project. Now tell me, male or female? Odds are they're male, but you don't know. Now tell me, are you likely to stop using an open source tool if you discover the maintainer is female? How about if you discover they're male? Want to bet people who make that decision on that basis are vanishingly rare? So why do you care what the sex of the maintainer is? You don't.
No one cares what the sex of the maintainer of an open source project is. We care about whether or not the tool does what we need done, whether or not its stable, whether or not it eats our data, and whether or not its available in our Linux distribution. The sex of the maintainer is irrelevant to all of those factors. It's not "Don't Ask, Don't Tell'—it's "Don't Give a Damn."
Quilting?
I am so tired of these "how can we get women interested in... " subjects. Science. Math. Programming. Uncle. Women will be interested in those things when it actually interests them. In many ways these discussions are totally degrading towards women as it makes things out to be that "if only we could show them...." or "if we only gave them a leg up..." Do you think women are stupid? They can't figure out what they like or don't like? Or that without preferential treatment they will go elsewhere?
All good points.
But from the standpoint of "providing strong role models of women using open source to have fun and make money" I can't really think of anyone who does it better, including any male tech "vloggers" I've seen awkwardly hemming and hawing their way through a device teardown or interface demonstration.
And yes, I'd also hope that my daughter would aspire to eventually be more, but at this point, just seeing someone on "TV" who talks enthusiastically about computers in general and Linux in particular who is also a girl would do wonders for the image of "what type of person plays with computers" that otherwise gets jammed into your head by the nerdy stereotypes that constantly show up in media.
Why, exactly, "should" we try to get people to do what they don't want to do?
I'll preface this by saying I do not know Nixie Pixel at all. My first impression however was quite negative and for one particular reason: when I come to a site looking for a person's ideas and thoughts, I don't want to see cartoons of the person peering at me (in revealing clothing even) and pictures of her face everywhere on the page. I also very much doubt that a persona similar to this, but male, would use the same sort of techniques to drag an audience in.
/.) and associating one with the other just... cheapens it. Like they're insecure about their content so they feel the need to add some more hooks in.
She might be great at what she does, but by openly flaunting herself in this manner I'm more put off than attracted frankly. I love smart people, people with ideas, be they men or women. If they're also good looking, all the better for them, but that's entirely orthogonal for me (unless I'm looking for a date, which I most certainly am not when I click on links on
This is a greater problem within society for humanity to solve. Nerds need to stop trying to be the white knight.
This desperation to lure fresh victims into tech doesn't really square with the MANY online complaints about the shittiness of many tech job situations.
Men trying to lure women into tech just want to change the workplace "scenery" and should admit it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I don't know very many men or women who I can talk geeky to (geeky in the academic way rather than with gadgets). But that's ok, I get bored with my friend's hobbies or talk of sports or wine, so I don't expect them to become fascinated by stuff I like. Which is probably the only reason I'm on slashdot anyway.
It's pretty easy for me though. If I wonder if someone is flirting with me, the answer is "no". Sometimes it's "oh my god no!""
What got me interested was a CD with linux at low cost. Didn't need anyone else bringing me in. The software seems pretty gender neutral: I don't see anything that says "boys here, girls there". What is it that attracts males to software, and sends women rushing away?
To be perfectly honest here, I don't know many of these. I would suspect that this sort of person was not taking the very hard prerequisite engineering classes like calculus or physics just to meet someone.
1 = 0
T = F
Young Women = Interested in Open Source
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Linux Format's February 2014 issue has an article about gender disparity and gender discrimination in open source development. It states that only about 1.5% of OSS developers are women, whereas as much as 28% of developers in proprietary software are women. They say that women are often intimidated by alpha geeks and put-off by misogynistic BS etc. The article is on page 50 if you are in B&N or Hastings sometime soon and want to read it.
Learn how to be a professional and ask yourself why you loathe women. Is it because your mom was mean to you or is it because you can't be what women want?
Why do we need to encourage a group or people to do something? A woman wants to work in tech can work in tech. If not then she does not have to. We do not require any social engineering. The same goes for gays, blacks and the disabled. If they want to do something then they can and it is already illegal to discriminate against them. But we do not need quotas or any kind of PR or subsidy campaign to encourage them to do things. Government and lobby groups please just f*ck off and mind your own frigging business.
for advice on women! My guess is that the closest most readers get to a woman is using public transport at rush hour.
It would seem that a comparable percentage of women would be interested in coding as men. The same is true for other trades, like automotive technicians and truck driving, so why is there such a low rate of women in open source programming?
You think girls are stupidt somehow force them into to that? Give em time, they will come? Just dont be an asshole.
I want to be a role model, making tons of money from open source software. Where can I sign up?
no, I don't have a sig
Or you could, you know, grow the hell up.
[FUCK BETA]
I personally am about as interested in fashion as I am in programming. I write my own software and sew my own pants. (Hakamas to be precise) The last two christmasses me and my buddy spent the holidays talking about FOSS, playing Wesnoth, watching movies and sewing. Last year I fixed my favourite tango jeans (jea, I dance too, imagine) and he sowed his living room curtains. No joke.
Remember that scene in Taratinos "Death Proof", where the guy at the convenience store sells the chica "this months italian vogue" from his private stash for some steep premium? That scene is about as spot on as you can get. Seriously. Two fashion nerds striking a deal. I found it hilariously 'straight from life'.
Why am I interested in fashion? Couldn't tell exactly. For a lot of reasons. ... And that's not a queer thing btw. I'm about as straight as you can get. But I enjoy looking good, I enjoy looking at cute & well dressed women even more :-) (dancing with them even more so, f*cking them even then some :-)) ... you know the drill) , and I hate the cheap quality that breaks after one year of usage. ... So I sew and repair my own. ... Extra sturdy pockets is a big deal too, as you can imagine. (Nerd Alert! :-) ) ...
Well, for one, as they say in Paris: Fashion designers dress the women they'd like to have. Or, more precisely, want to be, if they had a choice.
Oh, and another cliche: A button a man has sewn on himself *never* comes of again. That's because at one time we get so pissed at them coming off all the time we do it ourselves - and then the right way. Ever since my mom screwed up sewing lost buttons back on I've been doing it myself. Since the age of 15 roughly. The first time I did that I used dracon kiteline to sew metal buttons back on to my jeans jacket. They too never came off again.
In my opinion being a male geek/nerd and into fashion design goes very well. And the girls dig it a lot. Especially those who like to look cute and do the hookeypookey with guys they can connect with. *grins very wide*
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I used to know when there was a new woman hired. There'd be ten guys standing around a cube beating their chest... I'm exaggerating, but not by much.
A lot of the comments here are pretty foul. A lot of "There's no sexism!" A lot of "Oh yeah, well they do it too!". Oh, there's a "our brains are wired differently!" That's an old standby. There's the old "They just fake interest to get dates." There's a rant against feminists.
Notice that most of the comments are from dudes, and they're derogatory or dismissive......
One day I will have a daughter. I don't want her listening to you assholes. Of the posts I read, ONE was supportive and suggested actually listening to women. The rest of you denied the problem, cracked crude jokes, or blamed it on physiological differences. No. The problem is you.
My daughter will not get any pink shit. No princess shit. She'll be told from day one that she's good at math, and I don't care if she grows up to be a ..... glassblow, whatever, i picked something at random, but she'll have CHOICES and won't be shuttled to the back of the intellectual bus by the likes of you people. You should be ashamed of yourselves. The problem is YOU, you social skill lacking, self problem denying, asshats.
Little girls get told to be princesses. They grow up watching crappy disney films where the princess gets passively rescued by the prince. They get passed over and thought less competant. They get pushed and force fed images from day one. If they are forceful, strong, self reliant? They get labeled bossy, bitchy, pushy. This pervades every field. But tech IS terrible, and you should all be intelligent enough to know this. But that would require looking at your own part in it.
My own personal story? We had an opening. For weeks the jokes flew, "man, I hope we don't get a chick, we'd have to stop swearing and telling jokes." Well, we got a dude. My coworkers were discussing this very topic later, and denying it ever existed when I stopped them and asked them if they thought our boss had overheard us (of course he had) and if it had swayed his opinion, even unconsciously. They were silent. Of course it had, how could it not have? At least they had the good graces to show some remorse and take some responsibility.
"The point of view that they're there at work for you to hit on is inappropriate and unacceptable." That is obvious. I'm male -- At my previous job I had to endure aggressive behaviour, abuse, insults, threats of violence, threats of losing my job and threats of being put on so-called "employment-blacklists" which means you will never get a job ever again. Roughly half a dozen to a dozen incidents per day. Interestingly, all the threats of violence came from women.
Then start targeting Chinese and Indian women. Women seem plenty interested in STEM tech careers and technical education over there.
http://www.nature.com/scitable...
Turns out that telling women that STEM is just one of those things that men are better at tends to dissuade women from getting into STEM.
So the next time you're thinking of casually throwing around the whole "Oh, men are just better/more interested in this" argument ...
Remember you're part of the problem.
Without reading the comments I'm certain this very comment section will form a live demonstration of some of the major problems with attracting women to tech...
I'm all for diversity, but why is this a problem? Where is the big push to get more men in ballet or cosmetics? Is this really something society should be spending energy on?
No one ever asks "How can we get more men involved in cosmetics?"
It's Nixie Pixel: http://www.nixiepixel.com/
She's very articulate, and the technical depth is there, if you can keep yourself from getting distracted.
I really don't know if there's protocol on responding to a post when you became the topic, but we'll see.
Just wanted to say that I had been struggling with creating content lately. Over the last 4 years you'd be surprised how hard it is to come up with new, even semi-intelligent topics! Having taught myself Linux in the early 2000s, it's been a learning experience all around... I like to think I'm doing my best. In the end, I'm a one-woman-show, and I know I can be a tough act to follow.
I've received thousands of negative comments like the ones seen below. Even though I know better (don't feed the trolls, right?), sometimes they discourage me. Then I read ones like the one you posted here and I have to say, it makes it all worth it.
Thank you. ^.^
She seems to know her stuff. I show some of her videos to my daughter.
If someone cannot separate their libido from their technical and work related duties, then the problem is not Nixie Pixel's.
Does she lose credibility because she's attractive? I dunno. If anything, I'm more critical of the bubble-headed, "I played ResEvil so I'm a geek grrl!! lol" type. And actually, those types irritate the crap out of me. But looking at her vids, she has technical knowledge that's no worse than many others that I respect.
Oh how stupid of me, that's such a brilliant solution. And we should just let all those poor people work at McDonalds because that must be what they want too. There's no way that it is because of structural inequality or archaic cultural norms that some people are barred from highly lucrative white collar jobs...
Unfortunately it's hard to get rid of those things because we don't have absolute control over every person involved. There will still be assholes doing asshole things. What can be done is to try and counter those assholes with positive people doing positive things.
Then we should all be praying for more women to get into the industry so we can have normal jobs with some decent quality of life. Maybe we could get some paternity leave and a bit of life/work balance. Sounds awesome to me.
Maybe they're not interested because of all the assholes telling them "oh you're just different, it's not your thing, go buy a purse." Every single person on here who says that they just want equality immediately follows it up with some shit about how women are different and aren't cut out for tech, completely invalidating their own statements. Get some perspective please.
Actually, we should. Boys not having male role models growing up is a huge problem. We need more male teachers and we need guaranteed paternity leave. That's just not what this article is about.
Nice attempt at derailing, but you kind of have a point. We should be encouraging women to go into every field where they are underrepresented because they end up making it BETTER for men too. Better work/life balance, improved working conditions and additional safety regulations.
Your weird comparison to NP-hard problems is stupid because there are readily available approximation algorithms that will solve that case to within a small percentage of optimal, and that's all anyone is asking for. As to the inherent difference between men and women 1) there is not credible evidence of that and 2) did it ever occur to you that all day people TELLING you that you are different and inherently not suited to a field might in fact push you away from said field? People like you are the problem.
You are right that there is no way to know who is involved in an open-source project. That's why nobody knows whether Linus Torvalds is a man or a woman. Sounds like a girly name to me, that's what I'm going with.
I am distressed by your high Slashdot UID. :>
Once you can make a billion dollars from a new quilting pattern I think men will be all over that... The point is that STEM jobs are very lucrative and, if Slashdot people are to be believed, women are driven by money 24/7. So why aren't they entering STEM fields? Because assholes are doing asshole things all day long like telling them that their brains are different and they are not cut out for the hard maths involved.
Don't try to tell me that isn't true because this very article has DOZENS of commenters saying that exact thing. Or that women are inherently deceitful and they just want to get pregnant with your baby and steal your money. Or that they secretly plot to dominate men and that is the real agenda of feminism.
If you want to know why there aren't more women in STEM, look no further than this article on Slashdot to see the hostile environment that they have to deal with.
I find it sad that one man begins this by talking about how he would prefer an intelligent women to be a rolemodel for his daughter and it gets a reply about how stereotypical we make women in the work place seem. "But they have bewbs and i cant control my mind" well im sorry that you werent raised properly. I work with women who are both more intelligent and less intelligent than me, yet im never intimidated or distranced by them. I can see OPs point and hells yeah i want my kids to be self motivated and learn things like linux. Now, I know who Nixie is to the viewer level and i defer to her youtube channle when someone asks me about linux programs. Bottom line is i dont think OP wants his daughter to be physically like her, but share mentally in such things like teach herself something as difficult as linux and in this day we need positive female role models.
Hi, Nixie! :)
;) )
;) :D) and it's bad to be angry at endangered species :)
I'm not your fan or a regular watcher, but I do like your videos, it's just I happen to get information faster from other sources and most of your videos are more interesting to novices in the world of open-source. All that aside, I very much appreciate your choice of a job. You risked an entrance in this not so welcoming waters and succeeded. Keep up!
If you don't mind, I'll give a couple friendly advices (if you mind, just don't read past this line
1. Don't be discouraged by the trolls, only pay attention to constructive criticisms.
2. Don't force yourself, if the topic you're thinking on making a video about does not excite you, you won't excite your viewers, too, the video will be watchable at best, better to wait for a right topic or even the right moment—maybe today's boring stuff will show you its hidden gems tomorrow
3. As for the gender stuff, at least try not to be upset about it, morons will die out eventually (I hope
you need to learn self control and join the 21st century.
If I had to work with her, this would be a serious problem for me. I'm not saying that's grounds to not hire attractive women, but it might be why I'd have to look for another job myself.
Give yourself more credit. You are bound to eventually interact with women you find attractive in the workplace, and you will quickly learn how to compose yourself. You'll be fine. Besides, you couldn't flee from women forever: they're well over 50% of the world, and even if they are a minority in the technical fields (or whatever it is that you do for a living), you'll interact with them eventually, maybe the HR department, or someone in the Sales department, or an executive. Or, heck, a client!
Eventually you'll stop paying attention to gender and just interact with them as if they're people who have ideas that you collaborate with.
It's the same skill you learn to master when you get married and then continue to interact with women in the real world, as a monogamous man. (Well, if that's your plan, no intent to offend.)
My favorite is Barbara Shipman. This woman got a PhD in mathematics and discovered bees were doing a 6 six dimensional mathematical dance in 2 dimensions for communication.
*hug*
It seems like a perennial question: 'How do we get more women involved in tech?'
No, it seems like the kind of question you make up when you haven't got anything better to write an article about.
We don't have to get more women involved in tech, specifically. There's no magic target number that'll be "right," no 50-50 split to be fought for. Just make sure that women (or less specifically, that everyone) is treated fairly and equally, and those who want to get into tech will.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.