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Getting More Women Coders Into Open Source
Nerval's Lobster writes: Diversity remains an issue in tech firms across the nation, with executives and project managers publicly upset over a lack of women in engineering and programming roles. While all that's happening on the corporate side, a handful of people and groups are trying to get more women involved in the open source community, like Women of OpenStack, Outreachy (which is geared toward people from underrepresented groups in free software), and others. How much effort should be expended to facilitate diversity among programmers? Can anything be done to shift the demographics, considering the issues that even large, coordinated companies have with altering the collective mix of their employees?
Fill all the forums with macho bravado. I hear that works every time.
just stop
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Id much rather that the executives worry about their product, and not work quota. While they worry about how to get X into Y, they are not using that time to better their product or their service.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I really wish my company had more female coders, because I'd like to see if they would provide a different perspective. As it is, we only have one, and she is good, but does not work in our sustainment group (instead she works on capital projects only).
Maybe coding is just something that attracts more men than women. I know it's always been that way for me. I've known very few women who take coding up as a profession, and those I have known were always very good (or at least, I've known men who were way worse).
However, it's entirely likely that men and women simply gravitate to different professions. We are not the same, to assume we are is to deny our differences.
We shouldn't mandate a 50/50 split, but we should ensure that there are no barriers to anyone wishing to pursue this profession. Once any barriers are removed (and I'm not sure there are any now), then we would see what the true diversity in backgrounds for coders would be.
You know how more women can be involved into open-source ? When there are more women coding open source. That's it. This is not a f**cking social issue.
If diversity improves the quality of code, then let every open source project or company decide that it is suffering from al lthose nasty bugs and lack of vision because there isn't enough estrogen in the mailing list. It isn't my problem. It isn't society's problem. It's not like women are banned from computer science and coding. And frankly, nobody how cares many women are coding, good for those who are, and good for those who aren't. It's coding...not suffrage or human rights or anything of fundamental importance to society. It's like cribbing about how all the cobblers in my town are men , no women. Well, boo fucking hoo.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Do open source coders meet in person much? I am not hip to that scene, but I thought it was mostly done online.
Is there a vagina-to-good-code ratio? Please cite the evidence for this.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
One of the things that draws me to Open Source is that the barriers to entry are absolutely fucking zero. You want to build an Open Source app? Do it. Release it. If people want to use it and contribute to it, they will. If not, they won't (see the billions of abandoned/disused apps on sourceforge, github, etc). Run it however the fuck you want.
However, this really smacks of "Oh, but doesn't feel welcome in the community!" that's been going around lately. So the fuck what? DO IT YOURSELF. Don't wait for my approval. Don't wait to look around to see if anyone cares. If you want to do it, DO IT. You don't like how some maintainer is maintaining a project? FORK IT and make SOMETHING BETTER. Show them how YOU would do it. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP AND START DOING instead of WHINING.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Obviously, all women that want to be coders and have the aptitude to be good ones have a more than good shot at becoming coders. That is what matters. As most women do not want to be coders (just like most men, incidentally, the tiny reminder is just larger for men), "getting more women into coding" sound like trying to trick or coerce people into doing things they do not want and what they have no reasonable aptitude for. That never has a good outcome.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Let anyone with the aptitude and the desire to code do so. Enough of this forced "equality" for something that will never appeal to everybody.
What's next? Forcing equality on nursing? Medicine? Firefighters? Garbage collectors?
Face it: "equality" is a mealy-mouthed politically correct term. The term people should be using is equivalency -- as in people with different skills are getting paid equivalent salaries in different professions.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
you're a dick
You think so? Well let's try something then.
Diversity remains an issue in hospitals across the nation, with executives and project managers publicly upset over a lack of men in nursing roles. While all that's happening on the corporate side, a handful of people and groups are trying to get more men involved in nursing school. How much effort should be expended to facilitate diversity among nurses? Can anything be done to shift the demographics, considering the issues that even large, coordinated companies have with altering the collective mix of their employees?
If you find TFA acceptable, but my alterations not, then I am (not) sorry to say that it is you who is the dick, not I.
Open source projects require a lot of your own time, and women often still take on a bit more of the work caring for the house and kids when they are not at work (usually because they want to).
I've recently applied to join one for the first time. I want to do a bit more at home to boost my resume and skills, and I thought that might be a good way to do it. The reason I never have before is that while I don't have kids or a partner or anything, I have a lot of other interests and coming home from work after writing code all day, to have dinner then sit down to write more code, isn't really that appealing. I love my job, but I also like to play drums, I have dance lessons, I sew, I bake my own bread, I read a lot, play video games, and I'd rather be out with friends for after work drinks than still working for free. Is this because I'm a women and more social? I got into coding because I thought it was fun, not because I was a lonely guy with only my computer for company? Or just because it's how I am. No idea. I DO plan on finishing one of my Android home projects one day though, I swear!
Hey girls! Do you want to do programming work for zero compensation? Do you want to spend your free time doing labor? Then OPEN SOURCE is the place to be! Join us today!
I've been doing an open source project for about 4 years now (I have been working as a programmer since 1998 - I have a Comp Sci degree, too). Considering some of the places I've found my project in use (Middle Eastern locales) I'm almost certain they don't realize it's a one woman show project. I think we don't get tagged as female devs on our projects unless we cover our stuff with pink ribbons and flowers.
If things like gender are to genuinely supposed to not influence our reactions in the workplace, then we need to stop fucking focusing on them and accept people, men and women, for who they are, or whatever interests they happen to have that may, or may not, happen to direct them into a particular industry.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How many women would give up their nursing jobs to get more men in the field? How many Teachers?
Sound ridiculous? That is exactly what these vagina counters are doing to men in STEM occupations - they aren't creating new jobs for women, they are taking jobs away from men to give to women...
Ken
In my long (over 30 year) career, I've never once seen anyone hired because they were male despite there being a more-able female candidate.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen - I've just never seen it.
On the other hand, I *have* seen a less-capable candidate hired because they were female.
I'm not saying it's common (not least because I don't think it is) - but I have seen it.
In my experience, whether you keep your reproductive organs internally or externally has exactly ZERO influence on how good your code is - so can we just cut all this SJW bullshit, and hire the best person for the job?
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Recognize that there is no justification for the treatment received by Anita Sarkeesian for challenging sexim in games, that would help.
99% of the treatment she calls harassment is people calling her out on her bullshit. She spins this into "Its because I'm a woman/feminist", but the reality is its just the internet doing what it does best: Calling you out publicly on your bullshit. She is also a public figure at this point, and as such, has been receiving what plenty of public figures get - Non-credible death threats and some pretty mean tweets. So what you are saying is that we should treat her different because she is a woman? Or are you being sexist and not saying that all harassment of that nature is bad, but you will only defend it because it is happening to a woman?
But I thought Friday was SJW day on slashdot.org?
Nope! Unfortunately it has been, and will continue, to be pounded to death. Easy click bait and lots of page views for little effort.
Instead of worrying about penis and vagina counts how about we worry about all the American tech workers who have been replaced by foreign workers. 94 million Americans are unemployed including almost half of them are women.
While your number is incorrect, the point has merit. Instead of worrying about things that really hurt our economy (TPPIP/NAFTA/War/Corruption) people that own media are erecting the same straw man over and over. The lie is being repeated so much that people believe the lie (Bernays and Himmler were assholes, but not stupid). This is the value of propaganda, and the US currently is overflowing with it.
The same lies about discrimination in the workplace are being repeated by people that may be well intentioned, but too lazy to actually check a fact and not quite bright enough to realize they are being used as a useful idiot.
I really don't understand how people can believe this is accidental. If one news station had a different story they would make a mint in readership/viewership. Instead, they all repeat the same exact line of bullshit over and over. Also consider that the only "popular" opposition is controlled.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I keep trying to convince my teenage daughters that they should get into coding since they are absolutely guaranteed to get a great job after college, even if they are just mediocre developers, purely because of their gender! But no... they would rather study things like journalism and anthropology. My mind boggles. I am a professional coder who also teaches a college level web development course on the side. I have the resources and experience to train them, but my offers fall on deaf ears. Sigh. Even after being married to a woman and having four daughters I just don't get girls.
Quotas are not competition.
Most people who get into computers and programming are naturally introverted.
This is a stereotype, and not really true.
On the other hand, it's important to understand that men and woman at NOT the same, and they may have different ideas about what they want to do in life.
The idea that in every field, we must have 50/50 is simply stupid.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"Diversity remains an issue in tech firms across the nation"
It's a bullshit issue, and its importance is artificially inflated by SJW groups. Frankly, these companies that think there has to be a 50/50 split in everything need to get their heads out of the collective asses.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Build your own fucking community, run by your rules. Shut the fuck up and build something.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Considering we're talking about open source, how it is not open and accessible? You can take whatever code you want and contribute as much or as little as you want. If you don't like the way the project is going, you can fork the code and head off in your own direction and if the community thinks you're doing a better job, eventually you'll pick up contributors.
Forcing morals on everyone else and telling them that if they don't accept it they're being discriminatory is not making things better.
If women don't care about making code faster and more compact, maybe they should work on other aspects of FOSS. For instance, most of it could use a lot of help in the documentation department.
Documentation is rarely valued as a contribution. We specifically had to go out of our way to hire a technical writer for Mac OS X to get the man pages covered for the UNIX Conformance requirement. And those were just command line commands, Libc, and the kernel interfaces that had coverage requirements.
It's definitely not valued nearly as well as code. The most common comment with regard to it is advice to "RTFS" and some variant of "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand". This is seen in the tools, as well. For example, git is written in such a way that you pretty much have to understand all of it to use any of it. This steepness of the learning curve appears to be intention, and viewed as a merit badge for when someone gets their head around it and Groks it. In the same way that you can do anything in Perl in half a dozen or a dozen different ways, the same is true of git.
Also, your verbal vs. visual thinking bias is showing. Personally, I process software in the same part of my brain that does auditory processing of music (meaning I have a hard time coding if I'm listening to music, as verified by FMRI of the dorsolateral frontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus, Broca's, and Wernicke's areas, among other areas). Language centers tend to be common for processing both sound and software in many coders.
Ironically, if you are good with languages, you tend to be good with code as well, assuming you have a number of computer languages under your belt to generalize from. But if the tools have a crappy learning curve, then it takes a bit of OCD to be willing to invest the time necessary to overcome it. Staying overnight in a computer lab so that you can get time on the machines is not something most people do these days.
I've got three male cousins who are in hot demand because they were smart enough to take these jobs. One's a nurse, one's a primary school teacher and the other works in child care. Though they did what they wanted to do because they wanted to do it, not because they knew they'd be sought after to 'balance' the genders at work.
5) We need wives and mothers.
Ah, now the truth comes out.
We need husbands and fathers just as much as we need wives and mothers. In fact, we probably need them more at the moment, because the ones who work in the corporate world currently aren't around for their families as much as they should be or want to be. Women are allowed to have a family-work balance; indeed, they are expected to. Men are not.
If we as a society valued care as much as we value making money, institutional sexism in the workplace would be mostly gone within a generation.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Amazing yourself. The fact that you are unable to comprehend the big scary ideas in my OP says that YOU are the problem, not I. Shut the fuck up and build something.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
This sort of environment is going to repel a significant proportion of men as well.
"But that's not how it works in real life."
It's only that, well, yes it is. The vast majority of open source software projects, either successful or not, are the creation of just one single person. See? "person", as in "I don't give a damn if they are man, woman or aliens from XK-578".
Anyone can, say, open an account at github and publish their code to their leisure, accept patches from whoever they want and publish about their code and the community of users and developers they want to build around it as much as they want. It's difficult to think of any other human activity more agnostic to personal identity than producing software. And still, there's a gender bias: maybe it comes from somewhere different.
^This poster gets it. If I find myself in a so-called "toxic community", I will leave. If I find what that toxic community is doing, production wise, valuable, I will do it myself and try to create a community that is less toxic for me. In my case, I was/am a punk rock kid of the 80s/90s. You want to talk about toxic? The entirety of mainstream America was, in my esteem, toxic. Then in the punk scene itself? The straight-edge vegans and the pc punks were both insufferable. Instead of trying to browbeat everyone into what I thought was the "ideal" punk rock scene (inclusive rather than trying to be a cool kid), I did it myself. I started my own bands with my friends and before you know it, we had a rather large following of punks who had the same sort of inclusive, can do attitude I had. Sure, I can complain about how self-righteous cuntbags the sXe/hardline kids were, or how super sensitive idiotic the PC Punks where, but what good does that do? Do it yourself and don't worry about what other people think. Lead by example instead of whinging about every perceived slight. Shut the fuck up and build something.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
If you count stock, I sold my business for a XXX digit sum. It was grown from the ground up. It was created at the cusp, highly immature and risky as hell. Yet it succeeded. It thrived. It grew and, as the sphere matured, it grew in ways I'd have never expected. The compute power increases made us thrive and manipulate data in new and interesting ways - also, we could store data that was impossibly large just a few years before.
Now, to share a few things...
We were merit based. I'm not hiring you just because you have a vagina.
We had multiple women employees and they were very good at what they did.
We were, at times, assholes to one another - bad work means you do it again.
We had an unbelievably low turn-over rate - truly mind blowing.
We didn't give a shit who you slept with but you don't need to bring that shit into the office.
We probably, eventually, knew your family and wept when you did or celebrated with you.
We did things thought impossible, or improbable, on a regular basis.
We only wanted the best and not some absurd hire because of hurt feelings or supposed inequality.
We had multiple races - including myself.
Screw those who argue that things shouldn't be based on merit. It's infantile and absurd at the very front. Where you pee from or who you love hasn't a damned thing to do with it. If you can't do the work get the fuck out of the way and stop trying to hinder those who can. You don't deserve shit, you earn it. You don't even earn it on your own - you earn it with the help of those around you. Your drama and juvenile fantasies have no place in the real world. You can rightly fuck off back to your basement if you don't comprehend this - it's not difficult.
However, don't worry. We did open-invite interviews where you'd be reviewed by your peers before hiring. You'd have not made it past the interview process. Keep your drama queen shit off my code and out of my face.
Simple enough? The conversation has been had, it's over. Whining isn't going to change this. It's just going to piss people off even more. What you can do is what matters. If you can't do then shut the hell up and learn from those who can. Keep your drama to your friends. I'm not your friend.
[sum total redacted, none of your business and I don't need my ego stroked - suffice to say a lot]
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
My post was about people behaving in an unprofessional and discriminatory fashion. Something the moderators appear to support.
Being able to do the job matters. Being openly toxic towards your fellow workers is grounds for dismissal.
Just because your company succeeded despite people being abusive towards each other does not mean it's the ideal way to do business.
You'd have not made it past the interview process. Keep your drama queen shit off my code and out of my face.
Relax. I would never have wanted to work for you anyway. Besides, you couldn't possibly have paid me enough.
.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
FTFY.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
She left not because she has a vagina, but because she attempts to Tone police people and people didn't want none of it and told her in no uncertain terms.
She's not mature emotionally, and doesn't tolerate difference of opinion.
Any guy would've suffered the same fate she did. In fact, her buddy Matthew Garrett also exited with her. This was not a gender issue. This was a Sarah and Matthew issue.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
You absolutely and completely nailed it.
Men go: "ooh, that sounds like a cool thing to do; it doesn't matter how many hours per week I work, that I don't have a life, that nobody will ever recognise my contribution, it's still cool and hey, doing it in my free time is even cooler!"
Women go: "why would I work in a field that has some of the lowest satisfaction scores, asks me to give up my personal life, and then on top of it also do that stuff for free? That's crazy!"
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. Though it should be noted that none of what you describe ever happened. No female developers slept with any journalists in exchange for favorable reviews. It was a lie from the start. A lie which you obviously believed.
Except nobody ever claimed that. She was sleeping with someone who gave her favorable coverage. She is also a rapist by her own definition - She had unprotected sex with someone else which violates her boyfriend's consent, ergo rape. For people who try to take the high ground, I find it amusing that everyone who defends Zoe Quinn and overlooks this part of her is basically a rape apologist. Way to side with the abuser.
Attacking the source of the information, not the information itself. Geeze man, I thought you could do better than that.