A Look at How Indian Women Have Persevered Through Several Obstacles To Contribute to the Open Source Community (factordaily.com)

A fascinating story of how Indian women have persevered through various roadblocks, including cultural, to actively contribute to the open source community. An excerpt from the story: As Vaishali Thakker, a 23-year old open source programmer looked over the hall filled with around 200 people, she didn't know how to react to what she had just heard. Thakker was one of the five women on the stage at PyCon India 2017, a conference on the use of the Python programming language, in New Delhi. The topic of the discussion was "Women in open source." As the women started discussing the open source projects they had been working on, the challenges and so on, someone from the audience got up and drew the attention of the gathering to the wi-fi hotspots in the hall. They were named "Shut the fk up" and "Feminism sucks." "It was right on our faces," remembers Thakker. For their part, the organisers were upset and even warned the audience. But the event had no code of conduct for anyone to really penalise or expel the culprits.

"It's disheartening when you're talking about the problem, someone is actually giving a proof that it (gender bias) indeed is a problem. In a way, I found it funny, because how stupid can you be to give the proof that the problem actually exists," says Thakker. And how. It's just been three years in her coding career but she is familiar with the high wall that gender stereotyping puts up in the world of software scripting. More so in her chosen field of coding. Thakker is among a small -- but fast-growing -- set of women coders from India shaping the future of several open source platforms globally including the Linux kernel, the core software program behind the world's biggest eponymous open source software.

Comments

Re:Feminism

[DontBeAMoran]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Feminism is a range of political movements, ideologies, and social movements that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal, and social equality of sexes. This includes seeking to establish educational and professional opportunities for women that are equal to those for men.

Summary vs Article

[thecombatwombat]

I'm not saying it's all good and sexism is over, but this is being characterized as flamebait by a lot of comments, and it repeatedly contains things like:

“Biases are there because at many places some people feel women aren’t good enough to code. But I haven’t encountered any such bias because the Linux kernel community is really good,” she adds.

And this woman stating directly that having a baby was a bigger barrier than any of her male counterparts, but her modern office in India was very accommodating:

“Sometimes I feel, when they (women) are in this field they are more aggressive because they want to prove that they are as good as their male counterparts,” she says, adding she has not faced gender bias at work yet.

“I don’t have any complaints. I feel girls are not short on talent, it’s just that they have to stick around. Sometimes it becomes difficult if you have a maternity leave, you’re disconnected for six months from everything and you cannot complain about it because the child needs you,” she says.

How did she cope? “I took my child to office with me, and my office supported that,” Deshpande-Dalal says.

Those parts quoted in the article certainly exist and are important, but you know, RTFA.