I'm sick of this same thing coming up on slashdot every few weeks, too. Bookmark those sites, guys, and stop making the same old assumptions over and over.
I'm with you 100% on this. Well, 99%. I'm on linuxchix until it drives me up the wall. Which, with the number of posts today, is about to happen in the next hour or so.
Ayup. Women just aren't usually that obsessive. Ellen Spertus, who wrote a paper on women in computing that was slashdotted recently, comments that maybe women just aren't insane enough to spend all their time eating, sleeping and breathing computers -- and that maybe that's a good thing. Personally, I think that since women in our society seem to be better trained at "having a life" and doing all those communications kinda things that might keep some of us from hacking as obsessively, perhaps we should put those skills to use in the geek/hacker/OSS field. I wrote a whole rant on it, but/. didn't see fit to post it, so check out http://netizen.com.au/~skud/articles/chick2/ if you're interested in reading more.
From what I've seen, it's not the male geeks that are the problem as much as school and university teachers, parents, and non-geek/hacker/etc workmates. All the male geeks/hackers I've known have been pretty good, but the other problem is just the sheer numbers. I heard from a women the other day who walked into a LUG meeting to find that she was one of only a couple of females in a room of 100 males. She nearly ran out again. Luckily she stayed, and will no doubt become a keen member of the user group, but you can no doubt imagine how intimidating it might be for a newcomer. Oh, and while most geeks are pretty cool in RL, some people in certain online fora can be complete assholes.
*nodnod*... see my comments on this from a slashdot feature late last year. Going by the name of "Skud" (which wasn't intentionally chosen to seem male, but has had that effect) you'd be amazed at the number of people who think I'm male even after years of online acquaintance. And let's not even go into "Dear Sir.." emails. K.
Re:I'm gonna get moderated down for this, but...
on
Girls Like Linux Too
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you, actually. I'm on the linuxchix mailing list and contribute, but I find it a bit tedious. Too many social posts, and the technical posts would be better off elsewhere -- like in the appropriate technical mailing list or newsgroup. On the other hand, I'm priveleged in that I have a good peer group of local geeks/hackers/etc and don't feel isolated as the only female geek in my area. I suppose if one was feeling either isolated or timid about posting to the rough-house atmosphere of slashdot, usenet etc then linuxchix would be a good place to start.
While geeks will be geeks no matter what sex they are, it's the non-geek users who might want to see more "friendly" distributions. Sure, encourage women to get into computer science and technology, but for those that just want to "surf the web" and type up letters or play games, why require them to understand the guts of the system as well as the geeks do? Yeah, I think it'd be nice if the whole world understood the guts of their OSs, but it's not going to happen. In the meantime, making Linux viable for the desktop for users who *aren't* UberGeeks is probably a worthwhile target. And many of those potential users just happen to be female.
When everyone complains about the proportions of geek guys to geek girls, I just have to think of people like you to remember why being a scarcity token is not always all it's cut out to be.
I posted the original linuxchix question about distros aimed at females as a thought experiment. Someone had suggested it to me a while ago, and I thought it was a weird idea, but an interesting one to think about. If anyone bothers to read the mailing list archive, they'll see that nobody really thinks that women need their own distribution, and that most of the things which might encourage women to use linux already exist in other distributions. *sigh*... I guess it's too much to expect journalists to act ethically or slashdot comments to be sensible.
As a female who is a programmer, and who is involved in the open source/free software/geek community on a day to day basis, I have to say I'm getting kind of sick of seeing the same things over and over again. One of the things I see most often is ill-conceived affirmative action intended to encourage women into technical fields, often doing more harm than good. I mention this because I think CMU's efforts in this case are *not* ill-conceived and I want to make it clear that I'm not just saying that because I'm female yada yada yada. As far as I can tell from the very short and shallow article, CMU seem to be doing the right things. They're not setting arbitrary quotas, they're just getting out there and selling the course in places where women happen to be listening. They're not changing to course to fit the women, but rather are pointing out the applicability of the subject matter to a wide range of fields (many of which just happen to appeal more to women). So it will be interesting to see how it all turns out. I suppose it's unlikely that they'll post followup stories, though:(
If anyone's interested, there's an article I wrote a few weeks ago which you can read at http://netizen.com.au/~skud/articles/c hick2/ about female geeks, how to encourage them, and whether we actually want more of them in the Open Source/Free Software community.
Slashdot Mirror
Try the following:
http://www.ai.mit.edu/peopl e/ellens/Gender/pap/pap.html
... and no doubt many more.
http://tap.mills.edu/
http://slinky.scrye.com/~lej/women/
http://netizen.com.au/~skud/articles/c hick2/
http://www.linuxchix.org
I'm sick of this same thing coming up on slashdot every few weeks, too. Bookmark those sites, guys, and stop making the same old assumptions over and over.
Me, I joined linuxchix because I have a passion
for Open Source meta-issues. Pity there's so
little discussion of that on linuxchix.
Is there any good mailing list for such topics?
Much as I hate to say "me too", Me Too!
I'm with you 100% on this. Well, 99%. I'm on
linuxchix until it drives me up the wall. Which,
with the number of posts today, is about to happen
in the next hour or so.
Ayup. Women just aren't usually that obsessive. /. didn't see fit to post it, so check out
Ellen Spertus, who wrote a paper on women in
computing that was slashdotted recently, comments
that maybe women just aren't insane enough to spend
all their time eating, sleeping and breathing computers -- and that maybe that's a good thing.
Personally, I think that since women in our society seem to be better trained at "having a life"
and doing all those communications kinda things that might keep some of us from hacking as obsessively,
perhaps we should put those skills to use in the geek/hacker/OSS field. I wrote a whole rant on it, but
http://netizen.com.au/~skud/articles/chick2/ if you're interested in reading more.
From what I've seen, it's not the male geeks that
are the problem as much as school and university
teachers, parents, and non-geek/hacker/etc workmates.
All the male geeks/hackers I've known have been
pretty good, but the other problem is just the
sheer numbers. I heard from a women the other day
who walked into a LUG meeting to find that she was
one of only a couple of females in a room of 100 males.
She nearly ran out again. Luckily she stayed, and will no doubt
become a keen member of the user group, but you can no doubt imagine how intimidating it might be for a newcomer. Oh, and while most geeks are pretty cool in RL, some people in certain online fora can be complete assholes.
Great idea! As long as he also posts a list of
all the male slashdotters so we can write some
appropriate procmail recipes:
:0:
* ? formail -ISubject | grep -iqsf $SLASHDOT_GEEKS
/dev/null
*nodnod* ... see my comments on this from a slashdot feature late last year. Going by the name of "Skud" (which wasn't intentionally chosen to seem male, but has had that effect) you'd be amazed at the number of people who think I'm male even after years of online acquaintance. And let's not even go into "Dear Sir.." emails. K.
I agree with you, actually. I'm on the linuxchix
mailing list and contribute, but I find it a bit
tedious. Too many social posts, and the technical posts would be better off elsewhere -- like in the appropriate technical mailing list or newsgroup. On the other hand, I'm priveleged in that I have a good peer group of local geeks/hackers/etc and don't feel isolated as the only female geek in my area. I suppose if one was feeling either isolated or timid about posting to the rough-house atmosphere of slashdot, usenet etc then linuxchix would be a good place to start.
(No, Deb, I'm not going to unsubscribe just yet)
K.
While geeks will be geeks no matter what sex they
are, it's the non-geek users who might want to see
more "friendly" distributions. Sure, encourage
women to get into computer science and technology,
but for those that just want to "surf the web"
and type up letters or play games, why require
them to understand the guts of the system as well as the geeks do?
Yeah, I think it'd be nice if the whole world understood the guts of their OSs, but it's not going to happen. In the meantime, making Linux viable for the desktop for users who *aren't* UberGeeks is probably a worthwhile target. And many of those potential users just happen to be female.
When everyone complains about the proportions of
geek guys to geek girls, I just have to think of
people like you to remember why being a scarcity
token is not always all it's cut out to be.
I hate being quoted out of context.
... I guess it's too much to expect journalists to act ethically or slashdot comments to be sensible.
I posted the original linuxchix question about
distros aimed at females as a thought experiment.
Someone had suggested it to me a while ago, and
I thought it was a weird idea, but an interesting
one to think about. If anyone bothers to read
the mailing list archive, they'll see that nobody
really thinks that women need their own distribution,
and that most of the things which might encourage women to use linux already exist in other distributions. *sigh*
As a female who is a programmer, and who is :(
involved in the open source/free software/geek
community on a day to day basis, I have to say
I'm getting kind of sick of seeing the same
things over and over again. One of the things
I see most often is ill-conceived affirmative
action intended to encourage women into technical
fields, often doing more harm than good. I mention this because I think CMU's
efforts in this case are *not* ill-conceived and
I want to make it clear that I'm not just saying
that because I'm female yada yada yada. As far
as I can tell from the very short and shallow
article, CMU seem to be doing the right things.
They're not setting arbitrary quotas, they're
just getting out there and selling the course in
places where women happen to be listening. They're not changing to course to fit the women,
but rather are pointing out the applicability of
the subject matter to a wide range of fields
(many of which just happen to appeal more to women). So it will be interesting to see how it
all turns out. I suppose it's unlikely that
they'll post followup stories, though
If anyone's interested, there's an article I wrote
a few weeks ago which you can read at
http://netizen.com.au/~skud/articles/c hick2/
about female geeks, how to encourage them, and
whether we actually want more of them in the
Open Source/Free Software community.
K.