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Women in Free Software, by Fernanda G. Weiden (Groklaw)
Groklaw presents
an article by Fernanda Weiden that examines the
scarcity of female software developers in the open-source software arena.
"The gender issue in the Free Software community is a big paradox: we have a community of volunteers teaching the world how to develop technology in a different way, one willing to distribute equal opportunities through free access to the software, and at the same time a community in which more than 50% of the total world population doesn't participate."
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Women in Free Software, by Fernanda G. Weiden (Groklaw) Posted Sep 12, 2005 20:27 UTC (Mon) by thomask (guest, #17985) [Link] "a community in which more than 50% of the total world population doesn't participate"
Honestly. About 99% of the world population doesn't participate in the OSS "arena". Or rather about 1% does.
Maybe this isn't correct: remember that "participation" isn't limited to development. People who use the stuff are mostly doing us a favour, especially if they submit bug-reports. Who says women aren't _using_ free software? While I agree that chaps should be welcoming to female developers, I'd always thought that software development was something that men did much more of than women; whether proprietary or free. It's one of those old social phenomena, in the same way that we don't get loads of female politicians. Can anyone here imagine either the political arena or the OSS arena being dominated by the fairer sex?
They're welcome to it though.
Women in Free Software, by Fernanda G. Weiden (Groklaw) Posted Sep 12, 2005 22:08 UTC (Mon) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] "Can anyone here imagine either the political arena or the OSS arena being dominated by the fairer sex?"
Yes. It might actually be a bit better than what we've got, especially in the political arena.
Oh, and many women like their gender group to be referred to as "women," in my experience.
Women in Free Software, by Fernanda G. Weiden (Groklaw) Posted Sep 13, 2005 3:13 UTC (Tue) by landley (subscriber, #6789) [Link] I've noticed that men tend to get excited about interacting with tools andwomen tend to get excited about interacting with other people. Yeah, this is all just a matter of degree. But when you get four or five sigmas from the norm, a matter of degree becomes pretty important. Open source development is self-selected, and the core developers are the fraction of 1% of the population with borderline autism. We're the people who would spend six months building a scale model of the eiffel tower out of popsicle sticks in our garage. Alone. Hacking is not a particularly social activity. Our mailing lists coordinate our work but the _work_ is what's important. "Shut up and show me the code." Our social interaction tends to be fairly brutal (as Al Viro and Christoph Hellwig demonstrate). Better code wins, and a maintainer who picks code because he likes the person who submitted it is doing a disservice to the project. I've known plenty of women who like to program, but not a lot willing to lock themselves in their room for 18 months straight focusing on it to the exclusion of all else. And this is not a deficiency in them, it highlights the fact that those of us who do (and who take it for granted that this is the only real way to get good at it) are _abnormal_. Open source programmers are driven to obsess over tools in a way that makes Tim Allen look like an amateur rather than a stereotype. Previous generations rebuilt old carbeurators, we program computers. Anybody can look at "Text Mode Quake" or "Doom as a system adminsitration tool" (google for it) and say "that's sick but cool!". But we could actually see ourselves personally spending months implementing something totally useless like that, just because it is cool. So if it's maybe four sigmas from the norm for men to be this obsessively interested in digital tools, and more like six sigmas for women to act like this... (And this is before any "boys' club" pressures come up.) One thing to do is find groups obsessively interested in _other_people_, and see what the gender balance looks like there. What are all the social butterflies doing? (I'm, unfortunately, the last person to ask...)
Women in Free Software, by Fernanda G. Weiden (Groklaw) Posted Sep 13, 2005 4:34 UTC (Tue) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] Impressive... Thank you for sharing the details of your solo, er,exercises in your garage, that certainly explains a lot. However, you appear to be somewhat confused about the group this description applies to - core developers and utter... evangelists are not the same.
Women in Free Software, by Fernanda G. Weiden (Groklaw) Posted Sep 13, 2005 7:06 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Wow. The spin put on the word `evangelists' there is *impressive*.
I don't know about social skills, but when it comes to the cut direct not many people can do it better than that. :)
Women in Free Software, by Fernanda G. Weiden (Groklaw) Posted Sep 15, 2005 13:34 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link] I'm an extremely social hacker. Oh -- I'm male by the way.
I am more productive pair programming than programming alone. If I'm programming alone, I'm more productive if I've recently chatted with someone else about the goal or the design, or if I've chatted with someone else who is going to use the results of my work.
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