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The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program
GNOME to Sponsor Female Developers in a Summer Outreach Program The GNOME Foundation is offering USD$9000 to female students in order to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development. The money originates from GNOME's participation in the Google "Summer of Code" program (code.google.com/soc/), for which GNOME developers will mentor 20 students working throughout the northern summer on GNOME-related projects. This year GNOME received 181 applications to Google's program, yet none were from women. The GNOME Foundation has therefore chosen to reinvest Google's contribution into a new program designed to increase the participation of women in GNOME. The program has no official relationship with Google. "Free software prides itself on being open to anyone with a good idea, yet less than 2% of free software developers are female. We, as a community, need to be actively working to change this statistic, and programs like this one are a much needed step in the right direction." said Hanna Wallach, a GNOME developer who is involved in several projects that encourage women to participate in free software development. The Women's Summer Outreach Program is currently accepting applications from female students. Accepted students will receive a stipend of USD$3000 over a two month period. A pool of project ideas is provided at www.gnome.org/projects/wsop/, though original proposals are also encouraged. Projects may either be related to GNOME directly, or indirectly via projects such as Gstreamer and Abiword. Each student will be assigned a mentor to provide guidance throughout the program. Vincent Untz, member of the GNOME Foundation board and coordinator of the GNOME team for Google's "Summer of Code" program, explained: "Many women have the skills required to contribute to Free Software projects like GNOME, but may not see an opportunity to start working with us. By initiating this program, not only do we want to highlight the issue, but we also hope that this opportunity will help more women to get involved in the long term." Applications should be submitted using the form at www.gnome.org/projects/wsop/. More information about the application process may be found at the same location. About GNOME GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, and easy to use desktop for Linux and UNIX-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released two times a year on a regular schedule. The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading Linux and Unix distributions worldwide, including popular community distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Core, and SUSE. It is is also the default desktop on major enterprise Linux distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and Sun Java Desktop System. GNOME is also the desktop of choice for some of the world's biggest Linux desktop deployments, including large government deployments in Extremadura, Spain, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. GNOME's technology is used by major Linux ISVs such as Firefox, the Eclipse Project, Real Networks, and VMWare. Additionally, GNOME is increasingly being used by mobile device companies such as Nokia and Palm. More than 500 software developers from every continent, including more than 100 paid developers, contribute their time and effort to the project. Sponsors include industry leaders like Fluendo, HP, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun. GNOME is supported on a variety of platforms, including GNU/Linux (more commonly referred to as Linux), Solaris Operating Environment, HP-UX, Unix, BSD and Apple's Darwin. More information on GNOME can be found at www.gnome.org. About the GNOME Foundation Comprised of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap. More information on the GNOME Foundation can be found at foundation.gnome.org. Press Inquiries Check www.gnome.org/press/ to find your nearest press contact. You may also contact us at gnome-press-contact@gnome.org. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Google and "Summer of Code" are trademarks of Google, Inc.. All other names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. (Log in to post comments)
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 14, 2006 21:27 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] *applause*
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 14, 2006 22:51 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] So men get less money for the same job and have a much lower chance of even getting that. Now let's talk about sexism...
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 14, 2006 23:42 UTC (Wed) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link] The pay is at the exact same rate as the Google Summer of Code ($1500/month), it's just for two months instead of three (The $9000 mentioned in the article is the aggregate -- there are only enough funds for three people). In fact, I think the article even pointed that out.
And how exactly do men have a much lower chance of getting accepted?
I for one, strongly applaud this effort, and in particular Chris Ball and Hanna Wallach for taking the initiative and getting this thing rolling.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 14, 2006 23:48 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] I believe he was saying that any individual male applicant to the regular SOC would have a lower chance of acceptance because of the higher total number of applicants, whereas the (anticipated) low number of female applicants to this program would have less competition and thus a better chance of acceptance.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 15, 2006 2:01 UTC (Thu) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link] There were 20 accepted positions for Gnome in the Google SOC. There will only be 3 for this program. I guess it depends on the total number that apply as to whether someone had better odds in being accepted in the former or the latter and all we can do is guess at this point, but my personal guess is that the odds aren't much different. :)
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 15, 2006 8:22 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] I would expect that if your a female programming student that's about all it would take. Unless they have more then 3 show up.
All in all I don't mind. The summer of code is a pure public relations stuff so there is no such thing or realy any point to be fair about stuff.
It's not like some sort of government mandated quota system based on race or sex... :-)
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 19, 2006 13:36 UTC (Mon) by occ (guest, #38482) [Link] "And how exactly do men have a much lower chance of getting accepted?"
Since they are not allowed to apply their chance is exactly 0.
So everall, with this scheme, the 'chance' of a given individual is lower if he is male.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 14, 2006 23:52 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] It looks like this is paying less money total, slightly less per month ($3000 for 2 months instead of $5000 for 3 months), and comes out of money for work that nobody of either gender applied for. Unless I'm missing something, the program only open to women is less money and has a lower chance of existing at all. Of course, women could apply for both, getting a higher chance overall, but none actually did, so that hardly matters. (I'm reading the "$9000 for women" as implying that they have funding for three applications, each earning the $3000 stipend specified.)
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 15, 2006 2:02 UTC (Thu) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link] Google pays $5000 for 3 months, but only $4500 of it goes to the applicant while the other $500 goes to the relevant open source group. Thus, the pay rate individuals receive in either program is the same.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 14, 2006 23:53 UTC (Wed) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link] > So men get less money for the same job
I wouldn't say that. "Hackers who feel their gender is not relevant get less money for the same job" is more accurate.
I would think that Free Software is a field of work with one of the lowest tresholds of entry. GPLed code usually has no gender and no colour, just technical merit.
I'm uncertain about whether it is beneficial to introduce the gender dichotomy into Free Software development because it seemed to be doing pretty well without it.
Freedom of no existing preconception of ones work is a freedom too. One that is strongly ingrained in Free Software culture already.
On the other hand. Perhaps a period of special highlighting can the pique the interest of unaware soon-to-be contributors after which they will realize that they too can be genderless.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 15, 2006 0:19 UTC (Thu) by dang (guest, #310) [Link] Now look at the real world:
Look at http://www.cra.org/info/education/us/ and the splits for BS, MS, and PhD in the US by gender. It had been a 2:1 split but now it is more like 3:1. But even then, you don't see anywhere near a 33% ratio of women contributing to the open source commons.
Interesting because this is at a time when more and more women and fewer and fewer men are going to Univeristy in the US.
So there are two broad areas of concern:
a) Some set of forces continue to filter women away from CS and are in fact doing so at an accellerating rate
b) Of the talented women not so filtered, something is filtereing them away from contributing code to open source projects.
And regarding "being generless," my advice is that one takes this approach at one's peril ( at least until societies stop relentlessly gender training ). As long as gender categorizations do social work, we need to be aware of what work they are doing. They can do clearly bad work ( e.g., discrimination ) but they can also, by differentially training people, lead to different sets of experiences and inference, at which point you want to see how those different experiences and patterns of inference can lead to helpful insight. This is why it is at least interesting to study people like Barbara McClintock from the perspective of gender.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 15, 2006 7:42 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] It had been a 2:1 split but now it is more like 3:1. But even then, you don't see anywhere near a 33% ratio of women contributing to the open source commons.At the university I'd attented, the male-female ratio was around 10:1 at the CS faculty. Maybe it's specific to Hungary, but I've heard that the situation is similar at the other universities. Of course, at the human faculties, the male-female ratio is around 1:10 (e.g. I've had only one male language teacher, the other 8 were female). And it isn't created by sexism, girls doesn't seem to be interested in gadgets, while boys doesn't seems to be interested in learning things by heart.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 16, 2006 8:21 UTC (Fri) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] The university I went to five years ago in Australia had on paper a really good ratio, maybe 2:1 or better. You'd think great, except all these did the degree (and did it well, got good grades, etc) and then went and did HR work or website design or some such. Work in the IT industry but nowhere near programming. I don't recall any case of one of them actually going for a programming job.
It's a hard problem, I really don't know what the right solution is. In my years of interviewing applications for programmers, there really wern't very many women who applied.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 16, 2006 9:06 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] "And it isn't created by sexism, girls doesn't seem to be interested in gadgets"
Go read the "Women in Linux" faq (can't remember the proper name). You'll probably find it at linuxchix. Women are *driven* *away* from gadgets by mens' propensity to monopolise.
If you understand anything about female psychology (and I expect a lot of computer blokes don't - being above average on the Autistic Spectrum seems to be typical of them) you will understand why they don't get involved in programming.
Some simple stats from education. Maths and Physics are supposed to be boys subjects. In mixed schools, very few girls do those subject. So why, in the UK, have all-girl schools CONSISTENTLY topped the league tables in those subjects (typically taking four out of five top places every year!)
In "boys" subjects, girls do badly in the presence of boys. In the absence of boys, they outperform them. So what on earth are we doing to drive them away !?!?!?
Cheers,
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 16, 2006 9:09 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] Oops. I should have said "in mixed schools, few girls do those subjects, and those that do tend to do badly".
Cheers,
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 16, 2006 15:56 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] Women are *driven* *away* from gadgets by mens' propensity to monopolise.I don't know. When I was 10 years old, the school got a couple of Commodore 16 computers and they've started a "computer class" for the pupils - but I can't remember that there were any girls who wanted to go to this class, so I can't see how were they driven away when they didn't want to join in the first place.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 14, 2006 23:56 UTC (Wed) by dang (guest, #310) [Link] This is how it works when one has to remove access barriers. Sorry if it harshes the view from the position of privilege, but it is really hard to read remediation as sexism.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 15, 2006 4:23 UTC (Thu) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link] What access barriers? Maybe it has more to do with FLOSS (Freely Licensed Open Source Software) not being as high on the social status ladder. Its a society thing, not a gender thing.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 15, 2006 6:35 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] At the risk of further dragging out an uninteresting discussion, gendercomporises many things; biological, physical, chemical, developmental aspects all take part, none of which will anyone dispute, I think. Gender is also personal, it is also social. People are socialized into their genders, and to ignore this misses part of the picture.
The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program Posted Jun 16, 2006 9:20 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] Note that in his essays, ESR says one of the major rewards for FLOSS programmers is "egoboo". For most women, egoboo is not a reward ...
Cheers,
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