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The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach ProgramThe GNOME Women's Summer Outreach ProgramPosted Jun 15, 2006 0:19 UTC (Thu) by dang (subscriber, #310)In reply to: The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program by Zack Parent article: The GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program
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.
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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.
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