Yet another male perspective on women in free software [LWN.net]

Yet another male perspective on women in free software

Posted Oct 4, 2007 12:51 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
Parent article: Yet another male perspective on women in free software

Nice article.

Though I don't agree with some of your assumptions and conclusions:

1. Ads:

Adds in the technical area are no worse in that sense than sexist ads in practically any other field. They also sell (or otherwise probably owuldn't be used: those adds do cost money). Do adds in similar areas prevent women from joining in?

Actually I believe that someone pointed out that the rate of women in the general computer sciense "business" (the data was, IIRC, for general employment for CS-related jobs in the US at 2001) substaintially hier than the rate of women in free software projects (The relevant data were from a research done in europe in recent years).

So aparantly those ads don't keep women form propritary software companies.

2. Missing the reasons

There are various reasons why most of the people with the relevant talents ("skilled developers, writers, artists, project managers, and so on") don't stay in "the community". In fact, most people don't. Why don't them?

Rudness can only account for a small fraction of that. What attracts people in the first place? What rewards them to keep going? Just trying to fix one specific point without being aware of greater factors is just curing a symptom.

The problem is not exactly that talented people found our community welcoming and went away". The problem is that talented people have not found our community welcoming enough, or have not enjoyed enough spending the time there.

And thus we get to:

3. "What have nothing to lose"

> making it clear that a certain level of polite and respectful
> behavior is expected cannot hurt.

Maybe it will make it less fun for a large proprtion of the current contributors? What have we gained then?

There are some not so nice sides to politically correctness can also kill discussions.

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