| |||||||||||||
Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really??Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really??Posted Aug 27, 2009 19:46 UTC (Thu) by selenamarie (guest, #60476)In reply to: Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really?? by BrucePerens Parent article: FSF to host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software
Hi!
I started using Linux in 1994, installing Slackware from floppies on a home-built machine some friends of mine from the dorms helped me pick out parts with. I screwed the motherboard into a case myself and tried not to bend pins when I put the cpu in for the first time. I was terrified I was going to break something, but my friends wouldn't do it for me.
More recently, I was the co-chair of Open Source Bridge (a conference for open source developers and "citizens" in Portland, OR), and am very involved in PostgreSQL.
Anyway, I have written a lot about the topic of women and open source -- primarily from angle that mentorship and social circles really impact women's participation.
I think your comment could be an example of this effect. :)
When more of the men who lead and code the core open source projects start to know and are friends with the women who participate, I think we will see a huge shift in perception and reality around recruitment and participation of women.
My approach is to just do stuff - start user groups, write code, tell people what I think - rather than argue about whether there are or are not enough women.
When people ask me how to get more women involved in their software projects, I tell them to look around, start talking to the women around them and ask the women they find who show interest to participate directly. This, oddly enough, tends to work. I live in Portland, OR -- which some people think is some kind of techno-communal utopia. But we're just like everyone else.. We just have a bit more energy around bringing social activity and tech together right now.
I'm not very interested in discussing the barriers to participation at this point. They are there, *shrug*.
I think it is far more productive to just take action, measure the results and adjust accordingly.
If you're interested in some of what we've done, I've got a blog post about a specific group that's was successful in the last couple years: http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2009/04/29/whats-changed-por...
And here's something I wrote for O'reilly a while ago:
(Log in to post comments)
Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really?? Posted Aug 27, 2009 20:16 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] I like your papers. And I am very glad that you are bringing more women in. But pretty much your paper discusses women who are interested. Do you have any call on how many never will be, and why?
Reasons women avoid open source Posted Aug 27, 2009 20:31 UTC (Thu) by Skud (guest, #59840) [Link]
http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-...
http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/05/19/dispatches-from-the-... (linked from above) http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Open_Source_Software http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/x106.html http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262133989 http://flosspols.org/
Go, read.
Reasons women avoid open source Posted Aug 27, 2009 22:06 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] This is helpful, thank you very much. I will read every one.From the top two, it seems that these are general, rather than gendered, barriers. The need to build a whole development environment has kept me from hacking on some code at times. I really cringed at the fact that mailing lists were prefixed baby- . Women will take that, eh? I would have considered it to be abusive of beginners.
Reasons women avoid open source Posted Aug 28, 2009 13:08 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
When I worked for an engineering company, anyone with less than ~4 years of experience was a "baby engineer". (It was a small company and there were no female engineers)
Reasons women avoid open source Posted Aug 28, 2009 15:32 UTC (Fri) by Skud (guest, #59840) [Link]
Probably worth noting that this is the term used by the babydevs themselves -- not imposed by anyone else AFAIK.
Reasons women avoid open source Posted Aug 28, 2009 18:28 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] I accept that. But I suspect it could be possible that they're excluding people just because of the name. I never buy those "Dummy's Guide to C" books either. It seems to me that that they promote low self-respect.
Reasons women avoid open source Posted Aug 28, 2009 18:34 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]
Or it's a sign of enough self-confidence to be self-deprecating, and enough knowledge to counteract the Dunning-kruger effect? :P
Those 'Dummies' books are trash of course, but that's true of 90 percent of tech books.
Reasons women avoid open source Posted Aug 28, 2009 18:39 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] Yes, but since the goal of such lists is to lower the barriers to participation, asking for the participant to be self-actualized first is not productive. :-)
Reasons women avoid open source Posted Aug 29, 2009 11:02 UTC (Sat) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
For some, the name might be a way of giving themselves permission to make mistakes and be confused while learning, without risking their self-respect.
Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really?? Posted Aug 27, 2009 20:31 UTC (Thu) by selenamarie (guest, #60476) [Link]
Hi!
Thanks for reading! I appreciate it.
Honestly, trying to figure out why there are a lot of women who never will be interested isn't really a priority for me at the moment. If we look at *open source hackers* as a slice of the population of the entire world, we're a minority - no question. So addressing the issue of why more *people* aren't interested in hacking on open source -- I think the same reasons apply to women.
The stuff that Nat Torkington (and many others) have talked about and done -- volunteering at schools, and finding ways of integrating interesting/fun technology into curriculum, and starting very early (primary school) -- are important. But those aren't the only ways that we can change our culture. We can actually change how many women are involved *now*, by simply looking around for the people who are on the fence.
I think it is counterproductive for hackers to throw up their hands and say, "Well, most women just aren't interested" when the due diligence has not been paid to encourage people who are interested, but not participating -- for whatever reason.
Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really?? Posted Aug 27, 2009 20:34 UTC (Thu) by cesy (guest, #60482) [Link]
Do remember that there are many women who are interested but who don't get involved because of the barriers to entry. If you look at Skud's previous blog posts, this is particularly noticeable with Dreamwidth - many women who were interested but had never contributed to a project before became heavily involved once the barriers to entry were lowered.
Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really?? Posted Aug 27, 2009 20:46 UTC (Thu) by hypatiadotca (guest, #60478) [Link]
Skud linked to the "unlocking the clubhouse" book/study that CMU ran a few years back. There's an entire chapter in it titled :the nexus of confidence and interest". That's part of your answer - please go read it.
Sure, there will always be women who aren't interested. Just like there will always be men who are honestly just not interested in going into nursing. But at the moment, "interest" is so clouded by cultural expectations around gender roles - "computers are for dudes, nursing is for chicks" - that the idea of "interest" is effectively meaningless.
A more important point to focus on, that I think you're missing in this whole discussion - how is Open Source / Free Software <i>missing out</i> because women aren't participating? How can we change that, as a community?
Then go read the various link posted around this thread, where many suggestions regarding that have already been made :)
|
|||||||||||||