OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering [LWN.net]

OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering

Posted Aug 27, 2009 19:57 UTC (Thu) by lizhenry (guest, #60479)
In reply to: OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering by BrucePerens
Parent article: FSF to host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software

Well I'll bite back, Bruce. While I could discuss any number of the points you bring up I'd like to first say that I'm perturbed by how you partly frame the problem as one of men's sexual access to women. You suggest that we need to teach girls under 7 how to be more technically minded, specifically so that male nerds of the future will have a greater pool of girlfriends.

You seem to imply as well that someone female in FLOSS needs to take one for the team and sleep with RMS just so he'll stop making (bitter?) sexist jokes.

That's what I'm hearing as your subtext, anyway. If we can even call it "sub".

Really appalling but unfortunately all too common, for men to feel so entitled to every aspect of women's lives and bodies.

Please try to step back and listen to yourself a minute.

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OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering

Posted Aug 27, 2009 20:42 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

You suggest that we need to teach girls under 7 how to be more technically minded, specifically so that male nerds of the future will have a greater pool of girlfriends.

Ouch! I think you're being really unfair to twist my words around that way.

I suggest that any community which is predominantly of one gender is emotionally unhealthy. To the extent that they or their surrounding society are reinforcing their one-gender status through differences in early childhood education, they should try to solve the problem.

But this is not to suggest that your duty as women is to, well, "think of England". Good heavens no.

Let's please consider this as getting men and women to go to the same meetings. As I described in my story of the college program with one girl, their solution was to bus us to gender-mixed social events, and not to some less honorable resource.