Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really??

That's... very generous of you?

If you re-read my original post in this thread, you'll notice that my point was that we *don't* have to choose. I'm not making things up because I have a binary view of the world; I'm pointing out that the plain meaning of the original term "shift our attention" -- and also your clarifying term, "shifting our focus" -- is to *reduce* the attentional focus we give to one matter so as to give it to another. Not drop to nothing, necessarily, but de-emphasize. You think that maybe there aren't actually all that many women who "got held back by these issues", and maybe we shouldn't worry about them as much as we are.

I disagree with that. I think that we as a community don't put nearly enough effort into dealing with "these issues". I also think we should put more effort into dealing with other issues, sure, but that that's no reason to reduce our (already paltry) efforts in this area.

> when someone questions anything, that one is surely one of the dumb guys who are our enemies.

I definitely see where you're coming from here. But I think you misunderstand our position. Dumb guys aren't enemies, they just need to... learn some stuff so they aren't dumb anymore :-). Everyone's a newb at some point, no shame in that.

> Because I think lots of interesting ideas have been raised here [...] but these ideas have been mostly shot down on the spot because they _looked_ like ideas you would hear from an enemy.

I don't know which specific comments you're looking at, so I can't respond to them. But I can say that in general, when I personally have critiqued people's responses, my goal hasn't been to shoot them down and make them go away. My goal is to draw out problematic assumptions and show just how unconscious and common they are, in the hopes that people will learn something, dust themselves off, and do better next time.

And I know that sometimes having someone do that to you is painful and sucks -- I've been on the other side of such comments, and probably will be again! -- but I don't see any alternative.

> I mean, when one says 'maybe the main problem is not this one', this is very different from saying 'there is no problem at all'

And the other problem is that on the internet, it's hard to tell who has good intentions. You're right that those are different statements. But people who argue in bad faith will often bring up some other issue as an attempt to change the subject and stop discussion of the original issue. And even people arguing in good faith will do this accidentally. In either case, the end result is that the conversation wanders around and doesn't accomplish anything. Since this is so common, and since these conversations are so exhausting in the first place, those of us with more of an investment in accomplishing something will therefore tend to jump on such topic shifts very quickly.