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No evidence?No evidence?Posted Mar 10, 2010 11:58 UTC (Wed) by forthy (guest, #1525)In reply to: LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus by flewellyn Parent article: LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus
Yes, every time someone comes up with it. But the "no evidence" is simply wrong. We have a strong evidence: Statistics. Our counts reveal 2-5% female participants. 2-5%. This is a very strong evidence that there must be more than one huge road-block, since we are in the three-sigma range. When there are gender-specific road-blocks, the onces that block entry of females into FOSS must be extremely huge, and it quite likely is not just a single problem, but multiple. We definitely have a huge social problem (geeks considered "parias"), which interferes with the conforming attitude of females. We have the pioneer obstacle (let's face it: FOSS is being pioneered, it's not established), which commonly mostly excludes females, whatever thing is pioneered. We might have a talent obstacle; honestly, even established related sciences have only few females in it. Some things will go - the pioneer phase will end, the social acceptance of geeks will grow. The talent problem is a matter of tools - come on, the huge crowd of male PHP programmers aren't really talented, either. And we have a potential motivation problem: all we tried so far for motivating people to write FOSS is based on "scratching an itch". So we have to identify all potential problems, evaluate, whether they really are one, and try to solve or work around them (like I said: even the worst: lack of talent wouldn't be a problem if we can create tools and associated tasks that can be solved with less talent - we have the talent problem in the male population, too. I'd say that 99% of all males on this planet lack the talent to write Linux kernel code, even when they had perfect education on that subject). And some problems simply can't be solved from the inside. How to overcome the "geek" perception problem? Make sure that the geek in a movie is the person which deserves a lot of sympathy (like in "Stargate Universe" - hey, that's something we watch, not the audience we want to convert!)?
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