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25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for WomenPosted Feb 2, 2013 16:36 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)In reply to: 25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women by shmget Parent article: 25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women
You organise a 100 metre race. The first 4 people to cross the line get a prize. So far, so fair. But it turns out that someone's attached half the participants to the start line with bungee rope. It wasn't you, so you're not discriminating against them, but they're going to have to be much better than the others in order to win.
Running a program that doesn't explicitly discriminate against women doesn't mean that they have an equal chance of success. External factors such as stereotyping, a lack of good mentorship and past experiences of overt sexism in the technology industry result in women being significantly less likely to apply in the first place. Those factors are self-reinforcing - they exist because of there being a low number of women in open source, and they perpetuate the situation where there's a low number of women in open source.
In an ideal world people wouldn't be sexist and there'd be no problem here, but this isn't an ideal world and the only way we've found to reduce sexism is to artificially restore the balance by giving certain advantages to women to make up for the inherent disadvantage that they suffer. If you don't like this solution, work on a better one. Code talks, etc.
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25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 3, 2013 14:30 UTC (Sun) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
Let's put this in terms we can all understand.
A bug exists. We're arguing about whether we should implement a workaround or force a fix at the problem source.
As good engineers some are arguing that the workaround is stupid and the problem should be patched at its source.
As good engineers some are arguing that the problem source is an intractable vendor whose source code we don't have access to, and as such it's better to implement a workaround then just leave our users with the problem.
Nobody here is being evil, we just disagree about where to patch the problem.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 3, 2013 18:21 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Well, not exactly. Some are arguing that there isn't a problem. Others are arguing that there's a better way to solve the problem, but aren't actually doing any of that work. And some have come up with an approach that the former groups don't like, but which is so far the only approach that's achieved anything. We can discount the first group, but if the second group wants to be taken seriously then they should commit to demonstrating a better solution.
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