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25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women

25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women

Posted Feb 2, 2013 18:29 UTC (Sat) by bolle (guest, #73676)
In reply to: 25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women by xan
Parent article: 25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women

Honestly, I am quite astonished that a comment on GNOME's outreach program for women which actually states the obvious can cause this ad hominem reply.
Moreover I beg to differ regarding the history of mankind. The picture you paint may well describe the world in terms of today's prevalent feminist ideology where women take the role of innocent victims of evil men and where we all will face a bright future only after these male evil doers have been properly brainwashed and re-educated to stop discriminating their mothers, sisters and wifes. But maybe it was not such a bad idea in those dark ages of gender inequality to let the girls warm the cave and take care of the kids while the boys were hunting for the mammoth instead of vice versa;-).


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25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women

Posted Feb 3, 2013 22:16 UTC (Sun) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

Citation needed for the things you state. I really don't get what your intention is with this reply. I hope it is a weird kind of sarcasm?

25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women

Posted Feb 4, 2013 19:16 UTC (Mon) by bolle (guest, #73676) [Link]

Well, my comment was not meant to be a scientific paper therefore I did not give any citation - similar to my parent poster. By the way - wouldn't it be at first hand the task of those who promote such women-only programs to back up their claim that the relatively low percentage of women in open source projects is a result of active discrimination by men?
Couldn't this gender disproportion be simply the result of gender typical interests? I work as a software developer for quite some years now. In the various groups I worked I had and have female colleagues. Throughout all these years I do not remember any case of sexual harassment or anything that could be seen as a discrimination against women. In fact you could argue that it is quite the opposite now: as a reaction of the political pressure from EU and national government my company has committed itself to increase the percentage of women in managing positions within the next couple of years. So as woman you have actually better chances to be promoted than as a man. But that's another story. What is however striking is that none of my female colleagues seemed to have interest in any software or hardware related stuff in their spare time. No female colleague ever talked to me about her current software hobby project or her latest experiments with her new Raspberry Pi - as my male colleagues occasionally do. Of course this is not a bad thing at all - but related to the question why so few women volunteer for open source projects it might give a hint. The interesting question is whether these differences in interests have their root cause in social traditions or in biological dispositions. For that I finally I have a citation:

"The Gender Equality Paradox"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2xrnyH2wQ

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