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

I'm seriously missing the reference here, sorry.

> I would suggest you establish the ratio of student of computer science
> programs, based on their primary motivation for choosing that field.
> There would be 2 main categories: the one that do that because they are > passionate about the field and the one that do that because there is a
> good prospect of career, better than architect or Mechanical Engineering > or any other field that they would have been capable of graduating from.

So you think the *women* who do study computer science do so because of the prospect of making money after graduating, not for genuine interest in the subject? That's really funny given the 'man must be provider' 'caveman say cavewoman stay home go sweep cave ung ung ung' analogies that have been made.

That being said, yeh, I really don't get your point. I studied computer science at the height of the dotcom boom in the US; the majority of my classmates were male (the gender ratio was more like 10-15% female than < 1% in my program), and the vast majority of women I knew in the program were genuinely interested in the subject, I would say at a much greater rate than the men in the program.

The thing is, if you're interested in something only for the money, and it turns out to be an unpleasant experience (you're one of 10 women in the lecture hall and get stared at like some kind of zoo animal), you've not got much motivation to stay. If you're genuinely interested in a subject, you're much more likely to stick it through regardless of the BS you have to put up. This is why I think a higher proportion of the women in my CS program had that genuine interest than the men.

Although this is all conjecture based on anecdotal evidence, of course.

> all these tend to indicate that open-source communities are actually less likely to discriminate based on gender than the general population.

You may have convinced yourself of this quite well, but my personal experience as well as the experience of many of my female colleagues begs to differ. Do you think we're lying?

> "Seriously, go back to the MRA hole you came from"
> Is that supposed to be an example of courteous, friendly atmosphere that one is exhorted to cultivate in open-source project ?
> Just because I disagree whit the notion that two wrongs make a right, you must resort to name-calling ?

I didn't call you a name. I told you to go home.