women, get into IT... or else [LWN.net]

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 4:10 UTC (Sat) by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
In reply to: women, get into IT... or else by elanthis
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

So when are we going to start trying to force little girls to throw away their dolls and start playing with race cars like little boys?

From having observed little children, I think it's pretty obvious that this particular difference in preferred toys is a socialized behavior. Parents, other adults, and older children react differently -- even if they're trying very hard to be egalitarian -- to a little girl playing with dolls or to a little boy playing with cars. Sure, you might be very encouraging and open when it's the other way around, but it's hard to suppress the "oh, that's so cute!" that seems to "naturally" arise for the socially correct play. I was surprised to find myself doing it. Kids are sensitive to this sort of reaction and learn quickly. Add in all the input from people not actually trying to be conscious about such actions, and there you go -- socialization for play preferences.

Whether this is a problem or not is another issue.

And oh my god I've let you trolls draw me into this. This whole whiny misogynist thing needs to die. We already have slashdot.

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women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 4:49 UTC (Sat) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (1 responses)

Eh, classic nature-vs-nurture arguments. The world may never know. ;)

[I very strongly believe both are huge factors. Experiences may differ, I suppose.]

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 17:11 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It's not really meaningful to divide them. The nature/nurture divide would
make sense if all we had was `heterogenous genetic factors without
environmental influence' and `homogenous genetic factors encoding systems
influenced by the environment', but there are a *lot* more options than
that, and for most of them `versus' isn't even the right word to use.

(Pinker had an excellent analogy in _How The Mind Works_, describing this
as being akin to someone pointing at a high-end computer and saying `that
hardware is really powerful, so the software must be correspondibly
inflexible'.)

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 15:41 UTC (Sat) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

it's hard to suppress the "oh, that's so cute!" that seems to "naturally" arise for the socially correct play.

And exactly how should the free/open source software world solve this problem?

Bye,NAR

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 30, 2007 0:42 UTC (Sun) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (1 responses)

And exactly how should the free/open source software world solve this problem?

Simple. Be aware of your actions and words and how they impact other people.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 30, 2007 12:54 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

>Simple. Be aware of your actions and words and how they impact other people.

More importantly, realize that the other person is not the same as you.