It's social, too. [LWN.net]

It's social, too.

Posted Sep 29, 2007 16:51 UTC (Sat) by tuxchick (guest, #42009)
In reply to: It's social, too. by khim
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Coerce? What coercion? Nice bogus argument there. And citing the cliche fictional female who feels just the same way you do. Those tactics are so old they're moldy. I am curious- what stake do you have in denying that there are problems specific to women in FOSS? Why is it so important to you to be dismissive of these issues?

to post comments

Bogus ? Think again.

Posted Sep 29, 2007 18:20 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Coercion ? Few ideas were t-shirts, bags and some other strange ideas. I'm not sure how well they worked - I'm not a subscriber. As far as I can tell - not very well: we only got one female intern in our office so far and I do not think it was result of these campaigns.

As for "fictional female"... If you don't believe there are non-brainwashed women - it's your choice. Unfortunately LWN does not have any private messaging system so I can not direct you to her - and I'm pretty sure she'll not appreciate storm of e-mails from zombies that will try to tell her for 1000th time that it's just wrong that she does not support this "bring women to IT" campaign, so I can not publish contact information here.

Bogus ? Think again.

Posted Sep 30, 2007 0:34 UTC (Sun) by tuxchick (guest, #42009) [Link] (1 responses)

Khim, I misread your comment- you were referring to some specific
incidents. Sorry I ranted at you! You are right that trying to make
someone fit into a role they're not interested is doomed to failure.

As far as FOSS goes, I'll settle for getting rid of the barriers that
already exist for women who are interested in contributing. I don't care
if it's 50/50 or 90/10 or whatever. I don't want roses and ponies. I just
want to do my thing and not get hassled by jerks and trolls, and not get
hassled by folks who think that being part of FOSS means tolerating jerks
and trolls.

Bogus ? Think again.

Posted Oct 1, 2007 16:30 UTC (Mon) by N0NB (guest, #3407) [Link]

Having been involved with F/OSS for the better part of a decade, I think that having to deal with jerks and trolls is not a gender specific issue. The sucessful person in this field forges ahead regardless of their antics.

Perhaps we need to examine why many women find this so off-putting as to allow the trolls and jerks to dictate what they do while many men seem to be able to shrug the jerks and trolls off and continue their work on a project. This, I suspect, is a fundamental difference between the genders.

Is it that jerks and trolls don't exist in other fields of endeavor that women gravitate to? I doubt it. Most likely it is because the F/OSS community is so open and public that the jerks and trolls voices are amplified and women in general have no interest in these kinds of public confrontations.

That's one aspect of the "problem". Another could be that many men are interested in what goes on inside the "box", while many women are interested in how they can use and benefit from the "box" ("box" being a device or software, etc.). So, it may well be that men and women approach a technology with a different sort of curiosity and the "problem" is no more complicated than that.

It's social, too.

Posted Sep 29, 2007 21:40 UTC (Sat) by mitr (subscriber, #31599) [Link]

We all have a stake in knowing the _truth_. Attempting to change the situation is much harder, if not impossible, if we don't understand it - the attempts might even be counterproductive.

I can see no reason to assume malicious intent in khim's comment and to call it bogus it merely because it "denies that there are problems specific to women in FOSS". The existence of problems is not an axiom, and the burden on proof is necessarily on people that claim these problems exist.