Bogus ? Think again.

Bogus ? Think again.

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.