A look at the 2024 Debian Project Leader election

Posted Apr 6, 2024 6:52 UTC (Sat) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706)
In reply to: A look at the 2024 Debian Project Leader election by jhe
Parent article: A look at the 2024 Debian Project Leader election

I'm left-handed. Last I read up on that around 20% of the population are also left-handed. If I was part of an organization with a significant amount of people, but other than me only one or two other people were left-handed, I'd feel very weird about that, because to me that indicates that some type of bias is in play here. And while I don't think that every group needs to match the demographics of the entire population exactly, I believe that skews as extreme as this are indicative of some degree of unhealthiness.

Granted, some (or even many) of the reasons behind this might not lie within the group itself, but larger societal factors may be at play. I studied physics at university, and while there are certainly things to be improved within that field, my female classmates also reported that they experienced much more pressure to study something else from non-physicists than I or my male classmates ever did.

The way I see it, the fact that in tech in general women are so underrepresented is a problem. That doesn't mean that there's necessarily a cabal of evil men keeping women out, or that the people who are currently in tech are morally culpable - it just means that we should work on fixing that problem.

(Though to be clear, historically there have been tons examples of men keeping women out maliciously - think back to women having to fight to get the right to vote. And it's clear that you can still find some examples in tech where this is still happening to this day, though thankfully this has decreased over time. The point of my reply was that even when that type of explicit dynamic is not at play, you can still end up with unhealthy group demographics.)

A look at the 2024 Debian Project Leader election

Posted Apr 6, 2024 7:07 UTC (Sat) by timrichardson (subscriber, #72836) [Link]

India is much more progressive. 50% of STEM graduates are women.
Linux market share is really high, in a big and economically growing country.
The observation that there are only 2 DDs from India indicates a missed opportunity, and if more Indian DDs arrive in the project and they don't include a fair share of women, the problem is with Debian, I'd say. On the facts, the Indian candidate is right to highlight this missed opportunity. So many problems are solved with more contributors, we read, and here is an answer apparently ripe for the picking. The Indian candidate sounds well networked in India too, and she seems to be a good communicator.

Anyway, two good and different candidates.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/jobs/hr-policies-tre...

A look at the 2024 Debian Project Leader election

Posted Apr 6, 2024 8:46 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> The way I see it, the fact that in tech in general women are so underrepresented is a problem. That doesn't mean that there's necessarily a cabal of evil men keeping women out, or that the people who are currently in tech are morally culpable - it just means that we should work on fixing that problem.

The fact that society does not see it as a woman's field is the problem. A lot of the pressure keeping women out of tech comes from *other women* as you say.

Okay, I'm going back years, but I was the only boy studying GCE Latin in my year. Languages was (still is?) seen as a girl's subject.

And in my brother's year (the one after me) it stood out massively, because it was the only year boys outnumbered girls in both Latin, and non-exam Dom Sci. My brother wanted to do them, and he didn't want to do them on his own, so he pressured his mates into doing it.

The big problem, is peer pressure at school. It's far too late to correct things after that.

Cheers,
Wol

A look at the 2024 Debian Project Leader election

Posted Apr 18, 2024 12:20 UTC (Thu) by dvandeun (guest, #24273) [Link] (2 responses)

Studying the classics was of course the right and proper thing for boys to do for centuries, until science turned out to lead to better jobs in the modern age.

A look at the 2024 Debian Project Leader election

Posted Apr 18, 2024 15:09 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Studying the classics still is the right and proper thing to do.

Philosophy (aka Science and Maths) so you can think straight. Classics so you can communicate straight. You need to be competent at both. Dunno the stats, but before Comp Sci was a thing, the majority of computer programmer people had Classics/Languages degrees rather than Maths degrees, I believe...

I might have mentioned this before, but somebody decided to do a study (in the light of all these "why do we still teach classics" news stories). They picked a school, and a random cohort, and contacted *every* classics student from the cohort they could track down.

Typical response rate from an "out of the blue" study like that is - what - about 5%? They got more like 95%. And pretty much EVERY response was along the lines of "classics is one of the most influential subjects I studied". That's true for me, too, by the way.

Another wonderful quote from the letters page of a national newspaper - "I didn't send my son to school to learn to cook. I sent him to school to study eg the classics, so he could read a recipe book and follow the instructions".

Cheers,
Wol

A look at the 2024 Debian Project Leader election

Posted Apr 19, 2024 13:18 UTC (Fri) by dvandeun (guest, #24273) [Link]

I do agree with you on the value of the classics. I studied classics first, and computer science later myself. I just wanted to point out that attitudes had changed because of economic factors; our ancestors might find it quite strange that we nowadays think that "the classics are for girls and science is for boys".