Tackling Open Source's Gender Issues 589
angry tapir writes "Women's participation in open source development is at a far lower level than women's participation in proprietary software development. One of the groups that aims to change this is the Ada Initiative: A non-profit organization formed last year. I recently caught up with its two founders, Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora and comp sci PhD student Mary Gardiner, to discuss the project."
Re:Community resistance (Score:4, Informative)
the asterisk next to his name means he pays real money in order to see the articles a few minutes before the rest of us.
Not speaking up (Score:5, Informative)
Not speaking up signals to these fuckheads that their behavior is acceptable. It's not.
Re:Community resistance (Score:4, Informative)
It's also key that he's cutting and pasting [slashdot.org] the same post [slashdot.org] with minor rewrites and doing it without addressing the topic on hand in any serious way. Hell; this entire discussion is about "open source" which is something that RMS would likely disown anyway, making him completely irrelevant to the debate.
That bonch posts get anything other than -1 redundant/flamebait/off topic, let alone that he regularly gets moderated +5 within seconds of posting is pretty clear evidence that the moderation power of the shills in the moderating system.
Re:Community resistance (Score:1, Informative)
The statement is on Richard Stallman's blog from May 2003 [stallman.org]:
Dubya has nominated another caveman for a federal appeals court. Refreshingly, the Democratic Party is organizing opposition.
The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia" also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally--but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
He is quite clearly advocating the legalization of child pornography possession and pedophilia. Now, if he was being sarcastic, facetious, or attempting to make some other point, it sure doesn't come across in his statement, nor has he corrected himself since.
Re:Community resistance (Score:5, Informative)
Less competition in a female-dominated work environment? You are wrong.
There's just as much competition, it just takes other forms, it's less direct. That's one of the great things with the arrival of computer networks and stuff like shared calendars in for example Exchange and other groupware servers..... Secretary dominance fights are less crippling for a company nowadays... Though it still happens, and when it does, it wreaks havoc on entire departments. Same happens in medical care, the sniping, backstabbing and character assassination there is legendary....
Re:Self Selection From Life Realities (Score:5, Informative)
That's without dealing with the fact that women tend to have tighter deviations from the norm in various areas, which means that any group that is selected from extreme outliers is going to be disproportionately male. This is true whether you are selecting politicians that reach Federal office, people that are extremely interested in programming to pursue as a hobby, moving to America as a day laboring immigrant, or criminally oriented men to form a gang. The outliers are predominately (but not exclusively) male.
This. A hundred thousand times this. Any genetically-influenced trait is going to show a wider bell curve for males. Biologically, it seems to be due to the fact that men with an extraordinary (for better or worse) X chromosome have it expressed, while women have two. Since the second is probably normal, this tempers the effects of the first (it has to do with X-deactivation happening basically at random in each cell). Hence, there are more male geniuses than female - but equally more male retards (in the technical, not perjorative, sense) than females.
Brains are staggeringly different in structure, male vs. female. There's substantial evidence that on the balance they each come to the same level of intelligence in nearly everything, but through surprisingly different ways. Given the genetic differences, coupled with hormones, upbringing, society, and history - it's really shocking that sex differences are as small as they are (3-5 IQ points on average, which is well within the noise of measurement). However, when talking about rather subtle differences, it seems preposterous to suggest that there couldn't be rather enormous differences across sexes in specific areas.
There is sexism everywhere. Mostly misogyny, but an increasing amount of misandry. Neither is acceptable, and most of it is due to nonexposure. If there were more female programmers, there'd be less sexism. I suspect there was quite a lot of sexism in medicine and law as well, before women became dominant.
It's worth noting that the text of your post could have been paraphrased from a speech given by one Larry Summers. They fired him for saying pretty much what you did (time commitment issues due to family raising, combined with variance differences)
Maybe it's aggressively anti-woman geek culture? (Score:3, Informative)
Take these little gems as evidence of a real, vicious problem in geek culture:
"It’s by far the worst coding-related experience I ever went through. That made me retire from Open Source." http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/when-software-offends-the-pantyshot-package-controversy/509 [zdnet.com]
“I was trying not to, but it needed to be said.” http://skepchick.org/2011/12/reddit-makes-me-hate-atheists/ [skepchick.org]
"c'mon. you're not a girl if u don't show us pics." http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_17/109-OMG-Girlz-Dont-Exist-on-teh-Intarweb-1 [escapistmagazine.com]