<br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: matt <<a href="mailto:matt@cfxnetworks.com">
matt@cfxnetworks.com</a>><br>To: "General NBLUG chatter about anything Linux, answers to questions, etc." <<a href="mailto:talk@nblug.org">talk@nblug.org</a>><br>Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 13:33:09 -0700<br>
Subject: Re: [NBLUG/talk] SVLUG: Women in FLOSS<br>On Thursday 08 June 2006 00:47, Stephen Cilley wrote:<br>> I just got back from my first SVLUG meeting, and I<br>> thought their topic of discussion was very<br>> interesting. It was an overview of a study done by
<br>> the European Union into the gender differential in the<br>> FLOSS community and why it exists. Why do you all<br>> think that while women make up about 30% of commercial<br>> software developers they make up little of 1% of FLOSS
<br>> developers?<br>> One of the overarching issues was arrogance.<br>> Apparently we as a community are arrogant (I don't<br>> know what that's all about, after all I've never made<br>> a mistake and I've never been informed of anything I
<br>> didn't already know for sure!) And it's really<br>> off-putting to women, whereas men take it better. The<br>> presenter also talked about how originally hardware<br>> was a male field and the first programmers were women,
<br>> and about how women could even be experiencing some<br>> forms of sexual intimidation (there are some very<br>> revealing stats about male FLOSS community members<br>> making advances on female members.)
<br><br>Well, with only 1% of women for the 99% of men, you'd think there would be a<br>supply-and-demand issue. That may explain the intimidation and "advances"<br>being made =).<br>--<br>Valê,<br>Matt<br><a href="mailto:matt@cfxnetworks.com">
matt@cfxnetworks.com</a><br></blockquote></div><br>For my high school senior project in 1997 I researched the state of women in Computer Science:<br><br><a href="http://www.sonic.net/~patald/senprog/presentation.html">http://www.sonic.net/~patald/senprog/presentation.html
</a><br><br>The three main barriers to women entering the field are probably the same, in general, as for FLOSS:<br><br>1. Cultural Stereotypes<br>2. Educational Barriers<br>3. Lack of Role Models<br><br>On a personal level, the first time I ever went to a BBS meeting (micronet) the reaction to me was purely sexual.
<br>I think there was one other woman there. Everyone was playing Doom and in between fragging each other, the<br>players would comment to the guy friend I'd made, "Are you sprung?!" So even associating with a woman netted
<br>sexual harassment for him. I know it seems like not a big deal, but women feel uncomfortable in situations like that.<br>The people I ended up becoming friends with and learning about Linux and Apache from were the ones who addressed
<br>my intellect and not my booty.<br><br>Learning about computer systems, especially open source, requires being in the old boy network. If you don't have a friend<br>who has configured the thing before and can explain to you how to do it, good luck. Documentation is getting better in many
<br>cases, but learning is more than RTFM. How do you know what to learn? You have to be connected. The worst thing for any<br>learner, not just women, is to be in an environment where you're expected to know everything already. Of course, no one in
<br>existence knows everything, or even a miniscule percentage, but that's the attitude you can be up against in the nerd community. <br><br>Perhaps the reason women make up a larger percentage of corporate programmers as opposed to OSS is that it is a more
<br>formalized situation where there is a built-in support network for learning and more consciousness of sexual harassment.<br>I know I would rather be put on an assignment where I have the proper resources and co-workers who are focused on completing
<br>the same project than set loose in the wild west of competing egos.<br><br>Anyway, I don't claim to be an expert, I've just done a little research and had the experience of being a female Stanford CS dropout.<br>-- <br>
Suzanne Aldrich<br><a href="mailto:aigeanta@gmail.com">aigeanta@gmail.com</a><br>