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GNOME Reaches Out to Women
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Jun 15, 2006 09:08 PM
from the all-the-ladies-in-the-house dept.
from the all-the-ladies-in-the-house dept.
Dominic Hargreaves writes "This year GNOME received 181
applications to Google's Summer
of Code program, yet none were from women. As a result, they've
decided to address this imbalance by launching an outreach program to
sponsor three female students to work on GNOME-related projects this
summer." Most any science department will tell you that the amount of interest and involvement of women pales next to men of similar age and background. Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?
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Women and Linux - My Experience (Score:4, Funny)
should be banned in government. Operating Systems like Linux discriminate
against women because of a built in difficulty compared with Windows and
Apple's OS X.
Women pay taxes, and therefore shouldn't be discriminated against in
getting employment with government agencies. If these agencies had used
Windows or OS X, more women would be able to persue dreams of a full time
job in government. Linux is by its nature a man's domain. Women are
designed to use social interaction and emotions to deal with complex
tasks, things the command line are ill suited.
OS X, and Windows have
friendly and female-intuitive designs that take into account a woman's
understanding of objects,ie. folders, desktops, Clippy, the XP search dog.
These help women operate the computer by giving her a relationship with
these icons, and helpful animated pets. It makes a woman feel at home
with her computer by allowing her to relate to it.
Linux, on the other hand is designed for command line and programming.
Sure, it may have a fugly GUI to hide its true being, but to get any
serious work done you must know a bunch of archane commands with hundreds
of options that change with every command. Something like this: chmod
a+rwx. Only enginners can understand this. And most engineers are still
men. This puts the female population at a great disadvantage when
appliying for work. Men know this, and that's why they delibratly try to
install linux in the workplace.
How would womens groups react when they read the studies that are being
commissioned by industry on this very subject? Surely, women, when they
learn of this, will outvote men and ban linux from the government.
Re:Women and Linux - My Experience (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Women and Linux - My Experience (Score:5, Funny)
You are obviously unaware of simple Microsoft trivia/history. (which might be a very good thing)
The program manager of Microsoft Bob was Melinda French, who we now know to be Mrs. William Henry Gates, III.
Microsoft Bob's progeny includes Clippy. Clippy may not have any direct redeeming features, but something important/notable has occurred in his family history.
____________________________
Gates has defined his exit strategy. Why can't Bush?
Parent
Re:Women and Linux - My Experience (Score:5, Funny)
Learn how to evade international treaties against torture?
Learn proper engineering techniques for forming a naked pyramid out of prisoners?
Learn Islamic culture, the better to disrespect it?
No thanks, I don't need help."
Parent
Re:Women and Linux - My Experience (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Women and Linux - My Experience (Score:5, Funny)
Pfft. Almost had me for a second there.
There're no women on the internet! Everyone knows that! It's the place where men are men, women are men, and children are fbi agents.
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most women are cleanfreaks (Score:4, Funny)
me sexist? that's unpossible!
Re:most women are cleanfreaks (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, they are. (seriously) It's said that women are messy (things out of place), but what's under it is clean. Guys frequently have things in order, but what's underneath is dirty.
My wife is a serious, but self-taught cross-stitcher. Many believe the reverse side should be as nice as the front (no jibes from the peanut gallery) and her work is. I forgot to warn her the first time my mother & grandmother wanted to take a look at her work -- the first thing they did was flip it over. Along
Women don't know about linux... (Score:5, Funny)
(ducks)
Re:Women don't know about linux... (Score:4, Interesting)
Most techie guys that I've talked to are convinced that all women who've ever even thought of getting into the industry are untapped fountains of innovation in a conveniently sexy package.
Most women that I've talked to are convinced that all techie guys are ugly, overweight, unwashed 30-year-old nerds who sit in their parents' basement and look at porn.
Incidentally, I'm an example of a woman who isn't a total tech genius (although I certainly get by just fine), and none of my co-workers fit the male nerd stereotype. Most are actually fit young guys with pretty wives and newborn babies.
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hmmm (Score:3, Funny)
Big Deal (Score:4, Funny)
It's them letting me touch them that's the hard part.
Re:Big Deal (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
The Edge Debate (Score:3, Informative)
PINKER VS. SPELKE
A DEBATE
The above debate hosted at Edge is now a bit dated but it does a good job of looking at gender and science. Our patriarchical history in the west has given us science as envisioned by men like Sir Francis Bacon [wikipedia.org]. It led to a reductionist deterministic heritage that we've only recently begun to break free of. Women in general in the west are only a century or more free of being chattles to be disposed of by their fathers. I hope we'll see women bring to science a different mind set and new insights.
just my loose change
It's a great idea (Score:5, Funny)
Having a woman may convince 25% of them to take a shower.
Sadly those 25% are going to be the ones who already have the ability to get a girl, and they'd smell the best in the first place.
Is it sexist? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never been a big believer that bias can be cured by more bias. Affirmative action only leads to people thinking that a miss-represented group of people were only hired because of affirmative action. That kind of defeats the whole purpose. The article brings up issues like women not having same-sex role models. What I think the problem is that we feel the need to have to have a same sex role model. Why can't a Finnish woman look at Linus Torvalds as a role model? A woman from Finland probbably has more in common with him than me, a man born and raised in the US. If you ask me, that's the root of sexism. Trying to fix it with some patchwork of giving a few extra slots to women really won't do much of anything except maybe make some people at Gnome feel a bit better about themselves. If they want to do it, great, but don't try to tell me they're helping solve the problem, because they ain't.
Re:Is it sexist? (Score:4, Insightful)
Simple fact: there are vastly more women and minorities in the workplace now than there were before affirmative action and forced equal access to education. It works. It's not flawless, and it's not a cure-all, but it has produced results.
Affirmative action only leads to people thinking that a miss-represented group of people were only hired because of affirmative action.
Who gives a shit? Those are the same people who didn't think women and minorities belonged in their workplace in the first place.
Honestly, in a field so utterly dominated by men that a female software engineer is a bit of a rarity, you have to be pretty insecure to be bothered by the fact that one free software project wants to try to get a whopping three women involved. In any event, the odds are that your job and mine are both going to India long before they are threatened by any kind of domestic quota system.
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Re:Is it sexist? (Score:5, Informative)
Computing Science wasn't very popular back in the day; it wasn't a 'serious' subject. That meant it was okay for women to participate. As soon as it started to get more prestigious, fewer women were involved. Hmm. Fortunately, I think that particular reason has worn off over the years; popularity isn't the barrier that it used to be.
I examined the dearth of female CS students at my University and talked to one of my professors. She had been keeping track of the numbers for years, and it turned out that while ALL sciences had seen increased enrolment -- including pure mathematics -- CS enrolment for women was down every year. It's not too hard or too technical or too 'science-y', so what's doing it? (I still don't know, incidentally -- I think it has something to do with the image of all CS majors as sweaty nerds with no lives and bad hygiene.)
Lastly, it's worth noting that even in Nursing, things tend to favour the men. Based on Canada's census info (so this isn't a random sample, this is literally reporting for every working adult in Canada), men in nursing tend to make more money, even though it's a female dominated field. A good friend of mine is finishing off her Nursing degree, and she says that it's common to push men through into management positions as quickly as possible because, in part, patients are less comfortable around male nurses. Interesting that even when men are discriminated against, they come out on top.
In the end, this isn't a competition. I concern myself with this stuff because I have a mother, a sister and a wife, and my best friend is a woman; I'd like to see them get ahead in the world. I hope to have daughters one day; it's my job to make sure that they get a fair shake when they go out into the world. The minor amounts of bias that we're seeing being built into the system (trying to get 3 women into an internship, or trying to guarantee that at least 10% of enrolled students are female) rarely actually impact any men in any significant way. We need to start somewhere. If you have a good idea or think you can do better, I honestly urge you to please try. Women have come a long way, but I'd really love to never have to read any more stories like this. 180 entries and no women? How sad is that?
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Re:Is it sexist? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Is it sexist? (Score:4, Insightful)
Emphatically, yes. Nursing programs are AVIDLY trying to recruit men.
I posted an explanation of why this kind of equalizing isn't a bad thing - why what *looks* like a level playing field with open access to all is not, in fact, level nor open. I'll give the short version here: it's about the social environment.
Many men don't go into nursing because they're afraid it will make them seem less manly. Many women don't go into tech because they're afraid they'll be in a socially/emotionally desolate nerdspace. If things can be done to reduce the social anxiety that is keeping people away from jobs they'd otherwise be highly capable of doing, then that's a good thing.
And to anyone who'd say "If they can't overcome a little anxiety, fuck 'em, we don't want 'em and they obviously don't want it enough!" - it isn't a *little* anxiety - it's a LOT. For anyone who disagrees, I suggest they go do something that is usually very at odds with their typical gender roles and see just how "little" anxiety they feel. The "If they can't hack it" line tends to come from people who are fortunate enough to have their interests and the social spheres line up well enough.
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Oh I get it (Score:5, Funny)
Of Course it's Sexist (Score:5, Insightful)
What it clearly isn't, is supremacist.
Racism and sexism and all these other discriminations are perfectly acceptable, and even commendable in many cases, such as this one.
The problems these kinds of integration efforts solve are:
Not Sexist. (Score:5, Insightful)
There would also be some real practical value to figuring out why (structurally speaking) there is so little female participation.
It shouldn't start with the Summer of Code (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless, programs like this miss the point entirely. The main problem is not a lack of female applicants, its the lack of women in IT. This does not stem from a lack of funding or information - we all have access to the internet.
It stems from the basic belief that computers are a mans domain, and that even if a woman is a programmer extra-curricular activities concerning programming is taking it too far. The solution to this problem is to change peoples attitude toward technology-related sciences, not to throw money at it.
When I first showed interest in computers as a child, it was frowned upon by most of my family in a big way. Change it there, and there will be more openly geeky girl IT grads that will participate in the community without the need for extra money being thrown at them.
Irony (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, wait - I just reloaded the page and the "Chicks" tag is now gone!
Guess that means I'm not the only one who noticed...
This is appalling! (Score:4, Funny)
Just kidding! hahahah.
what they really should do is a swimsuit calendar with gorgeous models pretending to be women coders!
If I've offended female
Disneymetrics (Score:5, Funny)
As even the most basic scholar of Disney can tell you, there's almost always a ratio of one woman to every seven gnomes.
Of course, Smurfologists would argue the situation's even worse. No wonder the little buggers are blue.
'Sexist' is a strange word in this context? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a undergraduate, in 1990-1993, in addition to hearing tales of acts of substantial sexual harassment that went largely unpunished, I also got to see first hand a lot of horny nerds 'helping' the women in their classes by basically attempting to do all their work for them, as well as a few tutors spending an inordinate amount of time trying to score with students rather than teach them. While the situation has improved, the environment of 10 years ago influences the current supply of women with (for example) 12 years of experience.
So can the 'sexist' talk. Go read Stanley Fish's 'The Trouble With Principle' and see if you can still keep a straight face while pushing your abstract principles...
Personally, I suspect that the absence of women from projects like GNOME represents good sense, more than anything else. I have met many incredibly intelligent, hardworking and successful women in serious academic 'systems' research (there seem to be a number in compiler research, for some reason), but far fewer in the sort of hobbyist open source sphere. Perhaps they prefer to be formally recognized and paid properly - if you felt that there was the prospect of lingering sexism in a field, one might prefer a area where there's a solid audit trail for success (e.g. 'why did you hire a man with half the number of first-rate publications as me?') as opposed to the rather nebulous world of success in the open source world (e.g. 'I wonder why other developers didn't flock to my project?').
Re:What kind of projects? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, as long as you ignore the fact that early computer science was a traditonally mixed gender group, and before the dawn of computers came the Computers, a legion of women who sprung into action in wartime to compute firing tables for artillery.
http://www.dun-na-ngall.com/kay.html [dun-na-ngall.com]
Re:What kind of projects? (Score:5, Insightful)
All he said was that it might be worth our time to look into biological causes that draw women away from math and science. He did not say anything to the effect that women aren't as good as men. Saying that men and women might be different seems about as shocking to me as saying that, OMG, women are so much better at giving birth than men. Shocking.
If you don't believe me, read the transcript [harvard.edu] and tell me what he said that's insulting.
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Re:What kind of projects? (Score:4, Insightful)
Im tired of hearing this bullshit argument. The reason there is a vast imbalance of men vs women in math and science fields is not because of a social structure that "guides" them away from these fields. It's because they just aren't interested.
Women are more social than men. Math and Science fields many times requires no social interaction. Coding away for hours at a time alone may be interesting to a lot of guys (including me), but not women. There are of course, exceptions.
Why can't we just conclude that men and women have different goals and ambitions in life rather than trying to push everyone along the same path? On the flip-side, there is a large imbalance of men and women in the nursing and elementary school fields. I don't see many groups getting up and arms over it.
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Anecdotal Expierience (Score:4, Interesting)
In my undergraduate mathematics degree, there was just about a 50% split between men and women, and this continued throughout the duration of the course, roughly speaking. However, in the very same university, the proportion of women doing postgraduate research or learning, in the mathematics department, is only about 25%, if that. That's a big drop off.
You say the drop off is probably a result of the females in the class simply not being interested. I was in that class, and people's level of interest was totally unrelated to their gender. On top of that, the proportion of females in that very same course 10 or even 20 years ago was probably less than 10%, if there were any at all? Is it the case that somehow the female population spontaniously became more interested in mathematics in the intervening years?
The answer is probably; yes, they did become more interested. But not from some "innate" mathematical ability somehow emerging in one generation. Rather, it was as a result of changing social mores and expectations. In the 1950's, if a girl had said that she even liked mathematics, let alone wished to study it, the reaction would have been surprise and bemusment at best, and outrage and ridicule at worst. Today, such a girl is just about in the same boat as any boy who expresses an interest in mathematics.
Girls are told, from numerous sources, that "Girl's just don't do science." The message may never be overtly stated, but the irrefutable fact of its presence is a miasma that chokes the desire for science out of young girls. In the same way that someone can be encouraged to enter science via science fairs, presentations, practical work, etc; so too can someone be discouraged from entering science via uneasy support, social mores, outright skepticism, etc.
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Re:What kind of projects? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure I agree. In the UK education system, one chooses GCSEs at age 13/14. The number of science GCSEs (1, 2 or 3) you choose will control what A-levels (chosen age 15/16) you select (i.e. unless you did 2 or 3 science GCSEs you will have a lot of difficulty). And the A-levels you select will dictate what subjects you can do at university (i.e. it would be hard to get into CS without an a-level in maths, hard to get into engineering without an a-level in physics....).
If we're letting 13 year old kids (or even 15 year old kids) choose what they want to do for the rest of their lives, you can bet peer pressure is going to come into play.
I am reminded of something I read in an article some time ago. One year a group of school children were taken on a tour of a hospital. At the end of the tour, all the boys were given doctors' hats and all the girls were given nurses' hats. The parents complained to the hospital; why were the girls given hats corresponding to lower-paid, lower status jobs? The hospital promised to do things differently the next year. A year later the group toured the hospital again and, once again, the girls came home with nurses' hats and the boys with doctors' hats. The parents complained again. "We did things completely differently this year" the hospital said; "last year we gave all the girls nurses' hats and all the boys doctors' hats. This year we asked them what hat they wanted, and gave them that."
Anyway, here's my point: Demanding specialisation at a time when peer pressure is rife is an example of a social structure that could believably be keeping women away from the sciences.
Personally I think biology also plays a part, but I think it's short-sighted to discount the effects of society all together.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
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Re:What kind of projects? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What kind of projects? (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed, the article says that everybody who *applied* was male. If the ~10:1 male:female ratio in CS holds true, then they could hire 18 women and still have them be equally qualified.
Re:What kind of projects? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:What kind of projects? (Score:4, Insightful)
Think about it this way: if only three women apply at this point, all three are guaranteed to get the positions. Their combined intellect could be the equivalent of a doorknob's, and they'd still get in, but qualified men wouldn't even have a chance.
Besides, if they're confident that they can find three or more "superior" candidates, why not just put out a call for female applicants and let them compete with the men? If the women are superior, they'll win, right?
Incidentally, I'm female myself, but I hate discrimination of any sort. Giving a woman a job or a scholarship purely because she has a vagina is just as bad as giving a man that same position purely because he has a penis. Encourage all genders to apply, and let the best candidates win. Hell, I don't even have a problem with putting out a call for female applicants or even refusing to make a final decision before X women have applied, just as long as gender is ignored in the actual application evaluation process.
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Re:Is this for the benefit of the project... (Score:5, Funny)
[*]The semaphore and banana requirement also applies to women.
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Re:Is this for the benefit of the project... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:If they aren't interested... (Score:4, Interesting)
In my entire CS degree course I appear to be the only female student who will happily do a coding project on her own time. It feels like a real shame. The girls just don't seem to realise that it can be fun to sit down and scratch an itch once in a while.
Rather than offering plain old money to get more girls interested, maybe Gnome should be thinking of more interesting problems for us to get going on and saying "hey look! This isn't all that mundane or time consuming AND you earn money for it!". Once they get a few girls working on various bits of Gnome it'll be easier to keep them doing jobs.
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Re:It's the Summers principle... (Score:4, Insightful)
This may be true, but sometimes a project can benefit from another angle. Gnome really seems like its trying to be the desktop top that is accessible to everyone. By having women participate, there is a possibility that they will bring in ideas that male centric project would not have had. The truth is though, many of the female developers I know about tend to be just as shy as your average male coder.
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Re:Of course it's sexist (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's generally better to maintain some sort of gender balance than not to do so, just like I think it's better to support some sort of income/economic equality rather than having landed gentry with inherited fortunes and serfs. Of course, taking away some priveleges from the lords in my theoretical situation would be "classist," in a sense, but it would also be "good."
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Re:Of course it's sexist (Score:5, Insightful)
How many men get special seats in programs for nursing, education, etc., where the field is dominated by women? In fact, of the people who get college degrees, only 43% are men. Why doesn't this get the same attention that the lack of women in science and engineering gets?
All that we can accomplish by trying to perform gender balances is to promote mediocracy from the minority gender.
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Re:Of course it's sexist (Score:5, Informative)
The tunnel vision is the ignorance of social stigma and associated fear. Typically such programs don't reward mediocre candidates, they identify talented candidates and try to recruit them. For example a colleague of mine was originally working to become a veterinarian (a job more socially accomodating to women), but was recruited into ChemE (and had a 4.0 GPA). She was not a mediocre candidate, what she was looking for was an environment with social support, and encouragement.
How many men get special seats in programs for nursing, education, etc., where the field is dominated by women? In fact, of the people who get college degrees, only 43% are men. Why doesn't this get the same attention that the lack of women in science and engineering gets?
As others have pointed out there are similar programs for the recruitment of men into traditional female occupations such as nursing.
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Re: Of course it's sexist (Score:4, Funny)
We need a plan to help people who don't have mod points!
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Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Opportunity is complex. We're not a bunch of individuals, we're members of different overlapping social groups. We need peer acceptance. If none of our groups include anything having to do with science, we won't or can't consider it. In other words, we don't have the opportunity. Very few people strike out on their own; nobody is self-made. Everyone needs a support network. It takes a village to raise a child, etc. Reaching out across the gap like this is a good thing, it creates this opportunity that the
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, there's lots of stuff being done by nursing schools to bring in male students. Partly to address the nursing shortage, and partly to achieve gender equity (or at least get closer to it) just for the sake of doing it.
For one of my classes last semester, we were supposed to pick an area where there was a huge imbalance in gender representation and explore the causes. I picked nursing, interviewed 100+ male nurses and nursing students and asked them why they picked the field, what issues they ran into etc. - almost all of them pointed out that it was so *incredibly* dominated by women that they felt uncomfortable in the environment. Further, many expressed concerns that they'd be percieved as less masculine by those outside their profession - basically "People will think I'm gay!" By the time I'd finished my report, several of the male students hd dropped out of their programs.
For women in technology (of which I used to be one before I went back to school to study psychology), a huge issue is the "swinging dick" factor. Women and men tend to have different priorites and needs in order to be happy in a workplace - one of the big ones for many women is the social sphere. I know that, for me, the deciding factor was that I wound up feeling as if I was spending a third of my life around people I didn't particularly like, didn't find to be particularly able to have small-talk with, and generally just left me feeling pretty cut-off from the world.
(And, for anyone who says "Work is about work, not socialization, silly female!" let me just say: Men tend to also have certain needs from a workplace that seem just as silly - that whole alpha monkey/competitive thing is pretty goddamn funny and sad. Isn't work supposed to be about work, not establishing who's dick is bigger?)
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that yeah - women and men DO have (in the US, at least) the same theoretical access to whatever workplaces (with some exceptions) - but that doesn't mean that in practical terms a given professional space will be equally hospitable to both genders. Guys don't do "girl" jobs because they're afraid they'll look gay, gals don't do "boy" jobs because they they'll wind up in testosterone central. That kind of atmosphere presents a barrier to opportunity that a lot of people don't really see until they run right into it. So, from my point of view, a plan to address some of that stuff would be a good thing, regardless of the industry.
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Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
And the real reason, more staff capable of moving fat patients. As the general population gets larger, so must the carrying capacity of the average nurse.
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Re:This is terribly stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is terribly stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
And the people one finds in IT doesn't explain it all. There are more women in the Navy than in CS schools... I even think that despite their lack of women (or maybe because of it), IT departments tend to be the less sexists in most companies
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