Duncan, Thu, 5 Aug 2010 06:06:59 +0000 (UTC): > walt posted on Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:12:20 -0700 as excerpted: > > >> to > >> prevent the otherwise female assumption. Could/will that some day > >> happen to computer coding? I don't know. > > > > It's already happening. I tune in occasionally to the video streams > > from M$ and Sun/Oracle and Adobe to listen to the geek-talk, and the > > number of women participants keeps climbing as the years go by. > > One of the topics of discussion (and alarm, in some quarters, from both > sides) in the FLOSS community (various talks at conferences, articles on > LWN and the like) has been the fact that while women /do/ seem to be > getting more common on the proprietary side, it doesn't seem to be > happening to anything like the same degree on the FLOSS side.
Could it be, partly, due to a greater representation of not-so-technical but professional-level roles in the proprietary (and therefore commercial) software development? Consider marketers, translators, etc. (...) > I'm honestly not sure on this one. It's worth noting, however, that the > gender ratio of engineers and the like is far more even in societies such > as those of the former Eastern bloc, Russia and the like. Yes, that's true. I think that one of the key factors that played important role in this fact was Communist social engineering with the ultimate goal of creating a technical, industry & labor oriented society together with a significantly lowered role of the intelligentsia with traditional (classical) education in humanities. So from the 50's on, science and technology went ahead, together with pushing "new socialist women" from their traditional housekeeping to work. Thus there are many female engineers on the Eastern labor markets nowadays. > Their share of > the FLOSS community is lower as well, tho that may have to do as much > with opportunity in a formerly closed society as it does with recognition/ > monetary compensation priorities. Well, I live in one such former Eastern bloc country and I can't agree with you here. Why do you think that "their share of the FLOSS community is lower"? I'm pretty sure that their share is as high as it is with people from other developed regions of the world. There are tons of Eastern European engineers contributing to and working with FLOSS software, many of them work on FLOSS software projects as employees of such companies like Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, IBM, HP, etc. etc., as well as of many purely proprietary oriented companies that too have their offices in Eastern Europe for many years. Sure, since many FLOSS projects are strictly English, you can't see every one of them communicating upstream, but even if their English skills may be rather limited, they do exist nevertheless. :-) (...) > I look forward to the day when if someone makes a remark like that in a > presentation, RMS or no RMS, half the room (more, it'd be great if it > were the entire audience, but there's always the few) gets up as if one > body and walks out, end of presentation, beginning of message that such > behavior will NOT be tolerated. You know what I found more interesting about this RMS "joke" is that to make fun of women is strictly no-no due to feminism being more or less part of the Western culture nowadays, but to banter on religion (or Roman Catholicism and Virgin Mary, to be specific) seems to be much, much more broadly acceptable in (technical or not) society. I see this as a clear example of double standard. And no, I don't intend to defend RMS or anyone else being offensive to women in audience. Evidently, women have already found their defenders and advocates in technical community, but hey, where are the ones for Catholics? (And possibly for some other groups appreciably underrepresented in public advocacy.) Best, Petr Kovar _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
