Re: Just a single Question for the Candidates
> > I have never had a hostile experience with debian, but I still feel
> > really unconfident when I interact with the debian community, even
> > if it's only posting a bug report. I don't understand why this is
> > so, but it's very real. Partly it's knowing that I'm going to be
> > dealing with a man (almost certainly), and he may assume I don't
> > know what I'm doing, and he may put me down or be condescending or
> > unkind as a result.
>
Helen I hope you don't take this the wrong way but the problem isn't that
you're a woman or nearly all Debian developers are male. The problem is
you are a flake. (No that wasn't an attempt to put you down or be
unkind. It's simply the most accurate word I can think of. If
anyone knows a proper psychological term for what I'm describing I'll
use that.) Vague fears of persecution are a sign of mental
instability which can't be fixed by an operating system free or otherwise.
I don't think is a particularly female problem either. I maintain
the webmin web-based system administration tool which caters mainly to
newbies and I notice a lot of men who are hesitant to interact for fear of
being laughed at. Neither do I think it is cultural. My wife (like me) comes
from a highly traditionalist strict gender role based culture but that
hasn't stopped her from being a vi/ksh/elm-using unixhead who when we met
was working with AIX graphic card driver developers at IBM. There does
seem to be a divide between the hacker mentality and that of normal
people. I've tried to get my wife involved in Debian but at the end of
the day she likes to put the computer away instead of obsessing over it
every waking minute like me. But I don't see what Debian can do about this.
Either you are a hacker or you're not. Asking a totally hackerish
community to act differently is just going to end in tears.
--
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>
La Salle Debain - http://www.braincells.com/debian/
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