Re: Fwd: (Debian's Two Choices) The influx of women and the outflux of men. The end of debian as a distro and it's emergance as a women's rights pulpit.
On Sun, Jun 11, 2006 at 10:44:03PM +0200, annabelle tully wrote:
> I also think that a seperate group for women is sexist and a bad idea.
You make that assertion, but you don't really back it up in a general
manner (as opposed to it just being based on your personal experience).
So I thought the easiest way to discuss this might be to start with a
logical progression that leads to the existence of debian-women, and
then you can point out which bits you disagree with.
1) Women in computing often feel that they are subject to sexist
behaviour (I think this point is pretty difficult to argue against)
a) Being the target of sexism tends to reduce the degree of enjoyment
that people obtain from an activity. If people don't enjoy doing it,
they're less likely to do it.
b) A group made mostly made up of women is less likely to engage in
sexist behaviour against women
2) There are not many strong female role models in open source
computing.
a) Increasing the number of female role models is likely to increase
the number of women in open source computing
b) But increasing the number of female role models in open source
computing is likely to require increasing the number of women in
open source computing
3) Reducing sexism-linked discouragement is likely to increase the
number of women in open source computing
a) So from 1(b) above, we would expect a group mostly made up of women
to increase the number of women in open source computing
b) In turn potentially leading to an increase in the number of female
role models and a corresponding increase in women in open source
computing
The logical conclusion would seem to be that an organisation like
debian-women is a good thing. Of course, this ignores some fringe
effects. Your argument against d-w appears to concentrate on d-w helping
to enforce the stereotype of women as lacking technical ability,
resulting in d-w actually *increasing* the problem described in point
(1).
Using that as an argument for disbanding d-w isn't terribly convincing.
Firstly, if we are to increase the number of women in open source
computing, problem (1a) needs to be solved somehow. d-w is one way of
doing so. The other would be to remove the sexist behaviour in the first
place. That's rather more ambitious. We can't simply throw people out of
Debian (or, indeed, open source as a whole) for engaging in low-grade
sexism. There's no community will to do that. The best way to achieve
this goal is probably to change the community - and, realistically
speaking, that probably involves getting more women involved. And so
unless you invoke (1b), you have something of a chicken and egg problem.
But more importantly, it's an impression that's *false*. Many of the
participants in d-w are active in technical aspects of the project.
Several are in the new maintainer queue. We have more women involved in
Debian than we've ever had before. So it's a problem if d-w gives the
impression of being a bunch of people uninterested in doing anything
technical. Certainly, getting rid of the project would be one way of
solving that. Alternatively, we could fix the impression that people get
in order to ensure that it reflects reality.
So, as someone who's observed this impression, it would be really
helpful if you could tell us what gave you that impression and what
could be done to rectify it. Lists of maintained packages? Interviews?
Daily emails with bugs closed by women? Seriously, communicating the
goals of d-w with the rest of the project is important and I'm sure that
nobody is happy with people getting the wrong idea.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org
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