Manoj Srivastava wrote:
On Thu, 4 Mar 2004 00:22:14 -0500 (EST), Jaldhar H Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org> said:Yes I do. Or rather I think it could be. As anecdotal evidence mine is as good as yours. Let me ask you then, how would you go about setting up an experiment to test the hypothesis that Debian is scary to women?OK. Last I heard, irc.debian.org #debian is a project resource. Here is an example of how women are treated in Debian; and helix tells me that this is how they are treated all the time (dismayingly enough, I got responses that ranged the spectrum from "boyz ill be boyz", "But .. he apologized and all", "You should not make trouble for some one who actually apologized", "well, it was just a joke, and then helix over reacted. There are problems on both sides" [blaming the victim, heh heh]).
Pretty much everyone would agree that "tam" is a moron. Period.The problem is that IRC is not exactly the most friendly place and personally I never even go to #debian (#debian-devel seems much more profesional ;).
The bottom line is that problems here are larger than can be dealt by just the DPL (original question was to the candidates, right?); everyone has to get involved and even then we might not see any immediate change in the number of women joining the project. And discrimination is not limitted to men - there are barriers in other fields for men like ballet in US/Canada (I am not talking about the professional level here, but the ballet introductory/intermediate classes).
Let's face it; women in the OSS community, especially in the western world, are pioneers. There are advantages *and* disadvantages that come with that title. Sexism *will* occur and it is up to all of us, not just the DPL, to make sure that such behaviour will not go unnoticed.
- Adam