Re: Question to all: Outreach
On 3/18/20 10:58 AM, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> You hit a very important aspect of privilege in your mail here that I'm
> not sure you're fully conscious of. Back in 1989, me and my little
> buddies were typing BASIC in to a ZX-Spectrum so that we can play new
> games. It was great and we learned a lot considering we were just 6 and
> 7 year olds.
>
> At the same time, the girls in our street were playing with dolls
> because you know, boys are supposed to play with Lego and computers and
> girls are supposed to play with dolls and pink tea sets. At least,
> that's the rules society systemically imposed on the world. Back then if
> there were a microcomputer in the house, girls typically got very little
> time on it.
I was playing with dolls when I was a small kid, that didn't keep me from
becoming interested in computers. Several female physicists I know probably
played with dolls as well, yet they are what they are now.
> It's easy to assume that "because I did it, anyone can", but the fact is
> that if you compare boys and girls and computers, especially at our age,
> the gender gap becomes massive because of all the problems that have
> been imposed on us by the world out there.
No one is imposing anything. This is a claim that lots of people come up
with when they don't have anything to back their claims. Seeing a certain
distribution of age, gender and other social features does not mean you
already have an explanation for that distribution. On the contrary, the
fact that the gender equality paradox exists proves that this assumption
is wrong.
> And since it's not Debian's fault that the world is like this I suppose
> it's fair of people to ask "But why is this Debian's responsibility to
> solve!? Why should we commit any resources to solving this problem!?".
> Honestly, I don't think it's a problem we can solve right now, but at
> the very least, we should do whatever it takes to not be part of the
> problem, and we should take every small step we can take to be the good
> guys and help shift things toward equality.
Debian's main goal is to provide a Linux distribution. Not to make politics.
> Sure, this means that we might invest a lot of time, effort and money in
> to some individuals that end up elsewhere. Maybe a woman who started out
> with us ends up going to work for Red Hat. Maybe she comes back to
> Debian and contributes skills she learned there back here. Maybe women
> that got started with OpenSUSE outreachy initiatives end up here. I
> think that's all ok, if all organisations keep contributing, then all of
> them will eventually get some ROI out of it in terms of investing in people.
Why is it fair to support a woman in a rich first-world country but not
the poor boy in the streets of Delhi?
>> I don't think the majority of people in the FOSS community can claims that
>> they received a sponsorship early on to be able to join the community. On
>> the contrary, most people will have probably spent a fair amount of money
>> and their own leisure time to get things done, Linus Torvalds being one
>> of the most prominent ones who didn't even have the money to pay for his
>> first i386 machine in full but rather had to finance it through a loan.
>
> Linus is an exceptional person and most people who had more than him
> ended up being very mediocre. But even he had a lot going for him. He
> went to a fancy university in Europe where he got to learn Unix/Minix
> and he had his own 386. I think you're setting an unrealistically high
> expectation if you want people who have less than that to have to aim as
> high as being like Linus.
I don't think that Finland has any gender restrictions for their universities,
do they?
But I assume that this is going to derail again, so I'm staying away from
this discussion. I merely want to say that I disagree with these statements
and I'm sure I'm not the only one within Debian.
Thanks,
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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