also sprach Helen Faulkner <helen@debian.org> [2005.08.29.0155 +0200]:
> Would a German speaker mind telling us roughly what that article says, and what
> it says about Debian Women?
- there's prejudice against women in software, despite all the
important female contributors in history.
- related to the "secondary position" of women in society (not being
allowed to attend universities), women were "used" as programmers,
for that task was too repetitive for men.
- sexual tension existed at workplaces, culminating e.g. in the
prohibition for women to enter the Eniac room.
- the women remained tough despite all the obstacles, writing e.g.
the first compiler (Grace Hopper), or developing languages like
Cobol, Pascal, and Basic.
- then they refer to Magni's paper and her theory that free software
developers are equivalents of the adventurers of the "rough" times
in history, when pain and (the strive for) glory were what made
a man.
- she says that diverse groups have greater chances of success, so
free software should diversify more, partly by recognising
the presence and needs of male and female users more.
- now Fernanda is quoted as seeing the main obstacle in the
communication. without it, you can't contribute to F/OSS, but when
women try to join the forums, they get objectified.
- Karin Kosina of FSF Europe says that she's tired of being hit on
when that seems to be the only logical thing to do for males even
in the context of tech talks or the like.
- She wants women not to smile or "giggle", but to take a position
and set things straight.
- then the article goes to mention hot babe. Men suggested to women
to just work pictures of naked men into the tool, but the women
didn't see why they should do work just to make the software
acceptable in the archive.
- political correctness and religion are also mentioned, with
reference to debian-bible and debian-koran and how they are
theoretically also not okay.
- Generally, the desire seems to be for the 99.6% men of the project
to show more respect and understanding for the women's position.
- The hostility by men and difficulty of the situation cause only
few women to actually do something about it.
- The article ends with the hope that more women get active in DW.
If you ask me, it's a good article, and rather objective and
factually correct.
> We should add all these into the links on the "press" page of the DW website.
My translation is very rough, and it's late. But it's herewith
released under the Artistic Licence with the additional restriction
that the sentence preceeding this one must appear somewhere close to
it. :)
--
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.''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org>
: :' : proud Debian developer and author: http://debiansystem.info
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