Re: new member presentation
2008/11/3 Anne Ghisla Insubriae <a.ghisla@gmail.com>:
> hi all!
>
> after reading Linda's presentation and the following thread, I agree with
> you about keeping this list alive.
> My Linux story started three years ago at university thanks to a friend,
> Clara, who installed Debian on my laptop. Then I dropped it for Ubuntu,
> because I felt too dummy. Now I decided turning back to Debian and
> subscribed to this list among others.
I think we could discuss women and their own perception of their
capabilities, and the fact that society largely still encourages them
to perceive themselves in such a light, etc etc.
Okay some people are technophobes or just hopeless with any technology
be it car, bike or computer whereas others are completely at home with
technology and science.
I don't think there is a gender bias in the skill - the bias comes
about where society expects women to be inept and men to be capable -
and by society I don't necessarily mean
politicians or leading feminist thinkers - although they may have an
effect By society I mean school, parents, family, friends and
associates who think it might be really bad if a 6 year
old is bought mecaano set for no other reason than she is female and
she should make do with a Cindy doll just like they did.
Some children are typical of their gender and some aren't - it works
both ways. I believe computing to be one area where the intellect is
the deciding factor, not physical strength, and there is no reason why
women cannot do as well as men in it if they have the capability. But
take a look at the UKUUG conference in Manchester UK this weekend -
not one female speaker there.
Anyway I started with SuSE back in 1999 in the winmodem dial up days
and moved to Debian some years ago. Until the beginning of October I
had a OpenBSD firewall with one Debian box hanging off it and a dead
OB box waiting for me to kick it back into life - all in store atm.
Currently using a doze box but mercifully able to ssh into my Debian
VM to keep me sane and looking at buying a portable drive to have as
my substitute Linux boxen.
I found SuSE better at exploiting technology - graphics cards etc -
and therefore producing a better screen than previous releases of
Debian stable. Have yet to run Debian unstable in any meaningful way.
Regards
L.
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