GNOME Reaches Out to Women 672
Dominic Hargreaves writes "This year GNOME received 181
applications to Google's Summer
of Code program, yet none were from women. As a result, they've
decided to address this imbalance by launching an outreach program to
sponsor three female students to work on GNOME-related projects this
summer." Most any science department will tell you that the amount of interest and involvement of women pales next to men of similar age and background. Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?
The Edge Debate (Score:3, Informative)
PINKER VS. SPELKE
A DEBATE
The above debate hosted at Edge is now a bit dated but it does a good job of looking at gender and science. Our patriarchical history in the west has given us science as envisioned by men like Sir Francis Bacon [wikipedia.org]. It led to a reductionist deterministic heritage that we've only recently begun to break free of. Women in general in the west are only a century or more free of being chattles to be disposed of by their fathers. I hope we'll see women bring to science a different mind set and new insights.
just my loose change
Re:Of course it's sexist (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is it sexist? (Score:5, Informative)
Computing Science wasn't very popular back in the day; it wasn't a 'serious' subject. That meant it was okay for women to participate. As soon as it started to get more prestigious, fewer women were involved. Hmm. Fortunately, I think that particular reason has worn off over the years; popularity isn't the barrier that it used to be.
I examined the dearth of female CS students at my University and talked to one of my professors. She had been keeping track of the numbers for years, and it turned out that while ALL sciences had seen increased enrolment -- including pure mathematics -- CS enrolment for women was down every year. It's not too hard or too technical or too 'science-y', so what's doing it? (I still don't know, incidentally -- I think it has something to do with the image of all CS majors as sweaty nerds with no lives and bad hygiene.)
Lastly, it's worth noting that even in Nursing, things tend to favour the men. Based on Canada's census info (so this isn't a random sample, this is literally reporting for every working adult in Canada), men in nursing tend to make more money, even though it's a female dominated field. A good friend of mine is finishing off her Nursing degree, and she says that it's common to push men through into management positions as quickly as possible because, in part, patients are less comfortable around male nurses. Interesting that even when men are discriminated against, they come out on top.
In the end, this isn't a competition. I concern myself with this stuff because I have a mother, a sister and a wife, and my best friend is a woman; I'd like to see them get ahead in the world. I hope to have daughters one day; it's my job to make sure that they get a fair shake when they go out into the world. The minor amounts of bias that we're seeing being built into the system (trying to get 3 women into an internship, or trying to guarantee that at least 10% of enrolled students are female) rarely actually impact any men in any significant way. We need to start somewhere. If you have a good idea or think you can do better, I honestly urge you to please try. Women have come a long way, but I'd really love to never have to read any more stories like this. 180 entries and no women? How sad is that?
Women (Score:3, Informative)
There's nothing like an outdated stereotype... (from U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, via here)
I would say the former. When you get a women far less interested than their representation in the field, its an indication that its quite likely that your existing visibility is skewed, and that you are missing exposure to a substantial portion of the talent pool.
Women into Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Women and Linux - My Experience (Score:2, Informative)
Withstand definition
1. To oppose with force or resolution.
2. To be successful in resisting.
To resist or endure successfully
Re:Women and Linux - My Experience & My Sister (Score:2, Informative)
I have and idea this time. I strongly resist to open a terminal while she was watching, and never ever let her see what i am doing there and did all my favorite terminal based task for her system remotely from my own system. And with an hour of teaching she started to play with the system and found many interesting features herself and is really impressed with it. This time with no fear from that black page, maybe she like it and will stay with it!.
It seems she liked it when there is no terminal around any more.
Re:Of course it's sexist (Score:5, Informative)
The tunnel vision is the ignorance of social stigma and associated fear. Typically such programs don't reward mediocre candidates, they identify talented candidates and try to recruit them. For example a colleague of mine was originally working to become a veterinarian (a job more socially accomodating to women), but was recruited into ChemE (and had a 4.0 GPA). She was not a mediocre candidate, what she was looking for was an environment with social support, and encouragement.
How many men get special seats in programs for nursing, education, etc., where the field is dominated by women? In fact, of the people who get college degrees, only 43% are men. Why doesn't this get the same attention that the lack of women in science and engineering gets?
As others have pointed out there are similar programs for the recruitment of men into traditional female occupations such as nursing.
Re:Of course it's sexist (Score:3, Informative)
The University of Washington was considering incentives to draw more men into teaching recently - last year or the year before that - but withdrew the plan when certain groups protested the idea.
It is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out which groups those were (hint: the obvious ones).
Re:Of course it's sexist (Score:3, Informative)
Predictably, the feminazis kicked up a storm declaring it to be all manner of evil and sexist until a compromise was reached. The organisation was forced to offer half the scholarships to women.
Yes that is right, a program that was intended to increase the numbers of men in primary schools was virtually forced to subsidise the entry of more women into the field.
Re:Is this for the benefit of the project... (Score:1, Informative)
RMS comes to the rescue [lwn.net]. Call it "free software" and women will rush giving a hand.
Sex differences are very real indeed (Score:2, Informative)
There is such research, of course, and it mostly falls into a few broad categories:
- Gender "science". Gender science presupposes biological factors are irrelevant as a matter of doctrine.
- Sociology of various stripes. Rarely uses biological controls of any kind. No standardized or generally accepted methodology exists.
In short, the research you are referring to is pretty close to worthless. It is also often obviously driven by a certain (egalitarian)utopian ideological mindset, that is aggressively intolerant of any dissent from the party line whatsoever.
Unfortunately for these "sciences", real science in the biological fields is constantly pushing back the veil of ignorance that psuedoscience has been hiding behind. There is a plentora of articles discussing the phonomena - here is one:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00018E
Re:Women and Linux - My Experience (Score:2, Informative)
What I hate most about some people, is when they talk about women as if they all had IQ of a stereotypical "dumb blond", and that is just plane sexist, and racist, too. Cause it seems to exclude all black women. And guess what, I see even less of those here working and studying science and engineering then blonds. And I doubt it's because they are less smart, it's because nobody EXPECTS them to do anything like this when they are kids, and that affects a person's abilities and desires to perform so much! So instead of arguing that "Linux is too hard" you should open your eyes to the reality: this superiority complex that some individuals have, it has spread to the entire society, which believes that every person has intellect predetermined by their sex/race/fatness/etc.
Just stop this BS.
Re:Who cares? (Score:2, Informative)