Comment Some thoughts on female geeks/programmers/hackers (Score 1) 343
As a female who is a programmer, and who is
involved in the open source/free software/geek
community on a day to day basis, I have to say
I'm getting kind of sick of seeing the same
things over and over again. One of the things
I see most often is ill-conceived affirmative
action intended to encourage women into technical
fields, often doing more harm than good. I mention this because I think CMU's
efforts in this case are *not* ill-conceived and
I want to make it clear that I'm not just saying
that because I'm female yada yada yada. As far
as I can tell from the very short and shallow
article, CMU seem to be doing the right things.
They're not setting arbitrary quotas, they're
just getting out there and selling the course in
places where women happen to be listening. They're not changing to course to fit the women,
but rather are pointing out the applicability of
the subject matter to a wide range of fields
(many of which just happen to appeal more to women). So it will be interesting to see how it
all turns out. I suppose it's unlikely that
they'll post followup stories, though :(
If anyone's interested, there's an article I wrote
a few weeks ago which you can read at
http://netizen.com.au/~skud/articles/c hick2/
about female geeks, how to encourage them, and
whether we actually want more of them in the
Open Source/Free Software community.
K.
involved in the open source/free software/geek
community on a day to day basis, I have to say
I'm getting kind of sick of seeing the same
things over and over again. One of the things
I see most often is ill-conceived affirmative
action intended to encourage women into technical
fields, often doing more harm than good. I mention this because I think CMU's
efforts in this case are *not* ill-conceived and
I want to make it clear that I'm not just saying
that because I'm female yada yada yada. As far
as I can tell from the very short and shallow
article, CMU seem to be doing the right things.
They're not setting arbitrary quotas, they're
just getting out there and selling the course in
places where women happen to be listening. They're not changing to course to fit the women,
but rather are pointing out the applicability of
the subject matter to a wide range of fields
(many of which just happen to appeal more to women). So it will be interesting to see how it
all turns out. I suppose it's unlikely that
they'll post followup stories, though
If anyone's interested, there's an article I wrote
a few weeks ago which you can read at
http://netizen.com.au/~skud/articles/c hick2/
about female geeks, how to encourage them, and
whether we actually want more of them in the
Open Source/Free Software community.
K.
