[Pan-users] Re: updated info

[Petr Kovar]

Duncan, Thu, 5 Aug 2010 06:06:59 +0000 (UTC):

> walt posted on Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:12:20 -0700 as excerpted:
> 
> >> to
> >> prevent the otherwise female assumption.  Could/will that some day
> >> happen to computer coding?  I don't know.
> > 
> > It's already happening.  I tune in occasionally to the video streams
> > from M$ and Sun/Oracle and Adobe to listen to the geek-talk, and the
> > number of women participants keeps climbing as the years go by.
> 
> One of the topics of discussion (and alarm, in some quarters, from both 
> sides) in the FLOSS community (various talks at conferences, articles on 
> LWN and the like) has been the fact that while women /do/ seem to be 
> getting more common on the proprietary side, it doesn't seem to be 
> happening to anything like the same degree on the FLOSS side.

Could it be, partly, due to a greater representation of not-so-technical
but professional-level roles in the proprietary (and therefore commercial)
software development? Consider marketers, translators, etc.

(...)

> I'm honestly not sure on this one.  It's worth noting, however, that the 
> gender ratio of engineers and the like is far more even in societies such 
> as those of the former Eastern bloc, Russia and the like.  

Yes, that's true. I think that one of the key factors that played important
role in this fact was Communist social engineering with the ultimate goal
of creating a technical, industry & labor oriented society together with a
significantly lowered role of the intelligentsia with traditional
(classical) education in humanities.

So from the 50's on, science and technology went ahead, together with
pushing "new socialist women" from their traditional housekeeping to work.
Thus there are many female engineers on the Eastern labor markets nowadays.

> Their share of 
> the FLOSS community is lower as well, tho that may have to do as much
> with opportunity in a formerly closed society as it does with recognition/
> monetary compensation priorities.  

Well, I live in one such former Eastern bloc country and I can't agree with
you here. Why do you think that "their share of the FLOSS community is
lower"? I'm pretty sure that their share is as high as it is with people
from other developed regions of the world.

There are tons of Eastern European engineers contributing to and working
with FLOSS software, many of them work on FLOSS software projects as
employees of such companies like Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, IBM, HP, etc.
etc., as well as of many purely proprietary oriented companies that too
have their offices in Eastern Europe for many years.

Sure, since many FLOSS projects are strictly English, you can't see every
one of them communicating upstream, but even if their English skills may
be rather limited, they do exist nevertheless. :-)

(...)

> I look forward to the day when if someone makes a remark like that in a 
> presentation, RMS or no RMS, half the room (more, it'd be great if it
> were the entire audience, but there's always the few) gets up as if one
> body and walks out, end of presentation, beginning of message that such 
> behavior will NOT be tolerated.

You know what I found more interesting about this RMS "joke" is that to make
fun of women is strictly no-no due to feminism being more or less part of
the Western culture nowadays, but to banter on religion (or Roman
Catholicism and Virgin Mary, to be specific) seems to be much, much more
broadly acceptable in (technical or not) society. I see this as a clear
example of double standard.

And no, I don't intend to defend RMS or anyone else being offensive to
women in audience. Evidently, women have already found their defenders and
advocates in technical community, but hey, where are the ones for
Catholics? (And possibly for some other groups appreciably underrepresented
in public advocacy.)

Best,
Petr Kovar