What I learned about women last week

[szabgab]

It is not a new topic for me either but since I read the
Standing out in the crowd: OSCON keynote of damned_colonial about the lack of women in the open source world I tried to do some little things. Primarily I tried to talk to a few women about it.

I probably grossly misunderstood everyone, so let me just write down what did I understand:

Last week I had a chat with Su-Shee whom I guess I can describe as a geek woman that started off on how to attract more women to the Padre project. The main point I got from that conversation was that women are less interested in the technology behind the thing (e.g. they don't care much if it is written in Perl, Python or Java) and are more interested in how can a tool help them to get their job done.

This was more or less confirmed by my wife who is a super anti-geek.

On the other hand in the last 7 days or so I looked around DreamWidth in an attempt to locate interesting posts and people. Most of the people I found seem to be women - based on either their self description in their profile or on some of the comments they make. They are involved in conversations which are interesting but none of which seem to have any connection to getting things done.

That just seems sooo contradicting to me.

Based on this sample I can easily generalize to the rest of the 3+ billion women and say that I still have no clue what would interest (or allow) more women to join open source projects in general and Padre in specific and what could I do to help that.

Maybe most importantly what can I do to make the life of my daughter easier?

So for now back reading about Geekfeminism.

Comments

[yvi]

They are involved in conversations which are interesting but none of which seem to have any connection to getting things done.

What do you mean with that? I need to update that list for August, but I am a pretty active Dreamwidth developer. I am also a Bioinformatician and have worked for my university's IT for two years. I think that counts as 'getting things done'.

afuna and kareila are two of the most active Dreamwidth developers.

[And if I wasn't a Python person that only uses Perl to code for Dreamwidth, I might be interested in your project. But Perl is... not my language of choice]

[yvi]

And I am not sure whetehr I just proved your point of e.g. they don't care much if it is written in Perl, Python or Java. I can program in about 5 languages, and I vastly prefer Python. I just don't mind too much if I have to use another one. Then again, neither does my boyfriend, who is at the moment using Java, Perl, and python for three separate projects.

posts vs actually doing

[szabgab]

I did not mean you don't actually do. Hell, from the little I saw I can tell you do a lot.

I was talking about the journal posts. It seems to me that most of the posts are about none-work related stuff.

Going over your recent posts again it seem you are probably more on the side of work related posts than what I felt to be the average around here. With a stretch we could even count the knitting related posts in this as you will certainly get advice from other knitters. So in a way it relates to thing to do.

Of course this is only my view of the subjects, you might see them in a totally different light and as I wrote I might have totally misunderstood what Su-shee meant "getting things done".

Again, just to emphasize it. I am not trying to judge the posts or say it is bad. In a way I envy you that you dare to talk about other things and in fact one of my reasons to join DW was to find out if in this community I can do that too. I am just making observations in my own subjective way.

[yeah, I realized that you probably prefer python over perl]

ps. and thanks for commenting and asking for clarification

Re: posts vs actually doing

[yvi]

I was talking about the journal posts. It seems to me that most of the posts are about none-work related stuff.

Ah, I see what you mean. Soeaking for me, I talk a lot about development stuff in IRC, so I don't feel the need to post about it in my journal. It's mostly for writing down various stuff and oftentimes, I will go through phases. For example, right now I have a new hobby, knitting, which I post about. Before that, it was me starting to get involved with DW, before that fandom.

I have thought about starting a science and Atheism blog, but I am never sure whether I can actually blog about something consistently. At the very least, I need a place where I can write down random stuff without feeling like I am off-topic in my own journal.

Oh, and I think I just misunderstood your sentence: They are involved in conversations which are interesting but none of which seem to have any connection to getting things done.

In my non-native speaker, early-morning brain, I somehow thought 'none of which' referred to 'They' and not to 'conversations'. Ouups. Now I get what you meant.

Of course this is only my view of the subjects, you might see them in a totally different light and as I wrote I might have totally misunderstood what Su-shee meant "getting things done".

Well, for me, programming certainly is mostly a tool for getting things done, although I *do* enjoy the process of programming very much - the seeing the problem, breaking it down and then solving it things. But I can never be sure how much of that might be a gender thing, of course :)

Re: posts vs actually doing

[szabgab]

Oh, and I think I just misunderstood your sentence: They are involved in conversations which are interesting but none of which seem to have any connection to getting things done.

In my non-native speaker, early-morning brain, I somehow thought 'none of which' referred to 'They' and not to 'conversations'. Ouups. Now I get what you meant.


Yeah, now I understand why you might have been upset by my post. Thanks for not leaving it with that.

Re: posts vs actually doing

[yvi]

Heh, no worries :). I hope I didn't come across as aggressive.

Re: posts vs actually doing

[chichiri]

In my case, part of the reason I say very little about work is my employer is a bit paranoid about trade secrets getting out. I do occasionally post about work, but the posts are mostly devoid of any technical details and center around "office politics" more, plus they are always locked.

The other reason is people at my company can very easily get consumed so they work way way way too many hours and pretty much have no life outside of work. To keep myself from getting pulled into that sort of lifestyle I try to keep work and "life at home", which includes my dreamwidth account, segregated for the most part.

Of course, I do fit the mold of "women are less interested in the technology behind the thing (e.g. they don't care much if it is written in Perl, Python or Java) and are more interested in how can a tool help them to get their job done" in that programming to me is typically a means to an end but in my defense I'm not a programmer by trade - my work in another area of technology instead. However, I do find joy in writing scripts at work, not only because of what they let me do, but because of the improved efficiency and the instant gratification of seeing it work right away.

Re: posts vs actually doing

[szabgab]

It might be difficult to find the balance between giving away trade secrets and giving up on community support especially as managers tend to be on the more afraid side.

I think so far I managed to participate in discussions and ask for help showing code snippets that were stripped from any indication of where they are from (so not to give away information) and without any code specific to that business. This saved a lot of time to me an a lot of money to the clients so I can even explain to managers why it is in their best interest to let me talk about that in public.

Sometimes they even agree :-)

Re: posts vs actually doing

[chichiri]

Probably my scripts are not very good to share, though, even if I remove the company-secret information. Generally I use them to compile and parse data files so I can generate graphs in a statistical analysis program, lol. Or I use them to delete old data files so computer hard disks don't fill up. Things like that.

Re: posts vs actually doing

[szabgab]

I meant in case you have a question. For a starter at least.

it was not my point but yeah

[szabgab]

It was not my point - I am just echoing it and trying to understand if it is really the case - but yeah, this is just another data point in that direction. (quickly negated by your boyfriend :)

I wonder if it is only men who make religious language wars and if so is it because they being 98.5% in the OS community or because they like to pick fights?

Re: it was not my point but yeah

[yvi]

I wonder if it is only men who make religious language wars and if so is it because they being 98.5% in the OS community or because they like to pick fights?

I *think* it's the latter, but I don't feel comfortable making that judgmental, as I don't really particiape - maybe a bit in the Linux/Windows debate, but only face-to-face with people I know.

It think it plays very much into the 'my local sports team is better' mentality - you defend what you know again the outside.

[And, for your information and because I know it's not intuitive for someone coming from different platform - if you use the 'reply' button directly on my comment, I get a shiny e-mail that tells me you commented :)]

mail notifications

[szabgab]

I get them too :-)

still it feels like you are answering even before I posted the comment.

[cesy]

A lot of the conversations on Dreamwidth aren't about getting things done - I heard it described recently as being like the office water-cooler - this is where we have casual chats in between work. Sometimes it drifts into chats about work, and some communities are more work-oriented than others, (e.g. dw_dev, dw_wiki and dw_suggestions) but the actual work (whether docs, support or coding) tends to go on behind the scenes - in the other IRC channels, in PMs and emails, in internal comments on support requests, and in Bugzilla.