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

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.