szabgab: (Default)
Gabor Szabo ([personal profile] szabgab) wrote2009-08-21 07:16 am
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What I learned about women last week

It is not a new topic for me either but since I read the
Standing out in the crowd: OSCON keynote of [personal profile] 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.
yvi: XKCD comic: "You're flying! How" "Python!" (Python - Flying)

[personal profile] yvi 2009-08-21 06:08 am (UTC)(link)
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'.

[personal profile] afuna and [personal profile] 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: Kaylee half-smiling, looking very pretty (Default)

[personal profile] yvi 2009-08-21 06:25 am (UTC)(link)
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.