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]

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

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?

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.