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 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.

multilingual children

Hmm, I guess I am reading too much about motherhood and stuff as I started to remember that once I was very interested in the topic of multilingual children. I subscribed to a mailing list where people discussed difficulties and how they manage it. I even bought a book or two about the subject.

I think this helped a lot and my son now has both a Hebrew mother-tongue and a partial Hungarian father-tongue, so to speak. Unfortunately my daughter quite refuses to speak in Hungarian. She does not even want me to tell her stories in Hungarian.

Anyway I searched for multilingual and surprisingly only found one other person listing it as an interest.