An Open Letter to the Open Source Community

[Andy]

Hi

On 22/05/07, Melissa Draper <melissa at meldraweb.com> wrote:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-women/2007-May/000864.html

The link in the email linked above goes to a French blog post, luckily
Google does a pretty good job with it
<http://translate.google.com/translate_t>, I even took the time to
read it, despite the imperfect English used by the translation site
(looks like translation systems are getting a bit better though.).

I am assuming the objection is to the image that is behind some blokes face?
Apparently it is a cartoon women, but it's not easy to see, links in
post are dead.

> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-women/2007-March/000700.html
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-women/2007-March/000701.html

I may have to amend what I was going to say in light of the above
items, but I shall say pretty much what I was going to say. That way
you can see what an external person without insight into some of the
inner workings thinks.

This may offend some people, but then so does pretty much everything nowadays.

I am not at all surprised that there is a low number of women in Open
Source/Free Software/GNU/Linux/Ubuntu (covering everything here ;)).
The problem with Linux and to a certain extent Free software in
general is it needs a higher level of skill and knowledge to use. Yes
many of you will now yell those immortal words "Linux is user
friendly" and I agree to an extent. But installing ANY OS is not a
simple task to some people.

Many people do not know what OS they run let alone how to change it.
Neither do many of them know about open source.

So what has this to do with the number of women in Linux/FLOSS. Well
in my experience women tend to be less well educated in the field. Go
and have a look around some Universities Computing departments, look
at many of the CS courses. Notice something? The ratio of Men to Women
isn't anywhere near 1:1.

How did you guys learn about Linux? I personally learnt about it at
University and much of my course now run some flavour of Linux (mainly
Ubuntu). If women are less educated in the field then this could
account for the lower number of them in the community. Lack of
interest in computing courses may suggest that women have less of an
interest in computers, maybe we need to tackle this problem first?

That was pretty much what I was going to say when I saw Melissa's blog
post (Liferea picked it up on one of the planets).

I didn't think there was really a problem, till I read the links
Mellisa provided.

A few extracts if I may:

This actually did surprise me (maybe I am naive?):
schweingruber at pharma-traduction.ch
<https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-women/2007-March/000700.html>
wrote:
> What a surprise to
> find tonight a private mail in my inbox, asking me my age, to send pictures,
> if I had a boyfirend/husband, the usual crap!

Anyone find those last 3 words worrying? "the usual crap". I have
known this happen on (non FLOSS) IRC (back when I used IRC more). But
this is not the kind of behaviour I would expect from an Ubuntu
mailing list!!!

Why do people think that because a women speaks on a mailing list that
that instantly means they may be interested in you and you should
email then to ask their details? Do people not know this is a
broadcast system. And it is certainly not a dating website!




The real problem is that some people who take things to the extreme
tend to cause people to ignore the actual genuine concerns.

I have heard some ridiculous notions in the name of being Politically Correct.
Like: Motherboards must now be called system boards as it's sexist.
(Daughter boards should apparently be called companion boards).

How long before we can't call male and female connectors male and female?
Oh and on the subject of wiring, always remember the live side of the
connection is female (with good reason).


Note: As usual nearly forgot to send this to the list, why can't the
reply to be at least consistent across lists!

As  an end note, There is always the option of hiding you gender,
although this should not be necessary. However it is not without
precedent, it used to be common place for authors to write under
pseudonyms. However it is not a good sign if people feel they have to
hide who they are from the community they are trying to be a part of.


Andy
-- 
First they ignore you
then they laugh at you
then they fight you
then you win.
- Mohandas Gandhi