[UbuntuWomen] On becoming an Ubuntu Member

[vid]

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 10:03, Jonathan Niehof <jtniehof at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been on work travel and chewing on this (thus the lag). On the
> spectrum of "Women will have to solve their own problems" to "Let the
> men fix it for you," I feel I erred a bit much toward the latter, and
> my apologies. (Balance: it's difficult.) I still see a sheer numbers

True, numbers make all the difference and yet not for a whole host of
reasons. Generalising on the basis of gender is tricky as each
individual has unique thoughts, experiences and priorities which form
the basis of their actions, thus cognitive bias. Finding a convergence
point/balance turns harder when the dynamics of a community is
constantly changing -- in terms of language, culture, nations,
experiences, etc..

As opposed to "men fixing it" I'd approach the knotty bits with
"community awareness" via listening and empathy, thereby resulting in
community action. The latter may or not always fit into our perception
of how things should be but that is why we need spaces where
communication (more of listening actually :)) happens.


> I wasn't thinking of a "loud discussion of bad behavior." "Open
> letter" was a poor choice of words since they've typically been
> written for specified complaints. The thought was a basic "why?"
> document, i.e.: there are certain barriers to entry for women, these

For the most part, despite many suggestions to openly 'out' jerks, I'm
usually not comfortable with etching out every transgression on public
forums but recently, on a women-only list, when I listed out all the
negative experiences over the years, it helped me realise that
"silence" was not a good choice personally.

I'd echo some thoughts from these two blogs :
http://annaraven.blogspot.com/2009/08/status-expectations-and-gender.html
http://naramore.net/blog/gender-in-it-oss-php-and-how-it-affects-us-all-1

Python's diversity wikipage [
http://wiki.python.org/moin/DiversityInPython ] has links which spans
beyond gender into diversity. Not everything there is etched in stone
but they do help tackling unconscious cognitive biases, if not
introducing us to another person's perspective.

-- 
|| vid | http://svaksha.com ||