Ten Easy Ways to Attract Women to Your Free Software Project?
I am a little to sick with a cold now to say anything substantive. I agree in spirit with a lot of what the author says though I still think that part of the problem emerges way before the free software project. I still want to know, in other words, why girls/women are not hacking away at a younger age, which puts them at a disadvantage when and if they decided to join a project.
Also, though the author as an important caveat in one of his footnotes:
[10] Throughout this article I make a lot of generalizations about how “men” and “women” behave. Obviously men and women are not monolithic groups, and there’s a lot of variation, so this is just short hand. There are some important differences that apply in the real world, though, whether because of nature or nurture. Indeed, in writing this article, I have taken the assumption that many of the issues are really just manifestations of lifestyle differences, and it’s largely because of lifestyle issues that I feel I can identify with many of the problems that women face when dealing with “hacker culture” in general and “free software” in particular.
I am still more than a little bothered by the essentialized portrayal of females/males and the concomicant technlogical determinism as well.
Thoughts?
I totally disagree with the ten ways they propose. There are some of them that I don’t consider gender-related at all. Like “Use forums instead of mailing lists”, why? what’s the rationale behind that apart from the author’s intuition? I personally wouldn’t join a project without a mailing list. Some other points seem to be right but both for males and females, so I don’t understand why they’re mentioned at all in this context (“Use flat conversation rather than deep-threads”, “As much as possible, use wikis instead of version controlled archives”). Some other just don’t make sense and are totally dependent on the project desing, not on the gender of the developers (“Use very-high-level languages”, “Follow “extreme programming” ideas”). Why very-high-level languages, btw? There’s nothing gender-related in that.
My personal opinion is that the article you mention is nonsense, and based un the author’s intuition (which seems to be different than mine), and not in actual facts. I don’t think any project would be able to attract more women at all with some of those points.
Miry
Comment by Miriam Ruiz — September 24, 2008 @ 11:28 pm
I can understand your worries about this generalizations. In fact this generalizations lead to effects like women and girls thinking about software as “men activities”.
The goal should be to remove this stereotypes and allow everybody to move in the direction they want. Regardless of the sex of the person.
But this goal is hard to achieve, so short term solutions might be good ideas.
But only if they also try to explain the underlying problem.
Comment by stefon — September 24, 2008 @ 11:32 pm
[...] Biella, [...]
Pingback by that’s my stapler - women and free software — September 25, 2008 @ 2:08 am
[...] to commit to electrons, so I’m not going to spout off on it. Instead, I refer you to Biella, who recently linked an article with the (tawdry) title, “Ten easy ways to attract women to [...]
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