What GNOME's Women Outreach Program Is Paying For This Summer

[anda_skoa]

This is easy!

1. It encourages those that would not normally be qualified to sign up.

Even if that were true, it wouldn't matter, since there is a selection process. Applying for the internship is just the first step, there are many more applicants than internship slots.
Qualification is still the key for being successfully selected.

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

If you want to invite friends and family to contribute and demonstrate that it is more effective, that would be acceptable. Outreach efforts aren't limited to only one way a single project does things.

Indeed!

And GNOME is not just participating in this one single outreach effort, they are also part of Google Summer of Code, Google Code-In, etc.
Yet no one or only very few people seem to have a problem with those other outreach programs or their applicant selection criteria.

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

Is there a single woman partecipating to this thread? Just curious.

You are kidding, right?
Do you expect any woman participating in this thread, given the extreme hostility, to make herself a target for directed hostility?

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

Either they learn How to handle that reality or they don't.

I think you are misinterpreting the circumstances.

Anyone at a conference should be able to reply on a certain degree of professionalism and respect.
Those who fail to show even this minimum of human behavior should be the ones to learn to handle the reality that this is a required precondition to attend.

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

Wow, if you're going to start an outreach program for women you could at least not insult them with such crappy meanial tasks.

Probably a misconception on how the program works.

The participating organisations to not hand out fixed assignments to randomly selected interns.

Those competing for the internship slots are applying with proposals of what they would work on and the organsations then choose depending on their needs.

Cheers,
_

[F i L]

So if you are going to claim that the current gender imbalance is due to biology rather than the known discrimnation and cultural attitudes, then the burden of proof is on you to do that.

No it isn't. It's always on the person making the claim, and in this case that claim not some offshoot of your strawman, it's "we need more women in IT because ...". I don't work for Cosmopolitan, and that may be due to both biological and cultural reasons, but at the end of the day that makes little difference because we don't need a equal ratio of men-to-women working in the magazine industry to get shit done. Same with IT. No, especially IT. So it's you who's coming along and saying "we need more women here, and the reason we don't have more is because of subtle discrimination"... which i personally think is entirely oversensitive, but either way, it's on you to demonstrate that is in fact THE reason. Meaning you have to find (recent) cases of sexism which have blocked a woman from progressing in IT (at educational and entry job levels), which don't have an equal or comparable case which have blocked a man in IT. Then you have to demonstrate how such situations either don't happen in gender-equal industries, or how they're dealt with in a manor which allows for the equality in contrast to how they're dealt with in IT.

I mean, I'm smart enough to know that if I tried to get a job in an industry filled with women, that I would probably face quite a bit of sexism there, in all it's forms. And that if working in that field was important enough, I would need to have thick skin to deal with it (and no, I don't mean women shouldn't take action against overt sexism). What I find that IS sexist though, often from people making your arguments, is the idea that women are either not smart enough to understand that basic group dynamic (which applies to more than gender differences), or are incapable of dealing with it, and that THAT fact alone is why million of girls aren't flooding to IT right now like boys are.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against minority outreach programs of any kind. This one included (from what I've heard of ). Positive role models surely do have a significant positive impact on the next generation, and the budgets for these programs is usually just a drop in the bucket compared to the whole anyways. What bugs me is when people start blaming the majority, based off flimsy evidence, so much that it's almost an insult to the very group they're trying to help, while simultaneously guilt-tripping everyone else for issues we're not responsible for.

[philipmorris]

Well i'm not surprised if the Women of the outreach program are Indians, Indians invading the Tech area, they took our job

[berarma]

I've got some ideas:
How about we destroy the entire program, stop treating women like frail little things that have to be goaded into the "men's world" of programming, and just let those who want to code do it. There shouldn't be any gender seperation in programming (or design): Good Code is Good Code, no matter who it's written by and a Good Design is a Good Design no matter who it was thought up by.

I'm fully expecting a huge backlash for this, but I don't understand why we treat women so differently in the tech world...
(P.S. another example is "Women in Tech Day". Like wtf, why do we have that? Do we have a "Men in Tech Day"? No? Then we shouldn't have the former either)

+1 !!!!

[RahulSundaram]

I've already read that piece and again it has nothing to do with the lack of woman in tech. You run into the same drunken idiots at just about any large social gathering. It is a social problem because it is accepted by many that if you have had a little too much to drink your behavior can be excused.

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexualized_environment

Sorry but no, drinking is never are a good excuse for sexual assaults and such behavior has been frequently documented in several open source conferences, regardless of whether any drinking was involved. We are not talking about a bar or a frat party. We are talking about technical conferences. You are knee deep in denial and engaging in silly excuses for really poor behavior.

[omer666]

The simple fact that people feel the need to rage on this program plainly shows its interest. They're not ready to see any change in that respect, and as such, they take it as an aggression, thus explaining the particular tone of those comments. I mean if women are already equal to men, why are you upset? You state that money is wasted, but in fact, it is not. Programmers are being paid for their job, that's all I see. The only possible reason to see it as a waste is the fact that it deals with women, or else, I don't see your point. "Don't employ any women, because we're already equal"...