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

[pininety]

It's pragmatism. If more women work in this domain, more women might therefore be tempted to get in there, with talented persons amongst them. How a program aiming at having more talented persons working on FOSS could be bad ?

Unfortunately, the gnome woman outreach program is by now only for PR and not to increase the overall percentage of woman in tech.
They basically changed everything around to increase the percentage of woman in the gnome foundation by cannibalising on the woman employment percentage of other companies and not by encouraging girls to become programmers.
Makes sense for the gnome foundation but calling this a woman outreach program and saying it will help woman in tech is IMHO very cynical.

I really would prefer a program that increases the global rate of female programmers by 1% then a program that increases the rate for gnome by 10% but does not increase the global rate. But the later is better for PR so there the money goes....

[Daktyl198]

The problem is, that women are treated differently in the real tech world right now. The solution approached here, is to increase their quota to the point, where the tech world accepts them and stops treating them differently.

This is the flawed logic I see:
Women are treated somewhat different, so let's treat them _extremely_ different, and separate them from them big scary men, and make their gender special... in order to make them treated equally.

See the problem here? You're using an extreme version of the problem, to solve the problem. I say, "who cares if they're women". Don't treat them any differently... hell, let's just stop caring what gender the person is altogether. THAT is what will lead us to equality, not separatism.

TBH based on gender stereotypes the documentation and localization being under this program makes a lot of sense to me. The stereotype goes that women are more linguistically talented than men on average so following that assumption it would make sense to involve women with documentation and localization projects also with computing. People outside the computer industry might not understand that such activities don't have much to do with programming so you don't need to be a supernerd but them done by someone not talented in it can make an entire software project fail.

"Based on gender stereotypes" ... already off to a bad start. Even then, a "documentation program" that pulls in ALL genders would be more effective, both costs-wise and productivity-wise, than this "Women's Outreach Program" that focuses a part of it's time on Documentation.

Maybe in the ideal or naive view of the world, that is true. In reality though, gender based discrimination exists in the general industry and open source world in particular and finding ways to counter balance that is a good thing. That is the reason, a large number of organizations are involved in doing this.

.

Thanks captain obvious! Should I also point out that discrimination against blacks is still a thing to a lot of people in the US, but 99.9% of companies don't give a shit? How many "Black Outreach Programs" do you see in the FOSS world? Not very many you say? Well hot damn, that must mean there's no such thing as black discrimination anymore! WE CAN ALL RELAX PEOPLE, RACISM AGAINST BLACKS IS GONE!!
/s

I fully understand what you're saying but what I think you're forgetting is many women are DISCOURAGED to get into tech fields. If you want examples, go to websites like notalwaysright.com, search for any tech related thing, and you'll find an insane amount of bigotry toward women. It's a shame we still have to live in a world like this.

But, if women aren't appreciated and wanted in tech fields, then they'll never feel the want or ability to join. Give women a dedicated incentive to do something for the linux (or at least gnome) community and it could really be appealing to them.

On a side note, there are people like nixiepixel on youtube. I can't really tell if she's helping or hurting the appeal of more women joining the linux community. I think the fact that she's attractive and self-passionate about linux helps make linux seem "cool" to some, on the other hand, she's not really helping women in the developer or professional realm.

Discouraged? Where? By bigots who post angry stories about stupid people on a blog? Okay, okay, I concede that there is going to be "discrimination" against women going into tech, but I point you to my last statement. There will ALWAYS be discrimination in the world, we just have to work to not give a shit about those people and focus on just treating everybody equally, not treating certain people as special... that's kinda how we ended up here in the first place

[RahulSundaram]

Thanks captain obvious! Should I also point out that discrimination against blacks is still a thing to a lot of people in the US, but 99.9% of companies don't give a shit? How many "Black Outreach Programs" do you see in the FOSS world? Not very many you say? Well hot damn, that must mean there's no such thing as black discrimination anymore! WE CAN ALL RELAX PEOPLE, RACISM AGAINST BLACKS IS GONE!!

You are setting up a strawman and sarcasm doesn't hide it. Racism is not a pronounced problem in open source world compared to the rest of the I.T industry but gender discrimination is and therefore there are more efforts focused on that problem. It doesn't mean racism doesn't exist and noone suggested that either. If you want to address the race discrimation problem and fund a new black outreach program targeting open source developers, go right ahead. Doing nothing about either isn't a solution. It is maintaining status quo.

[89c51]

Maybe in the ideal or naive view of the world, that is true. In reality though, gender based discrimination exists in the general industry and open source world in particular and finding ways to counter balance that is a good thing. That is the reason, a large number of organizations are involved in doing this.

If i submit a patch as 89c51 and it is correct will you be able to tell if i am a man a woman a transgender or a dog. If i argue on technical matters and my arguments are valid will you care if i am black white green or purple. The problems start when people in "minorities" hide behind them to cover up their incompetence.

We don't need women, men, blacks, whites or whatever in FOSS projects. We need competent people that can contribute.

[RahulSundaram]

If i submit a patch as 89c51 and it is correct will you be able to tell if i am a man a woman a transgender or a dog.

Yes, we would be able to tell if you are a dog or not but seriously though, people do submit patches with their real names because they want to build their resume and doing so anonymously defeats the purpose. So what you appear to be suggesting doesn't help for many potential contributors.

[RahulSundaram]

Yes, we would be able to tell if you are a dog or not but seriously though, people do submit patches with their real names because they want to build their resume and doing so anonymously defeats the purpose. So what you appear to be suggesting doesn't help for many potential contributors.

Additional note: Many projects including the Linux kernel doesn't permit anonymous contributions. You need to do it under your real name since you are signing off on a legally binding document as part of your contributions.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches

"using your real name (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions.)"

[emblemparade]

There are many capable people who can contribute to free software. But the sad fact is that the vast majority identify as male.

It is a SAD FACT, period. And it needs to change. Being open to contributions from females has not worked out for us: the female contributions are not coming in, nowhere as close to as much as they should be. So, everybody in the free software has to do what they can to get women involved. If it takes some money and some outreach projects, so be it! The stakes are VERY HIGH: a male-centric free software world is obviously only half of what we want to achieve. The current situation is an DISASTER.

I'm not going to speculate as to why women haven't been involved, because it's really almost all speculation, with very little research to back it up: there are probably many social and cultural reasons for it, and despite important similarities they vary across the world. Even if we do research it, it will remain what it is. The fact that you are don't like the cultures that created this situation doesn't change it. To change it, we need to be active. If we don't change it, we are failing our goals.

I'm extremely exasperated by all these idealist commentators who think that if we just maintain a functional meritocracy the system will fix itself. We've done that, but it has not fixed itself. It's deeply damaged and it's up to us to fix it.

ALL free software projects should be devoting some of their effort into including females. Is GNOME's the only way? No. We should try various approaches and find out what works best.

[peppercats]

This thread reminds me of during my college years the people from a gender studies program protested outside our math building demanding more female students. A professor walked outside and invited them to audit his class and none of them did.

[liam]

You are setting up a strawman and sarcasm doesn't hide it. Racism is not a pronounced problem in open source world compared to the rest of the I.T industry but gender discrimination is and therefore there are more efforts focused on that problem. It doesn't mean racism doesn't exist and noone suggested that either. If you want to address the race discrimation problem and fund a new black outreach program targeting open source developers, go right ahead. Doing nothing about either isn't a solution. It is maintaining status quo.

Racism, in general, doesn't seem to be a problem but I've not met many black people who work in the field, nor heard of many who participate in the oss community. Considering there's at least a continent of them, not to mention the many millions in Europe and America, that's a vast group we seem to be ignoring.
It may not be racism that is causing it but the effect seems to be real.

[johnc]

GNOME is a trainwreck.