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

[RahulSundaram]

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.

I haven't seen any studies indicating one way or the other the participation level of minority groups in open source but we do know that women participate much less in open source projects (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/FLOSS) compared to women participating in the I.T industry in general (which itself is lower than men but there are other factors involved there) and while it is related, it is a different topic from gender discrimination. If one feels strongly about racial discrimination and has evidence that it is worse in open source than the I.T industry overall, pool in some money and address the problem. Crowd funding is an option as well.

[89c51]

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.)"

Policies like that are complete stupid IMO. Extremely and beyond stupid.

As for the resume thing: While i understand that FOSS contributions can lead in a good career path and eventually money and that many have this in mind nothing should prohibit someone from contributing for whatever reason he wants to. And he should have the right to do it anonymously.

[RahulSundaram]

Policies like that are complete stupid IMO. Extremely and beyond stupid.

As for the resume thing: While i understand that FOSS contributions can lead in a good career path and eventually money and that many have this in mind nothing should prohibit someone from contributing for whatever reason he wants to. And he should have the right to do it anonymously.

Unfortunately, you are being idealistic again. Everybody has a right to contribute. However, noone has the right to demand that such contributors be accepted and anonymous contributions often will not be accepted by major projects. The reason we have such policies in many projects is because of the presence of bad actors like SCO and the legal necessity to have a audit trail. I also noticed that you use the word "he" which assumes the contributor is a male. Part of the reason outreach projects target women is because of such assumptions.

[wizard69]

You expressed exactly what I was feeling the minute I started to read this article.

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.

It is truly a waste of money, there is absolutely nothing stopping woman from going after these slots just like the men do.

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.

Yep! Let's face it if a woman can't do the design work and coding a man does she doesn't belong in the industry. Just like many men are not suitable for this industry.

I'm fully expecting a huge backlash for this, but I don't understand why we treat women so differently in the tech world...

It is discrimination plan and simple.

(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)

The contrast in America is pretty stark when compared to the rest of the world, with American woman thinking that they need a helping hand and believing it.

[peppercats]

Since when did pull requests start attaching your gender to them?

[pininety]

Everybody has a right to contribute.

Unfortunately, this is not true. Fedora, for example, has a do not ask, do not tell policy regarding contributors nationality due to American import/export laws. See here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTYyMjg

[wizard69]

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 ?

This is easy!

1. To start it promotes discrimination!
2. It encourages those that would not normally be qualified to sign up.
3. It takes resources from funding channels that could be more liberally applied without this program. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the program costs itself could have financed a few more projects.
4. There is absolutely nothing about the world of software that keeps woman out, there is no physical barriers and frankly no mental barriers. The only thing keeping woman out is woman themselves from what I can see.
5. Such programs are very damaging in the real work world as they create a we against them attitude. Even the US military has seen evidence that treating the sexes unequally results in a very hostile attitude towards the very sex you are trying to integrate into the force. If woman want to be treated as equals they need to work as equals. Contrary to popular opinion such programs do more harm to the status of woman in the workplace rather than promoting it, simply because of the reality that they got special favors to get there.
6. In a nut shell the programs do more harm than good.

A perfect example here is the one example listed of Greek translation. Translations are good, everybody supports that, so why support that translation through a discriminatory selection process? Let's face it there is probably a limited pool of people out there that can do a good job of such translations in the first place. Here though we have someone that has stained themselves with a mark that says I couldn't do this through normal channels and had to get special support to deliver the goods.

In a nut shell would you really want to hire someone that expects special treatment to get the job done?

[alazar]

This program fights sexism with more sexism.

They are not encouraging women to become techies, they're just being sexist on their job application list.

[Nobu]

If everyone invited their wives and family to learn and contribute, I'm sure we'd be close to at least 33% female participation. I think that'd be much more effective than an outreach program, but maybe that's just me...

And please don't start on the he/she thing...it's a fault of the English language that it doesn't have a gender-neutral, singular pronoun, other than 'it', and I doubt many people are going to start calling other people 'it'. That is the only reason people use 'he' or 'she', and usually it's a matter of what they learned rather than personal preference or bias.

[wizard69]

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.

Might it not make more sense for GNOME to simply focus on supporting a more balanced set of projects open to everybody? In the end the strong candidates would be woman for the very reason you point out.

I really see this being better handled by having GNOME support diversity in projects supported instead of wasting money the way this program did.