Fedora Is Looking For A Diversity Advisor

[mattdm]

There is no doubt that the industry needs more woman in tech but these efforts to pull from the top never work. You literally need to push from the bottom which means getting girls interested in tech well before high school. Let's face it if there is little interest in tech by the time the high school years hit you won't be seeing young woman going to college for these sorts of jobs.

Now I honestly don't know how to change the mindset of the entire nation but I really don't see this Fedra initiative having a big impact. They are literally targeting the wrong end of the problem.

I definitely agree that programs reaching out at young ages are key, and it it's probably true that most Fedora efforts are going to be at ages past that, but we'll see what we can do. We've got to work from where we are and with the things we have influence over.

As an aside, in my experience and from what I've seen studied, most children are interested in tech at very young ages, and ability is not strongly gendered; it's in later elementary school and high school where we start to lose that, and evidence is pretty clear that this is strongly cultural rather than innate. That's unfortunate because we lose out on the potential contributions of so many bright young people. But there are many women and others from minority backgrounds who stick with it and have incredible technical skill and talent ? yet, open source is significantly behind even proprietary software in diversity. I don't have all the answers, but something is going on, and I think there is room for us to have impact on that.

[TheBlackCat]

There is no doubt that the industry needs more woman in tech but these efforts to pull from the top never work. You literally need to push from the bottom which means getting girls interested in tech well before high school. Let's face it if there is little interest in tech by the time the high school years hit you won't be seeing young woman going to college for these sorts of jobs.

Now I honestly don't know how to change the mindset of the entire nation but I really don't see this Fedra initiative having a big impact. They are literally targeting the wrong end of the problem.

The problem isn't just that there aren't very women in tech. The problem is that even compared to computer science in general, there are are very few women participating in FOSS. For some reason, the women that are in software development and have the knowledge and background to participate in FOSS development generally aren't doing so. Something is leading them to avoid participating in FOSS.

This is even more counterintuitive if you buy the stereotypes about women, since FOSS is supposed to be the sort of social, community-oriented environment that the stereotypes say women should be attracted to. So why are they generally not participating?

[Luke_Wolf]

The problem isn't just that there aren't very women in tech. The problem is that even compared to computer science in general, there are are very few women participating in FOSS. For some reason, the women that are in software development and have the knowledge and background to participate in FOSS development generally aren't doing so. Something is leading them to avoid participating in FOSS.

This is even more counterintuitive if you buy the stereotypes about women, since FOSS is supposed to be the sort of social, community-oriented environment that the stereotypes say women should be attracted to. So why are they generally not participating?

[Citation Needed]

And basing off of XDC doesn't cut it as the people of XDC are in a cut all their own known as Graphics Developers which are their own particularly hardcore group. Basing off of FOSDEM or similar would be acceptable though.

[BoTuLoX]

Countries like Norway have shown that purely establishing equality and meritocracy does not automatically lead to more gender diversity in occupations (it does the opposite, apparently). So if we want more women in FOSS, we have to actively recruit them.

Why do we want more "women" in FOSS? Given two engineers with equal skills and experience, what makes the woman more valuable?

Shouldn't we not discriminate between sexes? Or, simply put, can't we accept the fact that there are proportionally less women interested in this industry because they simply prefer something else and they're free human beings to choose it, and that's the real reason ?

[bregma]

I can only see this is a very good thing. A part-time, unpaid advisor is not the same thing as a quota, and diversity does not mean gender prescriptivism. There's definitely a diversity problem in both our software (the general 'our', I have nothing to do with Fedora), our industry, and many of our institutions. Sometimes a little bit of advice can help.

Evidently a lot of commenters here feel threatened by the very mention of diversity. That's OK, there's room for those people too.

[alexvoda]

The problem isn't just that there aren't very women in tech. The problem is that even compared to computer science in general, there are are very few women participating in FOSS. For some reason, the women that are in software development and have the knowledge and background to participate in FOSS development generally aren't doing so. Something is leading them to avoid participating in FOSS.

This is even more counterintuitive if you buy the stereotypes about women, since FOSS is supposed to be the sort of social, community-oriented environment that the stereotypes say women should be attracted to. So why are they generally not participating?

[Citation Needed]

As Luke_Wolf said, Citation needed.
I always thought the problem was industry wide. If what you say is true and this is the actual problem, then sure, this warrants investigation and countermeasures.

[wizard69]

Countries like Norway have shown that purely establishing equality and meritocracy does not automatically lead to more gender diversity in occupations (it does the opposite, apparently). So if we want more women in FOSS, we have to actively recruit them.

Recruiting is the wrong path. You want to produce an environment where young woman grow with an interest and desire to do the job. You go do the recruiting path and you end up pulling in those that don't have the tech background to succeed.

I honestly believe that you need to light the spark early in life so that young woman see tech as a viable career path that they pursue because they are interested and get it.

[wizard69]

As Luke_Wolf said, Citation needed.
I always thought the problem was industry wide. If what you say is true and this is the actual problem, then sure, this warrants investigation and countermeasures.

It is industry wide. There is no doubt that some males in the industry have a negative attitude about woman. Personally this seems to be proportional to that males lack of skills or ability. Generally though there isn't a lot of resistance to woman in tech.

I think the real problem is that woman simply don't want to put up with the bad treatment people in tech have in general. Being on call 24/7 is one thing that is a big turn off for people in general but I suspect more so for woman. The long indeterminate hours don't help either.

[Luke_Wolf]

It is industry wide. There is no doubt that some males in the industry have a negative attitude about woman. Personally this seems to be proportional to that males lack of skills or ability. Generally though there isn't a lot of resistance to woman in tech.

I think the real problem is that woman simply don't want to put up with the bad treatment people in tech have in general. Being on call 24/7 is one thing that is a big turn off for people in general but I suspect more so for woman. The long indeterminate hours don't help either.

I highly suggest you watch the denmark documentary on the gender equality paradox linked twice in this very thread.

What I would like to know is why do we care about gender ratios in jobs? Why exactly is it a bad thing if there are few male nurses or women programmers so long as the roles are filled and competent people are filling them and that they did so of their own free agency? The reality is that men and women naturally have different interests and that this isn't a bad thing and we should be celebrating the fact that people are in fact capable of choosing the jobs that they want to do, and recognizing that as a result... no the ratio is not going to be 50/50 instead of making claims about some hidden oppressor that must obviously exist preventing women from becoming programmers or men from becoming nurses.

[Rezza]

Btw. diversity is not only about gender, race as I can see in this thread but I see it also as a project wide thing - Fedora is still a small distribution but to allow its grow, we have to move from the shadow of software only project. We are all developers, software engineers, admins. Yes, we have marketing team, we have design team, docs, websites. But if you compare scale to engineering, it's small. And to move forward, we need more diverse project from roles (or call it jobs) point of view. This is how I understand this position within Council, closely working with the outreach counsellor.