Originally posted by RahulSundaram
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What GNOME's Women Outreach Program Is Paying For This Summer
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Originally posted by Marc Driftmeyer View PostInterchanging woman/women incorrectly aside, you're extremelly naive if you believe the IT World doesn't have a long history of discrimination against minorities and women, with equal talent, to that of white males in the US. I won't speak for Europe, South America, Asia and what have you, but seeing it first hand several times, myself, I have interviewed and been overriden by other interviewers who pick people that later turn out to be an ill-fit, all due to natural biases they don't even realize they possess.
In confidence, most people exhibited a predisposed prejudice for picking people that they are `most used to being around,' and never about who would be the most valuable talent added to the team(s).
IT Software Developers are pretentious, petty little `bitches' [gender neutral label] who don't like talented competition showing them up, and more often then not are striving for `job security.'
The only place I've seen it less so was at NeXT Inc., but even at Apple I witnessed some really bad decisions on hires that ultimately left the company leaving a gap in needs that would have been filled with better talent, and provided a more diverse work pool.
Real life experiences that challenge the person's emotional well-being is probably the single most difficult factor most interviewers never attempt to explore. I never cared for what you could do for us writing an optimized algorithm in this or that language, whether your mechanical engineering background was as diverse as mine [CS & ME are quite diverse to have, if you want my experience] in your undergrad studies, etc.
What I cared about is how you handle tense situations, emotional reactions to being pressured by upper managment to meet deadlines, to defer to solutions you cannot solve but your teammate(s) can, etc.
I know where I work they often like to try out people via temp jobs and as I've noted often you end up getting gamed.
Those criteria rule out gender, race, color or creed. I've only seen a handful of people ever explore the human psyche during interviews. It's amazing how the bullshit washes away and how most potential talent fold when faced with their past and what they would do in the future. The more elastic the mind the better I see a candidate for future employment.
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Wow, if you're going to start an outreach program for women you could at least not insult them with such crappy meanial tasks. At least have something in there that's actually interesting. Having gone through tertiary computer science the women in my class were always the most determined and generally scored above the males, and then they come to the real world and get this dumped on them? It seems to me that the men get to build the house and the women are stuck with the job of cleaning it up (with a bit of furnishing maybe), whoopdedoo.
The FOSS software community needs these kinds of programs to stop them becoming alienated from the real world, as a bunch of esoteric weirdos. Lets be honest, with the right amount of experience, anyone can do this job and at the moment it's just a boys only club.
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Originally posted by wizard69 View PostThat has no bearing on woman in open source. The fact of the matter is they are and always have been the pursued sex. Either they learn How to handle that reality or they don't. However blaming men serves no useful purpose here, especially considering these are social events. This non sense just demonstrates the control mentality that many woman have.
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Noirin Shirley says after a man grabbed and kissed her at a conference after-party, she told him she wasn't interested, and "He responded by jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling"
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You are in denial when men attack women in *open source conferences* and you claim that it has no bearing on women in open source and men are not to be blamed.
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Originally posted by wizard69 View PostAll of this is a good discussion but I really don't see it having anything to do with the lack of woman in the open source movement. Again it is an issue of there being few barriers to submitting a patch or even contributing your own program. I just see a deeper issue here and until we get a variety of woman to comment on why they avoid open source.
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Women's Outreach programs like this are simply attempts at getting more women interested in FOSS and tech in general. It doesn't mean they are somehow "segregated". If they gained some experience and feel confident, they will often go on to contribute to projects along side the other contributors, which is always a net win.
Oh, and "women are biologically different", "not suited for programming", "weak", "there will always be pigs so deal with it" etc., it's awesome to see first hand how many shitty attitudes are held in this community. This just reinforces why programs like these are necessary.
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Originally posted by wizard69 View PostThat has no bearing on woman in open source. The fact of the matter is they are and always have been the pursued sex. Either they learn How to handle that reality or they don't. However blaming men serves no useful purpose here, especially considering these are social events. This non sense just demonstrates the control mentality that many woman have.
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Originally posted by Ancurio View PostOh, and "women are biologically different", "not suited for programming", "weak", "there will always be pigs so deal with it" etc., it's awesome to see first hand how many shitty attitudes are held in this community. This just reinforces why programs like these are necessary.
Apart from not suited for programming (which is something depending on the person alone and can apply to anyone) everything else is true. Ie. a woman having the same built as a man will be 15% weaker if i remember correctly. And its just biology. Nothing to do with discrimination or whatever.
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Originally posted by wizard69 View PostYou have to be amazingly dense to believe that treating people differently results in greater acceptance. It doesn't in fact the evidence is that it creates an extremely hostile environment. This isn't just a case with woman either, anytime a group gets special favors, especially favors that promote people that don't have the chops, you create hostility.
Your use of the word quota here should tell you something also. Quota always result in unqualified people being brought into the ranks. Quotas are simply evil and again create more problems then they solve.
What bothers me more than anything here is that there is absolutely nothing about the tech world that is or should be difficult for a woman of suitable intelligence. If woman aren't interested in the tech world then why would you push them into a field that they won't be happy in?
The funny thing here is that most of the female programmers I know, got into the field long ago. In other words they are old farts like me. They didn't need special programs to pursue these careers and frankly some of them have done very well for themselves. Now why at this time do we all of a sudden need all of this non sense to bring woman into an industry that they are clearly rejecting in large numbers?
How comes for example that women in same positions are paid less then men? I guess they are rejecting in large numbers to be paid better, right? http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.pdf
Gender inequality has aways been and is still an issue, independent of whether you are denying it or not.
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