X.Org Women Outreach Program Only Turns Up Two Applicants So Far

[wizard69]

Why do we need these special programs. No one prevents women from studying CS, having IT jobs, etc. If they are minority in this area than they probably don't want to do it.

Exactly! Woman should certainly be given the opportunity to enter the field. Many do look into it but often it only takes a small taste to convince themselves that there are better things they could be doing.

By the way it seems like a good portion of the people that enter the field, with the first semester of computer science, decide there are better things they could be doing! This applies to both sexes and is pretty obvious to anybody that takes CS101 and sticks around for a year or two. Those large classes thin out significantly a few semesters down the road.

So a better question might be for the industry to research, is why do so many give up on a career in this field? If the industry needs more programmers and they have this desire to see woman better represented they need to understand what is the root cause. That is why do so many students say fuckit before the college year is over.

[wizard69]

In my engineering school where there is a 3 years computer science degree course, we were about 105 guys and 10 girls.
There are other egree courses, for instance electronics, and there are more girls. IT is every year the least appealing to girls.
So the problem is clearly sometimes *before* the end of the studies... And certainly even before high school graduation, considering that even 1st year freshman in CS are an overwhelming majority of boys.

Which is part of the reason this program is useless. You can pull in these indivduals if they don't exist. The problem has to be addressed much much earlier. Even then the tendency is for woman to switch majors when they actually get to college with the intention of going into IT. So what we need to do is develope and understanding of why this happens. Is it related to how the program is taught? Maybe other career choices are just more appealing. Maybe the thought of spending 8 hours a day in front of what amounts to a typewriter and being on call 24/7 is a problem ( I know many a man that has left the business because of the 24/7 nonsense).

Whatever the problem you end up with a talent pool that is just too small and likely too in demands for projects like this. It doesn't help at all that the project was promoted in a way highly offensive to woman in general. In the end X-Org got what they deserved.

[philip550c]

LOL, and you know that the two "women" that applied are probably dudes in drag.

[wizard69]

"I am a white male who has never encountered discrimination or sexism in my life, but here's why this program is completely unnecessary".

That really has nothing to do with it. A couple of hints:

You will not be successful recruiting from a group if you callously insult them as part of your recruitment project.

The group they are after has a very very small representation in industry. As such there is actually competition to hire woman to try to balance the ranks so to speak. The enticement offered was and is nothing compared to what industry can offer.

The root cause here has to be addressed first. That involves getting girls, not woman interested in tech much earlier in life. This is an extremely hard thing to do because - wait for it - there are differences between the sexes. Young woman need to know that doing your own thing is OK and that bending to peer pressure isn't OK. I do believe that early peer pressure is a significant issue with keeping woman interested in tech in general and frankly there seems to be a massive difference between boys and girls with this issue.

[wizard69]

These programs are there to create role models, to kick start interest for (future) women before their studies (get them interested by knowing that other members of their group have worked in it).

The problem here is there is that tiny pool for programs like this to draw from. It makes the program worthless. We rather need programs that get girls interested in tech well before their university years. This will increase the pool of qualified woman.

Some countries have very high proportion of women in IT (e.g. India), so interest is not genetic, but it's certainly stable (low interest: fewer participants: lack of example and role models: low interest).

Again the lack of logic here, on phoronix of all places, amazes me! You can't have role models until you get a significant number of girls interested at a young enough age to actually pursue IT as an advanced educational endeavor.

An issue or two ago of Make Magazine had a picture of a woman on the front cover wearing a nut as a ring on one of her fingers. The article covered (yes I did more than look at the pretty woman) a lot of her efforts to involve girls in the tech and hands on world at a young age. It is pretty much a given that this woman will get more girls interested in the tech world than X-Ord ever will. The fact is you have to start young.

Increasing women interest in IT is useful because right now 40% of the potentially skilled applicant are "not interested", which is an obvious loss of economic output.

Screw economic output. You make an assumption here that what those woman are currently doing isn't economically valuable. Either that or you think IT is the only thing of Importance in this world.

Not talking about justice or diversity here. Just plain economical practical sense.

No you are talking garbage. You don't devalue somebody because they don't work in tech.

The fact is that innate talents are best discovered and developed early in life! In this regard our schools are often failures as they aren't highly optimized for discovering what a child's talents are nor promoting interested outside of the curriculum that the school is focused on.

In a nut shell I highly believe that this program is misplaced and insulting to woman. If you want more woman in tech you need an approach that develops those that are interested and have the chops early in life. Establish a large enough pool and eventually you will have woman represented in the open source world.

[wizard69]

And even compared to IT in general, it seems that women are under-represented in FOSS. If I recall correctly there have been zero women applying for the xorg funding opportunities, rather than the 10% or so people are quoting for IT in general.

Many woman have pretty busy schedules as it is. Beyond that they often give back to the community in different ways.

Further, even if you buy the stereotypes of women being more interested in "social" things, you would expect them to be more interested in FOSS considering how community-driven FOSS is supposed to be.

It isn't a stereotype, the social interactions of woman vary dramatically from those of men. Especially at a young age, girls and young woman experience a different sort of peer pressure. Would the average male student have to take crap from his classmates because he hacks on a computer or builds strange devices in his cellar? I highly doubt it.

And if you don't accept the stereotypes (which I don't), fixing the problems with IT in general and fixing the problems with FOSS in particular are not the same thing.

This is a tough one because I kinda are but then I dont. The reality is this, vastly increase the numbers of woman in IT and eventually you will develope a large enough pool from which some will take an interest in FOSS. Really lets be honest here not many male programmers give a damn about FOSS nor are involved.

Even if you go to the schools and get women more interested in IT, if the problems persist that are making FOSS unattractive to existing women in IT, those problems will likely persist even if the total number of women in IT remains the same.

I do believe schools are a huge part of the problem many girls are lost to other industries even before they hit high school. That right there is a huge problem. However if you don't go into the FOSS world freely then what is the point? Freedom isn't somehting that can be delegated to indivduals, they have to choose on their own.

[wizard69]

Unfortunately, the reactions to the program only serve to reinforce this perception.

How so?

The program has zero chance of making real progress. This because you need a large talent pool to pull from first. It doesn't help that the prgram probably offends more qualifued woman than it interests.

[wizard69]

Yes, trying to be inclusive for a group that is under-represented in a field is pretty much the definition of "diversity and outreach".

Because it is discriminatory and unethical? A persons success should be based upon demonstrated skills with respect to the occupation at hand. Success should not be the result of mis guided promotion.

Trying to exclude anyone not in the main group in a field is the exact opposite of "diversity and outreach".

No it is a response to the modern reality of the work place. If one group can have its own support group why not every group out there no mater their numbers. In the end to achieve equality in the workplace you need to eliminate these outreach programs and put everybody on a level playing field.

I don't understand why this is such a difficult concept for people.

Because it creates far more problem than it solves. The biggest one is the placement of unqualified individuals into jobs they can't handle.

[wizard69]

So 10% of the potential applicants are women, while 0% of the actual applicants are women. Clearly the lack of qualified women is not the only issue here.

The issue is the lack of qualified woman interested in working with this group. That is directly the result of not having a large enough pool to choose from. The idiotcy of this program is believing that the progrma can magically increase the size of the pool to choose from.

It can't because you need to prime the system, so to speak, early in a young persons development. The industry is loosing these woman when they are still girls in grade school. Any approach that doesn't address that issue will never enlarge the percentage of female programmers out there.

[wizard69]

That'd be because
#1. It's not being used for the pretense of filling a quota
#2. It's effectively analogous to a paid internship, which are usually student or recently-ex-student filled positions so for better or worse it's considered normal, and most don't consider classism a bad thing (people usually don't consider it bad to only give out food stamps to the poor, or to tax the rich more as an example.)

Actually giving out food stamps to the poor is a very bad thing! Just look at the crime stats in any community where a large number of foodstamps are in use. Nothing in this country should be free. That doesn't mean we don't help the poor but there has to be an expectation of work. If the public has to provide that work it needs to be absolutely brutal to encourage the lazy to go out and get real jobs.

As to excessive taxes on the rich that is a bad thing too, which has been proven again and again to be bad for the economy. Tax equality would go a long ways to solving problem in the USA as would closing loop holes, especially for businesses.

Now that said you have a point, just not the one you were trying to make. Why don't you make EVoC open to anyone? That way you open the door to NEETs and such, which would have a positive long term impact of giving NEETs the experience and skills to actually go get a job, thereby reducing the number of them and decreasing the social burden while simultaneously increasing the output of society.

This makes the ignorant assumption that all people are created equal with respect to their mental capacity. This is why these special programs suck so much, they often put people into roles they can't handle. This is why we need common standards that avoid all of these social engineering activities.