Fedora Is Looking For A Diversity Advisor

[TheBlackCat]

[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.

The percentage of women in IT is somewhere around 20%-30% (Source).

The percentage of women at FOSDEM was 4% (Source).

[TheBlackCat]

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.

You are just assuming that women are not choosing IT because they are inherently less interested in it. However, there are well-established social problems in IT regarding to gender. Pretending that these issues either don't exist or don't have any impact on how many women choose IT as a career is disingenuous at best.

If we fix the social problems and women are still less interested in IT, then we can start talking about inherent differences. But blaming everything in inherent differences is extremely premature when there are known, established social problems at play as well.

[Luke_Wolf]

The percentage of women in IT is somewhere around 20%-30% (Source).

The percentage of women at FOSDEM was 4% (Source).

I looked at both of the sources given on the wikipedia link and the first percent statistic is not an actual US Labour study but a book with a rather clear agenda, I'm not going to buy a book for the purpose of rebutting you however so I'll leave it at that.

The second source was not actually about women in the workplace but the results of an online survey by Catalyst about workplace satisfaction, and the percentage of women in the workplace never comes up.

The NPR Link states "about 20%" and does not provide a source for this assertion, and in fact I want to draw your attention to this paragraph

Allen graduated from Brown University in 1990 with a degree in computer science. A few years back, Allen starting going to workshops to learn a hot Web application framework called Ruby on Rails. Twitter was developed with it. Allen got really frustrated when she noticed that out of 200 people, only six were women. Allen and a friend started their own workshops; they were on weekends and had child care.

6/200 = 0.03%

More important are statistics like the Taulbee Survey (linked on that wikipedia page) which indicated that 11.7% of the people in CS Majors who graduated were women with 11.8% of CE Majors. Which when compared with the 4% number and realizing that OSS is effectively a small percentage of IT people to be blunt: the geek club of the geek club. 4% seems quite reasonable.

[Luke_Wolf]

You are just assuming that women are not choosing IT because they are inherently less interested in it. However, there are well-established social problems in IT regarding to gender. Pretending that these issues either don't exist or don't have any impact on how many women choose IT as a career is disingenuous at best.

If we fix the social problems and women are still less interested in IT, then we can start talking about inherent differences. But blaming everything in inherent differences is extremely premature when there are known, established social problems at play as well.

People love to repeat this, however I find that the actual women in tech do not appear to feel this way, and what Pundits claim is preventing women from entering are things that are experienced just as strongly if not moreso by men, because men are more likely to put themselves in situations where they are going to encounter trolls(easy example is that men are far far more likely than women to play shooters which are well known to be the den of 12 year olds making implications about people's sexuality and so on). Being a geek is socially looked down on, and the toxicity inside communities effects everyone. There's a reason the term Troll exists, and nobody likes them.

Should the community be nicer? well perhaps, but this is not a gendered issue.

[nils_]

Well I won't rush to judgement on this, but let's take measure of their success in finding someone and implementing the policies somewhere down the road. I might pitch in once my mission to increase the number of Jews in the NBA is done.