Getting More Women Coders Into Open Source 696
Nerval's Lobster writes: Diversity remains an issue in tech firms across the nation, with executives and project managers publicly upset over a lack of women in engineering and programming roles. While all that's happening on the corporate side, a handful of people and groups are trying to get more women involved in the open source community, like Women of OpenStack, Outreachy (which is geared toward people from underrepresented groups in free software), and others. How much effort should be expended to facilitate diversity among programmers? Can anything be done to shift the demographics, considering the issues that even large, coordinated companies have with altering the collective mix of their employees?
How about more offensive public mailing lists? (Score:5, Funny)
Fill all the forums with macho bravado. I hear that works every time.
Re:How about more offensive public mailing lists? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we invite people into the open source community based on merit rather than based on the unholy offspring of SJW fantasies and affirmative action??
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Who judges merit? How do they judge it? Is it a fair judgement? How do we know? What about all the biases that everyone has?
Re:How about more offensive public mailing lists? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who judges merit?
The users.
How do they judge it?
By using, or not using, code.
Is it a fair judgement?
It is the only judgement that matters, whether it is "fair" or not.
What about all the biases that everyone has?
No one gives a crap about the gender of the person that wrote the code. When I submit a patch to an open source project, no one asks me about my gender. It is irrelevant, and often unknown.
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"Who judges merit?
The users."
Wrong. We are talking here about open source. It is not users the ones that have access to a repo or apply the patch. Merit is judged by peers in control positions.
"How do they judge it?
By using, or not using, code."
Wrong again. Peer programers in control positions judge the code they recieve by two main criteria:
1) They understand the code solves interesting problems
2) Code provided doesn't put those peer programers in control positions into undesired troubles.
"Is it a fair
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"Who judges merit?
The users."
After all, how else would you explain the explosive popularity of systemd?
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If women don't care about making code faster and more compact, maybe they should work on other aspects of FOSS. For instance, most of it could use a lot of help in the documentation department.
Documentation is rarely valued as a contribution. (Score:3)
If women don't care about making code faster and more compact, maybe they should work on other aspects of FOSS. For instance, most of it could use a lot of help in the documentation department.
Documentation is rarely valued as a contribution. We specifically had to go out of our way to hire a technical writer for Mac OS X to get the man pages covered for the UNIX Conformance requirement. And those were just command line commands, Libc, and the kernel interfaces that had coverage requirements.
It's definitely not valued nearly as well as code. The most common comment with regard to it is advice to "RTFS" and some variant of "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand". This is see
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wrong, success of open source projects made by men with opposite characteristic proves you are just spewing from some land between your ears full of rainbows and unicorns.
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The answer is we don't want nor need that as an agenda; they question is flawed. I don't want quality projects distracted trying to recruit, for example either left handers, women, transvestites, jesuit priests...etc. as coders. If they have the ability and desire to do it, they'll make projects themselves and attract people. But to extend a crutch for the less motivated or less gifted, forget it.
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Yeah it sounds like GP is suggesting to basically stall software development in favor of advancing the community. I don't see why that would be an effective strategy.
Basically that's analogous to saying your company should focus less on the quality and completion of its product and more on making sure that they have more employees just for the sake of making sure that they have more employees, even if those employees are not doing anything productive.
Re:How about more offensive public mailing lists? (Score:5, Informative)
here's the problem. all of silicon valley has a ginormous brogrammer culture
Linux isn't developed in Silicon Valley. Redhat is based in North Carolina, Linus himself is based in Portland, Oregon, SuSE is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and IBM is based in Rochester, NY, and has programmers all over the world.
Whether a brogrammer culture exists or not in Silicon Valley is hardly relevant since all the pillars of the open source community aren't in Silicon Valley.
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Commits that break builds.
Commits that don't work.
Commits that are buggy.
Commits that are poorly formatted.
Commits that aren't logically structured.
Commits that don't follow project conventions.
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How about we not push people away who might have a lot of merit?
Re:Given the quality of comments on this article (Score:5, Informative)
If you count stock, I sold my business for a XXX digit sum. It was grown from the ground up. It was created at the cusp, highly immature and risky as hell. Yet it succeeded. It thrived. It grew and, as the sphere matured, it grew in ways I'd have never expected. The compute power increases made us thrive and manipulate data in new and interesting ways - also, we could store data that was impossibly large just a few years before.
Now, to share a few things...
We were merit based. I'm not hiring you just because you have a vagina.
We had multiple women employees and they were very good at what they did.
We were, at times, assholes to one another - bad work means you do it again.
We had an unbelievably low turn-over rate - truly mind blowing.
We didn't give a shit who you slept with but you don't need to bring that shit into the office.
We probably, eventually, knew your family and wept when you did or celebrated with you.
We did things thought impossible, or improbable, on a regular basis.
We only wanted the best and not some absurd hire because of hurt feelings or supposed inequality.
We had multiple races - including myself.
Screw those who argue that things shouldn't be based on merit. It's infantile and absurd at the very front. Where you pee from or who you love hasn't a damned thing to do with it. If you can't do the work get the fuck out of the way and stop trying to hinder those who can. You don't deserve shit, you earn it. You don't even earn it on your own - you earn it with the help of those around you. Your drama and juvenile fantasies have no place in the real world. You can rightly fuck off back to your basement if you don't comprehend this - it's not difficult.
However, don't worry. We did open-invite interviews where you'd be reviewed by your peers before hiring. You'd have not made it past the interview process. Keep your drama queen shit off my code and out of my face.
Simple enough? The conversation has been had, it's over. Whining isn't going to change this. It's just going to piss people off even more. What you can do is what matters. If you can't do then shut the hell up and learn from those who can. Keep your drama to your friends. I'm not your friend.
[sum total redacted, none of your business and I don't need my ego stroked - suffice to say a lot]
Re:Given the quality of comments on this article (Score:4, Insightful)
You absolutely and completely nailed it.
Re:How about more offensive public mailing lists? (Score:5, Informative)
I think you need to do a little more research into SJW history.
Just look at what happened to the Opal community to see why people have a major beef with "SJWs"
https://github.com/opal/opal/i... [github.com]
Go back and read the twitter conversation that shit storm was started from
https://twitter.com/elia/statu... [twitter.com]
He had an opinion on gender reassignment surgery being done on kids, that's not transphobic, but a couple SJW's started calling for his head. At first they were told to stuff it, so they went to twitter to drum up a mob
https://twitter.com/CoralineAd... [twitter.com]
Which included attacking anyone on the project that disagree with them
https://twitter.com/CoralineAd... [twitter.com]
Ultimately this Code of Conduct [contributor-covenant.org] was merged into the project. Now check out who it was that wrote that CoC, that's right the same person that started the issue is the person that wrote the CoC that got shoehorned into the project of someone's opinion on kids having gender reassignment surgery.
What's worse is this line:
This code of conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community.
was added after the fact because by the original CoC, Elia Schito didn't do anything wrong.
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Privilege Status: Having to support worthless Affirmative-Action deadwood.
I want to lose my "privilege status".
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I agree, it's 2015 and mailing lists are often still too triggering. Take for instance the mailing list for a large open-source project, Wayland. Just recently someone dared to post this:
Weston does not allow popup menus initiated by keyboard. Remove the broken keyboard shorcut for a popup from the stacking demo.
Obviously 'popup menus' is slang for 'lynching blacks'; and what to think of 'broken keyboard shorcut'? I think you mean 'differently abled keyboard-identifying human interface device control key combinatory' you shitlord! I just can't even right now. This is outright cyber violence.
And let me tell you that was one of the L
stop (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:stop (Score:4, Insightful)
just stop
Exactly. Making an issue of gender is hurting their objective more than helping it.
Most people who get into computers and programming are naturally introverted. Making a big deal about a specific category of person getting involved in a specific field is a great way to keep the shy introverted people of that category out of that field.
No, just no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people who get into computers and programming are naturally introverted.
This is a stereotype, and not really true.
On the other hand, it's important to understand that men and woman at NOT the same, and they may have different ideas about what they want to do in life.
The idea that in every field, we must have 50/50 is simply stupid.
Re:No, just no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not every field, only the ones with highest salaries
Re:No, just no. (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea that in every field, we must have 50/50 is simply stupid.
I completely agree with you on this. As a worker in the technology field, I believe this is an area that naturally suits a meritocracy (confession: this is also why I am not a big union supporter specifically in tech). With that being said, I think Slashdotters should consider that there are some potential upsides to "getting women into tech/coding" efforts:
1.) I believe that people have natural affinities to certain fields of endeavor. It's possible (probable?) that more women than men don't find tech attractive. However, it is undeniably true that there may be some females who would otherwise like tech but are discouraged by a culture that feels like it is discriminating against them. To throw out a counter-example: I see a disproportionate(?) number of Slashdot posters who express no interest in sports. (I am a huge nerd and huge NFL fan, BTW.) What percentage of those Slashdotters might otherwise have found that they really like (football, baseball, hockey, whatever) but were turned off by a middle/high school culture where the football players were dicks and picked on nerds? Had they had a different environment in which to acclimate themselves to the topic, would they have found something that they really enjoyed and are missing out on because of how they were introduced to it? I was introduced to sushi in the mid-90s by a group of rich douchebag semi-friends (I used to spend on food in a whole day what they spent on a single sashimi order) who insisted I throw a glob of wasabi on top of everything, and I hated it. It took me more than a decade to figure out it was something I really liked just because of the social context in which I first experienced it, and when I tried it "on my own terms" I found out I loved it.
2.) Racists are generally people who have never spent serious personal time with a large group (not just a few) of people they discriminate against. Most of their opinions are formed by inherited bias or media. Similarly, MOST (not all) misogynists are generally men who have had very limited SERIOUS interpersonal experience with women outside their family. (I want to note for the record that my 17-year-old, turned-down-by-every-girl-I-asked-out self would certainly have qualified as a misogynist; just like at that age I thought "fags" were perverts because I didn't actually "know" any, even though I knew several who were my friends but I didn't know they were gay). Just like I think the "cure" for racism is to actually get to know a LOT of people of other races (not just a few and in limited contexts), I think the "cure" for misogyny is to get to really know a LOT of women, as friends, bosses, subordinates, co-workers, whatever. It may not relieve your frustration with dating, but it will certainly change your opinion of "what women want/are." And having more women VOLUNTARILY in tech cannot possibly help but make that situation better.
TL/DR: it makes no sense to force women into tech or require a certain percentage of workers be women (or other minorities). But efforts that encourage females (but don't mandate them) to enter tech should be encouraged by every male tech worker.
Re:No, just no. (Score:4, Insightful)
In both cases it's because people tell us they want to do those things but face gender based barriers
A lot of folks tell us they face barriers. Not a whole lot of people can actually tell us what those barriers even are.
Can you even name 1 single barrier faced by women trying to get in tech ? Outside of "My gender studies degree is not landing me a job at Google doing C++" ?
You seem to like hanging out in these diversity posts on Slashdot, and you keep bringing up the issue at high level, but you always fail to go down to the detail level. I've yet to see a convincing argument for those "barriers" outside a perceived "Brogrammer culture" (which we don't even know what people mean by).
and because we need more women/men in those professions for various reasons.
We need more people. Their genitals don't matter. Their talent and passion does.
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Exactly. Making an issue of gender is hurting their objective more than helping it.
Their objective is to create jobs for SJWs.
Diversity consultant, gender consultant, etc.
The only problem they have is that there is not much money to be had at open source projects.
Propaganda has value to some (Score:3)
But I thought Friday was SJW day on slashdot.org?
Nope! Unfortunately it has been, and will continue, to be pounded to death. Easy click bait and lots of page views for little effort.
Instead of worrying about penis and vagina counts how about we worry about all the American tech workers who have been replaced by foreign workers. 94 million Americans are unemployed including almost half of them are women.
While your number is incorrect, the point has merit. Instead of worrying about things that really hurt our economy (TPPIP/NAFTA/War/Corruption) people that own media are erecting the same straw man over and over. The lie is being repeated so much that people believe the lie (Bernays and Himmler were assholes, but not stupid). This is the value of propaganda, and the US c
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Well, I don't believe I was restricting my comments regarding media to Slashdot. Further, yesterday's post was full of socked up anonymous posts telling everyone how bad Linus is, and how mean men are, and how men are all bullies. Nope, I'm not going to quote specifics on that. You can read through over 700 posts at your leisure and see what I'm referring to.
So what audience are articles like these intended to attract? It should be obvious: People like you. You are the market for these stories. People like you make the overwhelming majority of posts and page views.
Naive or just trolling? Seriously, that statement is absolute idiocy. You are probably the same guy that claims not voting is the same thing as de
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Are you completely ignorant in your day job, too, or do you save it for slashdot posts?
It's not just me. [slashdot.org]
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The objectives are all laid out in the executive orders which establish affirmative action, and it has nothing to do with forcing employment of various classes, quotas, or anything like that. The key objectives are "equality of opportunity for all qualified persons" and "efficient and effective utilization of all available manpower". Really, go ahead and read them [eeoc.gov] and see if there's anything that you find objectionable.
id much rather (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: id much rather (Score:2)
Open source has executives?
IDNKT... [kimdalferes.com]
Maybe it's just who we are... (Score:5, Insightful)
I really wish my company had more female coders, because I'd like to see if they would provide a different perspective. As it is, we only have one, and she is good, but does not work in our sustainment group (instead she works on capital projects only).
Maybe coding is just something that attracts more men than women. I know it's always been that way for me. I've known very few women who take coding up as a profession, and those I have known were always very good (or at least, I've known men who were way worse).
However, it's entirely likely that men and women simply gravitate to different professions. We are not the same, to assume we are is to deny our differences.
We shouldn't mandate a 50/50 split, but we should ensure that there are no barriers to anyone wishing to pursue this profession. Once any barriers are removed (and I'm not sure there are any now), then we would see what the true diversity in backgrounds for coders would be.
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I really wish my company had more female coders, because I'd like to see if they would provide a different perspective.
I work in a company with female coders. They do provide a different perspective -- because they're individuals, not because they're female.
We shouldn't mandate a 50/50 split, but we should ensure that there are no barriers to anyone wishing to pursue this profession.
This in spades. And one of the barriers we need to remove is the one created by the minority of boorish, petulant, insulting participants who think they're cool and powerful when they act that way.
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3 boors -- Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, and Richard M. Stallman -- created more in this field than any number of make-nice people ever has. So I doubt removing boors will be a net positive.
I will grant that just being a boor doesn't mean you'll make a great contribution; there's always Ballmer as a counterexample.
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Or maybe coding is something that when women try to get involved they discover they are unwelcome. There's the one guy who's just a dick to women. There's one who hasn't washed since 2004. There's one who has to one-up everything she says. There's several who have to hit on her because she's the only woman they get to talk to.
Sounds like the company needs better management.
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Or even there's just the one guy who's a dick to women, but there's the other 10 guys who just let him do it.
Re:Maybe it's just who we are... (Score:4, Informative)
Or maybe coding is something that when women try to get involved they discover they are unwelcome. There's the one guy who's just a dick to women. There's one who hasn't washed since 2004. There's one who has to one-up everything she says. There's several who have to hit on her because she's the only woman they get to talk to.
Let's put this another way... What makes the men who code so magical that women somehow just can't get past them in significant numbers, unlike nearly every other office-dwelling profession on earth? Do you really think that we're such troglodytes that these poor, fragile women are physically repelled from the building? I have to laugh if you really think we're all that special, or that they're so fragile.
And isn't it a bit demeaning to women to suggest that they can't make it in the world of programming if we men don't figure out a way to help them along, or become more welcoming, or whatever? Do you realize the incredible advantage a competent female programmer actually has right now, with all the recent focus on getting women into coding and other tech professions? Any company would absolutely *love* to hire good female programmers, and certainly don't want to lose the ones they have.
I'm actually fine with encouraging more women to get into coding and other tech professions. I get irritated with the constant accusation that it's somehow the fault of the people already in those professions. Personally speaking, the lack of female interest in programming has always been a significant negative for me. I'd love to see more women programming, and I've gotten along fine with the very rare female programmers I've worked with in the last several decades.
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Something has changed.
Back in the '70s and '80s, computers and programming were seen more as secretarial work than actual technical work. The field had more women participation because of stereotypes of the time being that "Secretarial" work meant work for women. As the industry progressed and created and identity for itself as a tinkerer field, guys managed to overcome the sexist stereotype that "Computers are for secretaries and secretaries are women".
That's what changed.
not necessarily different questions (Score:2)
Can anything be done to shift the demographics [of open-source projects], considering the issues that even large, coordinated companies have with altering the collective mix of their employees?
Since a large portion of OSS contributors these days, especially to the bigger projects, are employees paid to contribute, the questions of demographics of the tech industry, and demographics of OSS projects, are pretty intertwined. When you have so many gcc, LLVM, Linux, etc. developers employed by the likes of Red H
Not another one (Score:5, Insightful)
You know how more women can be involved into open-source ? When there are more women coding open source. That's it. This is not a f**cking social issue.
If diversity improves the quality of code, then let every open source project or company decide that it is suffering from al lthose nasty bugs and lack of vision because there isn't enough estrogen in the mailing list. It isn't my problem. It isn't society's problem. It's not like women are banned from computer science and coding. And frankly, nobody how cares many women are coding, good for those who are, and good for those who aren't. It's coding...not suffrage or human rights or anything of fundamental importance to society. It's like cribbing about how all the cobblers in my town are men , no women. Well, boo fucking hoo.
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Then they should just fucking get on with coding.
Shit, I was programming for seven years before I even heard of the internet, and within three months of getting online for the first time I was contributing to an open source code base. Which had female contributors. Which is still around.
What's stopping women from just coding. Starting their own project. Writing software that meets needs that they have.
Nothing. Big fat fuck all.
So please, stop bleating about this supposed sexism, unless you'd like to comment
On the Internet no one knows you are a dog... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:On the Internet no one knows you are a dog... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Strange way to jump. On the Internet, people only know your gender if you tell them. Saying that gender, just like real name or real location is irrelevant seems like a fine solution. And society can push for that.
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there a vagina-to-good-code ratio? Please cite the evidence for this.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a strong correlation between shit code and developers with dicks. It's pretty strong, but Is it causal?
Perhaps in the case of the perl one-liner -- which is essentially dick-waving...
Step One: get out of the way (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the things that draws me to Open Source is that the barriers to entry are absolutely fucking zero. You want to build an Open Source app? Do it. Release it. If people want to use it and contribute to it, they will. If not, they won't (see the billions of abandoned/disused apps on sourceforge, github, etc). Run it however the fuck you want.
However, this really smacks of "Oh, but doesn't feel welcome in the community!" that's been going around lately. So the fuck what? DO IT YOURSELF. Don't wait for my approval. Don't wait to look around to see if anyone cares. If you want to do it, DO IT. You don't like how some maintainer is maintaining a project? FORK IT and make SOMETHING BETTER. Show them how YOU would do it. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP AND START DOING instead of WHINING.
Re:Step One: get out of the way (Score:5, Insightful)
Build your own fucking community, run by your rules. Shut the fuck up and build something.
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Amazing yourself. The fact that you are unable to comprehend the big scary ideas in my OP says that YOU are the problem, not I. Shut the fuck up and build something.
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^This poster gets it. If I find myself in a so-called "toxic community", I will leave. If I find what that toxic community is doing, production wise, valuable, I will do it myself and try to create a community that is less toxic for me. In my case, I was/am a punk rock kid of the 80s/90s. You want to talk about toxic? The entirety of mainstream America was, in my esteem, toxic. Then in the punk scene itself? The straight-edge vegans and the pc punks were both insufferable. Instead of trying to browb
Re:Step One: get out of the way (Score:4, Insightful)
And why should this be done? (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, all women that want to be coders and have the aptitude to be good ones have a more than good shot at becoming coders. That is what matters. As most women do not want to be coders (just like most men, incidentally, the tiny reminder is just larger for men), "getting more women into coding" sound like trying to trick or coerce people into doing things they do not want and what they have no reasonable aptitude for. That never has a good outcome.
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You make it sound like people's preferences are fully formed when they emerge from the womb. They aren't. Society, and subgroups within, try to mold preferences for all kinds of reasons..
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And you think targeted manipulation is somehow acceptable?
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Let anyone with the aptitude and will code (Score:3)
Let anyone with the aptitude and the desire to code do so. Enough of this forced "equality" for something that will never appeal to everybody.
What's next? Forcing equality on nursing? Medicine? Firefighters? Garbage collectors?
Face it: "equality" is a mealy-mouthed politically correct term. The term people should be using is equivalency -- as in people with different skills are getting paid equivalent salaries in different professions.
Better things to do (Score:2, Interesting)
Open source projects require a lot of your own time, and women often still take on a bit more of the work caring for the house and kids when they are not at work (usually because they want to).
I've recently applied to join one for the first time. I want to do a bit more at home to boost my resume and skills, and I thought that might be a good way to do it. The reason I never have before is that while I don't have kids or a partner or anything, I have a lot of other interests and coming home from work afte
git commit -m 'First draft advertisement women' (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey girls! Do you want to do programming work for zero compensation? Do you want to spend your free time doing labor? Then OPEN SOURCE is the place to be! Join us today!
Re: (Score:3)
Do you want a job doing development work? Github is your new resume! Do free work to gain the possibility of doing paid work!
we exist (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been doing an open source project for about 4 years now (I have been working as a programmer since 1998 - I have a Comp Sci degree, too). Considering some of the places I've found my project in use (Middle Eastern locales) I'm almost certain they don't realize it's a one woman show project. I think we don't get tagged as female devs on our projects unless we cover our stuff with pink ribbons and flowers.
Or. you know... we could just fucking stop... (Score:5, Insightful)
If things like gender are to genuinely supposed to not influence our reactions in the workplace, then we need to stop fucking focusing on them and accept people, men and women, for who they are, or whatever interests they happen to have that may, or may not, happen to direct them into a particular industry.
Re:Or. you know... we could just fucking stop... (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that doesn't happen.
Just as men interested in nursing face obstacles that women in nursing don't face, so women interested in computers face obstacles that men don't face. In both cases, it's a result of societal pressure.
If you want your ideal to be realized, you need to make people aware of the issues. It's the first step toward effecting social change. Ignoring or denying the problem does nothing but perpetuate the status quo.
The more interesting question is why no one seems to have a problem encouraging more men to go in to nursing, but so many people seems to think encouraging more women to enter tech is going to destroy the world...
Re: (Score:3)
News flash: the world isn't fair. Live with it.
I could have said the same thing to a slave three hundred years ago, or a child working in a coal mine a hundred and fifty years ago.
Fortunately, while the universe is uncaring either way, societies can become fairer.
Get over yourselves (Score:2)
Are we really pondering the question of how to convince more women to code for free? Why? What barriers are there to their participation?
On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog - just pick a cool l33t name for yourself and start contributing, and when anyone finds out you are (or identify) as a girl, you will become real popular REAL FAST.
Publicly upset (Score:2)
Diversity remains an issue in tech firms across the nation, with executives and project managers publicly upset over a lack of women in engineering and programming roles.
Yeah...uh, some executives may have expressed dismay over the lack of women in E & P roles, but if a "project manager" expressed anything on the matter publicly, s/he would be looking for new employment lickety split. Expressing an opinion in the public square just isn't a part of the job description of a "project manager" (at least in the corporate world).
In any event, I'm not seeing anyone *upset* about this issue. Call me when there's a protest or picket or sumpthin.
That's easy (Score:2)
How much effort should be expended to facilitate diversity among programmers?
That's easy.
Let people who want to give encouragement give as much encouragement as they want.
Let people who don't want to expend effort not expend effort.
Problem solved.
This line of thought is self defeating (Score:2)
I recently realized (I'm ashamed it took me this long) that this line of thought is self defeating. Social justice demands equality in numbers. The benefit, they tell us, is diversity in thought. That a more diverse workplace results in a better product or service due to the diversity of those that contributed their ideas.
But these are the same people who also tell us that women are exactly like men and that any difference is a false social construct. That being the case, then once [oppressed minority] reac
Some facts... (Score:5, Insightful)
In my long (over 30 year) career, I've never once seen anyone hired because they were male despite there being a more-able female candidate.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen - I've just never seen it.
On the other hand, I *have* seen a less-capable candidate hired because they were female.
I'm not saying it's common (not least because I don't think it is) - but I have seen it.
In my experience, whether you keep your reproductive organs internally or externally has exactly ZERO influence on how good your code is - so can we just cut all this SJW bullshit, and hire the best person for the job?
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In my decades, I've seen women openly and subtly refused roles or downgraded in evaluations because "they might get pregnant, or married, or follow their husband's career, or they'd be distracting to the workplace, or reduce the camarederie, etc., etc., etc.". And I've certainly seen considerable sexual harassment in the workplace.
I've also seen a less capable female colleague hired. Then everyone refused to train them, and gave them the work no one else could be bothered to do, and the results were predict
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As the former manager for a team of 75 consultants, I saw the exact opposite. The companies my staff were placed at were so hell-bent on improving their stats that every woman they employed was promoted to project manager, team leader, or management within 2-3 years of starting with the company, far faster than any males were.
A minority woman? Shit, she was a director in five years.
Outreachy: isn't hiring by race/sexuality illegal? (Score:2)
Isn't that discrimination? Why must I be of a certain race or sexuality to be considered for a job? Aren't there laws against this in the US?
Daughters (Score:5, Interesting)
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Doesn't go far enough (Score:2)
Women Of OpenStack (Score:2)
No. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Diversity remains an issue in tech firms across the nation"
It's a bullshit issue, and its importance is artificially inflated by SJW groups. Frankly, these companies that think there has to be a 50/50 split in everything need to get their heads out of the collective asses.
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Think any of them have a 50/50 split in the HR department? I'm thinking not.
Re:FUCK OFF DICE (Score:4, Insightful)
you're a dick
You think so? Well let's try something then.
Diversity remains an issue in hospitals across the nation, with executives and project managers publicly upset over a lack of men in nursing roles. While all that's happening on the corporate side, a handful of people and groups are trying to get more men involved in nursing school. How much effort should be expended to facilitate diversity among nurses? Can anything be done to shift the demographics, considering the issues that even large, coordinated companies have with altering the collective mix of their employees?
If you find TFA acceptable, but my alterations not, then I am (not) sorry to say that it is you who is the dick, not I.
Re: FUCK OFF DICE (Score:5, Insightful)
How many women would give up their nursing jobs to get more men in the field? How many Teachers?
Sound ridiculous? That is exactly what these vagina counters are doing to men in STEM occupations - they aren't creating new jobs for women, they are taking jobs away from men to give to women...
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Quotas are not competition.
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FTFY.
Re: FUCK OFF DICE (Score:2)
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Re:FUCK OFF DICE (Score:5, Insightful)
Forcing morals on everyone else and telling them that if they don't accept it they're being discriminatory is not making things better.
Re:FUCK OFF DICE (Score:5, Insightful)
"But that's not how it works in real life."
It's only that, well, yes it is. The vast majority of open source software projects, either successful or not, are the creation of just one single person. See? "person", as in "I don't give a damn if they are man, woman or aliens from XK-578".
Anyone can, say, open an account at github and publish their code to their leisure, accept patches from whoever they want and publish about their code and the community of users and developers they want to build around it as much as they want. It's difficult to think of any other human activity more agnostic to personal identity than producing software. And still, there's a gender bias: maybe it comes from somewhere different.
Re: It's pretty simple, really. (Score:2)
Uh, Gamer is not equal to Coder (nor are they mutually exclusive).
That's like saying we'd have more women in the engineering departments at the big three automakers if NASCAR wasn't such an 'old boy's club'...
Re:It's pretty simple, really. (Score:5, Interesting)
Recognize that there is no justification for the treatment received by Anita Sarkeesian for challenging sexim in games, that would help.
99% of the treatment she calls harassment is people calling her out on her bullshit. She spins this into "Its because I'm a woman/feminist", but the reality is its just the internet doing what it does best: Calling you out publicly on your bullshit. She is also a public figure at this point, and as such, has been receiving what plenty of public figures get - Non-credible death threats and some pretty mean tweets. So what you are saying is that we should treat her different because she is a woman? Or are you being sexist and not saying that all harassment of that nature is bad, but you will only defend it because it is happening to a woman?
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Which has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. Though it should be noted that none of what you describe ever happened. No female developers slept with any journalists in exchange for favorable reviews. It was a lie from the start. A lie which you obviously believed.
Except nobody ever claimed that. She was sleeping with someone who gave her favorable coverage. She is also a rapist by her own definition - She had unprotected sex with someone else which violates her boyfriend's consent, ergo rape. For people who try to take the high ground, I find it amusing that everyone who defends Zoe Quinn and overlooks this part of her is basically a rape apologist. Way to side with the abuser.
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SJWs find an issue in everything. Their solution strikes me as being heavily biased toward quotas and reverse discrimination. They're not so interested in root causes. Finding and remedying root causes is work and work and whining just don't mix well for them.
Only a stupid company (or project or what-have-you) would fail to take advantage of talent. That's one thing I admired about the IBM of some years ago. They made full use of the talent pool without regard to race or gender (at least that's how it appea
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1) The desire to have a diverse workforce is inherently prejudicial. The workers should be judged on their abilities, not their sex, not their race.
The observation that their are relatively few women in a particular sector wiggles it's ears and strongly suggests that something prejudicial may be going on. Its reasonable to ask why, and its reasonable to be completely dis-satisifed with the set of bullshit non-answers people like you have come back with.
Me: Hey, I notice there aren't a lot of women in tech, what's up with that?
You: You can't ask that! Its sexist! Your sexist. And your a bully! And you want to coerce women to do something they don't want
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Typical straw man argument thrown out by sexist SJW
Re:Deconstructing diversity in tech (Score:5, Insightful)
5) We need wives and mothers.
Ah, now the truth comes out.
We need husbands and fathers just as much as we need wives and mothers. In fact, we probably need them more at the moment, because the ones who work in the corporate world currently aren't around for their families as much as they should be or want to be. Women are allowed to have a family-work balance; indeed, they are expected to. Men are not.
If we as a society valued care as much as we value making money, institutional sexism in the workplace would be mostly gone within a generation.
Boo hoo? (Score:2)
I don't know how old you are or how many jobs you have had, but you present he same whine we saw yesterday. Perhaps here it was a joke, but I see it the same as yesterday's "Linus wrote an email with curse words in it!" thread. Oh the horror!
Even if I was not a Veteran, I understand stress in the work place. I have been at plenty of jobs with "that fuckup" who made everyone work an extra 20+ hours a week for months on end. I have seen people defend "that fuckup" when people finally get fed up, after mon
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She left not because she has a vagina, but because she attempts to Tone police people and people didn't want none of it and told her in no uncertain terms.
She's not mature emotionally, and doesn't tolerate difference of opinion.
Any guy would've suffered the same fate she did. In fact, her buddy Matthew Garrett also exited with her. This was not a gender issue. This was a Sarah and Matthew issue.
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