El dj 01 de 06 del 2006 a les 10:51 -0500, en/na Shaun McCance va escriure: > there tends to > be a reasonably high percentage of women in technical jobs > that aren't necessarily programming (though they may involve > some programming), such as project management, tech writing, > graphic design, and quality assurance. > > All of these positions tend to be under-represented in the > free software world, at least among volunteer efforts. Good point. We can try to find and convince the very few geek women out there for free software hardcore programming. But if we miss people in all the non-programming tasks, wouldn't be easier to find new types of contributors through these gateways? Documentation, marketing, web publishing, graphic design, journalism, project coordination, community management... are tasks that involve both women and men in the professional world. We have difficulties recruiting volunteers, any kind of volunteers, in these tasks and I think the reason is not some kind of gender or minority discrimination but, put simply, the predominant geek culture (which I bet some sociologist has already found out to be based mainly on male and western paradigms). It is probably good to promote geek-ism in those aspects of free software related to programming but... is it useful to promote it in the rest of tasks? I don't think so, unless we want to develop a desktop and a bunch applications successful between geeks only. I bet this geek culture is stopping many women from being interested in the free software phenomena (in fact I asked several computer-friendly women and this is the answer I got). Being myself not a programmer, it stopped me from finding a place to contribute until I learned to be geek-friendly. And this culture is still stopping many of my non-geek colleagues (both women and men) to come and give a hand. Ask your friends. It is clear that women in general are happy investing their personal time in social activities without a monetary or even a clear benefit. Women have been key in any process of social change (even if their names don't appear in the history books). Have a look on social, non-commercial activities around the world and you will find women everywhere, many times challenging the gender percentages or simply having a clear superiority over men. If we fail involving women (and other "majority" groups in other social, non-commercial organizations and activities) it's because something else, an the geek culture is in the top of the suspicious list. We can work making the geek paradigms more feminine or less gender-determined but changing a paradigm takes time and there is no manual for it. Working on less geek-ish gateways and environments for the non-programming tasks seems to be a more tangible challenge that can make a change in the short term. -- Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org | http://guadec.org
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