I wanted to put my 2 cents on this women involvement issue. Actually women in proprietary software market have a good motivation like earning money from what they do. But in free software world, they hardly have this motivation, and most of time it's volunteer work. I doubt that female enthusiasm to IT is high in the world. Therefore they need some motivation to get involved. It's something to do with the loving what you do in Free Software world, and women mostly choose other things than staying by the computer for hours. If we go deep into this gender psychology and genetic closeness to particular activities should be considered. From where I live (ie. Turkey) most women in the IT world are only there for earning money, and those I doubt they would ever touch computer at home or elsewhere from their office. Sure thing that there are some who loves to use computers. But that's really few, which won't exceed fingers of an hand. It's not easy to increase women involvement in that sense. We need to find motivation, and proprietary world does it by giving money. But nothing comes to my mind for Free Software world. I doubt it would be easy to change generic women behavior and eagerness. But maybe finding some really handsome hackers, and opening a beauty saloon with GNOME installed computers might help. (was a joke :). On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 18:23 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: > On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 23:16 +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote: > > On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 04:47:40PM +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: > > > > > Apparently, yes: This is one plausible explanation for our disastrous (1%) > > > female involvement and low asian involvement. That 1% is so scary that I > > > can't see how we can make it worse, so I'm for all kinds of crazy > > > experiments to fix it. > > > > Not to dispute that affirmative action is a good thing, but > > perhaps we're on the wrong level here. > > > > A quick browse of intake statistics for the University of Western > > Australia says that of 47 BCompSc freshers last year, only 2 were > > women. For BEng (all majors) the female intake was only 10%. > > We seem to be far below 10%. And way below the 25% or so number that > I've read for general proprietary involvement. > > I agree that wider society is the problem, and I think we should be the > solution, but we are not quite there yet. > > > Also of interest, a (female) colleague asked where we're getting our > > 1% contribution statistic from. It sounds believable, but is it > > people with CVS accounts, or does it include translators who send > > translations to their i18n team leader. Did someone just look > > through a list of names and guess the genders? Similarly for > > "asianness" (sic). Are we just using the domain names on their > > email addresses? > > > > Perhaps we should be looking towards going forces with other groups > > for a "women in open source drive" or even a "women in IT" drive. I > > know that Pia Waugh has really gotten behind this in Australia. > > Yes, the current people on gnome-women-list gnome org seems to be > involved in Ubuntu and Debian. I'm sure they'd welcome ideas. >
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