> > I have never had a hostile experience with debian, but I still feel > > really unconfident when I interact with the debian community, even > > if it's only posting a bug report. I don't understand why this is > > so, but it's very real. Partly it's knowing that I'm going to be > > dealing with a man (almost certainly), and he may assume I don't > > know what I'm doing, and he may put me down or be condescending or > > unkind as a result. >
Helen I hope you don't take this the wrong way but the problem isn't that you're a woman or nearly all Debian developers are male. The problem is you are a flake. (No that wasn't an attempt to put you down or be unkind. It's simply the most accurate word I can think of. If anyone knows a proper psychological term for what I'm describing I'll use that.) Vague fears of persecution are a sign of mental instability which can't be fixed by an operating system free or otherwise. I don't think is a particularly female problem either. I maintain the webmin web-based system administration tool which caters mainly to newbies and I notice a lot of men who are hesitant to interact for fear of being laughed at. Neither do I think it is cultural. My wife (like me) comes from a highly traditionalist strict gender role based culture but that hasn't stopped her from being a vi/ksh/elm-using unixhead who when we met was working with AIX graphic card driver developers at IBM. There does seem to be a divide between the hacker mentality and that of normal people. I've tried to get my wife involved in Debian but at the end of the day she likes to put the computer away instead of obsessing over it every waking minute like me. But I don't see what Debian can do about this. Either you are a hacker or you're not. Asking a totally hackerish community to act differently is just going to end in tears. -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> La Salle Debain - http://www.braincells.com/debian/
