Manoj Srivastava wrote:
On Thu, 4 Mar 2004 00:22:14 -0500 (EST), Jaldhar H Vyas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
Yes I do. Or rather I think it could be. As anecdotal evidence
mine is as good as yours. Let me ask you then, how would you go
about setting up an experiment to test the hypothesis that Debian is
scary to women?
OK. Last I heard, irc.debian.org #debian is a project
resource. Here is an example of how women are treated in Debian; and
helix tells me that this is how they are treated all the time
(dismayingly enough, I got responses that ranged the spectrum from
"boyz ill be boyz", "But .. he apologized and all", "You should not
make trouble for some one who actually apologized", "well, it was
just a joke, and then helix over reacted. There are problems on both
sides" [blaming the victim, heh heh]).
Pretty much everyone would agree that "tam" is a moron. Period.
The problem is that IRC is not exactly the most friendly place and
personally I never even go to #debian (#debian-devel seems much more
profesional ;).
The bottom line is that problems here are larger than can be dealt by
just the DPL (original question was to the candidates, right?); everyone
has to get involved and even then we might not see any immediate change
in the number of women joining the project. And discrimination is not
limitted to men - there are barriers in other fields for men like ballet
in US/Canada (I am not talking about the professional level here, but
the ballet introductory/intermediate classes).
Let's face it; women in the OSS community, especially in the western
world, are pioneers. There are advantages *and* disadvantages that come
with that title. Sexism *will* occur and it is up to all of us, not just
the DPL, to make sure that such behaviour will not go unnoticed.
- Adam
