also sprach Helen Faulkner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005.08.29.0155 +0200]: > Would a German speaker mind telling us roughly what that article says, and > what > it says about Debian Women?
- there's prejudice against women in software, despite all the important female contributors in history. - related to the "secondary position" of women in society (not being allowed to attend universities), women were "used" as programmers, for that task was too repetitive for men. - sexual tension existed at workplaces, culminating e.g. in the prohibition for women to enter the Eniac room. - the women remained tough despite all the obstacles, writing e.g. the first compiler (Grace Hopper), or developing languages like Cobol, Pascal, and Basic. - then they refer to Magni's paper and her theory that free software developers are equivalents of the adventurers of the "rough" times in history, when pain and (the strive for) glory were what made a man. - she says that diverse groups have greater chances of success, so free software should diversify more, partly by recognising the presence and needs of male and female users more. - now Fernanda is quoted as seeing the main obstacle in the communication. without it, you can't contribute to F/OSS, but when women try to join the forums, they get objectified. - Karin Kosina of FSF Europe says that she's tired of being hit on when that seems to be the only logical thing to do for males even in the context of tech talks or the like. - She wants women not to smile or "giggle", but to take a position and set things straight. - then the article goes to mention hot babe. Men suggested to women to just work pictures of naked men into the tool, but the women didn't see why they should do work just to make the software acceptable in the archive. - political correctness and religion are also mentioned, with reference to debian-bible and debian-koran and how they are theoretically also not okay. - Generally, the desire seems to be for the 99.6% men of the project to show more respect and understanding for the women's position. - The hostility by men and difficulty of the situation cause only few women to actually do something about it. - The article ends with the hope that more women get active in DW. If you ask me, it's a good article, and rather objective and factually correct. > We should add all these into the links on the "press" page of the DW website. My translation is very rough, and it's late. But it's herewith released under the Artistic Licence with the additional restriction that the sentence preceeding this one must appear somewhere close to it. :) -- Please do not send copies of list mail to me; I read the list! .''`. martin f. krafft <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> : :' : proud Debian developer and author: http://debiansystem.info `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system Invalid/expired PGP (sub)keys? Use subkeys.pgp.net as keyserver! only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers. -- douglas adams, "the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy"
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