Thank you for sharing this story Geertjan. As context on how I interact and drive conversations, my approach is to confirm that my understanding of essential and crucial information shared with me is aligned with the sender/emisor's original intention, as a result, I tend to ask a lot of questions that might seem obvious, please bear with me.
I'm adding follow up questions inline. On 2019/05/09 18:27:26, Geertjan Wielenga <geert...@apache.org> wrote: > Hi all, > > Just a trigger warning here -- I was in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia last week, > giving a course in which Apache NetBeans was used. There were 8 people on > the course, three of which were women completely covered in black hijabs > with only their eyes showing. I do think safe spaces, microaggressions, and > trigger warnings are very important -- but in an ecosystem where there are > literally women in the back of the classroom with only their eyes showing, > it seems complicated to address this diversity topic at all, unless we're > not concerned about the diversity issues connected to superiority, > colonialism, and ethnocentrism, etc. What I extract from this point, is that you believe that in order to be successful in our efforts to improve diversity and inclusion at the ASF, we should consider external factors such as cultural and regulatory aspects that influence how others get involved, is this correct? > > And... a year ago those three women would not have been in a computer class > at all, so the fact that they were even in the room was a sign of massive > progress. > > Just want to raise this because what some might see as diversity could be > pretty problematic in a global context -- unless we're comfortable, or at > least very prepared, to deal with the fall out. I hear you, this is why I believe that we shouldn't take a position where D&I efforts are mandatory or enforced - that just won't work in so many ways. Our approach should be to facilitate the adoption of practices that enable projects to be more diverse and inclusive, and to support minorities to take a more active and involved part of the ASF mission and goals. Since you care about this topic and how we approach this, I would love to invite you to stay active in the conversation and this list. Thank you! > Gj > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: diversity-unsubscr...@apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: diversity-h...@apache.org
