I've been reading this thread with great interest. When I combined some of
the insights put forward here with a demographic survey I saw the other day,
I found an interesting correspondance: The social make-up of the open source
community is nearly identical to the social make-up of university computer
science classes.
Now, before anyone says, "Du-uh, yeah!" let's stop and think about the
social implications of that for a second. Kathleen Weaver made an extremely
important point, IMHO, when she spoke to the difficulty of convincing people
that sometimes a C student on the lunch program is going to make a better
programmer than another student on the honour roll.
As someone who has had all of 15 minutes of formal instruction in computers,
but who manages to hold down a senior technical position in a high tech
company, I firmly believe that bringing supporting communities such as this
offline is very important.
I don't deny for a moment that an online place where women can say
'<shock!>I'm not the only one!</shock>' has a tremendous value. But I'd
suggest that once that mission is well in hand, the participants might want
to consider that their group is comprised mostly of middle class liberals
with college degrees, living in a fairly small geographic range, globally
speaking.
Again, I understand that things have to start somewhere, and I would be the
last to suggest this group was lacking in sensitivity to others. I would
however point out that it would be a very good thing to have an offline
element that can support teachers like Kathleen in making sure that everyone
gets access to instruction without prejudice, or that can allow people (like
I once was) who are just curious and playful to sit down and discover
whether computing is what they want to do.
Bottom line: as long as the cost of entry into computing world is a college
education, there will be problems (including the ones being addressed here)
that will disenfranchise significant segments of our society.
So, some questions:
1) Does high-tech always *require* an advanced education?
2) What are good ways to lower the cost of admission to the high-tech
'club'?
3) How does one explore one's interest in computing, short of spending
years in class finding out?
I'm sure that answers to the above will address not only the problem of
women's under-representation in computing, but that of a great many others
as well.
--
Dan McGarry
http://www.moodindigo.com/
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
