On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 04:28:20PM -0600, Jenny Brown (was Gable) wrote:
> To that extent, it's been somewhat helpful, but not as much as
> I expected. Mainly, I think, it's because I see women asking
> questions and guys answering... and they're still the experts...
> It's hard to summarize though because there just hasn't been
> that much traffic.
I ask questions on techtalk and go unanswered... (most are about quite
specific uses of quite specific programs).
I try to post answers when I know them (see the recent thread on kernel
compilation for example) but since I don't actually do very much
sysadminning, most of techtalk is either too out of my realm or too
basic.
The things that's bothered me about techtalk is the fact that having
just the one mailing list for technical discussions has meant it has
become a help forum. So, as a linuxchix list it attracts women, and as a
help forum it attracts women in need of help.
I think that the reason there are men who answer is that they are
attracted to a help forum that doesn't have any of the RTFM bullshit
(which manual huh?). Only men who've been around Linux for a while know
this nastiness, the beginners go to more obvious routes for help than a
women's list, and only come to Linuxchix once they've been burned. By
then they know something, and want to help out newbies who are hurting.
However I am primarily a programmer, not a sysadmin. I know all I need
to know about partitions, I want to talk about the design of my
brilliant new web-templating system that I've hatched in the past week.
I want to learn about Linux kernel internals, but I'll probably have to
head over to kernelnewbies to learn much.
Somehow, it's kind of indicitive about 'women and Linux' that we have a
chat list, a gender discussion list, a help list, all of which is well
and good, but no hardcore hackers list.
Mary.
--
Mary Gardiner
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