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On 17 Jan 2008, at 22:26, Simon Waters wrote: > Clare Shepherd wrote: >> >> It's just that guys have this way >> of excluding women and keeping the good stuff to themselves. > > At the risks of prolonging the painful bit of the thread. > > How do you think guys are excluding women from Linux? > > What could we do better? > > The bit I agree with Stinga on is that I don't think that IT is > specifically different from other areas of endeavour where gender > biases > exist or develop. > > Interestingly better educated fathers are one of the significant > factors > identified in females taking up careers in engineering. So probably we > should be encouraging our daughters to experiment with software. > (Although I think genetics is a better career choice - knowing they > could write software or build a computer if they wanted to won't > hurt a > child's development). > > -- > I think that it's partly our fault, in that women often, but not always and maybe less so with younger women, see an all male enclave of IT people, bikers, golfers or whatever, as slightly threatening, intimidating etc. I think this is a trait that is improving, in that men are more used to having women included and we are getting used to it too. However, I do think that matey rather cliquey atmosphere can be rather excluding, presumably even to new men to the group. I also think the fascination with the minutiae can put women off. This doesn't really apply to Linux, but when I went to the 1st Paignton meeting, I was relieved that there was another woman present, Gemma, I think. It is difficult to generalise about things, I just think there is still a tendency for this to be so. I do think that the type of meeting where instruction is given is more welcoming to new users. After all both genders can suffer from the I'm afraid of leaving the comfort zone of the familiar, MS or Mac. As for the point about about fathers encouraging daughters to take up engineering. When I was at school I wanted to go into engineering, not only was my grammar school headmistress (yes, it was that long ago) horrified but also my Scots father, who came from a large family and his brothers were mostly engineers, as were several earlier generations. he thought it" no a suitable job for a lassie". As this was the 60s, and pre-women's lib., I took notice, to my subsequent regret. I wanted to get into electronics, and would have been ideally placed to go into IT, as people were being needed only a few years later. In fact an early boyfriend was a programmer for Commercial Union, in Exeter, one of the early commercial users of computers. Clare Clare -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html