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On 16/01/08 15:35:46, Viv wrote: >> We don't seem to have very many female members. >> There are indeed few female Linux users, recent studies show that while the general computing user base clocks in at around 30% female, the percentage of female Linux users is at a staggering low 2%. There is no 'one simple answer' as to why, there are however a shedload of various factors which come into play. I've been a Linux user for half my life (female for all of it) -- I am fairly involved with several FOSS projects and have over the years met many people from both the wider community and the more specific sub communities, few of these people have been female. It is however a topic which I have spent endless hours discussing both within the community, while speaking to people doing research into it, while being part of discussion panels of women in Open Source, while considering starting up a "women's group" for the female developers, contributors and users of one of the two distributions I work on, and, whenever it has randomly cropped up in conversation. A lot of general statements and assumptions has been made and most of them are probably true for someone, somewhere. "Men want to know how something works, women just want it to work." is a statement I have come across over and over again, perhaps it is true. "Women simply just aren't interested" is another, which may be true for many women but not so much for the women in FOSS. Women generally are discouraged from technology, in childhood, media, social expectations.. There is also a lot of stigma attached to the FOSS communities, the stereotypical greasy haired, bearded birkenstock clad arrogant geek doesn't always inspire confidence and make you view getting involved with the community as easy, let alone hip! :) Arrogance -- FOSS users have a tendency to be arrogant and oftentimes quite rude, while we will spend hours advocating our choice of OS we may be far from interested in stretching out a hand to help you when you do give in and try it out -- we're just as likely to roll our eyes and mutter something about stupidity as we are of giving you any further direction, that is of course, unless the problem you are faced with is one which we find sufficiently interested to care about ourselves. We're not always the friendliest bunch, we're often quite loud about our dislike and hatred making us somewhat scary to the new kid on the block. Sexism -- if asked 75% of female FOSS contributors will have seen or experienced sexism, yet, 75% of male FOSS contributors will not. Sexism is by large still around and is perhaps one place which really puts the FOSS community behind the rest of the world, which is a real shame, not only does it drive away potential female contributors but it also drives away many of the smart guys. Sexist jokes are pretty common and really unpleasant. Within 24hours of joining the Gentoo Linux project as a developer some years back I was at the receiving end of the 'Shouldn't you be in the kitchen?' style comments and had more invites for 'dates' than I could count, I was pretty close to walking away again at that moment, while the guys in question still to this day feel I should have taken their date proposals as a compliment it did nothing but reduce me to feeling that I was viewed as a baby making machine and that my technical contributions were entirely invalidated. Going even further back in time, when I first started frequenting online FOSS communities (MLs, IRC, Forums etc) I soon learnt that men got respect, I became the subject of jokes. So I simply took on a male persona online and happily (well, outwardly atleast) participated in the community that way, it allowed me to be taken seriously, people stopped accusing me of pretending to be a girl (Duh). I have later come to realise that I was one of very many women who did this. When I first joined a LUG and went to my first installfest I was full of energy and enthusiasm, within two minutes of entering the room questions such as 'You must have taken the wrong door..?' 'Is it your first time installing Linux?' 'Would you like me to teach you anything?' so many times I wished to scream, in actual fact I had by this time a understanding of Linux good enough for me to come there with the intention of being able to help others and simply enjoy chatting to likeminded people. Of course, there is another thing which makes you weirded out, and that is when you're faced with the geek who's social skills leaves a bit more to be desired, while he may not throw out the sexist jokes or belittle your intelligence he often ends up waving his arms around like a bird trying to learn to fly while excitedly exclaiming 'OH MY GOD IT IS A GIRL,' which is an experience which leaves you somewhat baffled, amused, but baffled. Eyecandy -- while the times have changed and it's now perfectly possibly to have a nice looking Linux system, the assumption among non-geeks are often still that they'd be stuck in a text based console and why on earth would they want to choose that over something 'pretty' like Vista or OSX. Another interesting thing of note is that many Linux distributions (and other FOSS projects) create womens groups in an attempt to attract more female contributors and make them feel welcome, however, sometimes this turns out to be the wrong approach -- they are often run by rather hardcore feminists, and while feminism is well and good it often can be just as frightening to your average woman as the bearded birkenstock geek. These groups also often end up causing more segregation where rather than including and welcoming women as part of the wider community women are made to feel that they need a 'special program' to cater to them not being 'smart enough' to participate on equal terms. I believe that simple to use type distributions like Ubuntu means that we are seeing a lot more non-geek Linux users, both male and female and I believe that with time these numbers will perhaps start to even out a bit more. And one thing which I have come to realise is that while it no doubt would be cool to have more female contributors to FOSS the gender of whomever wrote whichever little sniplet of code I use, or the gender of the person communicating with me on a ML or some other internet fora really doesn't matter at all. C. -- 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