Re: [Pan-users] Re: updated info - O.T.

[Alan Meyer]

Petr Kovar <address@hidden> wrote:

> Duncan, Thu, 5 Aug 2010 06:06:59 +0000 (UTC):
> ...
> > One of the topics of discussion (and alarm, in some quarters,
> > from both sides) in the FLOSS community (various talks at
> > conferences, articles on LWN and the like) has been the fact
> > that while women /do/ seem to be getting more common on the
> > proprietary side, it doesn't seem to be happening to anything
> > like the same degree on the FLOSS side.
>
> Could it be, partly, due to a greater representation of
> not-so-technical but professional-level roles in the
> proprietary (and therefore commercial) software development?
> Consider marketers, translators, etc.

I was thinking the same thing.  In the shop where I work, perhaps
30 programmers have passed through in the last so many years.
Only two were women.

However many more people have come through as graphic designers,
QA testers, writers, and client liaison people and most of them
were women.

It seems common in the U.S. information processing world to find
men working on the technology and women working on the content.

The open source world tends to be very technology intensive,
often with those other roles that are common in the broader
information systems world, completely missing.

> (...)
>
> > I'm honestly not sure on this one.  It's worth noting,
> > however, that the gender ratio of engineers and the like is
> > far more even in societies such as those of the former
> > Eastern bloc, Russia and the like. 
>
> Yes, that's true. I think that one of the key factors that
> played important role in this fact was Communist social
> engineering with the ultimate goal of creating a technical,
> industry & labor oriented society together with a significantly
> lowered role of the intelligentsia with traditional (classical)
> education in humanities.
>
> So from the 50's on, science and technology went ahead,
> together with pushing "new socialist women" from their
> traditional housekeeping to work.  Thus there are many female
> engineers on the Eastern labor markets nowadays.

I'm curious to hear your opinion on whether it took a lot of
"pushing" to get women into science and technology, or whether it
was more of a "liberating" to enable their entrance into roles
that they really wanted to get into but were inhibited from doing
so in the past by male dominance and social convention.

Such inhibitions are more pervasive than many of us realize.
When I was growing up in the U.S. (too many years ago), parents,
teachers, and other boys and girls would all discourage any child
who aspired to cross traditional gender role lines.  Girls didn't
aspire to be engineers, doctors, soldiers, seamen, construction
workers, miners, or business managers.  Boys didn't aspire to be
elementary school teachers, nurses, librarians, social workers
or, worst of all, house husbands.  The limitations on aspirations
were set in place by very strong social conventions long before
the young adults joined the labor force.

...

> You know what I found more interesting about this RMS "joke" is
> that to make fun of women is strictly no-no due to feminism
> being more or less part of the Western culture nowadays, but to
> banter on religion (or Roman Catholicism and Virgin Mary, to be
> specific) seems to be much, much more broadly acceptable in
> (technical or not) society. I see this as a clear example of
> double standard.

Perhaps so in the Czech Republic, however in the United States I
would say that disrespect for religion is every bit as condemned
as disrespect for women.  For example, I can think of only one
fringe politician (Jesse Ventura), and only a few fringe media
people (e.g., Bill Maher), who have dared to say anything even
mildly disrespectful about any religion.

I'm not a religious believer myself, but I've learned to be
extremely cautious about making any criticism of any religion 
except to people I know very well.


Incidentally, and even further off-topic, I wish I could speak or
just read and write *any* foreign (to me) language as well as you
do with English.  I would never know from your posting that you
were not a native English speaker, and a well educated one at
that.

    Alan