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Youth [Was: Re: Women and GNU and RMS (was Re: something else)]
From: |
Alexandre François Garreau |
Subject: |
Youth [Was: Re: Women and GNU and RMS (was Re: something else)] |
Date: |
Fri, 01 Nov 2019 19:44:02 +0100 |
Le vendredi 1 novembre 2019, 17:27:53 CET Sandra Loosemore a écrit :
> On 11/1/19 3:32 AM, Andreas Enge wrote:
> > Do you have ideas on how to change that, maybe on a per-package basis?
> > For instance, did you experience things in GCC/Binutils or in other
> > environments that you think might help to attract more women, or more
> > generally to make diverse groups of potential contributors feel more
> > welcome?
>
> I've thought about this and discussed it with other CodeSourcery people
> from time to time in the past, but we've pretty much come up blank. It
> might help if I personally pursued a more visible role in the community
> so I could act as more of a role model for other women,
Might it be that it’d be mostly related with the bad gender ratio in CS in
general?
And, imho, maybe even more specifically in some *very specific* technical areas
which are actually of greater importance within GNU (eg. lisp, compilers,
languages, libraries… and not, eg. video games, internet protocols, etc.)? I’m
quite unaware of differences of (anyway all pretty bad) ratios in differents
areas of computing.
> Maybe people who work for other organizations who contribute regularly
> to the GNU project could look at their hiring practices and try to
> recruit and retain more female hackers?
That seems an extremely good idea.
> but all of us women who've worked specifically on the GNU
> toolchain have been older (me, Catherine Moore who is now in a
> management role, Janis Johnston who has retired, and Rhonda Wittels who
> has left the company), and we don't have any more junior female
> developers in the pipeline at present. :-(
Bringing age parameter seems to be an extremely interesting idea here. Because
indeed GNU, more than other projects, is a pretty legacy and old project,
founded in the roots of software computing itself and the yet-to-be internet,
with a big ratio of quite low-low-low-level software, more of interest at the
time, much less hacked on (and getting popular interest) nowadays (I’m pretty
sure there are more women working for firefox, ubuntu, etc. than even *knowing*
that Debian, gnutls, binutils exists, their names, and what they are).
Maybe the highest level things that are rooted in GNU’s culture of lisp/
compilers/languages are actually software package managers, as GNU has knew
quite a dozen. And I’m pretty sure the median age in Guix project is pretty
*much* lower than anywhere else.
And gender ratio was likely *way more bad* (yet still bad) at the time
(because of policy and social cultures that *are* to reject, but maybe now
partly gone) , and that might explain why it might be more bad in GNU than
elsewhere. Without even being related to, even unconscious, behavior of its
members.
So my solution, and it is quite kind, welcoming, pacific, and inclusive: offer
formation about what’s of great interest within GNU, to younger hackers, maybe
not even yet hackers (so to overcome the still-existing bad gender ratio of
universities, because of still bad social culture) and, instead of “diversity
programs” that’d consist in aggressively and negatively policy our already-
there community (and risking to cristalize disagreements), we might go out and
teach people lisp, C, compilation, interpretation, languages and such!
I’m sure “attract, or even make, younger hackers” may be a more attractive and
unifying perspective to *all* of us.
I’m already pretty young (according the current discussions, half a dozen of
years ago I may even have been a “child” (too bad I really didn’t become a
fully-achieved hacker at 14 (so even more “as a child”) like Aaron Swartz),
and I already see that, for GNU hackers, “young” is something around 40yo.
It’s not their fault. They all seem pretty nice. It’s likely not because of
their behavior, but the *reasons* why they’re here, while others not.
- Re: Women and GNU and RMS (was Re: something else), Andreas Enge, 2019/11/01
- Re: Women and GNU and RMS (was Re: something else), Dora Scilipoti, 2019/11/01
- List posting rules, Mark Wielaard, 2019/11/01
- Re: List posting rules, Dora Scilipoti, 2019/11/01
- Re: List posting rules, Carlos O'Donell, 2019/11/01
- Re: List posting rules, Jean Louis, 2019/11/01
- Re: List posting rules, Ruben Safir, 2019/11/01
- Re: List posting rules, Alexandre François Garreau, 2019/11/01
- Re: List posting rules, Ruben Safir, 2019/11/02
- Re: List posting rules, Dora Scilipoti, 2019/11/02