Re: Women and GNU and RMS (was Re: something else)

[Sandra Loosemore]

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, but e.g. I 
haven't been attending Cauldrons because I have some health issues that 
make travel and sitting in meetings all day difficult for me, and TBH I 
would rather just hack instead of trying to be an evangelist for the 
project anyway.

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?   Companies that have the 
resources to hire and train interns or new grads might try harder to 
steer some female programmers towards the GNU project, for instance. 
CodeSourcery/Mentor has always seemed to be a female-friendly 
environment, 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.  :-(

-Sandra