On Monday 28 April 2008, Elaine Ashton wrote: > > Sure, I can see what you mean, and that sounds very altruistic, to > > keep > > Elaine's material 'on file' so to speak. It's a highly defensible > > position, > > on the face of it, but in reality, we all know what being quietly > > side-lined > > means. > > History repeats itself time and time again. You get the people you > deserve by the silent majority remaining silent. Just like all the > politics inside Parrot. The silent remain silent and things continue > on just as they did in the days of P5P. For years many have > plaintively commented as to why there are so few women in perl, > especially when compared to other projects, and you need only look to > yourselves. >
I'd like to comment on the "Why there are few women in Perl" remark. It may be a bit tactless to bring this in this context, like a pushy women-lib-fighter who keeps bringing up the subject. (This is a style-over-substance remark) But I'd like to address it anyway. First of all I should note that I know quite a few female programmers here in Israel, in real-life. Most or all of them seem intelligent and impressive, and they most likely make good programmers. I also know some other female Perl programmers online. As for how much they contribute back to the community, that is probably less than ideal. It is well-known that in most development environments what happens is that most of the people just use it and not contribute back, while the amount of active contributers is much smaller. This is similar to the fact that most of the code in the world has no sale value, (or otherwise isn't sold) and only a very small percent of it is open-source/shareware/freeware/proprietary/etc. (see http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s03.html ). Since there are fewer women, there are also fewer female contributers. However, despite all that, I still know of several female Perl developers who contribute in various ways. There's http://search.cpan.org/~elizabeth/ who wrote many useful CPAN modules. There's imacat, who is an active CPAN tester. I know of at least three female Australians who are doing advocacy and organisation. And in Israel, we have a few FOSS women developers who are active in mailing lists, other online mediums, and in giving presentations. There are also Allison Randal and Ann Barcomb who have done a commendable contribution to Perl. Do we have enough female contriubters? No. Can we make contributing to Perl more attractive to women? Sure. But I don't think we should feel that we are particularly bad now, in comparison to other projects in this respect. I don't think I know of any projects who sport 50% (or more) female developers. In regards to http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/ - while it is a fine and enlightening document, I don't think that after women have become more dominant in many different fields of experience, they should suddenly encounter particular problems when it comes to taking part in FOSS projects. Obviously, most of the problems described in the "HOWTO" were prevalent previously (and to a large extent still are), and women had to overcome them and deal with them. I am most certainly not a sexist person, I highly respect and admire some historical and present women (some of which I personally know) and would love to see more female FOSS developers. However, I also received some heat from women-lib-pedants, regarding perfectly innocent things I said, such as using "girls" instead of "women", or expressing interest in some females that I met on IRC[1], or for saying "There's a girl on #perl", instead of "there's a programmer on #perl" or whatever. {{{{{{ [1] - for the record I also express interest in many male people I met there. }}}}}} It's perfectly natural for a guy to do that even if he isn't a chauvinist, so naturally I feel a bit frustrated about it. And if I feel frustrated, you can imagine how some people who are somewhat more offensive than I would feel. Like it or not, there would always be "guy talk" and "sex talk", and some flirting, etc. even if there are 50% (or more) women around. But it's time for a few bold girls to face the heat (with enough knowledge and determination), persist in this "female-alienating" society and pave the road for more of them to join. I heard somewhere that freedom cannot be given, and it must be taken and fought for. Regards, Shlomi Fish P.S: while I was studying in http://www.technion.ac.il/ , I was told that there were then 40% female students there (possibly more now). I recall visiting the Computer Science building and seeing ~50% girls there (possibly less or possibly more). In my department - Electrical Engineering - there were very few female students back when I studied - 10% or so, possibly because it is considered a very hard and demanding specialisation. There are many girls in the Industrial and Management Engineering department, which is notorious for being the easiest department in the Technion. In any case, it is possible that with this proliferation of females there (and in other schools and universities), we'll see more of them contributing to FOSS projects. In a previous workplace of mine (a start-up developing 10 Gbps Ethernet NICs), there were several female Electrical Engineers, which seemed very impressive to me. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Understand what Open Source is - http://xrl.us/bjn82 The bad thing about hardware is that it sometimes work and sometimes doesn't. The good thing about software is that it's consistent: it always does not work, and it always does not work in exactly the same way.
