> The drastically lower rate of participation in free software suggests > that the free software community is worse behaving than society at > large.
Wait. You're operating under an unstated assumption that the only factor influencing the percentage of women in a particular community is how well the males in the community behaves towards women. That's a GIANT unproven assumption. This is a complex problem and there are undoubtedly many factors. For example, maybe it is the case that women are naturally inclined, to some degree, towards a professional career in computing, but are much less inclined to pursue computing as a hobby. I'm not trying to put a case for that, but just suggest one possible explanation for this apparent gap between women in free software versus women in the software industry -- one that doesn't have anything to do with behaviour of the other people in the community. Taking the rate of women's participation as a proxy for the happiness > of the ones there seems reasonable to me. So I don't think they are > such different questions. > That is, again, not a very good proxy. If we take a hypothetical example in a school where Grade 6P spontaneously starts a finger-knitting craze. It spreads within the class, but not so much outside the class. Now a couple of students from Grade 6S hear about it and also start finger-knitting. But it never really catches on in Grade 6S, because there isn't an "everyone else is doing it" mentality. Basically, finger-knitting is in the culture of Grade 6P but not in the culture of Grade 6S. However, there are still 3 or 4 students in Grade 6S that are doing it. They occasionally hang with the 6Pers at lunch time and they knit together. You could look at this situation and say "well only 5% of finger-knitters are from Grade 6S -- therefore, we must assume that Grade 6S people are generally unhappy with finger-knitting." But that's not true at all. The 3 or 4 Grade 6S students who are in the community are very happy indeed. They just haven't been able to convince many of their fellow 6Sers to join them, because it is not in the Grade 6S culture. By way of analogy, I am trying to say that just because only a small percentage of a particular group is participating in some activity does not mean that the ones that are participating are unhappy. It also doesn't mean that, were that percentage to increase, that the ones already participating would become happier. You seem to be unhappy that there aren't enough women in free software. If you are being genuinely offended because people are treating you differently as a woman, then that is a legitimate problem which should be addressed. But if you are merely unhappy because of the low numbers, then what I think some of us are trying to say is that it shouldn't matter: we're not here in our capacity as men and women, we're here to discuss and appreciate free software, and we should be able to do that without consideration of gender. Matt
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