Heard about it a few years ago when Val stopped by for a visit with pro-podcaster Leo Laporte, where he also gave less than flattering stories of how it was having Richard Stallman on set hitting on every X chromosone in sight. However I have to believe this is isolated to that part of the open source elite who traded in their real life and the associated social skills, which is not behavior specific to CS. Having said that, a ratio below 10:1 between male and female is hardly a healthy thing and so the experiences by Val and others seems like an symptom of a larger problem, that of gender inbreeding (for lack of better words).
I know of conferences (http://jaoo.dk/aarhus-2009/women/) who tried to entice women to participate by giving them a free pass, but that's really just symptom treatment rather than focus at the root of the issue. Part of me wonders if it really isn't genetic and gender related, many of us male geeks started out career moving from Lego building to taking moms transistor radio apart, to writing Basic etc. etc. That seems to stem from some core curiosity trait of wanting to know how things work and solving problems, something that can be tracked back to the natural evolution of humans many thousands years ago; the male was the hunter exposed to critical decision making. Today we even joke with the fact than women multi-task while men is only able to do one job at a time. Hmm perhaps worth submitting a story to Mythbusters about. Which is a nice segway, we don't actually need to go into CS to see this difference in interest. My experience tells me men are much more inclined to watch an episode of Mythbusters while their lady enjoys a rerun of "Sex and the City", "Desperate Housewifes" or something similar. On Dec 7, 3:41 am, Chris Adamson <[email protected]> wrote: > Wow, any thoughts on this, fellow nearly-entirely-male list > readership? > > http://jezebel.com/5705980/women-fed-up-with-open-source-community-cr... > > "A feminist programmer describes the culture of the open source > community as fraught with sexism and discrimination against women > programmers—and a serious lack of accountability. It's "Geeks Gone > Wild"—as in, "some computer dudes are like wild animals." " -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
