I figured I might as well respond to myself--clarify my position a little. First of all, I'm not well known as a particularly sensitive person, but I try to be pretty reasonable. When I first saw the Encourage Women in Linux HOWTO a few months ago, and again yesterday, it seemed pretty funny to me, and my email yesterday was mostly joking around.
Most of the guys in the UUG (and as we all know, most UUG members are guys) tend to think that most of the things described in the doc don't happen around here, and since we're all light-hearted we naturally joke about them. I was very interested to learn this morning in a semi-private conversation, that there really are members of our club who feel very uncomfortable for many of the reasons cited in the document. Nobody's intentionally trying to make anyone uncomfortable, but we should all try to do better. In my opinion one of the largest problems comes from the fact that there is in computer science a pretty small sample of girls, and it becomes extremely easy to generalize and stereotype from one or two people; everyone on this list has heard someone at least once express surprise that some girl knew her stuff. That's just wrong. I was corrected about my criticism of the doc's comment about choice of topics. I still think that the doc's wording is a little weak; as I read it it sounds like we are supposed to sit around and talk about social issues all day, which I'd be the last person to call for. The person I talked to interpreted it as saying that a club shouldn't cover the same topic week after week, and I completely agree with that. As they put it, most of the suggestions in the HOWTO aren't just about getting women interested in Linux, they're also about getting newcomers interested in Linux, and they're beneficial overall. I'm still not a feminazi (I had to use that word at least once), but in light of actual opinions of actual people, I think that we could do better to pay a little more attention to our behavior. Just don't assume that everyone on the list is male. And by the way, I'm still looking forward to Evan's report on Thursday. Go Evan! -- Andrew McNabb http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/ PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55 8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868
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