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 s****t 50% (or more) female
developers.
In regards to http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/
- while
it is
a fine and enlightening do***ent, 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 ***ist 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 "*** 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.
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