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Not necessary
by Slovin on Monday 25/Aug/2003, @15:25
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| I agree that KDE-Women is an unnecessary component. It gives the impression that "women" are a special group of people with special needs when it comes to KDE. Well, they're not. We don't need segregation in KDE. Thank you. |
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Re: Not necessary
by Tom on Monday 25/Aug/2003, @16:02
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I agree that *in theory* it is an unecessary component. We shouldn't need to discriminate at all, not even positively. But the fact remains that there are very few women involved in KDE. There are many reasons for this, and none reflect poorly on the way that KDE welcomes contributions from women, but any initiative that can encourage women to actively contribute is worthwhile.
Why do we want more women participating? Well, KDE reflects the needs of its users, or rather the needs of the users that express their needs on bugzilla. If you don't have any women participating, from using bugzilla to coding DCOP, KDE will become increasingly male orientated and male dominated. That's not to say that women somehow how very different needs or tastes, but that you are excluding a large number of users, because you aren't making an effort to include them.
So promoting participation to women is a good thing, IMO. If there comes a time when we notice that there are very few elderly people using KDE, then it'd be a good idea to promote KDE to the elderly, concentrating on particular benefits they might find in KDE the product and KDE the community. And so on.
To me, Free Software is about *providing Freedom* to users, not just satisfying my own wants and building cool technology.
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Re: Not necessary
by anon on Monday 25/Aug/2003, @17:14
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> It gives the impression that "women" are a special group of people with special needs when it comes to KDE.
It has nothing to do with "segregration". What's wrong with encouraging one of the most underepresented minorities in KDE development from contributing?
Women as percentage of World's Population - 51.72% - (Dec 2001)
Women as percentage of KDE's contributor Population (less than 5%, conservative estimate)
It's important to encourage women to help out in KDE development. If women had not been encouraged in other fields, we would have seen even more male-domination in the world than we have now.
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Re: Not necessary
by AC on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @00:35
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>>It's important to encourage women to help out in KDE development.
Look, if _people_ are interested in KDE, they will help and contribute, there is nothing more or less to it.
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Re: Not necessary
by Rayiner Hashem on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @23:37
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That's bullshit. Its simple mathematics to wor out why initiatives like this are needed. Consider the X-axis to be time, and the Y-axis to be a particular gender's involvement with technology. If women start out lower on the Y-axis (and they do, because of various historical and social reasons), and the slope of the two lines is the same (implying equal rate of progress for both genders as a result of neutrality) they will *always* be behind. The only way to get women to catch up is by increasing their rate of progress, and outreach efforts like this can do that.
PS> I used to be in a robotics club in high school. We sometimes did technology events for the kids in the area. We'd line up some programmable Lego robots and watch the kids come in and play with them. I noticed then that the 8-12 year olds that came in were pretty much evenly divided among girls and boys. Meanwhile, our robotics club was all guys, and at my college (an engineering school) a full 72% of the students are guys. There is definately a terrible social phenomenon at work here --- there is no point in going all "ivory-tower" and pretending its not there.
PS2> Now the above mathematical metaphor does not hold if gender inequality is a self-correcting phenomenon. That is, in the abscence of external force, it reachs some equilibrium. There is no reason to believe that it is, and lots of reasons to believe that it isn't. Gender inequality is a lot like financial inequality in that the rate of change is proportional to the current level. This can be easily seen in economic statistics, which show that the gap between the rich and poor keeps getting larger, even in a theoretically neutral system like capitalism. The same probably applies to gender equality.
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Re: Not necessary
by azza-bazoo on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @05:09
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Double posts aside, it's worth pointing out that countless studies have confirmed exactly what you observed in your robotics clubs -- there are real social factors at play which are disencouraging girls from science/engineering.
IMHO, seeing the KDE community (well, some of it) actually *doing something* about this is a big part of what makes KDE, as a whole, so very cool.
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Re: Not necessary
by Rayiner Hashem on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @23:37
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That's bullshit. Its simple mathematics to wor out why initiatives like this are needed. Consider the X-axis to be time, and the Y-axis to be a particular gender's involvement with technology. If women start out lower on the Y-axis (and they do, because of various historical and social reasons), and the slope of the two lines is the same (implying equal rate of progress for both genders as a result of neutrality) they will *always* be behind. The only way to get women to catch up is by increasing their rate of progress, and outreach efforts like this can do that.
PS> I used to be in a robotics club in high school. We sometimes did technology events for the kids in the area. We'd line up some programmable Lego robots and watch the kids come in and play with them. I noticed then that the 8-12 year olds that came in were pretty much evenly divided among girls and boys. Meanwhile, our robotics club was all guys, and at my college (an engineering school) a full 72% of the students are guys. There is definately a terrible social phenomenon at work here --- there is no point in going all "ivory-tower" and pretending its not there.
PS2> Now the above mathematical metaphor does not hold if gender inequality is a self-correcting phenomenon. That is, in the abscence of external force, it reachs some equilibrium. There is no reason to believe that it is, and lots of reasons to believe that it isn't. Gender inequality is a lot like financial inequality in that the rate of change is proportional to the current level. This can be easily seen in economic statistics, which show that the gap between the rich and poor keeps getting larger, even in a theoretically neutral system like capitalism. The same probably applies to gender equality.
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