Re: Not necessary

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Re: Not necessary
by Rayiner Hashem on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @23:37

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

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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