Fedora Welcomes Women to FOSS 339
nman64 writes "The Fedora Project, the project behind the Fedora Core Linux distribution, has introduced Fedora Women, a program to reach out to women who are interested in using and contributing to Fedora Core. This follows in the footsteps of LinuxChix, Debian Women, and Ubuntu Women and is part of a larger trend to support women in the FOSS world. At present, women are believed to make up only about 1.5% of the FOSS community. Is that finally set to change?"
My only thoughts on this... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:2)
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:2)
Please excuse me while my head explodes.
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:5, Insightful)
First post. First joke. And in six words you sum up every stereotype of the Geek.
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:2)
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:3, Insightful)
You misspelled "boy".
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Comments like this is exactly why women stay out of computing, that women programmers are reduced to their sex. Nobody would dare to make sexist jokes about male programmers!
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:2)
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:2)
Perhaps it's because we've drilled it into their heads for thousands of years that sex is something to be ashamed of.
useless without pics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Without pictures, most slashdot readers don't know what a "women" is. While there was occasionally a female in my CS classes (a while back, so maybe times have changed, but if that 1.5% number is right not much has changed), we never had the need for the plural of the word.
And, uh, comments like yours are exactly why men think women are uptight [REDACTED] with no sense of humor. But whatever... just means more good jobs for us. Besides, making sexist jokes about men is gay. (OH
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:4, Insightful)
I hear them all the time. They usually go in the opposite direction, about how they're all losers that can't get laid.
The best way to get women to is to point out that if they get involved with FOSS, they WILL get laid with no effort, no matter how repulsive they are, just due to the odds.
Re:My only thoughts on this... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a woman btw. Just in case someone was wondering.
Little confused about the membership requirements (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Little confused about the membership requiremen (Score:2)
Artificial (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Artificial (Score:2, Insightful)
As for "why encourage", maybe you'd like to start to explain why Google's Summer of Code had zero women applicants, whereas Gnome's Women's Summer Outreach Programme had a great number of applicants, when the two programmes were basically the same.
Claiming women's "natural inclination" or interest is to not participate in free software projects is about as sexist a viewpoint as you can possibly
Re:Artificial (Score:3)
That's easy to explain (and already was in the OP). It's because nobody encouraged women explicitly. They let them choose naturally. And the result was that girls didn't want to participate. They weren't interested. Do you get the point?
Re:Artificial (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Artificial (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing can be done about the current situation, though. The community now is comprised of men who have for a large part had very little exposure to women, and don't know how to not offend them.
And, maybe it's just another sexist thing to say, but women get offended way too easily. Most guys at work regularly insult each other far worse than I've ever heard a guy insult a woman. It's just joking around. Women don't s
Re:Artificial (Score:2)
Thanks.
Re:Artificial (Score:2, Interesting)
The point is that this kind of difference isn't necessarily natural. It's more likely to be cultural or social, meaning there's no good reason not to encourage them to participate.
Mankind's tendency to assume that most traits are 'just natural' is where we got things like slavery and the holocaust from.
Re:Artificial (Score:2)
You're using some very inappropriately strong words to describe what's being done here. Why is that? Are you scared of something?
Traits and interests are not the same. Men and women have naturally different traits, that much is obvious. But interests? My favourite example here is skateboarding, as described in this essay [angelfire.com] (mirror [linuxvirus.net]).
Describing the attitudes of male skaters towards
Re:Artificial (Score:2)
You know, not to sound too sexist, but women not being all that involved in skateboarding might owe more to their actual physical differences than anything else. I believe the "girls bouncing on trampolines" effect is at least as much a problem as anything else.
After all, women can and do compete very well in snowb
Re:Artificial (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Artificial (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a special case, however. A community being less than 2% female is more than natural self-selection. I suspect that a number of women have tried to get involved, but been repulsed by the community. Look at this Slashdot article; the first post was a comment asking for pictures. Now, as someone who has been around Slashdot for a while, I can be fairly sure that this was meant in jest, but this is exactly the kind of thing that would make a woman interested in joining the community leave.
There are, secretly, at least two women[1] who post on Slashdot. If you look at any thread where they make a reference to their gender, even indirectly, then you will see a huge number of 'wow, look! A girl!' posts. These are often followed by a load of accusatory posts ('you only hang out here because you have low self-esteem and you want to be fawned over by geeks'). It's small wonder that most of the female population of Slashdot tries hard not to draw attention to the fact.
This kind of program is not intended to encourage women to participate in the geek community, so much as to prevent the ones who want to become involved from running away. This, I think, is a sensible objective.
[1] Or FBI agents; it's difficult to tell on the Internet sometimes.
Re:Artificial (Score:2)
Have you considered the po
Re:Artificial (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Artificial (Score:4, Insightful)
Axiom 1: People do what they want to do.
Axiom 2: It would help to have more people doing X.
Corollaries of Axiom 2: (i) It would help to have more women doing X. (ii) It would help to have more men doing X. (iii) It would help to have more people from $ethnic_community doing X.
From these, it follows (among other things): It would help if more women wanted to do X. In other words, it would help if women were encouraged to do X.
Encouragement is never bad. If you (or enough people) feel that it would be good/useful to encourage men too, go ahead.
Also, have you ever considered that "natural" inclinations may depend not only on biological/genetic/evolutionary factors but also on societal/psychological/community factors? Since we can't change the former, we try to change the latter and see if it makes a difference. Every group that decides it wants more women (or $ethnic_community, or whatever) is free to encourage more women (or
(In summary, maybe "natural" isn't so natural after all? Also, somewhat offtopic, see this [j-walk.com] and then this [snopes.com] for something that would be "natural" once but seems very out-of-place today
Re:Artificial (Score:3, Insightful)
Because men are already encouraged. We are encouraged from the moment we are born. Encouraged to pursue intellectual challenges, technical ability, and achievements. Women have traditionally been encouraged to look pretty and shut the fuck up, though this is luckily changing; but the subtle differences in encouragement are still very present, if you make a conscious effort to perceive them.
I'm the oldest of 6 siblings;
Re:Artificial (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Artificial (Score:2)
In order to get to a university class only one thing is required — get the grades at school. Preferably in maths related subjects. I don't know about you, but most of the maths teachers (and all the good ones) at my school were women. The women took the top classes (including last two years) and the one men took the reprobates classes.
At school there are no geeks. I would have been right in there if there were, but alas there was nothing really geeky about it. The girls were under far greater expect
Looking around a CS Engineering class (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not right to care. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that it should matter! If they like being developers, cool. If not, oh well.
There is also Andrea, who is male. It's an Italian thing, OK?
Great (Score:2)
Having a woman's touch on a software would be really great. I sure hope this project is a success and brings some great woman into OSS.
Re:Great (Score:2)
Having a woman touch a software programmer would be greater.
This probably isn't set to change significantly (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd like to think so (Score:3, Insightful)
On a more contraversial note, it seems to me that a lot of FOSS is driven by a very... male... obsessiveness. It is the experience of myself and my collegues that female programmers tend not to be "computer geeks," in the sense that when 5:00 rolls around, they are done programming for the day - no hobby coding, no
Of course I, for one, would welcome our new female FOSS overlords, but I think that's probably a long way off.
Re:I'd like to think so (Score:4, Interesting)
There are some intangible benefits to contributing to FOSS which might attract some women, like developing a better resume or making professional connections. However, I don't think women will contribute under much of the rationale that men do: scratch an itch, bragging rights, altruism, or even stick-it-to-the-M$.
These programs won't have a major effect on the percentage of women contributing to FOSS. (Is there even a good way of measuring that?) If men wanted to attract women to contribute, they would advertise. There are a lot of businesswomen in marketing. QED
No, it's not about to change (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think you need to set up programs to beg certain segments of the population that other people do because it's fun and exciting and rewarding to them, you're out of touch with reality about what makes people tick. Let the people who WANT to do technical work do it, whether they're men, women, black, white, pink or purple. It's about individual choice, not about counting numbers of certain groups.
David
Re:No, it's not about to change (Score:5, Insightful)
One last thing, Read the earlier postings. I think that if were a women, that I might get tired of the attitudes that are demonstrated here.
Re:No, it's not about to change (Score:2)
Why?
Both women and men have the ability to choose what they want to do (restricted, of course, by their social class). Encouraging women (or men, for that matter) to do something which they aren't really interested in, brings the wrong people into such programs.
People that have no natural interest into a topic. That doesn't mean that people attracted by such programs will always be inferior to na
Re:No, it's not about to change (Score:2, Interesting)
This is the premise that your entire argument rests upon, that women have the ability to choose what they want to do. When in fact, culture and society restricts us immensely in what we are expected to choose to do. Today, one would look at the high ra
Re:No, it's not about to change (Score:3, Insightful)
This wasn't my assertion at all. Iam not a native english speaker, so might've not written clearly what i meant to say.
You said:
So long as our culture expects women to be submissive, we will never be able to assert our true desires.
I said:
If you don't like the results of our system, don't
Re:No, it's not about to change (Score:3, Insightful)
Iam from the german speaking part of switzerland, and the german term for rape is "Vergewaltigung".
While women can be charged for "Sexuelle Nötigung" (sexual coercion, i hope this is the correct translation, see http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=de&search=n% F6tigung [leo.org]), which has the same upper limit for a punishment (but not the same lower limit ) as rape, they can't be charged for rape itself.
Here's the original text, right from the law:
Re:No, it's not about to change (Score:2)
David
Re:No, it's not about to change (Score:2)
Re:No, it's not about to change (Score:2)
See, the problem with debates like these, is that people polarize and jump to odd conclusions.
While parent is right, there is variability of who just has some fundamental base level of interest in computers and geekery, there is still a vastly disproportionate number of men in computer science. The reason for this is cultural. And actually this thread is a fantastic demonstration of the problem. What's the first post? A request for pics. And then the remainder of the thread is littered with comments,
Re:No, it's not about to change (Score:3, Interesting)
they think guy geeks are jerks. And i don't blame them... sit through 4 years of people who make you uncomfortable on a daily basis
Where the heck did you see that happening? My experience is that most geeks are shy guys who would do almost anything to get the attention of a normal girl. My geek friends and I always behave nicely to girls and when we are in a relationship we sometimes tend to smother them, even. I have NEVER seen a nerd behave rudely to a
Re:No, it's not about to change (Score:2)
Of course, there are cultural things that reinforce
Not all women (Score:2)
Mostly, The individual personalities of one's co-workers can influence a person's working environment far more than individual
Re:No, it's not about to change (Score:2)
Please tell me the last time you were denied an IT job or the ability to contribute in an OSS project because you were female.
So implicitely (Score:2, Insightful)
But if they are maybe it's not a good idea to do thay...
And if they're not then why the need for affirmative action?
Every discrimination is stupid.
Colbert, is that you? (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank you for brilliantly illustrating why programs like this are sorely needed.
Re:Colbert, is that you? (Score:2)
Re:So implicitely (Score:2)
I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of women are interested in joining F/OSS communities, but are repulsed by the behaviour of the members. A
Re:So implicitely (Score:2)
If I were a girl I would be more offended by an unnatural "Welcome, we don't act this way naturally but you're a girl so we'll try and be nice" attitude than a few stupid jokes.
Re:So implicitely (Score:2)
Because the reason that people go into one field or another is only partly due to their skills and intelligence. Feeling accepted as a person (and not just 'OMG!!1! it's a girl') and camaraderie is really important as well.
Personally, if it has just been skills and such I probably would still be in pure math. But I enjoy computers more because of the social aspects (chatting on IRC, posting on slashot, mailing lists) and the people here are generally pretty intelligent and interesting to read. I'm an intro
Re:So implicitely (Score:3, Insightful)
To account for all the brainwashing of women by the society over time making them believe that their only job is to take care of the household and satisfy their men.
Take a look at all the jokes, the discrimination is still there and will remain until any affirmitive action is taken.
This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I the only one sick of this kind of 'news'?
This just in: two more female workers signed up for oil drilling, bringing the total population of female oil drillers to 4, of the total population of 20,000
Why does it matter what sex they are? The reason this is 'news' is because people want to hear stories about how women are being treated equally in the workplace. Women's rights are always easy news. You say, "Women have lagged behind men in [insert job] but are catching up thanks to [insert bullshit here]" and you sell newspapers/ad-space/FreeIPodsAndViagra.
If you single out women for working in a specific job for no reason other than 'they're women' you aren't treating them as equals to men. You're treating them like freaks, like a sideshow.
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
...and for FOSS women over 50 there is (Score:2)
Seriously though, shouldn't Fedora contact them? At the very least they can cross promote each other.
Really (Score:2)
Women are more social (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike some other fields, women aren't being kept out of programming through any sort of imposed discrimination. Anyone can learn to program and anyone who writes good code can participate, especially in FOSS. I've known female coders for more than 20 years, from the COBOL whiz when I was a sysop at the Department of $US_DEPT to a few people in my department at $MegaCorp today. Yes, they're a minority, but only out of choice. No one is telling women not to code. Code doesn't have genitalia. As long as it works who gives a rat's ass whether code was written by a man or a woman or even by Hugo the Incredible Coding Marmoset?
Re:Women are more social (Score:2)
Computing had no prestige back then. Nobody cared if women were in it because nobody really cared about it at all. Obviously it's not too hard or beyond their scope, and I don't think it's a 'social career' thing, either. Enrollment in Engineering and Mathematics is basically equal for men and women, and I wouldn't call either of those particularly 'social'. In fact, enrollment in n
Re:Women are more social (Score:2)
No, it's just a really stupid analogy. Everyone with a functioning brain will freely admit that there are some things handicapped people simply cannot do. This is the whole reason the are called handicapped. It's the meaning of the term, for fuck's sake! This is fundamentally difference that a ma
Re:Women are more social (Score:2)
It's a perfectly reasonable analogy. Someone in a wheelchair can drag themselves up the stairs. It's a hard climb, but physically possible. THEY JUST CHOOSE NOT TO.
And why should they have to? Similarly, why should women have to put up with the crap of this male-dominated field? They don't feel welcome, so they don't put themselves through the strain of breaking through the
Re:Hi Strawman. Meet my Zippo (Score:2)
I'm not claiming there's any particular discrimination; my 'reverse discrimination' example was in response to someone claiming that setting these groups up at all is a form of discrimination. I hardly think so. Giving someone a leg up so they can be included isn't discrimination. It's actually why my example is particularly apt. If the barrier to entry for programming was that you could get into the building, people in a wheelchair would be able to
Re:Women are more social (Score:2)
Communication patterns (Score:3, Insightful)
One example: my university classes used to overlap with those of CIS students a lot, and what I heard from the few female students there was that they found it hard to communicate with the men at times and often didn't really want to. Simply take a look at
I once asked.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I once asked.... (Score:2)
Re:I once asked.... (Score:2)
And, of course, if something sounds plausible, it must be true....
Are you sure all men have an innate drive to be creative, rather than to, say, sit on the sofa and watch sports?
And where exactly is that happening here? The Wiki page for Fedora Women [fedoraproject.org] says:
Re:I once asked.... (Score:2)
Fortunately, her type probably only exists in the same proportions as the equivalent stupid men.
Re:I once asked.... (Score:2)
Knowing full well you'd buy it.
Re:I once asked.... (Score:2)
You don't sound like someone who interacts with women much (I know that sounds like a put-down, but I couldn't think of any better way to phrase it).
Take a look at your local PBS station's listings for Saturday morning sometime. Want to know what the majority of shows will be in most markets? Sewing, knitting, quilting, needlepoint - HOBBIES that tend to be dominated by women.
My wife has spent more on sewing machines than I have on computers, came
Here we go again... (Score:2, Interesting)
"Is that finally set to change?" (Score:2)
Certainly not because Fedora thought it's time they jumped into the line. Generally I guess the number (around 2 percent) is just about right. Although during my university years, that is from ~4 to 9 years back, in IT this number at us was much higher, you can hardly meet women actually working for their living in the field.
While I also - like others above - don't really think such "separation" of women related to linux is generally good, it might help some newbies to get
the sims2 (Score:2)
You guys don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm looking at the comments so far and they seem to be broken up into two groups:
Hasn't anyone ever thought that these two viewpoints might be related? That maybe the reason more women don't go into tech is cultural - not in the "women are more interested in nail polish than hard drives"-sort of way, but in the sense that they sick and tired of dealing with all the "oohh, titties!" comments that we men think is good natured humor, but gets old with women? Maybe, just maybe, if women (or minorities or the handicapped, etc) can be provided with a supportive environment, we'll find that women are interested in tech. Maybe we'll even find that some women can be really good at it.
Let me put it another way. Everyone once in a while, a sports-related story pops up on Slashdot, and the comments inevitably drift toward stories of posters who have been pushed around by jocks in high school, so they now have a dim view of sports. Like us men making "titties" jokes, jocks would consider their messing with geeks to be good-natured humor. Imagine for a second that your exposure to sports came in a supportive environment (think affirmative action for geeks)- is it possible that this might have resulted in a more positive outlook towards athletics (especially sports like American football and basketball that involves a high degree of strategy as well as athletic talent)?
It's not a matter of discrimination or taking something away from men. It's all about providing a supportive environment so that women can concentrate on the matter at hand, rather than dealing with all the 'good natured' 'non-PC' crap that men throw at them.
Re:You guys don't get it (Score:2)
As far as the "This thread is useless without pics." joke, I read that as irony making fun of immature nerds, not anything insulting to women.
Yes, I do think that. But it's stupid to let the joke
Re:You guys don't get it (Score:2)
While this may mean fewer women in IT, it will certainly mean better women in IT. And before you jump on me for being sexist, what I mean by this is women who can deal with that kind of bigotry. Especia
Re:You guys don't get it (Score:2)
But what is the point is that it is their 'choice'. Here, there is some magical stuff going on. I recently saw a talk by a female computational physics professor about women in science. A few years back, about 50% of the Natural Science (math, physics, chemistry, etc.) students in Iran were women. Similar numbers can be found in Italy, Spain, South America. The big riddle is that no-one really k
"more women" != "fewer men" --get the difference? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are crying "Unfair!" about how it's not fair to have compensatory "reverse discrimination" or "affirmative action" because men and women should be on an equal footing, you don't get it.
You can debate about whether this is fair in the job search market, but that's a completely different debate, because that's a zero-sum situation: if a company hires a woman due to "affirmative action", then by definition they have rejected a man applicant. That's not what's happening here
Re:You guys don't get it (Score:3, Funny)
I mean MORE TITTIES [madmagick.net]
Re:You guys don't get it (Score:2)
Being a waitress is hardly a career though is it? I mean, loads of girls go work in restaurants/bars at some time because it's easy to get work and demands basically no skills or commitment. If you go into computing you have to have put a fair bit of work into it and that means thinking "hmm is this what I really want to do?" - so the effects of a female-unfriendly environment are magnified.
That said, I really don't see what the big deal is. These "get women into engineering" debates pop up all the time.
Re:You guys don't get it (Score:2)
I seriously question this. Maybe that's a factor in the US, but in the UK, I've been in quite a few computing classes both pre-university and during university, and have encountered no sexism. Despite this, there have been extremely few women in the classes.
I think it's more of a societal thing in that women aren't so much encouraged to go into IT.... or maybe it's intertia.... I dunno. But a sexist environment?
how is that 1.5% determined, anyway? (Score:2, Informative)
Unless someone indicates otherwise, on the internet, we are all gender-anonymous. There could possibly be more women involved in F/OSS than is assumed (none?). The default assumption here, anyway, is that everyone involved is male. Somehow every comment I post with any sort of gender reference is replied to with the assumption that I am male. Last time I checked, I was fairly certain that I was a woman.
Personally, I am detracted from Women-specific IT/programming/OSS/etc groups, if only for the fact that
Only driving the wedge deeper (Score:2)
Get over it (Score:5, Insightful)
- ponies
- pink
- periods
- pedicures
As a woman in IT, I have actually found the majority of men in IT either don't care about women in IT or else are actively interested in broadening diversity in the field. (Mind you, that applies not only to gender but to ethnicity and other criteria as well.) Then there's that minority, the stereotype bitter socially retarded geeks with chips on their shoulders, doomed to eternally relive some perceived rejection from a woman or girl that dates back to elementary school...
To those (whose postings I found so typical of their group) I say, what do you care if there are specialized programs targeted towards women? You are the majority participants, are you really that threatened if a bunch of girlies with sub-par technical skills (as you like to describe them) sit around, do their nails, doodle ponies and contribute to FOSS? I am flabbergasted to imagine how such an activity would have any impact on you whatsoever.
If you are really concerned that the quality of FOSS will somehow decline, may I remind you of the peer review system. Even supposing any of the women's groups were to promote something that was of no use to the larger user/developer base, it would be critically reviewed and sent back for revision or else shot down completely. My point is that it shouldn't be an issue how people arrive at solutions; let them gather, support each other, brainstorm and develop in the forums that suit them best.
Users/developers form specialized groups all the time, whether it be because of their gender, location, belief system or what have you. The news here is not so much the groups -- it's whether the percentage of women in FOSS may be higher than is popularly understood. All the hogwash about women not being interested in IT, not having the innate skills etc. aside, we're here and we're working away on the same projects men do. This may come as a horrible shock, but there are women who excel in the field.
Personally I'm all for it. Let there be women's groups, gay groups, blue collar groups, Hindi groups, what have you. Let people work and network in whatever ways increase the brain trust. It's the results that count.
Yeah, we -really- fawn over you all idefinately... (Score:3, Insightful)
The stereotype humor appears to be alive and well
Then there's that minority, the stereotype bitter socially retarded geeks with chips on their shoulders, doomed to eternally relive some perceived rejection from a woman or girl that dates back to elementary school...
Wow. Just...wow. You complain about one stereotype, and then use another.
Newsflash: I don't know, nor have I ever heard of, any guys who "eternally relive [sic] some perceived rejection from a woman or girl blah blah blah". I -do- know
THIS IS NOT ABOUT "PUSHING WOMEN INTO FOSS" (Score:5, Informative)
Note the "is made up of women". That's not talking about getting women to use Fedora. It's talking about women already using Fedora.
It also says:
Note the "contributors". It's not talking about pushing women into contributing. It's talking about women who are already contributing.
It also says:
Note the "who are interested in working with the Fedora Project". It's not talking about pushing women into getting interested in Fedora. It's talking about women who are already interested in contributing.
So this is not the project to get the girls away from their cooking and sewing, haranguing them into instead developing driver patches even though they'd rather be knitting baby booties, that all too many of the responses seem to be treating it as.
Minority reporting (Score:3, Insightful)
So while we're at it, let's have "Fedora Blacks," "Fedora Orientals," or maybe just lump them together and call them "Fedora Coloreds?"
I don't think it's a good idea, frankly, and for all the same reason that racial identification might seem inappropriate.
(And on a side note regarding political incorrectness, why is the NAACP still called NAACP!? "They" don't want to be called "Colored People" even though 'of color' was the popular term, so why keep the same organizational name?!... I don't get it.)
Re:why (Score:2)
Re:why (Score:2)
Maybe if people didn't have your bias it wouldn't be so difficult for women in sports and mechanics, say, to have such a hard time to be accepted.
So true - I mean look at Danica Patrick, in a sport that includes engineering, and how she's been shunned and marginalized because she's a woman.
That old "socialisation" myth again (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps you ought to read up on (and try to explain) the case of David Reimer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer [wikipedia.org]
This is not the only case:
http://www.infocirc.org/rollston.htm [infocirc.org]
So much for "socialisation".
Re:Interesting... Is this necessary? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Necessary"? Who knows. Good? Yes. I don't think you fellows realize/understand it, but women are indeed pretty social; social programs such as message boards and the like are what got me into IT in the first place, and it's really very irritating to make a post with a nick that's obviously female like mine and get some nitwit going, "Liar! You're not a girl, you're a 40 old man in your parents' basement!" or "Show me your boobies!" or whatever. A group for females provides a place for us to be girly
Re:disparity by geography and ethnicity (Score:2)
The pay in engineering jobs smacks most others around - if you are from a poor Russian or Chinese family and they have scraped together money for training or university, is anybody sane going to do an arts degree? No - because there are few well paying jobs that don't require hard/unusual skills. Better to train in some engineering/science subject where there are shortages.
The idea that women are just not interested in technology because of genetics seems silly to me. There's little evidence genetics can
Re:Obligatory (Score:2)
It's the upgrade to man. Less terse, so presumably a bit like info but hopefully a good deal easier to use. I always get lost using info.