March 8 passed me by... I’m usually not really confronted with sexism as part of my daily life, so it doesn’t worry me that much. When talking to Claudia, however, I often feel like I’m the more “feminist” in our relationship; thinking about the various subtle ways she is being restricted compared to me is scary. >{
Today I read the Debian Weekly News ¹ and found this item:
Does Debian scare away Women? Amaya Rodrigo Sastre ² asked the project leader candidates about their ideas to encourage more women to be involved and what the benefits would be. Helen Faulkner ³ explained that women face subtle problems and that on average, women are likely to be not so confident that their skills will allow them to survive in an environment like debian, compared to their male counterparts. The following discussion seems to have very well ⁴ proven this.
How sad that it doesn’t even work in FreeSoftware projects. 🙁
And to think that I chuckled at pages such as WomenAndMenAndWiki on CommunityWiki, thinking that there was not really anything I could do... I must search for ways to better integrate women in my online experience. ;)
Claudia is doing pretty well with her website ⁵ and some of her friends have expressed their liking of such a simple and friendly website. I’m happy to see that 1. Claudia shares my views on WebDesign, and 2. other people share our views on web design, eventhough they did not at first. One of Claudia’s friends, for example, got her own website done by a graphical artist. ⁶
For another case story on female hackers, see Raven Alder’s rant about a mail to Starla Pureheart. ⁷
#Women
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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I remember reading in a Neal Stephenson novel (”Snow Crash”? or was it Crichton’s “Prey”?) where Juniata (a female hacker) meets with sexism from male hackers “who thought they were too intelligent to be sexists, while they were”.
The same feeling I get from browsing the debian thread. Sad 🙁
– AadityaSood 2004-03-12 21:04 UTC