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Note that this crap is fractal - text that is coded female (romance fiction, fanfic) is valued less than text that is coded male - blog posts about programming, opinion pieces in big newspapers. Likewise, in the photography forums, the members (mostly male) value wildlife, nature and landscape (and female nudes) above photography aimed at and practiced by women, like wedding photography.
Before I begin let me say that I do understand the historical reasons for this to be the case. That said, rather than saying that geminispace has barriers in place which raise the cost of entry based on gender, should we not be attacking the notion of roles being gendered in the first place? I am male. During the years that I tried to make a living in photography I shot a number of weddings. I also enjoy cooking, and raised my daughter as a single parent. It's true that I'm a bit of a computer nerd. It's also true that I have a daughter who is a first year computer science student at Boudin University.
Unfortunately Gemini has multiple filters in place that reinforce this. Please note that these filters do not exclude women entirely - I personally e-know women who are part of Gemspace - but each filter removes some women.
This is along the same lines. We're assuming that women as a group have less of an affinity for text based communication, are less likely to care about open source, and are less likely to have Unix command line knowledge. And that is a fair assumption, but I would once again prefer to solve the root problems in society that have lead to this than to call out the gemini community as gatekeepers.
1. text-only: see above
I disagree. I've known more voracious readers in my life who were women than who are men.
2. free/open-source focus
I agree that historically there have been barriers for entry to open source which disproportionately impact women. There are groups working on this, and there are projects taking the issue seriously. It's awfully late in the game, but that doesn't make open source itself a bad thing. Open source as a concept was created by humans, who were and are flawed, and this was one of the flaws. It (open source) is in itself a good thing, however, and we should be trying to actively engage more women into that world.
3. lack of hosted services - and those that exist presume unix command line knowledge
Well there is a lot that can be said here. I'm not sure how one would make a hosted gemini service more "user-friendly" without having some kind of web portal, using https, html and javascript. But doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose? I can't see a great path towards creating an interactive control panel for a gemini capsule using gemini itself. Unix tools are probably prevalent here mainly because a) that's what the person running the service uses themselves and b) they haven't taken the time to write something which might have a friendlier user-facing interface. And really, I would once again say that we should be trying to reach a point where there are as many women using the Unix command line as there are men.
Interestingly, back in the early days of computing there was a quite large proportion of women working as programmers. If one looks at history that trend only changed when big money started changing hands and the occupation of computer programmer became a high paying profession. Those facts are, of course, despicable in what they say about our values as a society and how we historically viewed women in the workforce. But they also clearly show that there is absolutely nothing inherently "male" about programming a computer or indeed being a power user of a computer. I would rather Gemini keep it's current flavor and change our outdated attitudes about gender roles.
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