[clug] Equality (was Announcing: Canberra Google Girl Geek Dinner #3)

[Francis Markham]

Hope not to turn this into a gender thread of doom, but:

2009/9/10 Jack Kelly <endgame.dos at gmail.com>:
> Thought Experiment: take the original post and pipe it through
> sed -e 's/male/female/g' -e 's/Men/Women/g' -e 's/girl/guy/g' -e 's/Girl/Guy/g'
>
> Consider the effect of such a post to the list. Would it make the
> community feel more inclusive? I conjecture that it would not. What
> makes the unaltered version so fundamentally different? It splits the
> list along an arbitrary line (<= 1 hops from a girl geek) and excludes
> those on one side of it.

The thing that makes the unaltered version so fundamentally different
is that, as discussed on the other gender thread of doom, only 1.5% of
participants in FOSS are women.  Thus, as a very small minority in the
community, probably facing various subtle forms of discrimination, it
makes sense to get together and discuss experiences/support each
other.  Whereas, if this were done by a majority group it would not
serve any purpose other than exclusion, especially since most meetings
of geeks are almost exclusively male affairs in any case.

Just my 2 cents, and apologies for derailing the original thread,

-Francis