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

[Jack Kelly]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Francis Markham <fmarkham at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hope not to turn this into a gender thread of doom, but:

I read your post in terms of "lively debate", not "thread of doom", so
I hope we can continue at that level.

> 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.

Yes, that might be true. I don't see how allowing people exactly one
degree of separation from girl geeks supports that purpose, though.

I don't know what the subscription stats are for this list, but let's
take your quoted figure of 1.5% for all of FOSS and disingenuously
apply it to the list. Given that the dinners appear to allow a single
guest, that's at most 3% of the list that is able to go to such an
event (also disingenuously assuming that all guests are only drawn
from the CLUG list). Posting an event where 97% of the people who see
the invite won't be allowed to go is a pretty nasty thing to do (to my
mind).

My friends and I use a private list to organise our events. If we
started posting the discussion of such events here, it'd be pretty
much the same thing.

Maybe a better model is to move the GGD announces to a separate list
where the people who see them are those who aren't arbitrarily
excluded? This does have its own bootstrap problem in terms of getting
people onto the list, so it's a partial solution at best.

-- Jack