[clug] Announcing: Canberra Google Girl Geek Dinner #3

[Paul Wayper]

On 11/09/09 21:41, Jack Kelly wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 9:28 PM, Paul Wayper<paulway at mabula.net>  wrote:
>> On 10/09/09 23:40, Jack Kelly wrote:
>>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Congratulations!  You've just failed the "positive discrimination is not
>> negative discrimination" test!
>
> Congratulations! You've hit the dead horse and it's still not moving! :-)

Weren't me that killed it... :-)

> I'm assuming you either get the digest (and are working through it) or
> you haven't checked your email at all today, because my above claim
> was pretty quickly dismantled by about 5 different people in the posts
> following.

Still working through my email.  Down to only 269 unread.  I don't see any 
people replying to you in that thread.

> Also, your analogy isn't accurate. Anyone can buy/hire a bike and go
> on a ride. Anyone can download a compiler and get into programming. I
> conjecture that generalising that approach to the GGDs won't work.
> Your conclusion is still correct, but your reasoning is wrong.

Ooooh, nice one - the old "missed by that much" analogy deflection.  Not 
_anyone_ can do those things - it's trivial to come up with classes of people 
that can't.  I'm also amused that 'downloading a compiler' is your way of 
'getting into programming', but that's irrelevant.  Still, your conclusion is 
correct even if your reasoning is wrong.

But if you want an analogy:

There's a CLUG bike ride scheduled.  You turn up on your mountain bike.  All 
the lycra lizards look at you in your daggy clothes and your big knobbly tires 
and low gears and look at their own, ultra-high-tech racing machines.  The 
look says "you're going to slow us down, and you obviously don't fit in here, 
but none of us are going to say so to your face".  As you're riding you hear 
laughter but it's never including you; they all talk about track times and 
titanium gears and carbon fiber and how you have to hand-tune the spokes if 
you're a 'serious' rider.  They either idle along as if they have to make a 
special allowance for such a slowpoke as you, or shoot off in sprints so that 
you *are* the slowpoke.

Pretty quickly you get the feeling that the 'bike ride' is just actually a 
chance for one particular type of person to get together, and they're not 
really open to welcoming anyone else along.  After you quit coming because you 
can't stand feeling like the one that everyone's staring at, you hear that 
they're asking themselves why they never get any mountain bike riders...

*That's* my analogy for what it must be like to be a women in FOSS.  I've been 
in enough socially awkward situations to know that feeling unpleasantly well now.

Car analogies are so 2008, anyway ;-)

Have fun,

Paul