then who are the folks in this photo at the Ubuntu developers summit a month ago,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uds_karmic.jpg
who appear to be women? Female Robots? Cross dressers? Wives of male developers along for the ride? Shuttleworth's hookers?
Do you think the women (would I be labeled a "sexist" if I said "gal"?) in the front row was forced to lay on the laps of the male developers, or was she being sexist because her behavior may be deemed offensive to Feminists? Am I risking being labeled a sexist for suggesting such?
Personally, it looks to me like she was having fun. The smiles on the women in the rows behind don't appear, to me, to reflect a repressive or abusive atmosphere. If Mark is a sexist he is obviously failing to do that job properly. BTW, it appears to me that more than 1.8% of the attendees are women.
The oft quoted percentage statistic is conveniently trotted out to "prove" that FOSS communities discourage, abuse, harass or otherwise drive out female developers. The icing on the proof cake is an anecdote by some female developer who was "offended" by some comment or action her colleagues made, which may or may not have been intended to offend. That interpretation is completely self-serving to those making the "sexist" argument.
About 75% of the contributors to the Linux kernel work for corporations. If corporations are so gender neutral why are nearly all of the corporate Linux kernel developers male? Where are the 21% female kernel developers?
As I have stated in another posting, one could, with equal justification, say that men are more willing to volunteer on evenings and weekends to writing FOSS than women.
As far as bad manners are concerned, the problem of the rude guru is classic, for both Linux AND Windows web sites. "RTFM!" has been thrown into the face of many newbies who venture onto Linux help sites asking questions, along with insults and other bad manners. Most of it was directed at men because men were the predominate visitor to such sites. However, much has changed in the last four or five years. Over the last 5 years I have used MEPIS, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva and Kubuntu. As a member of the forum for those distros I read rules which forbid disrespectful or abusive postings. I have NEVER seen a posting which was disrespectful of anyone, regardless of gender. As a global moderator of one, I vigorously enforce the rules which prohibit such postings and block the account from which the posting was made. That is ZERO tolerance. Such a posting would be compared with the rules, not with someone's transitory feelings, and clear violations pointed out to the offender. Since I and other moderators are not on the forum 24/7 some prohibited postings may be present on the forum for a short while, but regular users often click the "report to moderator" button and we get an email when we turn our PC on. So far, during my tenure as a moderator, I have yet to see a single post which could even be vaguely construed as "sexist". So far, they have been either corporate Spam or personal battles which has have degenerated into ad hominem attacks.
By the way, it is very difficult to tell the gender of a poster, even if they use female avatars or claim to be a specific gender. Sometimes people lie.
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GreyGeek
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