What does it take to make computers more accessible to women

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rarsa
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What does it take to make computers more accessible to women

#1 Post by rarsa »

I'm opening this thread not because I got specific ideas. The topic started in a different thread and I thought it was relevant enough to require its own thread.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 199#101199

Here are the relevant bits as reference:
firescarab wrote: Linux must become more accessible to women rather then the computer academic, the hobbyist, the boffin (all of whom are predominately men).
pizzasgood wrote:I thought we were equal? Care to explain how a woman is at a disadvantage? I'm a guy, so I don't know first-hand how well women learn linux, but my little sister gets by alright. I hate discrimination based on stupid things like race, gender, and age, so I'd be glad to try fixing it if you can point me toward something specifically anti-woman. (I really would be glad to fix it, more women using linux = ).
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rarsa
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#2 Post by rarsa »

Now, here are my thoughts:

Men and women and for that matter different people are not equal, just equivalent: we deserve the same rights and the same oportunities. Still, the desicion to exercise those rights and oportunities is individual. (I'm of course refereing to my part of the world, North America)

I find it very 'unpowering' from one group that has the same power and rights to ask the other group to make things easier for them.

I have at least two issues with this:

1. Men don't know how women think and what women want, so we cannot make those desicions for them. I for one wouldn't know where to start.
2. If women want to have a 'feminized' version of linux they can create it. They have the power and no doubt the inteligence and ability.

In the past there were high barriers for women to be considered equivalent. They fought and regardles of what we think about "feminists" they achieved great things.

When I say "they can create it" I mean it in the full meaning of the creative process.

It is a missconception that women are not as good as coding as men. I work and I've worked with many women programers. I've gone to technical conference sessions presented by women and learned a great deal. I really don't see a real barrier there.

So some women can participate coding (the JWM configurator was created by a woman)

But the creative process is not only coding. Actually I consider it about 20% of the full process. There are many people in this forum that don't know how to code at all, but give advice on how and why a particular feature or change will be very accomodating to their needs, whether they are visually impaired or with limited motor skils. Even I have made sugestions based on the fact that I think in a structured way.

So women can participate giving sugestions. A user with the nick of Gliezl comes to mind. She was active propossing things, she hasn't been around recently but search her posts.

So, what does it take to make computers more accessible to women?
Different way of teaching math?
Different way of aproaching the techical concepts?
A different way of communication between developers?

I don't know, you tell me.
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#3 Post by Pizzasgood »

For the record, as I explained in the other thread, I mistook the intended meaning of Firescarab's post. I believe the intended message was that the people likely to expend the effort to learn Linux tend to be men. That means making things simpler would entice more women to use Linux, thus doubling our user-base and increasing variety. Not that Linux is inherently anti-women, they just aren't as inclined to work at it.

Personally, I think if you compared the number of men who don't use linux to the number of women who don't, there wouldn't be much of a difference. I think there tend to be more male tinkerers than female, but not enough to matter when looking at the non-users. I think making things simpler would bring in as many men as women.
Pizzasgood wrote:And yes, I'm all for the differences between people. If all pizzas were cheese, I'd get sick of it fast. By equal I meant roughly. Just because you put bacon on a pizza doesn't stop it from being a pizza, and the dietary content is still very similar. But it is slightly different, and extremely delicious.
Men and women are not the same. Which is a very good thing.
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#4 Post by amish »

maybe this isn't a software question, maybe it's a social question.

i mean, if women were a part of the community, the would just have suggestions. they wouldn't be suggestions for making puppy better for women, but if women were making suggestions, and listened to, puppy would become better for women anyway.

this is after asking myself the question over and over again. what could "better for women" possibly mean?

personally i'm in favor of making it better for everyone, but that certainly includes women. is there a puppy_chix forum that could be built? a website? it would be very cool to get someone to train cob (who's probably already capable) or kermit to make a puplet.... they could experiment from that and we could compare notes.

aha! lobster, what about a PuppyWomen or WomenPuppy page on the wiki for starters? whether it turns into a community or a puplet or both, it's something.
sadly, it is not possible to separate politics from free software. free software - politics = unfree software.

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#5 Post by HairyWill »

One of my colleages is doing a PhD on the low entry rate of women to study computer science at university level. What I say below contains generalisations and I'm sure we could all find exceptions.
She has found that girls in secondary school (in the UK) view using a computer as a solitary activity, it is a means to get work done. Their choice of degree is often determined by the likely financial reward at the end. IT is currently perceived as paying low.
Boys treat using a computer as a social activity, they discuss their activities, work together problem solving and get enjoyment from interacting with each other online.
The entry was much more balanced 15 years ago when children had much less contact with computers, both at home and at school.

I see tinkering with puppy to be similar to pigeon fancying, ham radio and model trains, things to be done by men (in majority) in the shed at bottom of the garden. This doesn't mean that the community has nothing to gain from greater female input, the more perspectives the better IMHO. It is just that very often women aren't interested and the reason for this is a much bigger issue than puppy.

Interestingly in the arabic world IT equates with office work that should be done by women. My research group contains a high proportion of women with a muslim background.
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social role

#6 Post by raffy »

I guess it's more a type-casting (pre-defined role) in a society or in a home where women exist. Here women are treated as co-equal in work, and as you saw in gliezl, she expected to be treated as co-equal.

In a home, if girls are expected to have the same time with the PC as the boys, then they could have their own hobby and socializing through the PC.

Even then, my jaw once dropped when I listened to an articulate young woman explaining one complex situation of software development in a big company. I thought, "Boy, is she missing fun by being so absorbed by her complex project?" Now, this reaction of mine tends to follow the observation above that women choose (or are expected) to socialize more.
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#7 Post by Sage »

Can o' worms, this one!
Had you lived as long as I, you would've known that mere males were banned from anything computer back in the '60s.
Programmes, oh yes, back then the word was even spelt correctly, were written by young dolly birds straight out of school, after a year or two they became compilers and operators, permitted access to the (airconditioned) inner sanctum where programmes were run, and their controllers tended to be, shall we say, more 'experienced' ladies approaching their 21st.
What a delight it was back then. I could sit for hours with the girl of my choice and explain what I would like her to do for me.............
Before anyone of the female persuasion jumps up and lambasts me, I have to tell that all these experiences proved mutually satisfying,



and many technical papers were published as a result of our liaisons.

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#8 Post by headfound »

In my wifes words, 'No fiddly bits (for setting stuff up), simplified options, GAMES! and a good word processor with cool font types' :D
Download a better Computer :)
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#9 Post by rarsa »

Hey, we are wasting bandwidth in this thread...

Where are the women's voices?
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#10 Post by amish »

yeah we are rarsa, although after reading sage's post i was immediately reminded that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper was a woman...
1969 – She won the first "man of the year" award from the Data Processing Management Association... 1973 – She became the first person from the United States and the first woman of any nationality to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society.
While she was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. Though the term computer bug cannot be definitively attributed to Admiral Hopper, she did bring the term into popularity.
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#11 Post by Lobster »

Maybe these guys can advise us?
http://linuxchix.org/
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#12 Post by amish »

Maybe these guys can advise us?
http://linuxchix.org/
that would be great, although welcoming them to edit a wikipage (see earlier post) with their ideas might give them more to start with.

i think the trick may be getting them to take puppy seriously as an avenue to make linux more friendly, more compatible with this essence of "better for women" we men can't seem to put our finger on?

in any case, a dialog of some kind would be great. ( why does this suddenly sound to me like the middle-east peace process? oh yeah... women and men... Old Friends :) ) seriously, if puppy can cater to a more diverse community and stay special in a "puppy sort of way" (and i really, really think these things are mutually possible if they both stay priorities) then imo it should.

we've grown beyond the days when almost the whole of society foolishly sees women as people to be kept under foot or under thumb. given that, they deserve to be helped out from under microsoft's looming, grim and excessively patriarchal shadow :) every bit as much as we do.
sadly, it is not possible to separate politics from free software. free software - politics = unfree software.

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#13 Post by rarsa »

Actually that site points to very specific things that I hadn't thought about

http://www.linuxchix.org/content/whatis/
And that vocal minority has a strong tendency to be brash, harsh, and intolerant of people who know less than they. This scares new users off, and reflects badly on the Linux community as a whole.
Our interactions in the forum and in the chat are sometimes quite rude. We don't think much of it maybe because in general culturally, men are taught to just brush it off.

If I receive a RTFM or a "that's a stupid question" I would normally think "what a moron" and continue with my search.

Acording to that page, some (most?) women take it personally and think of it as gender bias.

Could it be that the gender bias is the other way around? We act as we act just because we are who we are, genetically and culturally.

But again, those are my thoughts I want to hear those of women and in light of the quoted text, lets listen without being judgmental or rude.

Note: I added myself to one of their email lists to ask them to contribute with their ideas to this thread.
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#14 Post by pleia2 »

Val Henson of LinuxChix wrote a fantastic document that discusses this subject:

HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux

Not only does this explain the issues, hurdles and such, it gets into how you can help to fix it.
And that vocal minority has a strong tendency to be brash, harsh, and intolerant of people who know less than they. This scares new users off, and reflects badly on the Linux community as a whole.
Acording to that page, some (most?) women take it personally and think of it as gender bias.
I think you've misread that. We don't necessarily take it personally or believe it's a gender bias. We see this happen to everyone, regardless of gender. We see it as hostile and something we don't want to be involved with. This is certainly not a woman thing, I know many men who don't feel comfortable in the more hostile FOSS environments. LinuxChix itself boasts a lot of male members who were drawn to the project because of the "Be Polite and Be Helpful" rules of the list.

Other Linux distributions have struggled with how to encourage more women, and several have created -Women groups within their projects, including: Debian Women, Ubuntu Women and Fedora Women. These project seek to join women together (so we don't feel so alone) and supportive men, provide mentors, and general encouragement to get women involved. They also run into resistance from time to time from people who don't believe women should have a separate place, but as far as I can tell the projects with good leadership work.
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#15 Post by amish »

finally- thank you!

i had a long reply to this thread that *might* be interesting (might be dreadfully boring) if posted elsewhere- one of the things that i suspected was we stood a better chance of getting a reply if we welcomed and invited people one at a time here to post her thoughts.

another was along the lines of what you said- that "rtfm" attitudes not only lead to communities devoid of women, but devoid of many other sensitive people, that "sensitivity" isn't a quality of females (women) but of a feminine energy that some women do not posess (or that they hide to get along in a patriarchal society) and that some men do.

it went off in what i hoped were interesting tangents into stereotyping, jungian archetypes, and mysticism, so consider this brief synapsis both an invitation and a warning that it's probably dull and very odd.

the conclusion was that if we could build a community that was inclusive of women, a suitable o.s. would follow. and if no where else, i was PRETTY Sure i was onto something there. but who knows? thanks again for posting, i strongly hope we can make a community that women (and sensitive men) do not wish to shy from. sensitive people have too many insights that are often regarded (foolishly and unfortunately) as weak, frivolous, or even "girly..." the internet could benefit from a balance that was neither too male or too female. and while i am all in favor of the creation of "havens" on the internet, i think they might be symptom of a bigger problem (our mutual problems) as much as a partial solution- especially if they are the only place you see many women online. signing off now before i write another essay- many thanks!
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#16 Post by rarsa »

I am reading the link provided by Pleia2. It is a great read and it seems to answer the Title question of this thread. Of course I won't know until I finish reading it.

//rarsa away reading it.
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#17 Post by amish »

i'm think i've read that page before, but in any event i'll reread it before i post anything more about it.

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#18 Post by Billwho? »

Disclaimer: The following comment is extremely badly worded but was the best I could come up with.

After reading the article it seems to me that one thing we could do is have a page with a few links to other sites that may be of interest to all (possibly as a welcome page to new members but still accessable to everyone). Included on the page would be a link to linuxchix.org to give any women using our forum access to female mentors (we don't seem to have a large number a female members at the moment, but it may just be that the men are drowning them out). The reason this link should be among other links is to avoid the "your a women, thats unusual" implication that needs to be avoided at the same time.
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#19 Post by rarsa »

I am not done reading the HOWTO page completelly but I am feeling a catch 22.

If we talk about this we are actually pointing it out in a way that may alienate women that are already part and active members of the Puppy comunity.

If we don't talk about it we remain ignorant. I was totally ignorant about many things that are said on the HOWTO and I'm sure I'm not the only one. And that's worrysome. I was ignorant even when 50% of my coworkers are female and I treat them as peers with the same respect and deference as men.
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#20 Post by amish »

the realization that we were a bit naive (actually, we admitted ignorance) is no cause for panic, rarsa. if we alienate anyone by linking to linuxchix somewhere prominent (i have to disagree with you on that) it only shows that we're working to improve ourselves (we men) and it says nothing else, and it says nothing about the women on the forum.

it also says nothing that we post howto's or offer help on linux. if we help people with linux it doesn't carry the implication that the people we help are stupid, if we post a link to linux chix it only makes us slightly more accountable because we would be hypocrites to post a link and then have a place that is still extremely sexist. i don't think that we need certified compliance to post it, it could help a lot of men understand better, i'm sure it will piss a couple men off here (but it shouldnt.)

if anyone female is bothered by the link we can take it down. if anyone female thinks we shouldn't put it up for some reason then i retract my entire comment about it. and if you're really concerned, just ask pleia if she thinks it's a good idea. considering that she posted the link here first, i'm inclined to think that she thoguht it would be a good place for people to see it.

i honestly think we should just post the link on a sticky (no, not actually a sticky, we've talked about stickies on the forum before) Or Something Like That and forget about it. because it's not important? no... because forcing the issue is a poor idea for all the concerns you have about alienating people. i'll post my post about it and if it draws no comments, i too will probably forget about it. hopefully i won't forget the things i learned in that howto tho- that was a pretty cool howto and yeah anyone can learn something from it.

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