Bianca Gibson Ben Finney +1 On Jan 13, 2012 1:23 PM, < free-software-melb-request@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au> wrote:

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Encouraging women (Bianca Gibson) 2. Re: Encouraging women (Bianca Gibson) 3. Re: Encouraging women (Matt Giuca) 4. encouraging women (Bianca Gibson) 5. Re: encouraging women (Andrew Pam) 6. Re: encouraging women (Bianca Gibson) 7. Re: Encouraging women (Ben Finney) 8. Re: Encouraging women (Ben Finney)

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Message: 1 Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:44:25 +1100 From: Bianca Gibson To: Melbourne Free Software Interest Group Subject: Re: [free-software-melb] Encouraging women Message-ID:

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" I see complimenting any person on their achievement, without referencing their sex or discriminating on that basis, to be one improvement of many." I agree there. To me, were a lot of groups tend to fall short is including women or other minorities in the group without making us feel like the odd one out. Very similar stuff can be said for age, someone I know that is male and went to his first LUG at 15 felt like the odd one out, the next youngest person was 21 and he found it daunting.

If I'm complemented like the example I don't take it in a bad way, to me it's just a complement.

It's not rare for someone to comment around the same time that they meet you about there not being many women in FOSS. If you are a young woman it takes a pretty tough skin to show up and keep coming, partially due to pressures completely external from the group.

I'm not particularly good at judging how daunted people feel because I'm so used to gaming culture. I've found FOSS groups more inclusive mainly because I've received very little unwanted attention, whereas in gaming culture I saw and sometimes was the target of much worse. That could just be because in this case I'm significantly younger than most people. I'll try to find out more at Adacamp.

I think people need to bear in mind that when a woman takes an interest in computing, at least in my experience, you have to put up with a lot of stigma around your interest and being discluded from a young age. Right from primary school I was discluded largely for my interest in computing and games over things like sparkly gel pens. High School was better because I attended a partially selective school, but a girl I knew that was years younger than me ended up not going on the school camp she wanted to (games camp) because of the stigma around going to the nerd camp. For her it would have been hard to go completely against her existing social group and she would have been teased by them.

The point of that is, that women coming to things like this have probably had to take a lot in their pursuit of that interest. Probably been actively discouraged along the way, and may well still be getting actively discouraged. The complementing stuff isn't about coddling women, it's about being nice to people in general and taking specific care to be nice to people that may feel excluded, or have forces pushing them away from the group in order to make them more likely to stay.

Bianca