Re: debian and women? from DWN #10

From: Emma Jane Hogbin (emmajane_at_xtrinsic.com)
Date: 03/25/04

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    Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 14:41:54 -0500
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

    On Wed, Mar 24, 2004 at 06:10:56PM -0700, Monique Y. Herman wrote:
    > <http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/debian-vote-200403/msg00067.html>

    I've personally found the Debian community to be an equal opportunity kind
    of place. Help is given equally to all, and RTFMs are thrown out equally
    to all. That said and done--I personally believe that women are better at
    presenting their problem and therefore are more likely to get a useful response.
    They've probably also tried searching for the answer before asking for
    help and are more informed. This is based on my experience on-line as well
    as a tech instructor at two community colleges. I teach classes where
    there are 20 men and maybe 3 or 4 women--the women (on average) are much
    happier reading manuals on their own than the men. A higher percentage of
    men would rather that I read the manuals to them (they don't want to do
    their own learning--they just want to be spoonfed). There are always some
    on both sides of the fence--but the women tend to be a little more
    self-sufficient than the men.

    With the exception of one occassion I've never felt uncomfortable on *any*
    Linux-related list (other tech lists yes, but never Linux related). The
    one occassion was on the Debian IRC. Whenever possible I use my name as my
    handle (emmajane)--I used to be Newt, but that raised more problems
    because I was a Monty Python Newt, not an Aliens Newt or a Gingrich
    Newt...sorry, I got distracted for a moment. So anyway, I asked if there
    was anyone who could help me with XYZ, someone made a sexist comment, I
    said, "*** you." And the sexist commenter was yelled at by everyone else
    on the channel and then booted. So that's really as bad as it gets for me.

    Sometimes on software-specific mailing lists I have problems. I won't name
    any names *cough*openoffice*cough* I had to send my original email back to
    the list many times because people weren't reading what I was actually saying. I
    quoted all of the FAQs I'd tried but not succeeded with, and their
    response was to try exactly what I said I'd already done. I don't *think*
    it was a gender problem though, I think it was just that the list is high
    volume, and people are used to sending off-the-cuff replies to stupid
    users. Or maybe I'm just naive.

    Yes, I do get a little entourage when I go to my LUG meetings; however, not all
    the women do. I think it's because I engage with the presentation. I belly
    laugh when people say funny things, I ask questions, I get involved.

    I think that Debian is one of the least newbie-friendly distros because of
    the install process not being a pointy-clicky GUI. Newbies assume that it
    will be too hard to run the distro just because they've heard horror
    stories about the install process. I definitely get a *lot* of raised
    eyebrows when I tell people I run Debian. Not because I'm female...but
    because I'm not using RedHat, SuSE or Mandrake.

    > Just kind of wondering what others think about this. I don't find
    > debian off-putting, but then, I use vim, so maybe my interpretation of
    > "userfriendly" is a bit unconventional.

    Me too. Vim rawks! ;)

    emma 

    -- 
Emma Jane Hogbin
[[ 416 417 2868 ][ www.xtrinsic.com ]]
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