Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux helpSpecial Offers
Feature: Linux
Debian Women: Geek feminists in action
Share
Print
CommentsDebian Women began after Clark and Amaya Rodrigo, two of the few female Debian package maintainers, began privately discussing the lack of women in Debian last spring. Rodrigo, who currently maintains nine packages ranging from GNOME front-ends for CVS and SETI@home clients to a menstruation calendar, posted a question on the subject for the candidates for Debian Project Leader in March:
How can we say make a "Universal" OS when it's do scarcely related to half the population of the world? I would be very interested in knowing what is each candidate's plan or ideas on this subject, how to get more women involved, and what (in their opinion) would be the benefits.Rodrigo's question received lengthy replies from the candidates, and started a wide-ranging, though inconclusive, discussion on the subject.
In May, Clark, who co-maintains LyX and is also active in her local LUG and Perl group, gave a talk on Women in Debian at DebConf. As Clark prepared for the talk, she consulted a group that later became the nucleus of Debian Women, including Rodrigo, who translated the talk into Spanish and delivered it in Spain. Immediately after, the Debian Women's Mailing List began. A Web site followed within a month.
Debian Women is not the first group for women with an interest in GNU/Linux. Clark is active in LinuxChix, and, in helping to set up Debian Women, she researched other projects such as Gnurias and KDE Women.
All these groups are similar in that they try to create a supportive atmosphere in which women are encouraged to become involved in the free software community. However, Debian Women necessarily has a narrower focus. "To be a Debian developer," she says, "One needs to have specialized knowledge about a variety of things, such as licensing, packaging, philosophy, and the community." The Debian community has a rich tradition, and participating in the community without understanding that tradition is almost impossible.
Debian's traditions are especially obvious in the process of becoming a new maintainer. To begin the process, an applicant must find an advocate who is already a maintainer, and return a GPG key signed by at least one maintainer as proof of identity. The applicant's work on packages is overseen by a sponsor, and he or she must also demonstrate a working knowledge of the Debian Social Contract and Debian Free Software Guidelines. The sponsor makes a final report to a committee, which then decides if the applicant becomes a Debian maintainer.
Learning the Debian philosophy and asking someone you may never have met except through email or IRC to be your advocate takes time, and those are difficult steps for many men. However, for women, the process can be even more intimidating. They mean entering a largely male circle of associates, many of whom have long-term relationships with each other, and being judged by male office holders. This can make many women uncomfortable.
One of Debian Women's main roles is to help women through this process, partly by being supportive and encouraging, but also by demystifying the process. For example, for the last few months, Helen Faulkner, a Debian Woman regular, has posted updates on her progress through the process, outlining what she is doing and how she feels about it. Similarly, on her Web site, Amaya Rodrigo cheerfully encourages anyone who needs an advocate to contact her.
In addition, Debian Women is also discussing demystifying submitting bug reports -- not just by explaining the process, but also by showing how to make the reports useful. Since bug reports are publicly and sometimes copiously commented on, they are another area in which a newcomer who also happens to be female can easily feel overwhelmed.
Other areas in which Debian Women is considering becoming active include localization, documentation, and education for users. "We try to encourage women to participate in other areas of Debian," Clark says. "We do not want to recreate other areas of Debian within Debian Women."
At the same time, Clark adds that the group is also "a test ground" for the discussion of areas in which Debian needs to change if more women are to become active. For instance, in August, Helen Faulkner filed a bug against sexist language in Debian instruction and documentation, citing numerous examples and showing a sample rewrite of a passage.
Sexist language, Faulkner pointed out, "Can be offputting and potentially offensive to women like myself who wish to become Debian developers, and encourages people make the assumption that all developers etc. are male."
The need for the bug report was not universally accepted, even on the Debian Women's mailing list. One poster dismissed the bug report as "paranoid," and a number of Debian developers, particularly ones who speak English as a second language, questioned the need for the change and whether the replacement of "he" with "they" for the indefinite personal pronoun was grammatically correct. Yet many commentators on the bug report were sympathetic, and some documents have already been edited.
Contrasting opinions
Some members of the Debian community strongly object to Debian Women's action. As often happens in mailing lists and IRC channels for women, trolls have also been an occasional problem. Probably, it is in anticipation of such hostile actions that the Debian Women FAQ contains this question and answer:
Why isn't there a debian-men or debian-$SPECIAL_INTEREST_GROUP?Because it hasn't been requested. The existence of debian-women does not prevent anyone from requesting the creation of a new list or subproject.
Yet, despite some negative reactions, Clark says, "We also have a large number of supporters, and an even larger group of people that don't care one way or the other. Overall, it has been better received than I originally thought it would be."
Asked if she could foresee a time when a group like Debian Women was no longer needed, Clark says:
How Debian Women develops depends not only on DW itself and its members, but also on the rise in popularity of Linux and Debian. While it can be easy to forget that Debian isn't the entire world, there are outward social issues that need to be corrected first before Debian Women can ever become redundant. Ideally, Debian Women will grow to the extent that it can actually begin to affect small portions of society, but I think it will be a long time before that happens on a large scale.Meanwhile, Debian Women has created a friendly place for learning more about Debian and has drawn out many women to talk about their experiences and ambitions, and to become more involved. As one recent poster noted, when Debian Women started five months ago, there were only three female Debian Developers, but now eight women are in the New Maintainers queue -- a change that may be at least partly due to Debian Women.
It's a change that not even the founders could have anticipated. "I am quite surprised," Clark says, that "By simply forming a group such as this, many people will join and begin to think about contributing, whereas it might never have crossed their minds otherwise."
Comments
on Debian Women: Geek feminists in actionNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
Three cheers for Debian-Women and natural selection.
Some of the best Programers I have meet are Women.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 09, 2004 09:51 AMStrangely most common reson is that most Geeks don't just try to get into there pants without getting to know them first.
Also Geeks don't take appearance as important as brains ie looking perfect will not get a Geeks Love Ie they want brains.
Ie getting further into linux will not gain sex. The problem is the same with most programers.
I hate the word Geeks for two main reason. Number one says that the person will not fight this is wrong I would take out anyone by knollage and skill ie strenth is not Important it is how you use it.
Number two it use you are a Geek sorry I am not first fight I had at school after being no good at sports and working with computers. Please note I did not lose but knock out the strongist kid in school. Boy did this lead to problems when the weakest kid beats the strongist no problems yep He did even get to touch me. Kinda stuffs the full school yard system ie the geeks became the top of the heap any one picking on geeks was outed sports became lower knollage was more important ie better knollage better the sport people could do.
I had 8 invits to the prom the best sports person only got 2. Basicly been a geek won all the way to the bank.
Basicly a person with Knollage can be extramely strong. So week geeks sould not be.
At least I was constant I have improved ie in the past if I stuffed a word up I would stuff it up differently each time I typed it until I got it right.
It is really annoying when I still make these mistakes at my age.
Dam I stuffed programmers up as well.
Ok a new words add to the watch list of stuff I stuff up thanks.
It is really annoying to be able to spell words one day and the next day stuff the same words completely up.
One day I hope to get the glitch in my mind removed.
These days spell checkers can fix my faults in most cases. This is a major improvement.
This is the other thing I hate. Imperfect English is why I got called Dumb by even teachers when I was ace at maths. The truth is that I can spell it just depends how bad the glitch is deciding to be at the time.
And some teachers would go as far as calling me a cheat when I spent days working on a assignment handing it in with perfect spelling. Yet in class work would have errors more often than not.
Survey on the effect of "Geek culture" on the Chinese Freeware Movement
I am a student of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I am carrying out a study on the effect of "Geek culture" on the Chinese Freeware Movement. I wish you could kindly spend some time to answer our questions. We ensure that all your personal information and opinions will be used for analytical purposes only, and will be kept confidential. Thank you for your cooperation.
<A HREF="http://freeonlinesurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?id=77525" title="freeonlinesurveys.com">http://freeonlinesurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?id=<nobr>7<wbr></nobr> 7525</a freeonlinesurveys.com>
Free Software means that the source code is available freely. "Freeware" just means that you can get the binaries at no cost.
Cheers,
Daniel Carrera.
OpenOffice.org volunteer.
My wife has been using Linux for the past 3 years and is getting pretty good at it. She really likes a lot of the applications and the fact that a community of people work together to develop them.
On top of that, there where two women Linux users at the latest <A HREF="http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/" title="bloomingtonlinux.org">BLUG</a bloomingtonlinux.org> meeting that we held. I was taken by surprise when one of the the nice looking girls told me about her attempts to get the nvidia driver working with the 2.6 kernel. 8-)
Its refreshing to see that we are a diverse crowd because honestly, its hard to see sometimes. When I was a music major, I was surrounded by people of all walks of life, races and backgrounds, I really miss that.
--
Carla the country geek
Anirban
So are you going to replace all references to "he" with "they" or "s/he" every time you talk about some unspecified user? If you don't, then one could argue that you are still thinking in a sexist manner. It's worth pondering over, anyway.
The best solution is to rephrase the sentence in such a way as to avoid a third person pronoun entirely.
Using non-words like "s/he" or incorrect grammar is neither the purpose, nor the effect of gender-neutral writing. It is almost *always* possible to rewrite the sentence without using "he" and without making up words.
For example:
Original:
"After the user enters his login name, he is prompted by his password".
Rewrite 1: (use the second person)
"After you enter your login name, you are prompted for your password".
Rewrite 2: (third person, but no pronouns)
"After entering the login name, the user is prompted for a password".
Rewrite 3: (changing the subject)
"After entering the login name, the system prompts for the password".
Rewrite 4: (passive voice)
"The password prompt appears after the login name is entered".
Rewrite 5: (procedural, second person)
"First enter your login name, then your password".
If you'd like to learn more about gender-neutral writing, take a look at the Editing Primer from the OpenOffice.org User Guide project:
http://www.oooauthors.org/groups/authors/userguid<nobr>e<wbr></nobr> /contributorresources/editing_primer_v0.1.sxw
Cheers,
Daniel Carrera.
OpenOffice.org volunteer.
Like French and many other languages, but frankly if you want to change this, the only real fix would be to add a genderless pronoun to English, good luck to convince a majority of people to do the change!
In the meantime, avoiding usage of "he" because of "gender-bias" looks frankly stupid to me..
RenoX
>>gender-biased language.
> Like French and many other languages,
No, actually. English is more gender biased than Romance languages.
> but frankly if you want to change this, the
> only real fix would be to add a genderless
> pronoun to English,
Wrong again. It is not only possible, but *easy* to write gender-neutral English. I work at the OpenOffice.org user guide. We have a 400 page gender-neutral document. It's not hard really.
Now, *technically* English does have a gender neutral third person singular pronoun. It's "one". One could say "one doesn't have to say 'he' all the time, doesn't one?". But that feels akward, especially to USAians. Hence, the use of "one" has to be limited a bit and instead one should opt for some of the alternatives I suggested.
> In the meantime, avoiding usage of "he" because
> of "gender-bias" looks frankly stupid to me..
Why should you refer to a general user as "he" if the user need not be a "he" ?
Writing gender-neutral language is not hard and it does not result in akward phrasing. For example, the above sentence ("Why should<nobr> <wbr></nobr>...") refers to a third person user without implying gender. Did you think it was a terribly akward phrase? Do you think I had to think a lot to write it? It all came naturally.
Cheers,
Daniel Carrera.
OpenOffice.org volunteer.
>No, actually. English is more gender biased than Romance languages.
Uh? In French, when a pronoun refers to both men and women, the rule is to use the 'male' form of the pronoun.. And many job tittle do not have really female form: 'le docteur' not 'la docteur', some women accept 'la doctoresse' (which sounds quite terrible) but many prefers being called 'docteur' (the opposite exists also for some job traditionaly done by women)
>Why should you refer to a general user as "he" if the user need not be a "he" ?
Because AFAIK by default, English rules say to use he when you don't know the gender of the person you're refering to at the 'third person'.
[Note that I find very strange to read on<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/. 'a developer, she<nobr> <wbr></nobr>..', maybe this is an US-English rule that I haven't learn at school? (I'm French)]
And changing a sentence to use only you instead of he or she, isn't natural. Yes in many case one can only use 'you' but if I'm talking about a third person he or she, will probably comes quite natural: 'the support person is responsible to answer you, he will have to contact you later before...' avoiding the usage of 'he' is awkard IMHO: I prefer 'good style' over what looks to me as some kind of political correctness..
In the meantime, avoiding usage of "he" because of "gender-bias" looks frankly stupid to me..
Indeed.. political correctness has its day and now it is gone.
Aside from that, most of the writing I do is gender neutral (code).
And to whoever used the term USians earlier, that's pretty lame. Don't make me whip out my box of slang regarding countries other than the US.
I suppose things are different with all this abstinence-only education and what not..
I hope this project goes on and help to achieve the goal most of us want, that everybody, men and women, can work together without any discrimination (including gender, race, age, religion or whatever you can think of).
Seriously though, you have to understand that representing as a group of geek women is going to paint a nice huge target on your back from sexist trolls.
There are some real assholes out there who actually like the idea of Geekdom being a "He-man Woman-haters Club" (xref. "Our Gang Comedies" aka "The Little Rascals") and do their best to make your life hell. MsGeek.Org went from being an attempt to do a Geek News site for women to being just my personal blog because some schmucks went in and posted Gay Pr0n pix through a hole in PHPNuke. I busted one of the perpetrators...told his ISP, who pulled his connection. After that, my site was under almost constant attack from a bunch of his little troll buddies.
After someone installed an IRC server through another hole in PHPNuke, my ISP basically told me that hosting my site was too much of a risk. That's when I pulled it down and went silent for a few months.
Anyway, that's my story. Some people...[sigh]
Please consider hanging around the OpenOffice.org lists. OOo is by far the most positive open source group I've seen. And we also have probably the highest proportion of women of any open source project, including at the leadership level. If you come to OOo you won't be getting any of that crap that you've had to put up with.
I am personaly involved in the OOo Authors project. This is an especialy positive and active group. And it's an example of a project where women in leadership (3) outnumber the men (1 -- me).
While reading this article I was surprised to learn that the Debian team had a debate about sexist language. At our project, it is understood that gender-neutral and culturally-neutral language is a must. This is discussed in detail in our style guide and editing primer. I know, I wrote them (with the help of our chief editor -- Jean Weber).
I hope you will consider joining our mailing list (authors@user-faq.openoffice.org) and possibly join the team.
Cheers,
Daniel Carrera.
OpenOffice.org volunteer.
Leave women (and the English language) be!
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 12, 2004 03:25 AMAt our local LUG of about 25 people, there's maybe 5 women. I never thought twice about it. Why would I draw lines? When we say "mankind" we're not excluding "womankind" and when we say "he" we are not excluding "she". This is part of language almost universally. Masculine pronoun forms do not necessarily refer to males. If you don't like that, don't speak English, and for HEAVENS sake don't speak French, you'd lose your mind!
PLEASE NOTE: If you're a woman, don't let Debian Women trick you into believing that gender matters in Linux. You are welcomed with the same wide open arms that have welcomed the rest of the Linux community.
Re:Leave women (and the English language) be!
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 12, 2004 03:36 AMRe:Leave women (and the English language) be!
Posted by: Daniel Carrera on December 12, 2004 06:19 AMFortunately not everyone is like this poster. OpenOffice.org for example. I don't think it's a coincidence that OpenOffice.org also has a much larger ratio of woman participants than other open source groups.
Personally I recommend the Authors project:
http://www.oooauthors.org
This is a very positive project, where people tend to be more aware of cultural and gender issues. These things are discussed in our style guide for example. And we work hard to be inclusionary.
Again, it's not surprising that this project has the highest ratio of women participants of any open source project Iv'e seen. At Authors, the ratio is roughly 50/50, except at the leadership level, where women out-number the men.
I hope you will consider working with us. We need more writers.
Cheers,
Daniel Carrera.
OpenOffice.org volunteers.
Re:Leave women (and the English language) be!
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 13, 2004 08:55 PMRe:Leave women (and the English language) be!
Posted by: Daniel Carrera on December 12, 2004 06:09 AM> lines? When we say "mankind" we're not excluding
> "womankind"
But what's wrong with saying "humanity"?
There are real women who really don't like it when you act like all developers are male. And right now you are ignoring their concerns, like the other poster said.
> If you don't like that, don't speak English,
And that, my friend, is chauvinism. English is the language of open source (sadly enough). Your attitude is exclusionary.
Furthermore, English is perfectly capable of being gender neutral without sounding akward or forced. All it takes is for the speaker to give a damm.
Daniel Carrera.
OpenOffice.org volunteer.
You don't seem to have read the comment you are replying to - you certainly haven't understood it. I'd suggest you work on your own prejudices before making unwarranted assumptions about the prejudices of others, for example:
English is the language of open source
That's a pretty bigoted comment. What you mean is, everything you read about open source is in English. That's a statement about you, not a statement about open source.
- <A HREF="http://www.aful.org/index.html" title="aful.org">example</a aful.org>
- <A HREF="http://www.april.org/" title="april.org">example</a april.org>
- <A HREF="http://www.pro-linux.de/" title="pro-linux.de">example</a pro-linux.de>
A Google search for libre logiciel site:fr with a language restriction to French gives half a million hits. A Google search for "freie Software" site:de restricting the language to German gives only 254,000 hits. Of course there are many pages devoted to free software in those languages which those quick/crude searches do not include.
>
>That's a pretty bigoted comment.
No it isn't. It is an unfortunate reality. I don't like it. I am not a native English speaker. But if you do a search you will find that open source, and even the internet as a whole is disproportinally English-based. Very disproportinately. The fact that you can point to several open source projects that aren't doesn't change what I'm saying. I know of several other non-English open source projects. But they still make up the minority. The language distribution is *very* disproportinate.
> A Google search for libre logiciel site:fr with
> a language restriction to French gives half a
> million hits.
And if you do it in English you get 40 million hits. Isn't that disproportinate?
People more capable than you and I have reserached this and wrote a paper saying that the internet is very heavily biased towards English. Computing in general is. Heck, look at programming languages. Most of them use "if", "else", "while", etc. English. When I first learn how to program I dind't know any English. I had to memorize what these keywords did without any linguistic help.
Cheers,
Daniel.
Huh? 2 minutes ago, Google gave this (copied and pasted):
Results 1 - 10 of about 17,800,000 English pages for "free software".
But more to the point is the way Google does searches. Those 17,800,000 "English" pages include <A HREF="http://www.linux-fuer-alle.de/doc_show.php?docid=161" title="linux-fuer-alle.de">this page</a linux-fuer-alle.de>, which is entirely in German! That's because Google counts as "English" all pages which don't specify a language in the header. So many, perhaps most, German pages get included in the 17,800,000 "English" count and excluded from the "German" count. Your conclusion about the relative importance of the 2 languages in open source does not follow from the data.
Is English the most widely-used language in open source? Yes. But that's not what you claimed.
Is English the language of open source? Absolutely not.
> source? Yes. But that's not what you claimed.
>
>Is English the language of open source?
Absolutely not.
You are taking that sentence out of proportion. I say that English is the language of open source in the same sense that English is the language of commerce, and the language of international politics. It doesn't mean that no commerce is every done in any other language. Please keep things in perspective. The *point* I was trying to make is that saying "if you don't like it, don't speak English" is wrong because you'd be excluding people from the bulk of open source.
Cheers,
Daniel.
That's why I don't like working w/ women anymore
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 13, 2004 10:46 PMThis attitude of having to "nurture women" because we "evil males" don't want them around is ludicrous. I am a black American man, and I learned what I know the old-fashioned way--I put in the time and the work. That is irrespective of whether or not you're male or female; if you want to participate, fine! Welcome! You simply have to put in the work--male, female, Martian, red elephant, or whatever. What these feminists seem to have forgotten is that the hacker community is not just predominately male, it's also predominately WHITE. I certainly didn't take an attitude that "oh, it's virtually all white people, so I need a nurturing environment for blacks for me to contribute." That would've been just plain stupid of me.
If there's an organization in which you'd like to participate that happens to be majority male, and you're a female, then go ahead and simply participate. Don't whine about "there aren't any women to coddle me." That's like white people going to, say, a Historically Black College or University and whining about the lack of white people there! Or black people (remember, I'm one of "them") going into a boardroom and bitching about how there "ain't enough brothas 'n' sistas." That is true, there ain't. So roll up your sleeves, become good at what you do simply because you have a work ethic--not because you're black, white, or whatever, and then you too will be qualified to walk into that board room.
This is my message to these feminists who think that we "evil males" want to exclude them. Particularly in the Free Software community, they're just dead wrong. Become good at what you do, regardless of your sex, and the hands will be extended, and people will say to you, "Welcome, Hacker." We call this "merit-based acceptance." It doesn't have a blasted thing to do with your sex.
Now, if you want to just be separatist and start your own group, then fine; you can be like so many "brothas 'n' sistas" these days with chips on their shoulders who younger whites want nothing to do with, personally or professionally. This is not because of "genetic inferiority" or any other such nonsense, but rather because they're sick and tired of being told, "just because you're white, you're automatically a racist." I don't blame them. The same kind of thing applies to men. I, for example, used to like working with women. Now, I find that I don't initiate conversations with them, for fear of getting false charges filed against me at the HR office (I've had that done to me twice already). Is that the kind of mindset we want in the Free Software community, too? That's where experience tells me that this will lead.
Re:That's why I don't like working w/ women anymor
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 15, 2004 11:33 PMI'm glad to see the group, and I bet a lot of men would also learn a lot about how to contribute to Debian by reading the debiwn-woman mailing list archives.
women
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 09, 2004 02:44 AMI think this article is misleading by giving the hordes of drooling nerds false hope that they can meet women (real ones) by getting further into linux culture.
And that's just wrong.
#