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How can one disagree with this article without being branded sexist and intolerant? She asserts there are few designers and women in open source software becau
by warrenwilkinson 16y ago
How can one disagree with this article without being branded sexist and intolerant?
She asserts there are few designers and women in open source software because men alienate them. And that we should try to make it so technical competence isn't required to contribute.
There are some good ideas here. But they only apply to a small subset of OSS projects. There is no cause for calling programmers anti-women or anti-designer.
- archgoon 16y agoHi, I think you misunderstand the argument being here, and are needlessly interpreting this as a 'men vs women' argument. The author is not saying that OSS communities are explicitly anti-women. This does not appear anywhere in the article. What she does argue is that OSS projects can be unwelcoming to newbies in general. There are no gender arguments being made here. In fact, she seems to feel that she herself has been guilty to an extent here. She cites a UX designer who argues: "There’s no perceived value in open source for mentoring, facilitation, disciplining of unruly users, training of newcomers or non-technical users, etc., which are needed to support both designers of any gender and women in any role." Again, I think a very poor summary of her argument is "She asserts there are few designers and women in open source software because men alienate them", as this suggests that the only issue is too few women being present. If you simply introduce more women, this argument would go, the problem would disappear. This is emphatically _not_ what she is arguing. Men and women are equally well suited to implementing the solutions presented in the article, and the mistakes are equally easy to be made by engineers of either gender.