headdesk I started out in open source as a 12yo girl back in the mid-90's. I loved the OSS community because no one cared in the least that I was a farm girl

headdesk I started out in open source as a 12yo girl back in the mid-90's. I loved the OSS community because no one cared in the least that I was a farm girl from nowhere. You know what? I came in at the tail-end of a time when we had a lot more women doing open-source tech than we do now (some estimates have it around a 1:2 F:M ratio if you go back to the 70s and 80s). Anybody wonder what the differences between then and now are? * There were no "girl groups", i.e. Debian Women and the like. Women weren't a special case in need of protection, we were as mainstream as the men. * There was no pressure to be politically correct. Everyone was indoctrinated into hacker culture, we weren't supposed to treat one another like foreign specimens in need of kid gloves. * The stereotype that women are more suited to design and support tasks, and men more suited to development, wasn't hanging over our heads (ironically, like the author of this article, the people pushing that stereotype are usually so-called feminists). * No one cared about the demographics. The current obsession with gender ratios in open source has been wholly counter-productive. It's taught people they must act differently around women, that women need special help, and generally worked against the hacker ethos of "best idea first" (no matter from where or whom that idea comes). In short, the actions of those who are obsessed with parity between the sexes are causing half the problem: increased stress between the sexes in open source communities. The other half of the coin is what happens long before most young people come into contact with open source: My 8yo son recently showed off his new netbook to some neighbors, who commented, "It's a good thing you had a boy, Susan, what would you have done with a daughter?" The boys my son knows have tech toys: netbooks, robots, Snap Circuits, and so on. The girls don't. Most of them never get more intimate with a piece of technology than typing and printing an essay or answering email until college, at which point it's too late. Every great hacker I know was introduced to hacking in some form at a very young age. I'm not on par with men because some patronizing feminists made me feel welcome, because the community was sensitive, or because I was gently sequestered into girl-friendly areas: it's because I wrote my first code when I was six. Feminists, stop whining and let the real women do what we do, without the burden of your self-destructive attempts at shaming the men.