Am I a girl? yeah… is just that sometimes we spend so much time online that forget that we actually have a body, we need to eat and need to walk. If this is your case, welcome to the new group of people that set names to their gadgets instead to their cats.
Today I had an interesting chat with a contributor that, I just found out, was a lady (after being helping her for about a month or so) we talk about, why are so few women in FOSS projects? I guess this is the question we all made to ourselves (as woman) and many guys do too. I start to point out things that I believe are the main reasons and I would like to share them with you:
The Comparison
I have meet a lot of women who actually code amazing things. Problem are comparisons: “That girl can code as good as a guy” or “She’s almost as good as any of us(guys)”. And we as women do that too sometimes: “I’m as good as any man can be” or “I can code anything that a man can code”.
If we start showing that there is a line to cross, then this line will always exist. This doesn’t happen with religion or skin color, doesn’t matter either with age. Everyone has made that imaginary line between sex gender a pretty clear way to use it as excuse for, either redeem us from our mistakes or to justify our victories.
The Emo-Side
Everyone gets hurt, everyone cries, everyone has bad moments… don’t use that to get more sympathy. If you show everytime that you’re beign disturbed that you need them to stop because you’re a girl, then you’re giving people the right to just keep doing it.
When you read a technical person (either lady or gent) you will find out that topics are never related to their emo-side. They can talk about the next release of X app, or just talk about the weather. That’s why we have -social- places to talk about that. (ej: #Fedora-social where everyone loves bacon…)
You ARE a girl, girls don’t do that
Since we were born we got people telling us what to do and which kind of things a woman was not supose to do. Is amazing to see that many of the geek ladies I have meet didn’t had this kind of parents, Most were fully support to do anything they wanted to.
I’m from LatinAmerica, the place where Novels (Novelas) come from, and we grow waiting for our blue prince who should come to rescue from -whatever-, that we are suposed to be full time moms and our destiny is to make lunchs and dinner in time keeping perfect our makeup. Tv doesn’t teach us to fight for what we want, it only teach us to wait for our destiny. If we show more people doing amazing things, without point out if is a girl or not, then next generations maybe won’t need to think on this issues.
You’re a girl, why don’t you recruit more?
WRONG! I sometimes ask myself… is there a special code that girls have or can use to recruit only girls? a secret society that I don’t know about? From all the women I have meet I think over 80% were recruit by guys. Yes, me too.
Even if I have my own heros and heroines I can only say that for me we are all the same. We might not have the same oportunities in life, same support, or same courage, but at the end, we are the same and we can do whatever we want with our lifes. As long as we keep showing that you own your own life and be a strong and professional woman isn’t *wrong*, then I’m sure we will see more ladies on the tech side.
I don’t know any other geek girl
WUT? I could name so many amazing women that I have the honor to meet, to work with and to follow on their amazing blogs that you would be amazed. Name them all might be imposible, and naming just a few would be not fair, however, let me tell you that maybe the contributor that helped you last time with your code issue was a lady, or the t-shirt you’re wearing was designed by a lady, or the tutorial that you’re following was written or translated by a lady.
The fact that we don’t add a label next to every goal that we have quoting
*I have boobs* doesn’t mean that technical and professional women exist. Maybe we just need to be more open, maybe we just need to realize that technology is not about genders, just like we did with ages. I really hope that next time the question
*why FOSS doesn’t have more ladies?* you change it by this:
*What can I do to bring more ladies to FOSS?*. We all can recruit contributors, just make sure to do it.
All those AMAZING photos thx to CC licences :D
Kodomut on flickr
