Treating Them as Teammates, Not as Political Props, Trophies, or Objects
Related: Albanian women, Brazilian women & Debian Outreachy racism under Chris Lamb
Many computer geeks, especially if they are tactless male nerds too, can be rather awkward around women. They might say inadequate stuff, stare, or even make unwanted advances (which aren't illegal by the way, provided it's not repeated it is just an inconvenience).
Fedora Week of Diversity is happening this week (outsourced to proprietary Google stuff) and it is shilling the "splinter group" SFC. The "room" is barely active and one person said: "This channel is not for support of the Outreachy program or the Mentored Programs at Fedora. I would recommend you reach out to the Free Software Conservancy with your concerns or the Mentored Projects leadership team at Fedora who can point you to the right information if you would like to know more."
Issues with Outreachy were covered here before. This "Free Software Conservancy" (it's wrong, it should say Software Freedom Conservancy) is also problematic, partly because it does not prioritise the right people. Remember who sponsors this so-called 'DIVERSITY PROGRAM': the company that "Paid Off Android’s Andy Rubin After Sexual Assault" and a company that profits from racial profiling. Based on the "room", Fedora "diversity" seems to involve no more than half a dozen active people i.e. it is a token of a PR push serving IBM.
This past week we wrote many articles about women's role in Free software and we said we would revisit the subject again. Women's rights have been hijacked by some of the very worse offenders. Some of them attack women and then act all surprised that women won't join.
In a perfect world we'd hire or recruit people not based on gender and race but based on quality, merits, skills etc. The advice we're asked to follow by the likes of IBM overlooks the company's atrocious track record, including on diversity at present [1, 2].
The world is a large place with many developers. Most of the world's people are women. Calling them "minority" is misleading. It also mis-frames the problem, which means proposed solutions would be misguided. █
