The OP responded. Basically, linux needs feminist spaces because FOSS communities are traditionally sexist spaces where their contributions are not welcome. The point isn't that no one else could have had the idea, that's absurd. The point is that no one had until that point, so it wasn't trivial. It's the banal idea that if we have spaces where marginalized groups are able to contribute without all of the extra baggage associated with being a part of the group. In the FOSS community, you face extra criticism as a woman.
I'm confused - did the traditional "go upstream to Linus" community reject her patch? Or did she somehow get a patch into the kernel via a sidechannel through linuxchix?
Near as I can tell, this was merely a case of the "hyper male sexist" community letting good code speak for itself.
I understood the article to be saying that the values that the author identified with the LinuxChix community assisted in bringing the issue to their attention, helping them understand that the use case didn't require the performance penalty that atime represented at the time.
> feminist communities are likely to be both smaller and more focused on user conduct than technical communities at large
Is Python small? I'm sure there were other small linux communities (the term seems almost redundant) who were much less welcoming to women.
I don't know what to say to convince you that open source communities are traditionally hyper male and sexist. It's not so hard to imagine that you might get more contributions from women in an explicitly women friendly space within a larger women unfriendly (to say the least) community.
Here's some reading, I encourage you to read it if you think I'm wrong.
> Also, these communities’ openness means that a minority of difficult members (including, for example, a sincere misogynist or an insincere troll) can disproportionately affect the tone and dynamics of interactions. Finally, the ideology and rhetoric of freedom and openness can then be used to (a) suppress concerns by labeling them as “censorship” and, to (b) rationalize low female participation as simply a matter of women’s choice.
> I argue that some otherwise commendable features of the free culture movement also contribute to the gender gap. That is, the geek stereotype and discursive style can be unappealing, open communities are especially susceptible to difficult people, and the ideas of freedom and openness can be used to dismiss concerns and rationalize the gender gap as a matter of preference and choice.
I'm making a second reply purely to point out that the article you cited talked about confounding influences as being one of the main sources of the problem, while you attacked my comment for talking about confounding influences being part of the solution.
That seems absolutely insane, and suggests you didn't actually respond to my comment on the merits, but rather, out of anger someone didn't agree with you.
> It's not so hard to imagine that you might get more contributions from women in an explicitly women friendly space within a larger women unfriendly (to say the least) community.
No one (at least, not me) was talking about this.
What I said is that ascribing certain common behaviors to being a result of being feminist or being part of a feminist community without examining other causes is such a common fallacy is has a Latin name and wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...
It's also a classic propaganda maneuver.
Ed:
Been too long since school, can't Latin on the fly.
It's a pretty accepted fact that men interrupt women and women do better when they have women authority managers or teachers. It's why there are women's colleges.
They name names, it becomes a radical feminist attack piece. People would ask, why did she attack so and so? They are so nice and do so many things for the community.
What's with begging the question by saying "it's Valerlie Aurora after all"? It doesn't do anything for someone reading your comment who doesn't know what to think of her.
I recently started on Zoloft, and despite how afraid I was of it and how many bad experiences I read online, it's been fantastic. Could you elaborate more on your experience?
Well, I had absolutely no negative effects from it, and many positive effects. It stopped the internal negative feedback loop. It improved my mood. It allowed me to focus on my work. I had no feelings of being emotionally dead, or whatever such effect people like to claim SSRIs gave them. It was an entirely positive experience.
While I don't like the idea of general practitioners handing out anti-depressant prescriptions (instead, they should refer to a psychiatrist who will take responsibility for a full-course treatment), I don't think people should be basing their medical decisions on negative anecdotes they find online. Really, that sort of nonsense plays directly into feeding the depression.
Being a PostDoc has its highlights, but mostly, it sucks, especially in life sciences, due to pathetic pay, unstructured hours and the suckiness is generally impossible to convey to someone who has never been one. Just 'cause it's research don't mean it's rainbows and ponies.
I like this article, and I tend to agree with its conclusions about which ones are most common on most platforms, but isn't this at best heuristics and at worst wrong assumptions?
Like, I would use these as my heuristic guidelines if I was on the job and constraints dictate that I can't spend time on researching icons. But I wouldn't write a blog post authoritatively telling people that one icon is more recognized that the other without having some kind of research to back it up.
Then again, the author does say at one point that their research is extremely informal, so maybe I'm just projecting my feelings about the cowboy nature of the UX profession right now. But I still feel like they could do more to qualify that these just appear to be their best guesses about how people interpret the share icon.
The way that people talk about the fruit is the intended effect of their marketing. It's kind of hard to ignore, when they've been so successful at becoming a lifestyle brand. Even if it doesn't end with any concrete suggestion, I enjoyed reading about the author's exhaustion with Apple hype.
> "it's unusual for women to be clever enough to program so we're making a song-and-dance about these ones"
The more examples you see of people like you programming, the less of a song-and-dance you think it is. And you might perceive it as putting them up on a pedestal, but others don't.
In an ideal world, we don't have to increase the visibility of other genders in programming.
Did you have role models and examples that you looked up to who also looked like you? I think it's a hard thing to empathize with if you've always had those examples.
> "well unless you can find examples of people of your sex doing that job well then forget it"
Which is a stronger message to a child: other genders or ethnicities being held up as examples or never seeing anyone who looks like you doing what you want to do?
