On Wed, Mar 24, 2004 at 06:10:56PM -0700, Monique Y. Herman wrote: > <http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/debian-vote-200403/msg00067.html>
I've personally found the Debian community to be an equal opportunity kind of place. Help is given equally to all, and RTFMs are thrown out equally to all. That said and done--I personally believe that women are better at presenting their problem and therefore are more likely to get a useful response. They've probably also tried searching for the answer before asking for help and are more informed. This is based on my experience on-line as well as a tech instructor at two community colleges. I teach classes where there are 20 men and maybe 3 or 4 women--the women (on average) are much happier reading manuals on their own than the men. A higher percentage of men would rather that I read the manuals to them (they don't want to do their own learning--they just want to be spoonfed). There are always some on both sides of the fence--but the women tend to be a little more self-sufficient than the men. With the exception of one occassion I've never felt uncomfortable on *any* Linux-related list (other tech lists yes, but never Linux related). The one occassion was on the Debian IRC. Whenever possible I use my name as my handle (emmajane)--I used to be Newt, but that raised more problems because I was a Monty Python Newt, not an Aliens Newt or a Gingrich Newt...sorry, I got distracted for a moment. So anyway, I asked if there was anyone who could help me with XYZ, someone made a sexist comment, I said, "Fuck you." And the sexist commenter was yelled at by everyone else on the channel and then booted. So that's really as bad as it gets for me. Sometimes on software-specific mailing lists I have problems. I won't name any names *cough*openoffice*cough* I had to send my original email back to the list many times because people weren't reading what I was actually saying. I quoted all of the FAQs I'd tried but not succeeded with, and their response was to try exactly what I said I'd already done. I don't *think* it was a gender problem though, I think it was just that the list is high volume, and people are used to sending off-the-cuff replies to stupid users. Or maybe I'm just naive. Yes, I do get a little entourage when I go to my LUG meetings; however, not all the women do. I think it's because I engage with the presentation. I belly laugh when people say funny things, I ask questions, I get involved. I think that Debian is one of the least newbie-friendly distros because of the install process not being a pointy-clicky GUI. Newbies assume that it will be too hard to run the distro just because they've heard horror stories about the install process. I definitely get a *lot* of raised eyebrows when I tell people I run Debian. Not because I'm female...but because I'm not using RedHat, SuSE or Mandrake. > Just kind of wondering what others think about this. I don't find > debian off-putting, but then, I use vim, so maybe my interpretation of > "userfriendly" is a bit unconventional. Me too. Vim rawks! ;) emma -- Emma Jane Hogbin [[ 416 417 2868 ][ www.xtrinsic.com ]] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
