Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (930 mails)

[Katarina Machalkova <kmachalkova@xxxxxxx>]

> During our strategy meeting, the initial item that cause that line to be
>  there was from me. And what the initial item was about was "making
>  openSUSE friendlier to women" (or rather "female contributors", even
>  though that sounds a bit odd and, don't burn me, I'm not a native English
>  speaker ;)).

Thanks Pascal for bringing this up. Each time I tried to do so among openSUSE 
contributors and colleagues (all male) in my close proximity, I was only 
laughed at, the most frequent arguments being: "Making openSUSE friendlier to 
female contributors is the same as making it friendlier to LGBTs, Chinese Jews 
or squirels, because those are also in minority", or "It makes no difference 
to me whether openSUSE users and contributors are male, female,  LGBTs, 
Chinese Jews or squirels, so I don't see why we should try to get  
specifically more women." 

So I never ever dared to come out in the open with the idea of opensuse-women 
( incl. other activities, such as mentoring program, making female 
contributors more visible, thus providing role-models, improving code of 
conduct etc.), because I didn't really want to be laughed at once again. 
Moreover, it seemed to me pointless to come up with supply (program for female 
contributors) when there was seemingly no demand. In a sense, few openSUSE 
guys are happy to be in all-boys club with no women standing in their way, the 
rest is just not giving a damn about what gender and species the contributors 
are and the number of involved women (visibly involved, I mean, in planetsuse, 
factory, forums etc.) is 1-digit  number, so there's hardly anyone that would 
complain about the current status.

Maybe I was just selfish and I didn't want to feel so lonely in openSUSE 
anymore.  Maybe it was just me and nobody else seeing the advantages of more 
diversified community (more creative ideas resulting from combinining 
different points of view, male and female, for example). But I essentialy 
reconciled myself with the fact that I'm not strong enough to find some 
support for the idea, so I basically stopped talking about it.

fB.
-- 
  \\\\\              Katarina Machalkova    
  \\\\\\\__o          OOo developer
__\\\\\\\'/_          & hedgehog painter