Women in Perl [was Re: Updating http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html ]

On Monday 28 April 2008, Elaine Ashton wrote:
> > Sure, I can see what you mean, and that sounds very altruistic, to
> > keep
> > Elaine's material 'on file' so to speak.  It's a highly defensible
> > position,
> > on the face of it, but in reality, we all know what being quietly
> > side-lined
> > means.
>
> History repeats itself time and time again. You get the people you
> deserve by the silent majority remaining silent. Just like all the
> politics inside Parrot. The silent remain silent and things continue
> on just as they did in the days of P5P. For years many have
> plaintively commented as to why there are so few women in perl,
> especially when compared to other projects, and you need only look to
> yourselves.
>

I'd like to comment on the "Why there are few women in Perl" remark. It may be 
a bit tactless to bring this in this context, like a pushy women-lib-fighter 
who keeps bringing up the subject. (This is a style-over-substance remark) 
But I'd like to address it anyway.

First of all I should note that I know quite a few female programmers here in 
Israel, in real-life. Most or all of them seem intelligent and impressive, 
and they most likely make good programmers. I also know some other female 
Perl programmers online.

As for how much they contribute back to the community, that is probably less 
than ideal. It is well-known that in most development environments what 
happens is that most of the people just use it and not contribute back, while 
the amount of active contributers is much smaller. This is similar to the 
fact that most of the code in the world has no sale value, (or otherwise 
isn't sold) and only a very small percent of it is 
open-source/shareware/freeware/proprietary/etc. (see 
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s03.html ). 

Since there are fewer women, there are also fewer female contributers.

However, despite all that, I still know of several female Perl developers who 
contribute in various ways. There's http://search.cpan.org/~elizabeth/ who 
wrote many useful CPAN modules. There's imacat, who is an active CPAN tester. 
I know of at least three female Australians who are doing advocacy and 
organisation. And in Israel, we have a few FOSS women developers who are 
active in mailing lists, other online mediums, and in giving presentations. 
There are also Allison Randal and Ann Barcomb who have done a commendable 
contribution to Perl.

Do we have enough female contriubters? No. Can we make contributing to Perl 
more attractive to women? Sure. But I don't think we should feel that we are 
particularly bad now, in comparison to other projects in this respect. I 
don't think I know of any projects who sport 50% (or more) female developers.

In regards to http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/ - while it is 
a fine and enlightening document, I don't think that after women have become 
more dominant in many different fields of experience, they should suddenly 
encounter particular problems when it comes to taking part in FOSS projects. 
Obviously, most of the problems described in the "HOWTO" were prevalent 
previously (and to a large extent still are), and women had to overcome them 
and deal with them. 

I am most certainly not a sexist person, I highly respect and admire some 
historical and present women (some of which I personally know) and would love 
to see more female FOSS developers. However, I also received some heat from 
women-lib-pedants, regarding perfectly innocent things I said, such as 
using "girls" instead of "women", or expressing interest in some females that 
I met on IRC[1], or for saying "There's a girl on #perl", instead of "there's 
a programmer on #perl" or whatever.

{{{{{{
[1] - for the record I also express interest in many male people I met there.
}}}}}}

It's perfectly natural for a guy to do that even if he isn't a chauvinist, so 
naturally I feel a bit frustrated about it. And if I feel frustrated, you can 
imagine how some people who are somewhat more offensive than I would feel.

Like it or not, there would always be "guy talk" and "sex talk", and some 
flirting, etc. even if there are 50% (or more) women around. But it's time 
for a few bold girls to face the heat (with enough knowledge and 
determination), persist in this "female-alienating" society and pave the road 
for more of them to join.

I heard somewhere that freedom cannot be given, and it must be taken and 
fought for.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

P.S: while I was studying in http://www.technion.ac.il/ , I was told that 
there were then 40% female students there (possibly more now). I recall 
visiting the Computer Science building and seeing ~50% girls there (possibly 
less or possibly more). 

In my department - Electrical Engineering - there were very few female 
students back when I studied - 10% or so, possibly because it is considered a 
very hard and demanding specialisation. There are many girls in the 
Industrial and Management Engineering department, which is notorious for 
being the easiest department in the Technion.

In any case, it is possible that with this proliferation of females there (and 
in other schools and universities), we'll see more of them contributing to 
FOSS projects. In a previous workplace of mine (a start-up developing 10 Gbps 
Ethernet NICs), there were several female Electrical Engineers, which seemed 
very impressive to me. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Understand what Open Source is - http://xrl.us/bjn82

The bad thing about hardware is that it sometimes work and sometimes doesn't.
The good thing about software is that it's consistent: it always does not
work, and it always does not work in exactly the same way.