[Womoz] translation survey

[Miriam Ruiz]

Just for the sake of completeness, this was missing from my previous
mail listing some possibles causes of the low number of women in
FLOSS:

9) Different emotional sensitivities

One of the things that might cause friction among projects is that is
quite likely that men and women have generally different sensitivities
and thresholds in the emotional area, as well as different ways of
responding to them. I'm not sure if it is biological or cultural, and
I don't really think it matters much, but the fact is that a project
will have to be able to deal with diversity in this aspect. The same
level of indiscriminated open aggressiveness in the same environment
is, in my opinion, more likely to affect harder the women than the
men, as men are more used to handle and live in openly aggressive
environments. I'm talking about harsh discussions, for example. Men,
when discussing something, tend to be more focused in the assertive
axis -which solution to choose- than in the relationship axis -taking
care of the group cohesion-. Men and women also tend to react to this
aggressivity in a different way. Men tend to increase their own level
of aggressivity and "fight back", while we women somehow tend to flee
from it. Or maybe is just a different kind of aggressiveness, and if
there were a majority of women, we might see other kind of
aggressivity harder to handle by men (I'm more used to move in overly
masculine environments, but for what I'm told, an overly feminine
environment environment can be very hostile as well in a different
way). In any case, an openly aggressive environment seems more likely
to draw women away than men, also when this aggressivity is
indiscriminated and there was no kind of sexism involved.

10) Lower technical self-esteem for women

I guess that this might be somehow related to 3 ("Acknowledging that
FLOSS is also for women"), but different. The fact is that women
usually consider themselves less capable of doing some computer
related stuff than men. When talking to male and female teenagers, for
example, boys usually tend to overestimate their capabilities, while
girls tend to underestimate them. I suspect it might probably be the
same for adults. As a consequence, and taking into account some quote
I once heard and that I guess is probably right, "you should talk
possitively about yourself, because when all is said and done people
remember the information, and not the source" (or something similar to
that, by Charles Dickens, I think), which feeds back possitively and
probably increases the gap, some women might not realise that they can
be just as good as anyone else with computers.

11) Perception that social relationships are opposed to computers

It is widely known that, for whatever reason, women tend to give more
importance to social relationships than men. As computer development
is seen as an lone activity. In my experience, FLOSS development
involves a huge amount of tasks related to social relationships, team
managing and coordination, peer to peer collaborative development, and
a lot of communication among the community itself. Maybe it is
something that should be clarified, that getting involved in FLOSS
does not mean to work isolated, and that social relationships play an
important part.

Greetings,
Miry