[Womoz] translation survey

[Miriam Ruiz]

2010/2/4 jed jed <jed at pculture.org>:
> Miriam,
>
> I have enjoyed reading your input, and I think your breakdown of topics is
> very relevant.  At the same time, when I compare your views to my views and
> experiences, I feel I come from a dramatically different perspective.
>
> ex:  9) Different emotional sensitivities -
>
> I feel like in the context of software projects, that you are making a huge
> generalization.  I would suggest that emotional sensitivity is more directly
> related to confidence than gender.  In my experiences, the people (men or
> women) on a project most willing to take suggestions, criticism, or defend
> an approach, are those who are confident in themselves and their skills in
> their particular area.  People who felt they had to 'prove' themselves every
> time were far more aggressive and defensive.
>
> I think your opinions and all offerred are all valuable, and I think it
> would be interesting to take your 11 areas here, and use them as the basis
> of the weekly blog writing assignments we had discussed before.  That way we
> could each offer our opinions on these specific areas and hopefully spark
> some more wide ranging discussion.

The first time I read about this different behavior between boys and
girls (I'm purposely using these terms as they were really talking
about teenagers and not about grown-up adults) was in the book "Gender
inclusive game design: expanding the market" by Sheri Graner Ray, and
I my personal perceptions seem to generally agree to that. Among other
things, and talking in a generalizing way that of course does not
represent the whole of men and women, it talks about the different
ways of communication, interacting and learning of both genders
(assuming that there are only two genders, of course, but that's yet
another discussion). Sheri Graner Ray cites a lot of studier in her
book which some of them I found out not to be as scientific and
reliable as they should, but they show a pattern. There seems to be
some statistical relationship anyway, whatever the reason of it.

My idea was, as we were talking about make a proper survey, to make a
mindstorm, find out the different causes of the low participation of
women in FLOSS, find possible solutions for them, and then design a
survey that could help us validate or deny our conclusions and
prioritize what problems we should face on. My experience with female
teams in FLOSS is that we somehow tend to concentrate in fighting
against sexist jokes and sometimes some mentoring projects. I wonder
if it's the best way to invest our efforts to get the most benefit
(measured in number of women joining the projects). It might be a good
thing to try to face this using some objective methods based in
science. A proper survey to confirm or deny our suspicions might be a
good thing, as it was said, but we somehow need a brainstorm and some
internal conclusions first.

Of course, as you say, the communication style might be related to
self-esteem, but even in that case, statistically women have a lower
self-esteem than men, so the statistical correlation seems to exist. A
statistical relationship of course does not imply a cause-effect
relationship (See: Global Warming vs. Number of Pirates).

It would be nice to talk about this in the conversations about the
global strategy of WoMoz in FOSDEM.

Greetings,
Miry

 [1] http://books.google.es/books?id=v3wRrNlPOe0C&lpg=PP1&dq=gender%20inclusive%20game%20design&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=&f=false