The GNOME program aims at getting more people involved in OSS projects:
https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/
Personally, I think it is awesome and appreciate the great contributors I've seen come in through the program.
https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/
Personally, I think it is awesome and appreciate the great contributors I've seen come in through the program.
It's have been quicker to write, 'internships are open to everyone but white, heterosexual men,' but that would have been too honest.
How utterly despicable.
Perhaps Paul Davis could apply, and claim to be Pauline Davis for internship purposes.
Agreed.
But I don't think it's despicable. Our field needs diversity, and in a dominated ecosystem you don't get diversity by just letting natural forces do their job, because the ecosystem is already dominated/biased.
So to my eyes we need biased, opposed initiatives like this one, or PyLadies.
Does it remove available funding for Paul? (In other words, are the total available OSS funds the result of a zero-sum game)? I don't think so: some support the goals of Outreachy and contribute to it, some like Mozilla just contribute to what's in their field. These programs are about OSS fundings but I wouldn't categorize them as part of the same set.
Are the total available OSS funds the result of a zero-sum game?
I think at face-value it isn't zero-sum. I think this question can be restated as "If advocacy groups became convinced that this kind of discrimination is unproductive, would they spend their money on supporting open source, or on promoting minority groups in a different way?". I think it's pretty clear that the answer is the latter. But you can also step back and ask whether the advocacy groups would have less funding if these programs came to be considered ineffective, and I think they would, since people would lose trust in them. I'm sure a lot of that money would go toward some other kind of minority advocacy groups, but I'm also sure that many sources of funding are actually specifically interested in promoting open source (otherwise it would be more productive for them to support minorities in employment, not open source internships). I think it's reasonable to say some of that money might make its way to people like Paul.
This is terribly speculative, but it is to say that if you accept that discriminatory programs like outreachy are not productive, there's merit to the claim that they deprive heroes like Paul of funding.
Serious question: was this kind of stuff necessary for the huge increases over the decades in the percentage of lawyers and doctors who are women? If not, then it seems it's possible (if not necessarily desirable) to let "natural" forces do their work for achieving gender balance, and least for careers requiring well-educated individuals that provide high compensation and confer high status (those are both higher status than developers in most circles, by far). But maybe there were lots of women-only medical conferences or something at some point. Maybe there still are, I really don't know.
(I did a quick DDG search for this issue in law and medicine, but turned up nothing relevant aside from graphs demonstrating the shift)
- Can we compare the case of legal/medical to software? Especially, have the legal/medical fields been so unbalanced as software is right now? (Not implying it was, honestly asking). And if it was, as you ask yourself, what mechanisms helped bringing balance?
- Regarding the specific case of sexism in software, early research suggests that the unbalance may have emerged in the 1970s as "the idea that computers are for boys became a narrative", maybe due to ads: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-... . Admitting this idea, what about now? Yes, unlike in the 1970s, software is part of everyone's daily lives. However, the "computers (and STEM) are for boys" myth isn't dead.
Oddly enough, the two most obvious big drops on that graph appear to correspond pretty closely with drops in the total share of university students majoring in CS[1]. What significance that has, if any, I do not know.
[1] http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/it...
> Perhaps Paul Davis could apply, and claim to be Pauline Davis for internship purposes.
How utterly reactionary.
Moreover, do you realize just how despicably transphobic or queerphobic this statement is? The irony in your comment is appalling. Your comment is a perfect example of precisely why we do need to support people who don't conform to heteronormative stereotypes.
Supporting such blatant discrimination against white males does nothing to encourage diversity. These kind of diversity out-reach programs operates under the assumption that diversity can only by achieve through discrimination against white males, which that is not true. Diversity can be achieved without discriminating against white males.
How so? Nobody is claiming everyone lies about it, only that it might be possible to do so (since outreachy has no recourse to an objective test).