Slashdot: News for nerds, or merely sexist? is in response to this article GNOME Reaches Out to Women on slashdot.org. Here’s alittle on the Slashdot post and then the rest will talk about the article. The little blurb by, I'm assuming, the guy who wrote it isn't at all surprising. I swear the age of the posters at slashdot is just going up (not stating the obvious). I assumed, with so many people retiring, a younger, hopefully less sexist, workforce coming, and many of the internets' users being younger encouraging women wouldn’t be considered a bad thing. I know just because the work force is younger won’t dictate who reads and posts to Slashdot but….
As I said the post itself wasn’t what bugged me. The comments it caused disturbed me. Many were entertaining no big deals like this one “…The only feelings I could express at the command line were male feelings after all. unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep -- More proof Linux is sexist!...” by user faraway when commenters were basically saying women couldn’t use Linux because it was too complicated for them. But others were just demeaning. The article in response has a good point. Firstly raising question to where the information came from, any proof of studies. She goes on to mention the whole point of Google's program. Helping students and encouraging coding etc. Nowhere does it say it is only targeting skilled coders or males. Sure it would be ideal for one opportunity to reach out to everyone but apparently that didn’t happen this year and the GNOME project felt the need to target women specifically.
Why not encourage women?
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