Gentoo Women

Fion · n00b Joined: 10 Jun 2006 Posts: 19

Besides the fact that DoctorMO stated one of my main arguments for catering to the females:

"Get the women to use it, and the men will follow", maybe we should try to do some kind of gender/user profiling:

What do (different segments of) women want to use their computer for? What should we change to make (Gentoo?) Linux a more attractive alternative to them instead of Windows/Mac?

RuiP · l33t Joined: 15 Jan 2005 Posts: 643

FieserKiller · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 9:23 pm Post subject:

Well, my Girlfriend uses linux.
She has to because i installed Gentoo on all PCs at home and sold the winxp licenses on ebay... hehe

Im sitting on my bed right now and told her that she belongs to the 2% of female Linux-users and her first comment was:
"If there would be a way to reliably send and receive files on ICQ, more girls would use it"

Then she pointed out that running linux desktop systems (well, she knows gentoo only) is a hobby for tinkerer like me, while everything works its ok, but when problems appear she doesn't know what to do. I think she simply prefers point&klick Interfaces instead of the bash, in fact, the only command she remembers is "killall <name>", and she is working linux-only for over a year now...

Another point is, I observed several times that she proudly wrote her friends that we are using linux and sent screenshots of our e17 desktop Windows simplay can't keep up with, so my final conclusion is:
Girls have no problem using Linux, but they don't want to invest any energy to maintain the system. The Windows way of "it just runs somehow for a few months, than its dead and has to be reinstalled and reconfigured again in one or two hours by the boyfriend/neighbour/brother/daddy/nerd/etc" is more woman-friendly for every-day use as a private Desktop-System with no sensitive data.

Female professionals are surely a complete different story, but that are my experiences with girls in using Linux @home.

ellotheth · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 123

I always get excited when I find Gentoo-running females on these forums (speaking as a Gentoo-running female employed in a tech field), simply because they're so scarce. (And because I was over-influenced by my feminist friends in college. But that's another story.) A group for women, by women is a great idea--has (much) less to do with discrimination and/or "let's make Gentoo pretty" and/or "<insert sexist/PC claim here>" than getting female users connected with each other, for whatever purposes they choose. Gentoo guys are connected by default, but there just aren't that many of us ladies. We need to work a little harder. User community is half the fun (ok, fine: a QUARTER of the fun) in a distro like Gentoo, and in this humble female's opinion, it's really okay to be proactive about it.

Just for the record, I spend more time customizing init scripts than fixing wallpaper (although my bootsplash kicks, yo). An 'attractive' distro in my understanding is one in which I can work and tinker and play, and Gentoo delivers on all three points.

And the color pink induces my gag reflex.
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sugar · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 9:32 pm Post subject:

mikemcquaid · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 9:54 pm Post subject: Bad Idea...

Christel, I like your blog, and what you've done with the GWN, but this is a bad idea.

Why don't we make a Gentoo for Non-Whiteskinned people or Gentoo Homosexuals. I'm sure we can find other groups of people that don't use Gentoo as much as white males.

Emphasising differences is a damn good way of encouraging conflict and discrimination. To be quite honest, I'm not sure why most girls on the internet are so quick to go HEY GUYS I'M A GIRL!

Maybe the reason the numbers are so low is thats just the number of girls who want the attention.

brot · Guru Joined: 06 Apr 2004 Posts: 322

Well.

I think what we as the male part of the community can do is to convince our girlfriends to use gentoo. While this sentence sounds easy, my personal experience shows that it is not. My girlfriend really thinks that linux, and so my gentoo is working well. but as i offer her to install gentoo on her notebook, she doesnt want to.

"i dont know that."
-"try it."
"nah. dont have time to fiddle around with things and to learn everything from new."

a friend of mine uses linux (suse) because she says that windows is crap.

So maybe with a little bit of propaganda we can increase the number of gentoo loving woman

christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:17 pm Post subject:

Reading some of the replies here have been pretty interesting, and I think a few things need to be clarified as it's quite obvious that people don't quite get what this is about.

I am one of the many people who made the leap from Debian to Gentoo, and as a Debian user I had the chance to get quite a good feel on the Debian Women project, which I totally admire. To use some of Hanna M. Wallachs words from her presentation in 2005 I will give you the following:

Aims

Now, she also mentioned some of the things Debian Women isn't, and I think it is important that we ensure that Gentoo Women would follow suit here aswell.

Debian was surprised at how many established developers (particulary men) who did get involved, some of the reasons for participating has been mentioned as being 'Feminism and interest in "women in computing".' and the fact that Debian Women created a very welcoming and collaborative atmosphere within Debian.

We do not have any wish to segregate GW from the rest of Gentoo, we do not want to 'play with Barbies' as someone suggested earlier in this thread, we simply want to encourage and welcome women who wishes to use and work on Gentoo, of course we do hope that such a project would result in more female developers; we need help with a lot of things, be it bug squashing, documentations, tutorials, testing to mention a few things.

A lot of people have mentioned that they are concerned the project would turn out to be discriminating against males, this is not the case, GW would be welcoming to all, it would simply be an effort to encourage more females to use, contribute and develop on Gentoo. Hell, besides myself the majority of people supporting and working on the GW project in its infancy are.. you guessed it, male.
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christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:22 pm Post subject:

christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:26 pm Post subject:

sybille · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:28 pm Post subject:

christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:29 pm Post subject: Re: Gentoo Women

christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:31 pm Post subject:

christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:35 pm Post subject:

christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:36 pm Post subject:

christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:36 pm Post subject:

sugar · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:37 pm Post subject:

christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:38 pm Post subject:

christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:39 pm Post subject:

christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:42 pm Post subject:

christel · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:45 pm Post subject:

DoctorMO · n00b Joined: 16 Jul 2004 Posts: 15 Location: London

Christel I wish you all the luck in the world.

For all those with some confusion:

Imagen you had a human class, and you instantiated a woman object which has human as a base class. the basic api is the same, the same capabilities there is just a few extra methods and some different variables here and there. same goes for the man class which despite many programers believing is the root base class is infact just another kind of human.
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Dralnu · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1919

Speaking of the "I don't know how to use it" bit in a previous post as a reason why not to use Gentoo, I think there is a semi-simple solution to that:

LiveCD

I know there is one out there BASED on Gentoo, but being based on and being something are two completly diffrent things. Also, in this day and age, having a LiveCD that can be used for either a rescue or install disk is always great, plus keeps us from having to use something like, oh, I don't know, Windows? Knoppix, Slax, GoblinX, DSL, and several others are their own distro, and personally, I think making up a CD that could be used to install Gentoo would be wonderful, but one that can be used just as well as a desktop for people to "learn" Gentoo while knowing that their other OS is safe and they have the option to go back to it.

Also, something I don't think alot of people here realize is that women are not as logical as males (sorry ladies, this is what my experience has been, and there are exceptions, as always), and tend to not have to spend the time thinking things through and trying to learn something when they have other options that have little or no learning curve. Gentoo has a massive learning curve to get to operate fully, and for women who'd rather do their nails and spend the day at the mall over spending the day to get the most recent KDE release downloaded, compiled, installed, configured, and working, and all that fun stuff alot of us guys either enjoy or tolerate, then they see no reason to change.

This is, in my opinion, an issue with both user-friendliness, and having no way to test it out well before taking a chance of ruining a good computer.

As for discremination, whether or not that is the case has yet to be seen. We all have our own ideas as to what discremination constitues, and hence I personally think that as long as we see this as a way to give women a foothold in Linux and not a crutch to lean on for the rest of their computing lives, then we may be on a good track.

As for the homosexuals/transgender/drag <insert term>/ect, well, if someone has a wish to start a G? for them, then thats their bussiness, and I wish them luck.

P.S. Personally, I would prefer a non-sausage-fest kind of enviroment. Women bring something to the community no male, despite sexual orientation, can, and I'd like to see what an increase could do for Linux development as well as other areas.
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Yuusou · Apprentice Joined: 18 May 2005 Posts: 178 Location: Canada

I'm all for this idea. If Debian is doing it and it seems to be going well, why not? I don't see what there is to lose and there seems like a lot to gain. In response to some of the questions on the latest GWN, I know I for one would volunteer time to mentor/guide people, as I think it's a very good idea. That's my two-bits.

mw007 · Apprentice Joined: 08 Nov 2004 Posts: 260

I think this is a great cause. Not only are you encouraging membership from a group that has predominantly stayed away from the linux scene, but you're also going to bring in the female outlook on things. This is a good thing, trust me.

I'm a guy, just so you all know. And if ya'll need any help, I'd be more than glad to pitch in. Just msg me on the forums, or email me at mw007x@gmail.com

peace.