quantitative

Posted Dec 2, 2010 9:44 UTC (Thu) by maco (guest, #53641)
In reply to: quantitative by dlang
Parent article: The dark side of open source conferences

The others were all hacking/security cons. Hackers on Planet Earth, DojoCon (small DC-area con), and ShmooCon, specifically. I think the hacking community, in general, is fairly well-known as being in the same state as the FOSS community when it comes to male:female ratios and commonality of misogyny. I suspect if I attended more "mainstream" tech events (Java developer conferences or MSDN stuff, for example) that those would have more women in attendance (closer to on-par with the percent graduating with CS degrees or working in the field, that is, about 1/4 of attendees being women) and fewer issues.

Actually, the only con I've attended where I can't say "one of the years I was there, $bad_thing happened" is the Debian one, DebConf. This was also the first year I attended, but I'm hoping that's a trend that will at least stick if I get a chance to go again.

quantitative

Posted Dec 2, 2010 10:46 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link] (1 responses)

> I suspect if I attended more "mainstream" tech events (Java developer
> conferences or MSDN stuff, for example) that those would have more women
> in attendance (closer to on-par with the percent graduating with CS
> degrees or working in the field, that is, about 1/4 of attendees being
> women) and fewer issues.

Depends.
If you feel offended by hired attractive booth babes being present, you will not like about 100% of commercial technology fairs (I have been at Cebit, embedded world, EAGE). Some advertisement material may use pictures of pretty young women presenting stuff. They will be usually dressed business-style, some companies try to get more attention by dressing them more "attractive" (I think that's mostly the companies where the target group is young men, e.g. gaming related stuff, search e.g. for "Cebit booth babes" to get some of the more "extreme" examples).

I have noticed *much* less to zero in this direction at FLOSS events (FOSDEM, LinuxTag, KDE Akademy, Chemnitzer LinuxTag, Dresdner LinuxInfoTage). Also, I have the impression that the women in the KDE community attending our events are usually very happy and don't have any of these problems (maybe it's different if all attenders are from one community and everybody knows everybody else).

Alex

quantitative

Posted Dec 2, 2010 11:57 UTC (Thu) by maco (guest, #53641) [Link]

KDE is one segment of the FOSS world that sticks out to me as having quite a *lot* of very visible women. K/Ubuntu folks noticed this too, when Lydia and I covered Celeste for a KDE Junior Jobs / Kubuntu Papercuts IRC session--they asked "why are all the women into KDE?" (A GNOME user then popped up to say she existed.)