[PLUG-TALK] PLUG and women attendees

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Sun May 13 19:39:43 UTC 2007


At Bar Camp, I met a kernel hacker friend who is now in the Portland
area, and offered to present at our meetings.  Topics of interest
include file systems, and women in open source computing.

The latter topic is a reminder of how few female participants we have
in PLUG.  That may be a result of a less-than-comfortable environment
for women.  In Portland, we talk a lot about how progressive we are,
and this might be an opportunity to back that talk up with action.  I
don't see extreme sexist behavior among us, so the problems we have
are probably correctable with a tolerable amount of awareness and
self-discipline.

For starters, I suggest reading:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/pdf/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO.pdf

or    http://snurl.com/1kfu1

It is eye-opening, both in terms of how pervasive some of the problems
are, and how relatively minor behavior changes could make a large 
difference.  The behavior I need to work on myself is jokes - most of my
humor is not sexist, but even a few blunders, multiplied by all the men
in the room, can add up to a very uncomfortable experience for the few
brave women that risk showing up.  So let me know when I am out of line.  

That said, the women that show up will probably be more interested in
talking about Linux than about sexism, if we keep the distractions
under control.

I look forward to how powerful Linux will be when the other half of
our community joins with us!

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



More information about the PLUG-talk mailing list