Subject: Re: What we need to do
To: =?UTF-8?Q?L=c3=a6titia_Avrot?= <laetitia.avrot@gmail.com>
Cc: pgsql-women@lists.postgresql.org
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From: Boriss Mejias <bmejias@dcc.uchile.cl>
Message-ID: <c279c20e-4777-7e1d-3deb-965175942ef2@dcc.uchile.cl>
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:57:34 +0200
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Hi Lætitia,

Sorry for the late reply (almost a week already, times flies). Here are my thoughts.

I understand that we agree that as an organization, we better work on this 
together, women and men. That was my first paragraph about. This seems to be 
kind of a consensus in the group, so I feel welcome to participate and contribute.

More comments here below regarding the part where we disagree.

Lætitia Avrot wrote on 12-04-18 13:48:
> Hi Boriss
> 
> 
>     I think excluding men from certain activities can be positive in the goal of
>     making women feel welcomed. For instance: Women-only IRC/Slack channels can
>     be a good thing. Women-only Hackathon can also help in making women feel
>     welcomed.
> 
> 
> I strongly disagree. I want everyone to feel welcome, whatever their gender is. 
> If you start creating little worlds without men, first you exclude people and 
> that's a negative message to give and then it's totally artificial as our world 
> is populated with both men and women.

I understand your concern, and I know you don't have problems participating in a 
world with mostly men. I saw your presentation at FOSDEM and you didn't seem 
intimidated at all. But for some women, maybe it is better to give some steps in 
a community removing some of the barriers (fictionally, I agree), but as an 
intermediate step, not as a fake reality, nor as a goal.

When I was in academia we often discussed the fact that so few women study 
informatics. A professor told us that their statistics (sorry I don't have them 
to confirm) showed that the percentage of women studying engineering was smaller 
if they were coming from a mixed-school, than from a girls-only school. Their 
conclusion was that women in a girls-only school didn't developed the idea that 
computers and science was a boy-thing, so they wouldn't be affected by that 
cliché when making a choice for their studies.

> So if we feel there is a problem with with 
> women representation in our community, we need to find a solution together.

Absolutely. I started reading "Lean In" by Sheryl Sandberg (I like it a lot by 
the way). She insists that this is something we have to work on together. She 
also tells some stories of her experience speaking and participating in 
women-only events, with very good results.

Note that I'm not saying that creating women-only activities is the solution. I 
just feel we don't have to discard them a priori, because they seem to have a 
benefit for some women in the long run, as an intermediate step. I think we 
should evaluate this when there is a more concrete proposal.

Cheers
Boriss


> Men 
> and women both have brain, so they can both come with creative ideas.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Lætitia