On 11/02/13 11:16, Louis wrote:
I also read a study that was interesting which was about how the popular image of engineering (iirc they used a sea of empty jolt cola cans and pizza boxes for their social experiment) was a big turn off for women who were around the age where they were deciding on a career. I wish I could find it. Speaking as someone who was interested in computers enough to make me good at math, I wonder if a lot of the discrepancy comes down to culture and interest. I did very badly in mathematics in grade school and picked up the slack in college, and it was because I liked the subject enough. It's entirely possible that we'll see attitudes change in upcoming generations as more people are addicted to computers and catch the bug to want to create software. Btw, there's a similar gender discrepancy in electronic music (as far as I've noticed), and that requires no math... There's more going on here than sexism, afaik.
I don't think it is the maths that is the factor here ... going by numbers described below the electronics is what is of least interest most teenage women. I've spent many years in the technical side of theatre and performance and I've worked with very many women who are very interested and skilled in the field, but at the moment I'm doing an undergrad degree in maths and computing (though I'm almost 3 times the age of most of my fellow students).
The gender balance in the various classes is very clear, though of course just a sample from a single institution. The really small numbers of female students is striking. The classes with most women are the highest level pure maths (about 35%), next comes the other maths, then the computing classes with maybe 10%, then the electronics and digital logic a long last with only a handful of women in first year classes of 150 to 200.
Both the final year pure maths units I've taken so far were taught by women, and several of the computing units, and though there are more men on staff than women the numbers are much less biased than the student numbers. The high school results here show women consistently doing better than men in maths.
So given the above it does not seem to be the maths component that is the significant one ... but there is certainly something that has led very few teenage women to choose studying computing and especially the embedded electronics side as the way to spend their next few years. Most of the women on the computing staff are senior staff members, the younger staff are mostly men ... so this problem may be getting worse with so few very young women interested in spending time in the field.
I suspect it has a lot more to do with what is considered cool or fashionable by teenage boys compared to what is considered that way by teenage girls, and that probably has a lot to do with the way gender and identity is presented in the media, entertainment and cultural sources that are read/watched/listened to by teenagers.
So in regards to this thread is Linux Audio better served by presenting a face that fits with the current fashionable images, or is it better served by actively rejecting current fashion and consciously presenting stereotypes that we think are better and more moral, and that musicians SHOULD be portraying?
Should we be broadening our appeal to include more fashion conscious young people, or should we be something different, something outside the mainstream and take a more didactic stance against fashions we dislike and find inappropriate. But what could "we" mean anyway!
The image in question is, I believe, from the on-stage presence of a group that projects the animated image as the lead singer with a synthesised voice. There is a lot of music out there which does not conform to my idea of a good thing, but I certainly don't want to keep it out of Linux because it does not have what I consider a pure and correct line. You may dislike the artists for their choices and reject their music as performed, you may also think that such a group is wrong-headed and should be removed from distributions due to their bad message and inappropriate social stereotyping. But you would be excluding a hell of a lot of music, musicians and audiences from Linux if you followed that line consistently.
Even so, apart from your strong personal dislike of their message, their image (which takes a few seconds to swap for your preferred wallpaper) and presumably their music they are still quite relevant to a computer music distribution ... they make fairly interesting and popular use of music and audio technology, and they appeal to a much younger audience than most of this list. In the context of this thread it would be interested to know whether the character/group has more male or female fans.
Simon _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
