how (many) are we [was: Re: [PD] Segmented patch chords?]

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Its good to see more women getting involved.  But it remains a sad fact  
that out 40+ Pd devs, almost all are white males.  I was just  
discussing this with my girlfriend ideas, it seems to be a pretty  
amorphic issue.  I read an interesting article about this problem  
regarding free software development in general.  It seems many women  
don't want to be openly female in such forums because it often leads to  
obnoxious and/or harassing emails.  So many women choose gender-neutral  
online identities to avoid this.  Then there was another interesting  
point about how free software development tends to be kind of a macho  
realm, with people trying to one-up each other.  Many women (and men as  
well) find this quite annoying.

Just my two bits...

.hc

On Mar 14, 2005, at 12:23 PM, B. Bogart wrote:

> The last PD class I taught at Interaccess (Toronto, Canada) was 50%
> female. This class was the first in a series on pd, gem, audio,
> electronics and microcontrollers.
>
> On top of that of all the workshops I've taught there have always been
> about 30% women and more.
>
> I don't know how many of my students keep up with PD...
>
> b.
>
> Ian Smith-Heisters wrote:
>> That's the thing. I have personally met one other person that uses PD.
>> Otherwise, I know of you guys only via the list.
>>
>> Another interesting demographic question would be what are the
>> national/gender makeups. Is there a single female that, say, has a
>> developer's account on the CVS?
>>
>> There was a discussion on Ars Technica a while back about the  
>> prevalence
>> of men in programming. Somewhere in there came up the fact that during
>> the internet boom autism rates in Silicon Valley went up 200%. Autism
>> effects men more than women for some reason that no one can figure  
>> out.
>> Also, the profile of asperger's syndrome (high-functioning autism) is
>> the same profile of a geek: anti-social, amazing ability to focus on
>> details no one else can see.
>>
>> Anyway. I count 2 Pd users and a bunch of emails that may be generated
>> by bots.
>>
>> -Ian
>>
>> Frank Barknecht wrote:
>>
>>> Hallo,
>>> Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>>>
>>>> My impression is that when I started lurking on the Pd list, which
>>>> was in
>>>> mid-2002, the Pd crowd was already many times bigger than the jMax  
>>>> crowd
>>>> -- say twenty times, and possibly a lot more.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Which reminds of something related: How many Pd users do you all
>>> think there are?
>>> Ciao
>>
>>
>>
>>

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Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to  
realize his wishes.
Now that he can realize them, he must either change them, or perish.
		                                     -William Carlos Williams