OK, I think it's time we try to remain professional and back off a little. Matias clearly didn't mean any harm by what he said, and he had good intent. Joaquín raises valid points in his email, and I think these need to be addressed, and negative discussions aren't going to advance the topic any. I ask that we stick with the objective view of the situation (as presented by Joaquín), rather than the subjective view (women feel patronized // women feel excluded // ...) Jake On 7/6/07, Edward Diener <eldiener@tropicsoft.com> wrote:

Matias Capeletto wrote:

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On 7/6/07, james.jones@firstinvestors.com <james.jones@firstinvestors.com> wrote:

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Anyway, I'd really like to applaud Matias for actively trying to address the gender imbalance, since if it wasn't for the female dancers that were encouraging of my participation in dance, I wouldn't be a dancer now (and I suspect not nearly as happy a person). I think that until you start to fix the gender imbalance, you don't even realize what kind of useful feedback, opinions, and participation you might be missing out on. You may find that women find it creepy for 50 guys to be, in effect, calling out, "Hey, join us! Come on, we're nice people! And we'll

From: "Stjepan Rajko" <stipe@asu.edu> listen to you - here, you can sit next to me!"

Don't force it.

Bravo !

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I think we have been clear enough. We are not forcing anything. To me it is just odd that Boost is a men only business, so I respectfully want to show them that we are open and invite them to work along us.

Women don't need for you to show them that they can work with men. They know it already and, if they don't, they are living in such a backward culture where nothing you say to them, as someone far outside their culture and concerns, is going to make a difference anyway.

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Why it is so hard not to be marked as a sexist? Come on, we are only trying to make boost a better place for all of us. Please do not put words in our mouths.

You are not being marked as sexist. You are being patronizing. That's much worse. No woman wants to be pointed out as a "token" being asked to join Boost so that Boosters can say they have a woman's point of view.

On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 02:39:14PM -0400, Jake Voytko wrote:

OK, I think it's time we try to remain professional and back off a little. Matias clearly didn't mean any harm by what he said, and he had good intent. Joaquín raises valid points in his email, and I think these need to be addressed, and negative discussions aren't going to advance the topic any.

I ask that we stick with the objective view of the situation (as presented by Joaquín), rather than the subjective view (women feel patronized // women feel excluded // ...)

From the political-correct point of view, how does it come to the assertion at all that there are not many woman present? Perhaps most contributors are woman who just have a name which traditionally is associated with a male person? Or they are using other names? How do we proceed to determine the sex? How about the androgyne cases? Perhaps I feel like a woman, and are now being neglected by the assertion

Interesting "objective view": The point of view that "something is wrong" is a an artifact from which one cannot even say that it is "subjective" since such believes have a very objective force. Nevertheless, there is nothing "objective" with them. May I remind at the extreme misrepresentation of Chinese and Indian programmers? What about the native people of America?? What about the over-representation of the English language?? What about the over-representation of C++? There are so many things missing in the boost community (basically the whole world, except of a few exceptions). A few e-mails early, "positive discrimination" was mentioned (forgot the politically-correct jargon for that), in a way as if everybody here would agree that this is a good thing. I would have my doubts, since I actually hope that a place like Boost is centred around technical (and scientific in a wider sense) excellence, and that for that it DOESN'T MATTER at all what special type of person is contributing. that there are "no woman" here?? Every "positive discrimination" has the following first act: Look at somebody, who was a person before, but ignore this, only look at that object regarding the speciality you are looking for, and then, by some (typically not specified procedure), decide whether this speciality applies to the object under consideration, and say "Yes, you are falling under the speciality, and thus you belong to our club.", or "No, unfortunately you are not falling under the speciality, and thus you are not belonging to our club". An interesting phenomenon of society, that this very blatant form of discrimination, ruled out as far as I know in every constitution I'm aware of, did come to be "accepted". A last word: I hear somebody saying to this message "Hey, that's politics, we should leave out politics at this list." --- in principle I think this is not an unreasonable point of view, but I didn't bring up the topic in the first place: I only want to avoid that these questions, which are purely political questions, sneak in in some typical way of subliminal reference to guilt. Oliver