Women : was: Re: Logo

[E L Tonkin]

Hi again,

> While we're being paranoid and 150% politically correct - what about
> homosexual women? They surely might enjoy the NakedPammieAnderson.gif,
> and a naked Europa on the GNU.
Good point...! but anyway I never said /I/ wouldn't - I said that you
don't /have/ to... ;)

> Gimme a break!
/me hands Jan a break ;)

> Just b/c we said "a woman riding on a gnu" - how is that sexist?

It isn't, necessarily; I may have been a little inflammatory in my
original email... but hey, it got you talking ;)

> Real paranoid people might evenargue the other way around: by
> substituting a male geek riding the gnu for Europa, some peopley might
> say that we try to diminish women and want to make a male image the logo
> of FSF or Europe.

I'm really happy to see a female Europa! The sexism thing is just a wider
topic...

> Quite frankly, I think people gotta relax a bit on the political
> correctnes.

Ditto... but the issue seemed to be worth bringing up, in general.
Obviously I'm not bothered by it, or I wouldn't be in physics /or/ perl-
personally, I get on okay with men in my field, which is just as well, as
they outnumber the women by about 50 to 1. As someone said, it's really
mainly dumb management rather than real people who fall into the
stereotyping thing - but I believe that there's proof that most
technically inclined women don't want to bother. Don't know why, though. I
think the ACM has some papers on this whole topic somewhere (maybe
http://www.acm.org/women).

It doesn't have that much bearing on anything the FSF might be likely to
adopt as a logo, because I like to believe that enlightened geeks have
better taste...

So don't label me as the Ardent Feminist(TM)... I'm not.  Nor am I
personally hurt by any of this;  I'm defending the absent many. It seemed
worth raising the point for general purposes, however. There's no denying
that major subsets of the field of computing (in business, at least) are
firmly aimed at men...

Now let's get back on to the real topic; who do we send preliminary
sketches of the theoretical fsf logo to? ;)

em

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