[IndiChix] Chix Semantics

[Tea Beedi]

Great points Gayathri & Vidya,

- another one issue is that the pressures on women change a lot with  
career trajectory, level and age. At BCB (bar camp bangalore) last  
Aug, there was a collective on gender, and this came out from  
peoples' anecdotes about getting "older" "settled" "pressures of  
family, in laws" etc - so gender image is still an issue i think.

>
> What has in fact been surprising to me is the other realm here.  
> When I was
> doing my Masters here

& Here = ?


>  Not kidding! but there were only 4 or 5
> girls in my Masters!

yeah in my year i was the only girl in physics in MS [and PhD] class  
in US, whereas in my india class, gender identity was no big deal.
(ie - if you are talking about india vs. US, i agree , the engg.  
education system in India is much better for women in science than in  
the US, which is pretty discriminatory imho in its attitudes towards  
girls at early stages. at later stages i don't know, i think the  
record is mixed in most places. at linuxchix FOSS.in, an american  
girl in the audience brought up a similar comment to yours re. the 41  
girls/guys ratio.)

> But, I digress.

I enjoyed your digressions:)

And, back to Vidya's comment:
> [And by extension I guess I am also asking, what can Indichix do to
> address issues of image

 >It is relevant but needs to be tackled by the people here...so i'll
pass this, even though i am tempted :)

I agree w/ Vid, YMMV but we all seem to have seen the relevance of  
"gender image" in our different contexts , no?

-kavita

ps : I can't resist quoting from another list here re. FOSS in India  
(is that ok?) ; what interests me is that a guy brought up this issue  
of family pressure too. Is Open Source development in competition  
with peoples' "lives" / "families" / standard expectations?

 >>>>>>
	From: 	  suresh at hserus.net
	Subject: 	Re: [silk] Will India Become the New Vanguard of the Open  
Source Movement?
	Date: 	January 11, 2008 12:31:07 AM PST
	To: 	  silklist at lists.hserus.net
	Reply-To: 	  silklist at lists.hserus.net

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote:
> "Open source is a relatively new concept in India," says Hariharan of
> the Open Source Foundation
>

Let's put it this way. It has been around more or less for ever.

But the kind of environment that helped the open source / hacker  
community to grow stateside (oh, like internet access, really cheap  
PCs as a percentage of your income.. even someone who is nominally  
poor has a car, if only a beat up old chevy, etc etc) doesn’t exist  
in India.

Nor are any of the Indian colleges a patch on even Iowa State (or  
whatever) in terms of the learning environment.

Then, there's this consistent pressure to earn, earn, earn .. join  
Cognizant, get married, have kids, settle down into a comfortable  
middle class lifestyle - that kind of gets in the way too.

 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

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