One interesting analysis here would be where users found out about nix for each way of identifying.
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You might be right on a logical/rationalizing the problem level.
But these kinds of issues arenât only quantitative. These problems are also human nature problems, and humans are not a fixed or static thing (nor is any living thing). Humans are an evolving/co-evolving complex thing.
In my opinion, we could consider the likely reality that there is a finite amount of women in the tech industry, and the likely statistical dynamics that should be expected to emerge from that.
But, also in my opinion, we would want to actually hear from women what they think about why they are or are not involved. What would make a better experience for women, from their own view. It would be similar if you were trying to figure out why some demographic of people had a difficult time procuring food. You could look at data and statistics, but you would be lacking a lot of information to close the gap of understanding if you only look at data and statistics. You would also want to talk with people to understand the conditions in their environment, etc.
This is a controversial subject, and so it is hard for people to have productive discussion around, due to the emotions this subject tends to incite. But in general, looking at statistics plus hearing directly from the people in their own voice that you are inquiring about (and qualitatively clustering the patterns from their responses) is a good foundation for organizational action on social dilemmas.
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Surely it doesnât stand with 100%, though, so where is the cutoff?
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So thatâs a bit of a weird question. To answer it nonetheless: if there hypothetically were no women at all going into software, and software projects are recruiting contributors from that population, well then, obviously, you couldnât expect any women to join any open source project either.
Edit: conversely the same would apply if there were no men going into software in the first place.
Is this the same Summer of Nix whose person responsible for interviewing and selecting candidates was recently posting about the âwoke ideologyâ and asking SC candidates about their thoughts on âpositive discriminationâ in their podcast?
(Archive link, since this got them banned from Hachyderm: archive.is)
I sure wonder why women are leaving this communityâŚ
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Well some of us are staying hoping to change that⌠and threads like this are here every year to remind us how much of an uphill battle that is⌠I do love that the threads for improving this always in themselves end up turning out to be another reason to leave in and of themselves.
I simply canât understand why so many people here are so inherently hostile to the idea of improving, fighting tooth and claw at every turn to make things worse. The arguments are always equally bad each year, weâre taking away women from other projects? Seriously?!
Last year it was that we should remove gender statistics entirely because we didnât⌠ask if people were bald. Like come on!
Ohh, and every year we get moved to our own thread which will sooner or later be hidden, because we get dogpiled, and the whole thing gets sweeped under the rug. Or maybe not this year? We can hope.
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One of my first interactions on the Nix Discourse was being told that Women donât actually wanna be software engineers.
Things are⌠mostly better than that now⌠but itâs still painfully rough (and I say that as someone going to great lengths to try and make it better 
).
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That doesnât actually answer the question at all. Itâs clear that the argument fails if thereâs no men or women. The question is at which percentage does it stop working? If 15% is acceptable, is 25%? Is 35%? 50%? 95%? Clearly there must be some point, and my question is where do you put that point.
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So it seems like to get into Outreachy, we need to apply to be in it when they open their applications again, have mentors available to help students thru the time, and define some projects we want people to work on. It nominally seems like the same things as GSoC, which is very doable. Am I missing something?
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No, there is no such point. My main point was that there are two distributions we are talking about. One we sample from, and one on the general population level. And in all these arguments people just look at the general population and say: We have a problem! This is how this whole discussion started, as a reminder.
But that is just not the case. If we sample from a distribution that isnât the overall general population, and we are sampling without bias, we should expect to reproduce certain properties of the underlying distribution we are sampling from. And not of the general population.
So if that underlying distribution is 10% to 90% then we should expect to find that. If it is 20% to 80%, then we should expect that. And so on. For all possible distributions. There is no cut-off point.
Why do you think there should be one?
(Obviously my initial argument was more complex, namely that if we adopt a policy of biased sampling, given some plausible assumptions, that policy is actually having negative side-effects for others. But I am not going to repeat that part, itâs not relevant to your point, I believe.)
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What would make things better in this community?
Was just making a suggestion it would be a good place to have outreach. I donât really know the people organising Summer of Nix. If they disagree with adding an outreach component to Summer of Nix thatâd be a bummer.
It can also be something like Outreachy. Most important part is finding mentors who are willing to do this kind of stuff. And I think the summer of nix project already had quite a list of mentors. Iâm sure most of them would be interested in something like this.
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Outreach orgs like Outreachy, amending the community values, explicitly denouncing bigotry while making it clear the Nix community is an inclusive place and stands for inclusivity and against bigotry.
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The community values that we just accepted are quite good for a software project that wants to focus on the software. Why would you want to amend them so quickly after having adopted them? They are very prominently featured on nixos.org now, too:
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The tacit assumption youâre making in your argument seems to be that the underlying distribution is fixed and not affected by actions we take as a project. Thatâs clearly not the case, as bringing in people from the âgeneral populationâ would shift the distribution.
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Makes sense to me. My guess is women might not enter on their own, but through something like that, it could encourage women.
Seems like as a community we should always be open to hearing why people would want to amend these. Thatâs my opinion. Itâs not hard to just be ok with people raising some issue like this and saying âok, how can it be better?â
You have my support on having some community values that explicitly denounce bigotry, and state that Nixos is an inclusive place. This is the least that we could do as a community.
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That is not so tacit, I made that assumption explicitly I believe.
I made it because I donât agree with your assessment that this is âclearly not the case.â I think it is more likely that we donât have a big impact on the underlying distribution with our project-based policies.
Why do I say this? Well, we do know some things from the survey about how people find out about us. I donât think that the general population is watching Linux dotfiles management videos on youtube made by Vimjoyer or is hanging out on the Unixporn subreddit.
Obviously it is conceivable that we devise some different approach that reaches a larger general audience. But I donât think there is anything around Nix right now that has that ability. We are much bigger than we used to. But we are still very niche.
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Like this was actually pretty decent, I especially liked the mention of otherkins and plurality/systems :3
Like we don this before, we can do it again for the community values.
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⌠and yet you â[âŚ] suggest that the Lix ecosystem may be a better place where those concerns are centered.â So, being inclusive stops at those people who ⌠want the community to be more inclusive?
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Please read more carefullyâIâm suggesting that for people who think that inclusivity is a first-class goal of the community (as opposed to something we unlock by being civil and providing a solid onboarding to everybody regardless of background) there is another community which aligns more closely with that value and which theyâd enjoy more.
There is also a difference youâre glossing over there between wanting us to be more inclusive (which many of us view as an emergent property of a healthy and respectful ecosystem) and wanting us to deliberately focus on that as a goal unto itself (which by necessity comes at the expenseâhowever smallâof other objectives, such as delivering software or documentation).
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