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Discussion on: Ethical Editor / IDE ?

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koehr profile image
Norman

Interesting point you got there. What makes you think that the communities around Emacs and Vim want to be white and male?

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devverto profile image
devverto

What makes you think the communities around Emacs don't want to be white and male?

There's a little snark here, I couldn't resist. However, all it takes is a cursory look at who's doing videos and writing blog posts to see that it's almost all men.

Almost all of the speakers at the recent conference were men: emacsconf.org/2019/

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avalander profile image
Avalander

What makes you think the communities around Emacs don't want to be white and male?

I mean... you made a claim and someone asked for proof. There's no proof of the contrary is not really a solid argument.

Getting back on topic. Is the fact that most visible people around the community are men the only thing that brought you to the conclusion that the community is actively trying to be mostly men? Can you point to any sources (tweets, youtube videos, blog posts and whatnot) where people are explicitly doing gender gate-keeping?

Don't get me wrong, I fully sympathise with your concerns and I'd like to avoid supporting or being part of communities that do any kind of discrimination as much as possible.

But seeing that most of the community are men in any software-related field is, in my view, not enough to conclude and active attempt to drive women away. It can be as simple as the female user base of emacs is simply that small.

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koehr profile image
Norman

I see where you want to go with this. But I'm not sure if this can be seen in such a black and white way. There is, unfortunately, still a much smaller amount of women in the field, especially in the not-so-hip area of lisp users. And I'm not at all an emacs user and also not part of the community, so I might be wrong but I know these people as cult of meritocracy. They usually don't care about the who but much more about the what.