Damn, and I thought the gender ratio on Lemmy was bad.
I do wonder how many within the man/woman responses are trans, too.
Idk if that survey was mainly advertised on lemmy, but i know that at least one instance that did a survey had maybe 2% woman respondents, but more than two thirds of those were transfem.
Either way, a little disconcerting. I’m not sure what to make of that or what (if anything) to do about it
Who cares if they are trans? The more interesting question is what would make women generally more likely to self host? More free time? Different applications? Actually having a job in IT? Being single?
Eh, the women I know in tech aren’t particularly interested in self-hosting. Not sure why, but women seem to have a stronger separation between work and hobbies, whereas the men I work with often do personal projects at home related to their work. I think the women I work with would be more than capable, they just seem uninterested.
I think we are still in an age where few women were encouraged to do technical things growing up, and found those subjects later in school, university or work. I suspect that will change over the next ten years.
That’s also a huge part of it. Statistically, the women you see in technical positions probably picked it in college instead of being a hobby as a kid, so they see it more as a career than a hobby. Hopefully that’s the case, because I’d love to see more women get into it.
Possibly related to the whole mental load thing: https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
When you have two jobs you don’t really want a third.
Yeah, I totally get that.
However, the women in my workplace either aren’t married or have no kids. They just don’t want to do “work stuff” outside of work hours, so I don’t think that comic really applies.
Personal experience w/ SO about similar realization
Over the past year or two, my wife has gotten really stressed by the kids, so I (male) have taken over a lot of the tasks involving the kids. I make breakfast and lunch and drop the kids at school every day, then more often than not make dinner when I finish work, and I put the kids to bed every night. My wife is a SAHM, but she’s had a ton of issues with anxiety recently, so she’s mostly been caring for the youngest (4yo) and picking up the others from school. All the kids are quite independent now and mostly play with the neighbors, and she makes dinner 1-2x/week. I do almost all of the shopping, laundry, dishes, etc, but she still stresses about those despite not doing much of it (again, anxiety).
We have a very different way of working on household tasks. When I’m short on time, I do the urgent things first and intentionally ignore the less important details to be handled later (usually the weekend). When she is short on time, she’ll stay up late and do all the details while also doing the important things, then she’s burnt out for the next few days (understandable) and things degrade back to where they were. I think the average level of tidiness and amount of work is similar between our approaches.
So she has essentially retained the mental load, even though I’ve taken the lion’s share of the actual work. Just seeing a mess stresses her out, whereas for me, a mess is just an obstacle that I can work around in the short-term. It’s not that I don’t see the mess, just that I’m a lot more focused on the task than the broader picture.
My thought is that this is a bunch of latent guilt stemming from her upbringing. She grew up in an E. Asian household, with all of the social expectations and whatnot, so when she sees a mess, she takes it as a personal attack on not being a good enough home maker. I had a similar upbringing, where my mom stayed home w/ us kids and my dad was the sole breadwinner. However, when I was a teenager, my mom started to work outside the house and my dad was able to WFH more, so they shared the household responsibilities a bit more (she still did laundry and shopping, but my dad did more cooking and dishes). My in-laws have had a similar transition (MIL works, FIL takes SS and doesn’t work), but my MIL still keeps the same responsibilities she always had.
So, I’ve been trying to have things a bit more complete, even if in just one area, rather than spreading efforts around the house, and it seems to have a much bigger impact on her anxiety than what I would normally do. I’ve also listed all of the household chores, and we’ll be assigning explicit responsibility of tasks to the kids (they had them as chores, but there was no formal handover of responsibility), as well as offering the kids incentives to take on additional tasks (in our case, that means spending money). My goal is to reduce her mental load and enable her to think about things outside of the home to hopefully get over the anxiety issues she’s been facing.
To me, this totally confirms the gist of that post. Taking away the work of a task still leaves the mental load of that task.
That said, I think there’s something more here though. I think men see work as a end in itself, whereas women see it as a means to an end (i.e. men want to hunt despite it being less efficient, because the trophy is the point). I’m sure there’s a ton of variability there, but I wonder if there’s more than just culture at play here (i.e. the above mentality also makes sense in a hunter/gatherer context; men do the big, showy things, while women do the consistent work of the tribe). I don’t know, what I do know is that none of the women I know have hobbies that are similar to the work they do, even if they find their work to be fulfilling.
Wonder how the survey was sent out and whether that affected sampling.
Regardless, with -3-4k responses, that’s disappointing, if not concerning.
I only have a more personal sense for Lemmy. Do you have a source for Lemmy gender diversity?
Anyway, what do you think are the underlying issues? And what would be some suggestions to the community to address them?
It’s hard to know overall for Lemmy, but I know that both Lemmy.ca and Lemmy.nz have surveyed their members.
https://lemmy.ca/post/15125231 https://lemmy.nz/post/12001861
Both were around 87% men, where as this selfhosting one is like 96% men.
I would guess it’s explained by society. Women are less likely to be in STEM which seems to almost be a prerequisite for Lemmy and possibly self-hosting, and of those women in STEM, and ( despite what you might think about your own house) there is still a societal expectation of them running the household and doing most of the household chores, even when they work full time. A third job, selfhosting, may be too much.
Shout out to my fellow “None Backup Strategies” chaos goblins.
I think this is pretty troubling. Including myself in the sentiment that the self-hosting community needs to do better. Aside from funding individual projects, are there any organizations that help fund self-hosting projects?
How so? 40%-ish is actually pretty good!
I’m also in the “no” bucket, but I’ve contributed bug reports and do intend to donate soonish now that I use more visible projects (used to just be minidlna, BTRFS, and openSUSE). I only added Jellyfin a few months ago, and I do intend to donate since I don’t intend to report bugs or contribute code.
True, it’s a good percentage, and probably better than most free software. That said, given the communities the self hosted apps support, their excitement for the products, and for some the essential nature of some of these apps, it would be nice to see the yes/no number more 50/50 at least.
I’m more interested in dollar amounts. Are people sending $5 every now and then, or is there more consistent funding?
I’m in the no-bucket, but instead i spend time on issues, helping the community and sometimes code contributions to self hosted projects instead.
This is not taken into the account of the question, however, but should be considered as contributing.
(I also consider donating to be contributing.)
I wish there were more commercial services around Foss. (And I don’t mean proprietary)
They could do all sorts of things like sell swag and support.
Yeah, really don’t get this one. As an example, I’ve been supporting the guy who writes most of the software I use via Github sponsors for a while, now. It’s nice to get access to additional support chat rooms and perks and stuff, but just the feeling alone is satisfying enough.
Feelsgoodman.jpg
I genuinely recommend those with gainful employment to consider supporting the people who make the software and media you like (E.g. Patreon).
Issue reports and the likes are nice, but they’re really not a substitute for cash (in my opinion).
“What is your gender?”
82 females, 3300 males…
Ah guys, where are the females?
Really interesting to scroll through and see. Picked up a couple of new tools to look into, too, thanks!
