ULYSSISMar 6, 2024
Today between 16h30 and 21h is your chance to find a job, internship or student job at a real open source company. Come and visit the Open Source Job Fair at the university halls. More information at http://opensourcejobfair.be
#FOSS #FOSSH #fossjobs #OpenSource
ULYSSIS Open Source Job Fair

Tuesday 11 March 2025 - Leuven, Belgium - unique open source companies

Show threadona [she/they]Mar 6, 2024
@ulyssis women?
Show threadPoroCYonMar 6, 2024

@ona @ulyssis (fyi I'm a member) our female members couldn't take part in the buildup due to reasons beyond any member's control. we've always had a few women between our members, though sadly it's always been a minority.

though, as we are a student organization associated with one university, we are only recruiting from the students of this university. and the university itself has been pretty bad at this, and the situation has worsened over time: the study programmes are rather segregated by gender, and this segregation is *increasing* rather than decreasing ( https://www.kuleuven.be/diversiteit/diversity/facts-figures-2 ).

so, achieving >33% of women in our membership when we try to recruit from the pool of CS and engineering students (roughly 10% women: https://www.kuleuven.be/diversiteit/pdf/20130927%20Gender%20en%20Studenten%20Openbaar.pdf page 3, only available in dutch, sorry) is just really really really difficult

this also seems to be a wider phenomenon in this country, the other big uni in the region also has this problem ( https://www.ugent.be/ea/occ/nl/kiezen/brochures/computerwetenschappen2017.pdf page 6, also NL-only)

FIGURES and ACTIONS

Show threadPoroCYonMar 6, 2024
@ona @ulyssis by now I'm a PhD student at the university, in a very international research group. and both there as well as the international masters students (that is, students who did their bachelor elsewhere), the imbalance feels much less bad in my experience. so there seems to be some reason specific to this country or region that drives women away from STEM programmes, which we recruit (most, though not solely) from. and that's not really something we can fix as a random student organization, sadly.
Show threadona [she/they]

@pcy thanks for your explanation. the problem is all over, no only on your country. maybe you could vindicate this in your actions? have a good evening.

cc @ulyssis

Mar 7, 2024 at 5:52pmWeb
Show threadPoroCYonMar 7, 2024

@ona in theory, sure, but how would that look like in practice?

organizing a "women in STEM"-style event? would be weird if it's mainly men doing the organizing and telling people what to do

having our female members be more visible in our activities? that also shifts the burden of work into an unfair distribution, while making it easy to do tokenization

focussing more on women when hiring new members? that feels stalker-y (plus it's not that we focus a lot on men either, because we have a slight shortage of members either way)

work on our internal culture? while of course due to the demographics of our members it's not exactly ideal (our teambuildings can sometimes feel a bit alienating, also speaking as someone who's queer and autistic), I'm glad to say it's still way better than some other student associations I've heard horror stories of. (though maybe the fact that we are a student org automatically causes an association. but eg we dont do any hazing)

anyway, It's Complicated