This is a valuable conversation on how to make hackerspaces more equitable for women. It's the first time I've heard a discussion on the lopsided burden for cultural, emotional, and care labor in technical communities like open source projects. Thanks for being fearless about pushing back, Romy.

I'm going to bring it up at https://github.com/chaoss/wg-dei. If you have more details, such as specific examples of care labor, I'll happily incorporate them.

On Tue, May 31, 2022 at 2:19 PM Yardena Cohen via sudo-discuss <sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org> wrote:
Romy, I feel you. Over a decade ago when I started working at
Noisebridge, and then Sudoroom, I did primarily want a place to hack,
learn, and get into that flow state. In the years since then, I have
often found myself forced into the position of doing cultural,
emotional and care labor in order to try making Sudoroom (and then
Omni) a safe space for myself and others. I have often felt very
bitter about that, about all the missed opportunities where I could
have just spent time enriching my brain, accomplishing awesome
projects and so on. I definitely agree that white men should be doing
more of this labor and it should not always fall on the rest of us to
fight for "rooms of our own".

Please know that when this BOGSS congress happens, you are under no
obligation to join or participate, and nobody should pressure you to
do anything but the work you came here wanting to do! To the contrary,
if you ever feel pressured to do inequitable amounts of labor, or to
be otherwise tokenized or exploited, I believe the BOGSS congress will
absolutely advocate on your behalf to stop that from happening.

Happy hacking,
Yar

On Mon, May 30, 2022 at 4:13 PM romy via sudo-discuss
<sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org> wrote:
>
> This sounds like a noble cause, but it looks like it requires soooo much time, and a lot of talking. SudoRoom is different from many other organizations because we're very focused on enabling people to do stuff, especially getting men, women, trans, and small animals into a flow state of creation.
>
> I feel like the world needs more creating female hackers, and we need more safe spaces where women are not subconsciously instructed to teach kids or volunteer in social work. There are very few women I run into lately who are able to be fully creative in Oakland, it just feels like so many people are bogged down with caring for kids and husbands, or into social volunteer activities. That is really cool, but what about creating a "room of one's own" Virginia Woolf style?
>
> I can't see this committee helping in creating a safe space for women free of subliminal messages that they should be doing more community volunteering work, caring for me kids, and hacking to save the planet. Perhaps we could draw paper straws and elect a robot to attend?
> Hope this wasn't offensive, I'm just trying to think of a way to get more women to create and not be mired in stuff that doesn't help women do cool stuff!
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