GitHub donates private repositories to women learning open source software

Thanks for responding. Fortunately women don't have a single Leader so while Valerie may be doing good work through certain initiatives she should find that other women who disagree with censorship will not support these actions.

You will agree when I say that being a male or a female is not really an advantage or disadvantage. And that either gender should be allowed to pursue whatever they like. If the teacher, society and everyone else in the world says to your little one that she cannot do it, you say to her she can. Because she can and your gender doesn't matter. And when you start telling your daughter that she can, that is one less person in the "society" who says she can't or shouldn't. When you tell your daughter that there is nothing that a girl or a boy cannot do, your daughter will grow up to be one more impartial member of the society.

And I think you will agree with me when I say that it is better to have a public repository, if you want to learn(unless ofcourse github wants female programmers to become closed source programmers). By handing out a freebie to the girls, you are telling the boys the exact same thing which your daughter's teacher told her.

We don't want girls/boys to become programmers, we want them to become whatever they want to. Having promotional activities for females may send a wrong impresion about a particular field to boys - who are also as human and as impresionable as the girls are in school. How many boys do you think take up engineering, just because it is seen as a manly branch and the society expects them to? I would argue many and that is a massive disadvantage to the boys who want to pursue something else.

We should aim at leveling the field instead of providing some people a helping hand at the cost of others. If helping girls take up CS is done by having girls-only CS colleges, free tuition for female CS students or free course material or as in this case free services based on gender, I will say stop. Because boys who are thinking of taking up CS will cry foul. What did your neighbour's son do to not deserve a free github private repo?

Instead, try changing the society. Tell your sons and daughters they can do anything. Tell your students that gender means nothing. Tell the teachers at your daughters school to back off and complain about her to the school authorities.

To be honest, I have no idea if that will work. But what I do believe is if you start handing out freebies to someone based on gender, it will poison the well for the boys, who will cry foul. It wasn't their fault they were born as boys. Equality - yes. Preferential treatment - no.

> Their hard-earned success was much easier to come by than a women whose achieved the same level of success.

But perhaps the men never wanted to be engineers and society forced them. It wasn't easy for them to give up their dreams. But they did because of evil society.

It goes both ways.

1. You could also say that Alphabetus law says that in any discussion the likelihood of using all letters of alphabet approaches 1. So what? Godwin's law doesn't say anything about validity or invalidity of mentioning Nazis or Hitler.

2. I meant neither Nazis nor Hitler. I merely pointed out that if they were giving free accounts to a group that is not (considered to be) discriminated then suddenly it wouldn't be so cool.

And just in case: there are many white males with blond hair around, I know quite a few personally and I've never suspected them to be Nazis. If you have any proof that some of them are give me a shout so that I can unfriend them!

Like most things the Ada Initiative does, this makes no sense once you scratch past the surface.

Even if women risk more criticism as newbies, the risk still exists for everyone, and solving it for part of the group only is discrimination.

If Github really cared about intimidation, they would offer a free private repo to new users as a promo, or perhaps have a $1/month micro plan. Instead they accept a small minority of users for free who wouldn't have paid anyway and score good will PR points.

And if the Ada Initiative cared about making women a part of the community, then they would recognize that those women will want to collaborate in private with men too, who should be given the same opportunity to experiment in private.

Modern feminists are the biggest sexists around, they keep acting like women can't compete with men on equal ground, even in a place as anonymous as the internet.

Have you ever noticed how the people complaining the loudest about online abuse are always the ones with the biggest pictures of themselves on their blogs? Featuring their lovely blue hair, tattoos, piercings, shot in their Pinterest-approved bedrooms? It's princesses all over again, and most women can see through the bullshit too.