Story: Open source needs sex education

Posted by: Norbert Thiebaud (Wednesday 2 August 2006, 3:18 PM)

raestel, I'm not 'explaining away' the 'lack' of women with the meritocracy argument.
For one thing, I pointed that meritocracy was the value attacked by the proposal aimed at 'fixing' this alleged lack, not the cause of it.
I said 'alleged' lack, because that lack is founded on the following false proposition:
Given any group of population G, and given any properties P and Q, Let GP be the set of member of G having the propery P, GQ the set member of G having the property Q and GPQ the set of member of G having both the property P and Q. then
Cardinal(GP)/Cardinal(G) = Cardinal(GPQ)/Cardinal(GP)
It is a 'false' proposition because there are obvious counter examples. for instance P=play basketball and Q=is taller than 2 meters.
Bear in mind that the property: 'Is an open source developper' is a 'rare' property. among the general population we are taling about