FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial

Last Friday Bryce Byfield gave us a little insight into the fallout surrounding his article on sexism in the FOSS world. Unfortunately it seems that FOSS junkies did little better than the rest of the world with respect to sexism, displaying similar levels of denial, abuse, and ignorance. "But the real flood of emotion comes from the anti-feminists and the average men who would like to deny the importance of feminist issues in FOSS. Raise the subject of sexism, and you are met with illogic that I can only compare to that of the tobacco companies trying to deny the link between their products and cancer. Because I took a feminist stance in public, I have been abused in every way possible — being called irrelevant, a saboteur, coward, homosexual, and even a betrayer of the community. I know that many women in the community have been attacked much more savagely than I have, so I'm not complaining. Nor am I a stranger to readers who disagree with me, but the depth of reaction has taken me back more than once. I think the reaction is an expression of denial more than anything else."

Comments

Refreshment of memory

[Anghwyr]

There was an example on a ruby conference earlier this year: http://dyepot-teapot.com/2009/04/25/dear-fellow-rubyists/

“If he had left it at a few introductory jokes, I would be writing a very different post. Instead the porn references continued with images of scantily-clad women gratuitously splashed across technical diagrams and intro slides. As he got into code snippets, he inserted interstitial images every few slides.

Re:Refreshment of memory

[baronben]

Okay, let's try an example from a Debian commentor called MikeeUSA

The women of the “geek feminism” movement will be just as effective at excising men from the movement as Nina was at systematically destroying Hans Reiser’s life untill he saw no reason, nothing left in his life, that could hold him back from striking back.

Ouch.

And also

Yea you’ve become a developer and have done nearly nothing except shill your feminist shit and try to turn debian into a woman’s project (you are succeeding, men are leaving debian because of you and your ilk, worthless bitch).

examples taken from Geek Feminism

Re:Refreshment of memory

[maroberts]

Yes, and as was pointed out in the article you linked to, he was banned from the Debian bug tracking system and others. The guy seems to be a general abuser of women in general, not an example of geek abuse of women.

Re:Refreshment of memory

[dlgeek]

You're calling MikeUSA a Debian commentator? He's a troll who got banned from all the Debian mailing lists. Calling him a Debian commentator makes it sound like he's somehow associated with the project, rather than shunned by it.

Missing reference

[SirGarlon]

The summary should have included a link to Byfield's original post, which explains the basis for his claim of sexism in FOSS:

In other words, women's participation in FOSS development is over seventeen times lower than it is in proprietary software development.

Now, isn't that by itself enough to get you thinking?

Re:I'll second the call for examples.

[fahrvergnugen]

Are you seriously going to sit there and argue that open source is a sheer meritocracy with a straight face? Okay. Here are 4 examples:

• Ruby on Rails sexism.
• Mark Shuttleworth refers to Linux as being “hard to explain to girls”. Ensuing flap is brutal.
• DrupalCon Paris homepage objectifies women. Although to be fair, the organizers made changes in response to pressure.
• Stallman refers to EMACS virgins, specifically "women who had not been introduced to EMACS" along with the advice that "relieving them of their virginity" was some sort of sacred duty for members of "The Church of EMACS".

That's the result of a 5 minute google search.

Like I said. 0.1% of the comments.

[khasim]

You've linked (1) to a link (2) referencing a presentation (3) by ONE GUY at a rather small meeting (200 people).

So that ONE instance is repeated over and over (and linked to) as "evidence" of "sexism" instead of being seen as what it really is:
ONE instance out of thousands of non-sexist presentations.

Again, if 1.5% of FOSS developers are women, but only 0.1% of the comments are sexist, what is the REAL problem that you're trying to "solve"?