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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."
I stopped reading after "I'm not complaining"
And I suspect a vast majority of FOSS people are dudes with a heartbeat and would react like the same overblown charges of racism that get directed towards non-progressives with heartbeats.
I think the male-female dynamic has much to argue over. In many areas there are cultural differences that keep women down and other areas where the natural differences of our mad ape ancestors merely express themselves in reality.
Many charges of sexism are valid, but some are so ridiculous they deserve the ire they generate.
No one is denying that there are idiots out there. Just browse at -1 here. You'll see every kind of comment for every kind of 'ism that you're looking for.
But let's look are real EXAMPLES of real COMMENTS. Okay?
And since we're talking about FOSS, we can look at the kernel mailing list. Hmmmmm, not a lot of sexist comments there. Particularly when taken as a percentage of total comments.
So if only 1.5% of developers are women ... but fewer than 0.1% of comments on development mailing lists are sexist ... what is the real "problem" that exists?
I think the reaction is an expression of denial more than anything else.
OK, how are we supposed to disagree without being "in denial"?
He mentions geeks asking peer women out for a date as an example for being sexistic. WTF?
A single woman amoung dozens of men actually is likely to be asked out for a date more often than each man. How is that sexistic?
That aside I presume this is a vocal few distorting perception of the majority. With feminists and 'manly' programmers alike.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
As much as the F/L/OSS community likes to pretend that it is distinct from the "real world" communities, it isn't. But whereas the "real world" is mostly comprised of idiots who lack the mental capacity to understand anything new, let alone seek it, F/L/OSS developers often represent some of the most curious, information-seeking individuals and some of the highest-calibre intellects out there.
So if we have trouble excusing such behaviour for the "normals", we must be far, far harder on ourselves for those same flaws.
There is a flip-side, though, that the original poster may have neglected to consider. F/L/OSS developers ARE amongst the brightest and the best, but they also have extraordinarily high levels of autistic behaviours, anti-social disorders, emotional instability and alienation.
(The first two are collectively known as "Geek Syndrome". The latter two are the inevitable consequence of Geek Syndrome in a society that tolerates no differences, no matter what it says.)
It is not just likely, but a near-certainty that people with that kind of internal and external pressure WILL fragment into groups that conceal differences by being essentially uniform.
I'm not sure if it can be called sexism when such behaviour is, at least in part, a mask to conceal what's going on. The mask can be sexist without the person underneath being.
However, true misogyny does exist, independent of the mask. THAT particular aspect of sexism should be rooted out and burned, as it is warped, buggy thinking. Bugs SHOULD be erased, and a buggy brain SHOULD be patched.
The problem is how to tell the mask from the person underneath. These are distinct issues. The mask doesn't need fixing, rather the person needs an extended API to handle errors, and the Real World needs replacing with Real World 2.0 to debug the flawed mental processes that produce the garbage in the first place.
Once either the person has better exception-handling or error trapping, and/or there's less noise generating errors, the mask can be erased. It's a filter that exists to hide bad wet-coding and so the sooner we get rid of the bad code, the sooner we can get rid of the filter.
My guess would be that if the mask died, a good 75% of the perceived sexism in F/L/OSS would die with it, without a single F/L/OSS coder needing to change their view of gender.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
okay, how about 54 incidents? And that's with about 25 seconds of searching.
And before you respond, tell me if you'll need a tractor to help you with all the goalpost moving you're doing.
Sleep is for the weak!
Create yourself TWO new accounts. One with a name that a teen boy would choose and the other with a name that suggests that you are a girl. Go on. Do it. Right now!
Then the NEXT time this subject comes up, post similar comments (not trolls) from BOTH accounts.
Then compare the scores and the follow up comments from the two accounts.
I will bet that the comment from the girl-account will be ranked higher and have more "me too" comments than the boy-account.
Sexism in FOSS does exist. But it isn't the type described by the author.
Just look at this discussion. How many different accounts reference the SAME handful of incidents as "proof" that there is sexism and that anyone who disagrees is somehow "bad".
THAT alone should be enough to tell you where the real problem is.
Guys rarely go into female only fields like nursing or pre-school teaching for the same reasons girls don't do tech
Except that 10% of nurses are now male, rising every year. On top of that 20% of current nursing students are male, again, rising every year.
Is it really so hard to believe that more men find electrical engineering interesting and more women find psychology interesting? Do we really have to be the same to be equal? I hope not, that would be pretty boring.
By "gender is masked" you mean "gender is assumed male until you choose to admit you're a freak," right? Because that's how it really is, from a woman's perspective. We're not assumed gender-neutral. If we were, everybody'd say "they" or "ze" instead of referring to every developer as "he" or "dude" or "guy" without proof that the person in question actually identifies as a man. No, we are definitely assumed to be men if we don't...well, basically, if we don't come out of the closet about being women.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux