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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."
Raise the subject of sexism ...
What reports of sexism have there been? Are you raising the subject of sexism just based on the fact that only 1.5% of FOSS developers are women? It takes a very special kind of person to do FOSS development -- because it's often outside of work. Which means you have to love what you do at work and then come home and do it some more. Even I get sick of coding. It's an uncommon desire and requires a special kind of insanity. So much of the stuff I write outside of work is just absolutely useless in the end. Is it possible this trait is far less common in women than men?
... recognition?
Present evidence of sexist attitudes and attacks and I will gladly support you. Hell, I support you right now, nothing would make me happier than more women in FOSS. I just am not sure how you promote that sort of goal -- usually it's a monetary or favorable employment reward for having ovaries but the only reward is
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.
People on the internet called you names? It happens. Who are these people? Probably random pigs the internet has no shortage of. Don't let it get to you, hold your summit and figure out a way to designate Female FOSS Developer of the Month on your website.
To reiterate, I'm not denying that there is an disturbingly low percentage of women in FOSS development. I'm just questioning what's causing that. It's probably a number of factors including Hollywood not showing women as the computer hacker in many of their movies (except maybe Hackers). It's predominantly the stereotypical male. Women have to overcome that and women have to realize that getting together and working on a project with your friends by just coding can be fun. But I think society tells them early on that's not what women do. If there's any sexism, I've seen no proof it's internal to FOSS.
My work here is dung.
Yeah I guess you may have encountered some jokes, but it's your code that matters, not your plumbing. If you're offended by jokes, joke back or say it's inappropriate - in the informal community of FOSS, that's about all you can do.
If you truly think you're a victim, create an androgynous pseudonym. The tone of OP's article suggests a hyper sensitivity to me.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I stopped reading after "I'm not complaining"
....when the sex of the contributor is more often than not completely unknown?
I see a contribution from a "Terry", I have no idea if that is a male or female, and really why would I care? Either the code is god, o rit isn't. Why would sex ever have any bearing at all?
Frankly I really don't even get how a claim of sexism could exist in the FOSS world. It just doesn't translate from meat-space, because frankly, more often than not you have no idea the sex of the person in the first place. And really, that is how it should be.
How wrong were I thinking that only professional matters should be of concern. Before we tackle the obvious sexist attitude in capitalist society towards childbearing, let me recall Sokal's discussions with postmodernist on mixing politics with science. Hope we aren't all living in Orwell's animal farm, just yet...
I feel a Denis Leary rant coming on.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Girls are all about that cake - think Betty Crocker.
If a girl is going to sit down and write some code I don't think she will be doing it for free =)
PS - this is suppose to be FUNNY.
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.
That's assuming you can pin down a consistent definition of feminism.
out out damn spot?
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?
Pretending to be a crusader for the feminist cause on the Internet will not make you anymore likely to get laid. Not even net sex. Sorry to disappoint.
It just seems that now adays everything is completely overblown. I think that a huge majority of men in this country aren't sexist or racist, I think they just want to get to the end of the work day.
I think that the near-complete elimination of sexism and racism (which has been accomplished) is prompting many people to become even louder in their accusations of sexism and racism. If fighting discrimination is your raison d'etre, you may not WANT it to end; even if only on a subconscious level, you will seek out ever more and more slight examples of it, and make ever more and more shrill noise about it.
How can someone speak out against generalizations made towards an entire group of people (women), while at the same time condemning an entire group of people (FOSS)?
If you would like to see individuals judged on their own merits then stop trying to link behaviors with groups of people. It makes your argument look flawed.
It's EtherApe. But you knew that didn't you..
Here's an example of how you appear to show your feminism by how another person appeared to me when "being sensitive".
Talking about "The Accused". One girl and she says "A friend of mine felt ashamed of being a man after watching that".
My IMMEDIATE thought was "What? Did he get a boner in the rape scene?"
My second thought was "He said that hoping to get a 'sensitivity' shag".
People accept feminine problems exist.
And they don't assume women don't understand stuff "because you're a girl".
But then YOU come along and try to make us feel guilty about how other people treat women.
And that pisses people off.
We have enough we HAVE done in our lives to be ashamed of without someone trying to get us to shoulder stuff we didn't do.
I have been abused in every way possible — being called irrelevant, a saboteur, coward, homosexual, and even a betrayer of the community.
Gosh...this totally happened to me too on the original Everquest forums. And they never did fix paladins!
Indeed. I have known several women who write open source software, and (admittedly from the outside) I didn't see them treated any differently on mailing lists and in meetings than men. Yes, there's an imbalance, yes, there may be institutional sexism... but what's the source?
Bruce argues that proprietary software has a higher proportion of women. The thing is, proprietary software has a bigger payback for the actual developer... and it's a payback that is valuable for everyone: MONEY. It's a relatively well paid trade that women are at no great disadvantage in. Most people working on proprietary software ... men or women ... don't program in their spare time, either. It's a job, not a hobby.
For most developers, open source software is a hobby. A valuable one, yes, but I would suspect that "fewer than 1.5%" of open source developers actually have that in their primary job description. What are the proportions of women involved in other technical hobbies? It's my impression that the answer is "pretty low", and a bit of googling tends to support that. So... what's the reason why women aren't involved in things like model railroading ("I haven't met too many women modelers" -- mary Miller, MMR)? I suspect that's where you need to look to dig up the answer to this question.
I think the reaction is an expression of denial more than anything else.
OK, how are we supposed to disagree without being "in denial"?
Making sexist remarks, ok, I can understand how that might be seen as being sexist. But how is asking a woman out considered sexist behaviour? Face it, if I were to join a group that's 98.5% women and demonstrate that I share an interest with all of them then I strongly suspect I'd get asked out too. Would I complain that their behaviour was sexist? No. Obviously not.
No. I'd be making lurve. All those ladies! Oh yeah baby!
Wait. I think I might be being sexist. Err.. Oh dear.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Nothing is so prevalent among FOSS developers as that chunk of people with the elitist attitude. Anyone who's ever asked for help in, let's say, #whatever-foss-project on Freenode, knows exactly what kind of people, what kind of "tough crowd", they are; a stereotype so "nailed" you could hang a coat on it; the know-it-all complete-opposite-of-a-people's-person.
Instead of being friendly and helpful, spending 30 seconds giving a kind answer to help another, these people instead gladly spend 5 minutes elaborating to another how stupid they are, how wrong they are, how inefficient their idea is, how bad their way of thinking is, how wrong they are for trying to learn things the way they do, how wrong they try to solve problems and solve their task, and, in the end, that they should just "rtfm/google" or similar.
People who have a hard time getting along with others in real life situations often try to assert power, as a means of compensation, where they can: in "their field".
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
'Yall be postin' in a troll thread now.
Really, I don't see how this isn't more than just a troll to get people to read the blog post or just a personal rant from the author. Maybe if the article was backed up with statistics and proof would this be a worthwhile read.
Simply crying wolf won't solve a problem. If there's an issue, present it with the data to support it.
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
> They seem unaware that institutions and customs can be sexist simply by what they value or how they operate, that even something like a discourse developed by men talking to men can institutionalize sexism. Nor do they understand that, by simply accepting such institutions or ways of acting, they become supporters of sexism.
Maybe they understand what you are trying to say perfectly well, but think its a pile of steaming of crap. A bunch of the arguments boil down to saying people could only be disagreeing with because they are too ignorant or stupid to know better.
> Similarly, I assumed that, in the FOSS community, if you were a free software supporter, you were concerned about social justice and would therefore be against sexism as well.
Social justice... ffs.. maybe there is a correlation between caring about free software issues and issues that matter, such as.. I don't know, actual social justice, meaning issues of people being murdered, enslaved, raped or denied education, healthcare, opportunity, whatever. Maybe your interpretation of people not falling over themselves to appease your particular interpretation of how they ought to behave does not entirely correlate with not caring about social justice.
In summary, fuck off and take your smug, self righteous, time-wasting bullshit elsewhere please.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
All of the high-tech companies that I've worked for have many more men than women. Most of the applications for positions are from men.
In over 20 years in the industry, I only remember observing one sexist incident.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
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.
Now, isn't that by itself enough to get you thinking?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
You're talking about sexism targeted at a specific individual ("your code sucks because you're a girl").
There can also be generalized sexism. That would be comments about women not directed at any specific individual. Such as telling sexist jokes.
The question is, where is that behaviour demonstrated in FOSS development? So far there have been very few examples of such.
"For instance, I am currently part of an email conversation with a prominent FOSS community member who has been pilloried who is hurt and baffled that I (or anyone else) could apply the word "sexism" to them. Their reasoning? They did not intend to be sexist, so therefore they can't possibly be. Therefore, labelling their behavior as unacceptable is unfair, they argue. The fact that, in context, their actions and remarks could not possibly be described in any other way honestly does not seem to have occurred to them. No matter what I say, they remain hurt and baffled -- and, like so many, deeply in denial."
The version of sexism as I see it(and I'm guessing most people in the UK/western world) is sexism *is* an intentional chauvinistic attitude, http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=sexism and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexism are the main things I am looking at right now. I can see that sexism may technically mean "the belief or attitude that one gender or sex is inferior to, less competent, or less valuable than the other", but this would mean that their intentions would be very important into determining what is meant. Using an emotionally charged word like that to describe someone without defining it would hurt most people, there is no reason to be surprised here.
I believe there might well be some bias in the FOSS world against women (although I've never encountered it due to working on fair few projects) and this should be rallied against (it's just foolish to be biased and helps noone, the project would suffer from fewer contributors), but labelling it sexism places it close to "women should be in the kitchen" thinking in my mind and is unproductive and will lead to defensiveness and even resentment from the male community for being labelled as such. It seems as if the author can't understand why someone might be hurt by being labelled a sexist.
In all, this doesn't seem to be very objective or useful reporting and is purely to get clicks and links onto his site and stir up some debate. In my opinion. :D
The subject is one of tags for the story at the moment. ;-)
Anyway, FOSS realm seem to require extra heavy-duty flame-proof skin, and anyone that stands out, even just by being a female, will attract the flame. OD level testosterone means extra allergic reaction to social issues like sexism.
Apply another layer of makeup and keep plugging on, GRRRRL HAXORS! (That's how they spell these days, right?)
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Just about every post above me is displaying denial abuse and ignorance, exactly as described in the article. if you people really dont see any sexism here, you are blind.
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)
If a woman programmed and became a geek because she really wanted to do it, and allowed neither the unpopularity of her choice nor anything that some online asshats have to say to dissuade her, then she'd be just like a man. If men needed a culture of approval and acceptance and someone to remind them whenever possible that they are wanted and welcome, and then and only then could they program if they wanted to, then they'd be just like women. This arrangement necessarily leads to the appearance of men doing whatever they want while women are excluded. I believe it's the women who need to change, to get a bit more backbone, and to realize that anyone who's ever done great things has caught a lot of flak for it. If they could do that in a graceful way instead of a bitchy way that only proves they are better at hassling someone than the sexists, very little would ever stop them. Otherwise they are just as strong and, when they do have that determination, just as able as men. I don't see this as a sexual difference, more like a mental image that is quite malleable.
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"?
when you consider that there are no girls on the internet.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
The article invites us to draw conclusions from the fact that there is a dramatically higher percentage of females working in non-free programming as opposed to free software. Then it also throws out the fact that quality is dramatically higher in free software - but I assume we're not supposed to draw any conclusions from that correlation, eh?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I don't think you do. Because you do exactly what you accuse women of doing: stereotyping an entire gender based on what a few idiots are doing. Are you so insecure that you have to take every accusation personally that any woman brings against any man? And then extrapolate it to all women and all men?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
THAWTELESS, West London, Monday — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release later this month of Ubuntu Linux 9.10, "Karmic Koala," to men.
Project founder Mark Shuttleworth explained that "this stuff is difficult to explain to girls" and thought they'd have gotten the hint when he called 8.04 "Hairy Hardon." "Worrying about sexism in open source just detracts from the battle for Linux. So we've put the tits back into the default desktop. And arses."
Crime-fighting geek Shuttleworth, who dresses as a billiionaire playboy by night, swore that plenty of women liked him lots and that he obviously wasn't unable to get laid or anything, having gotten seriously rich in the dot-com era, not to mention having gone into space. "Chicks dig that stuff. Trust me, I've met lots of girls. More than five!"
Canonical Community Manager Jono Bacon echoed this sentiment on his blog. "We just don't understand how come women are 15% of all computer programmers but only 1% of open source programmers. It must be a bit complicated for them. That's why I've written this spontaneous blog post, completely unrelated to anything my boss may or may not have said, on all the fantastically talented women in free software, even if none of them seem to work much on Ubuntu any more. Also, I'm absolutely confident that saying I'm in a computer geek heavy metal band will get me lots of chicks too, even if their pretty little heads can't understand Linux."
A special women's edition of Ubuntu 9.10 will be released on a bright pink CD. "It doubles as a makeup mirror!" said Shuttleworth.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I will state up front that I believe there is sexism withing the FOSS movement. However...
I actually went back and read his original article (I know - suspend my membership) and the most glaring problem with his argument is his comparison with proprietary software companies. He bemoans that those organizations have a breat many more women, and why can't FOSS do the same? Well, here's some clues:
1) "FOSS" is not an entity. It is a philosophy that is practiced by a number of organizations, some of which hardly merit the term.
2) Backstopping employment of women in the proprietary software world is employment law. Microsoft MUST employ a certain number of women or get into legal trouble. But free software development is done largely by volunteers - very few people are being "employed". Note that I exclude the employees that work on FOSS as part of their position. Should they be excluded? Probably not, but it appears the original author did so, and this is a criticism of his essay.
3) Participants in a FOSS project are largely self selected, with few obstacles or inducements other than personal interest and skill level. In situations like this, people tend to self segregate. That goes for race, gender, interests, whatever. You can't compel someone to participate in a FOSS project they don't like, for whatever reason.
The author is trying to make a case for institutional racism to something that models itself on a completely different model. The "people" who participate in FOSS projects may be sexist, and their actions are probably driving away some women who would otherwise participate. But "institutional" solutions have a problem in that there is no "institution" involved here.
People can be boors, and crude. If the other participants don't censure him, he'll continue. The solution is for individuals to act and speak up. If a lead developer continues to make comments about T&A, and it bugs you, leave - and take a copy of the code with you! In many ways, the ideas behind FOSS make it easier to take a personal stand - you can dissociate yourself without losing your work. I don't know if my ideas will "solve" sexism in FOSS, but you'll feel better about yourself.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
BitchX is an IRC client and the word "Bitch" in the name refers to "Bitching" as in nagging, which is related to conversating which reflects back to IRC. It has nothing to do with women [...]
You are aware that "bitching" is a sexist term referring to woman nagging their husbands I assume.
Not one specific case of sexism was described in that blog post. I'm damned if I know what this writer is talking about.
I think a much bigger problem, from the point of view of /., is racism. As soon as an Indian or Chinese technical achievement is mentioned around here, the jokes start flooding in about curry and Chinese food and the way those people talk funny. It's as if the achievements of the Apollo program are almost of religious significance, but India launching satellites is considered a big joke. I wonder how much laughing these racists will be doing when a Taikonaut walks on the moon while America goes bankrupt.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
There aren't many FOSS web sites devoted to feminist issues
AND
the few that do exist have declining membership
AND
many people have vigorously denied that they are sexist, some of whom have been pretty darn mean about it, in fact,
THEREFORE
FOSS is sexist
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
You say women have it worse, so you are not complaining? But the sentence above is a long list of your complaints. Hey I agree with you, sexism anywhere is only unproductive and goes against the ethos of FOSS - but those two sentences in the middle of your post has such sharp hypocrisy, it cut me in half. Just because you are a boy, you don't have to belittle the prejudice you have suffered so the girls can look more important. It sux you have been slandered for defending women - complain about it! Z/
What other people think of me is none of my business
It took you 5 minutes to come up with only 4 examples. And you were specifically LOOKING for such examples.
Here's the Linux Kernel Mailing List. http://lkml.org/ That's a few thousand comments without any sexism at all. It's all about the statistics.
Your post was a perfect example of the problems with this "discussion".
You aren't concerned with the statistics. And with the Internet, it is very easy for a single example of a sexist comment (whether it was intended to be sexist or not) to be shared between the people LOOKING for sexist comments.
Again, if 1.5% of the FOSS developers are women, and only 0.1% of the comments are sexist, what is the REAL problem that you're trying to "solve"?
Overweight, socially awkward men with poor hygiene resent women. They really resent women who are smarter than them or are better at the things around which they derive self-esteem.
The problem isn't that you aren't tolerant of women. The problem is that you're tolerant of the sad sacks who drive them away. FOSS needs a pecking order and it needs to keep the cretins at the bottom, where they belong. You're living Revenge of the Nerds but you're letting Booger call the shots.
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.
Have a little cry and get over it.
But seriously: There's sexism in every industry. But the FOSS world tends to ba made up of lots of smaller companies. Where they don't have big HR departments, corporate policy manuals the size of the NYC phone book and mandatory quarterly sensitivity training. So the a*holes think they've got free reign to abuse women (and everyone else). And the businesses aren't wealthy enough such that anyone can bring a discrimination suite against them and hope to do any more than see them file bankruptcy and disappear. Or they're so small that everyone is a key person that they can't afford to lose.
Have gnu, will travel.
You are ASSUMING that the claims of sexism are factual.
Yet when the STATISTICS are presented to you, you claim that it is "ire and denial".
Again, when 1.5% of the developers are women, and only 0.1% of the comments are sexist, what is the REAL problem that you are trying to "solve"?
Feminism is at is base a destructive doctrine. It fails to recognize that men and women are not the same. Equal - yes. Equivalent? No!
I'm a 26-year-old male, and my wife and I have a 1-year-old. I'm a typical geek in a lot of ways, and my wife is an excellent graphic designer. She had an excellent job in the field before we had our daughter, but once she arrived, she didn't go back. We sat down before conceiving a child, and discussed our plans. We decided, together, that any children we might have would deserve and need the full attention of one of us.
This decision does not mean that I am more capable of earning a living as a man, or that she is relegated to the role of housewife. What it does mean is that I, as a male, am more fulfilled provided for my family outside the home, while my wife is more fulfilled being present in the home to raise our children.
I truly believe that racism and sexism are essentially dead with my generation. I can honestly say I've never discounted someone's ideas because they were a woman, or because they had a different skin color. Continuing to live as if entire groups of people are being subjugated is nothing but a recipe for unhappy people, seeing racism and sexism where there is none.
Learn about Photography Basics.
"It just seems that now adays everything is completely overblown. I think that a huge majority of men in this country aren't sexist or racist, I think they just want to get to the end of the work day."
That's a false dichotomy. Not all sexist (racist, homophobic, etc.) acts and comments are matters of premeditated intent.
--Joe
I'm a nature photographer.
2. then there are absolutely clueless types who say stupid things out of complete ignorance of how to relate to or even just talk about the opposite sex
3. and then there are the genuinely warped men with serious pscyhological issues and a serious axe to grind, with mother issues/ previous girlfriend issues/ stalker issues. these have to do with developmental psychology, emotional instability, and genuinely frightening deeper psychological issues like a need for control, and a perception of a threat in women on a psychological level they can't deal with
but all such men are only a tiny minority of men. in public, in the workplace, in the FOSS community. unfortunately, they themselves by their words and actions generate the majority of heat on the subject
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
over the meanings of sexism and sexist.
Given that FOSS is not a for-profit venture, there can be as much discrimination as the project leaders want. Don't like it? Write your own project.
I hear my local bar has lots of sexist remarks spoken, too.
semantics are everything!
Is there a higher percentage of women into RC racing, model rocketry, HAM radio or amateur astronomy? Most "geeky" chicks I know just read a lot & might play video games.
There is a war going on for your mind.
... many women in the community ...
I was reading the summary, trying to keep open minded, and you almost had me - until I saw this reference to "many women". MANY women? I've been to LUG meetings. You're lucky to see one woman.
Note by LUG I mean Linux Users Group, not Lesbians Until Graduation - meetings of the latter would likely attract more women than I've observed in the former.
#DeleteChrome
I think it's fair to say they've done a fair bit worse. Most IT shops are Porky's without the good manners.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I get really sick of subversive PC behavior... Life isn't fair, and nobody should have to be coddled in an open community. I have yet to see any woman, or man be treated differently in this industry in terms of skill. If anything women seem to be given more slack, without any merit.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
I've said it before. People like (crave) drama. Check out what's popular on TV and you can see that. You'll find "reality TV" that's so overblown that it's not even like reality. Before that was Springer and all the other talk shows. Celebrity goofs, overdoses, Police and Professors reactions, etc. People want something to talk about the next day and drama seems to fill that void easily. In fact, I have a friend that texts me every time he sees an accident or is in a crazy driver situation. Then wants to make a big deal about it when we meet up for game weekends.
Sometimes I wish people would just mind their own business and move on.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
It was almost a cliche in the socialist movement in the UK in the early eighties for some of the most unreconstructed men to champion women's rights while living a private life that was not quite as pure as the driven snow with regard to women.
Since I don't know the author, I can't comment on that aspect of his life. However, he is guilty of grandstanding on the issues of group he is not actually part of. Laudable as this may be, I would suggest that in order to clarify the issue, the victims should come forward and bear witness.
You don't really see a great number of women down the pub knocking back 16 pints of lager every Friday night commenting on how Chelsea are doing and whether or not money will buy a team success but is that an example of sex based exclusion or is it because they have better things to do?
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
echo "alias woman=man" >> ~/.bashrc
Nice try, you've failed statistics.
And the odds are that you were not even at that presentation.
That would indicate that the person giving that presentation could be racist (or very stupid).
And that SINGLE even has already been reference MULTIPLE times in this discussion.
Meanwhile, go and read the LKML to see thousands of comments without any sexism at all.
Then learn statistics.
Then you'll understand where the REAL sexism is. You might want a mirror.
FOSS is done primarily by male geeks in their early 20s; guys who all too often will graduate college as frustrated virgins.
What makes anybody think they would be opposed to the inclusion of *more* women into their lives? Perhaps in large part for self-serving reasons, but so what? The same is true of any other area of society.
I, for one, would have loved to have more girls in my CS courses (2 of which had no girls at all), for the chance to meet them...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
So the proof of Sexism is that when an absurd claim of it is made, the accuser is met with a negative response?
This is a new low for /. How do I configure my account to no longer show me any stories edited by ScuttleMonkey ?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It shouldn't be surprising that there is sexism of one sort or another in FOSS development. It's everywhere, and at all levels of Western society.
Sexism is so pervasive that we have a hard time recognizing all but the most obvious forms. And yet most of us recognize that it is an undesirable human quality, like bigotry or religious fundamentalism. So when we are called on sexist behavior, our first reaction is to get massively defensive and deny the problem. We're not sexist! We think sexism is evil! Some of my best friends are women!
Uh-huh. The problem is, the person calling you on your sexism ISN'T making it up. From her point of view, denying it just means you're as clueless as all the other men.
Guys, it doesn't matter whether your intentions are good. Sometimes you will say or do something sexist. You probably didn't mean too, you'll probably be really embarrassed to find out, but that doesn't change anything. The best thing to do is acknowledge, apologize, and try to accept that what you said or did was sexist. Even if you don't know why. Even if you think it wasn't.
Denying that what you did was sexist is the same thing as saying that what you did was fair because you played by the rules. It's not fair if the rules aren't fair. And the rules, in our society, aren't fair to women. Until we invent some new rules, you're going to have to cope with on-the-fly correction.
DON'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Apologize and think and try to do better next time.
Because women don't volunteer their time for FOSS development, men are sexist? Sorry, I just don't follow that logic.
Being called a "homosexual" is "abuse"? Great going, Bruce: show off your feminist stance by insulting another minority group.
I've read the article (yeah sue me), and I really liked this link: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO.html
If anything just read the bit "1.2. What problem? Sexism is dead!"
If you don't see what the problem is, and just think the two guys are making a funny comment, then you're probably oblivious to a lot of sexism going on in the world.
Once you open your eyes, you'll see that there is a lot of sexism (and racism) in the world still. Some of it so ingrained that even some women don't notice it, especially if they grew up with it.
It's a really hard thing to see part your own culture and put things in perspective.
I think the article makes a good point that often people don't have bad intentions, and get defensive when accused. I do think that there still is a lot of unintentional sexism in our society.
It's as simple as assuming the male is the person in charge when meeting a man and a woman in a business environment, like for example a job interview.
It's assuming the girl wants to be a nurse and the boy a doctor when you see some children playing with some toy hospital equipment.
It's simple comments like: "You silly girl", or "I wouldn't have expected that of a woman".
It's also that men are more expected to work late then women.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
There are actually two issues buried in the one
One issue is, "why are the number of female FOSS developers so low?"
The other is, "are open software developers sexist?"
I would suggest that the "answer" to the latter one, is "no more than a random sample of males of similar age groups and location"
I would also suggest that the "answer" to the former one is, "because most women just arent interested in doing it".
At its core, "FOSS" software, starts as a project by an individual. There are ZERO barriers to entry for a woman interested in doing so. You dont need anyone's permission. You dont need money. All you need is Time, and Interest in doing so.
Women generally arent interested in "hard science" type stuff. Sure, SOME are, but the majority simply are not INTERESTED.
feminazis will want to scream that is sexist, blah blah. But simple facts, are not sexist. they simply are.
Reinforcement of this can be found by looking at the small areas where women ARE getting involved in open source the most.
I havent done an extensive study on this, but I've noticed a trend on the handful of "women in open source" articles over the last few months. The women pulled up as examples, are primarily working on... social networking/forum/blog type software.
Hmm. startling news. Not.
Women get involved in what interests them. That sort of stuff interests them. But the majority of FOSS projects, do not interest them. So, they dont participate. Mystery solved.
Feminists always seem to be desperate to prove that "men and women are the same", reguardless of facts.
Well guess what? They are NOT THE SAME. This is obvious to any 5 year old, unless they fall into the clutches of the "womyn" brainwashing troups.
For decades, it has been accepted, that statistics is evidence. Recognizing, that there can be legitimate differences in inclinations towards certain activities among genders is a big no-no. The only exception is made for negative inclinations — such as increased aggressiveness — among males, or positive — such as attention to detail — among females, err, scratch that — "female" has a "male" in it — the proper term is womyns.
That the same testosterone (or whatever it really is), that makes males more aggressive on average may also make them more determined scientists or more involved FOSS-developers, is not mentioned... Or, perhaps, one needs to have been nerdy and suffer from bullying — something girls rarely have to go through — in school to look for a recreational outlet online.
Whatever the real reasons for disparity, claiming "sexism" in FOSS — the activity, that's done almost exclusively via Internet, where nobody knows your real gender (nor race, for that matter, nor even species!), is beyond stupid, of course. But by pointing this out, a person — myself included after I typed the previous sentence — automatically becomes a "sexist in denial". I guess, I need therapy now...
Lastly, the 1.5% is not bad — among FreeBSD-project, for example, there were 0 (zero!) females, last time I checked. The situation only "improved" a little bit, when one guy (from San Francisco, of all places), announced his gender- (and name-) change...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
nope but apparently the person in the article does
Don't use terms you don't understand. I said 0.1% and I have not changed that.
Now, to contradict your 54 examples (provided on a page that seems dedicated to finding such examples), I'll tell you about the Linux Kernel Mailing List which has thousands of non-sexist comments. Thousands. And that is a SINGLE mailing list.
Or is it that you do not understand what 0.1% means?
Given: Human Gender Ratio in the physical world ~= 1 male/1 female
Given: Human Gender Ratio in FOSS ~= 65.6 male/1 female
Therefore: FOSS is not Gender neutral
Delima:
1_FOSS inherently favors males.
or
2_Sexism has been built into FOSS
_a) intentionaly
_b) unintentionally
Given: studies in under representation in Sciences, Math and Engineering, have found NO inherit factors that can contribute to such ludicrous ratios as 65.6/1
Therefore: Sexism has been built into FOSS, either intentionally or unintentionally.
so what is it gonna be ppl Murder or Manslaughter?
How about this.
First you define _exactly_ what you mean by sexism. Give me some concrete examples so I can understand.
Then tell me exactly how _I_ am being sexist.
I may agree with your definition of sexist and I may agree that my behaviour is sexist, and I may even decide to change that behaviour. This can only be a good thing.
However, if all you have is a vague and general accusation i.e "FOSS is sexist!!" don't be surprised if you get a whole lot of irate denial back at you.
Also if you state "only 1 % of FOSS devs are women, therefore FOSS must be sexist" you are making a logical leap that many of us will not follow.
Thanks.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is that people just being petty or is it that meeting the first 80% of a goal is much easier than the last 20%?
Your brain is not a computer.
It's all about the STATISTICS!
And claiming that a handful of sexist comments proves anything when there are truckloads of non-sexist comments only shows that certain people WANT there to be an issue.
First of all... Shut up! You are a bozo!
Second of all... There's no sexism in FOSS...
Did I cover everything?
A lot of people presume that the term "sexism" refers solely to the intentional denigration and/or repression of women, and using that definition it is easy to see why people fail to identify the sexist elements of FOSS culture and react so vehemently to accusations that it exists and is widespread. It is unlikely that anyone in the FOSS world wants there to be fewer women involved.
What is indisputably the case is that the culture is male-oriented. Whether this is due to explicitly exclusionary practices or more benign gender-oriented predisposition is irrelevant. When 98.5% of the members of a population are male, the atmosphere is inevitably male-centric and therefore, like a locker room, inhospitable to varying degrees to female participants. RMS's speech and the "Perform like a pr0n star" presentation are clear evidence of this. Mean-spirited? Probably not. Inappropriate and potentially offensive in light of current workplace behavioral norms? Definitely. It is difficult (and counterproductive) to argue that these are isolated incidents which do not reflect at least some aspects of the FOSS culture as a whole. These are FOSS leaders that made these presentations - they have to reflect to some degree the mores of the majority of FOSS participants. Therefore while FOSS may not be sexist in the sense defined at the top of this post, it is certainly sexist with regards to its insensitivity to the POV of women involved in the movement. And how could it not be? It is overwhelmingly male.
Rather than attacking the author of the article, who's actual arguments are admittedly weak (asking girls out on dates is totally natural), perhaps the community should solicit the opinions of female FOSS developers and establish a dialogue to find out a) why there are so few women and b) what the FOSS community can do to make the movement more hospitable and enticing to women.
Just the idea that there are some people that use the word homosexual as a form of abuse...
And the fact that the author refers to being called homosexual as a form of abuse without inserting a caveat that he himself did not found it abusive...
Yes, there is sexism. And homophobia, that is for sure. :(
Rather than typing, "Really?" with ever increasing levels of bold and italics, I'll try to address this in a more structured, rational way. Forgive me if this is too long for some, but there were many points made by the article author which need discussion or refutation.
First, and somewhat most importantly, anti-female sexism in FOSS. The entirety of this claim rests on pure statistics: a small percent of FOSS contributors are female, in an unreferenced study, with purported validity due to opinion polls that mirror it's results somewhat. Let's just assume that the statistics are correct, and low. The author references this in a separate article he wrote.
This statistic does not indicate that there are either active or passive pressures on females to avoid this self-declared membership. This statistic does not provide insight to the reason why it is so, or suggest rationale to explain it. By itself, it is a fact and further study would be required to determine the cause. Oddly, I cannot actually find any studies that would suggest that, merely the leap from statistic to unsupported assumption. It seems that this is a perfectly valid, unquestioned mechanism, though I can't see how any individual would rationally support it. Any hypothesizing on my part about what people used to determine sexism from what appears to be a single statistic is therefore pointless - I'd could spend all my time tilting at windmills trying to refute the unvoiced assumption.
Second, much ado has been made about Richard Stallman's recent speech, indicating two separate items;
- First, that Stallman is a representative who embodies as a whole - beliefs, motivation, goals - the entirety of those who declare themselves part of the FOSS community.
- Second, that Stallman is sexist.
Therefore, the claim goes, all of FOSS is sexist.
I'll ignore dealing with the first. Obviously it's a fallacy not worth further consideration. Beyond that the text of his 'sexist' speech was;
"And we also have the cult of the virgin of Emacs. The virgin of Emacs is any female who has not yet learned how to use Emacs. And in the church of Emacs we believe that taking her Emacs virginity away is a blessed act."
I'm not going to simply leave you, the reader, to interpret that as you wish. This is one of Stallman's reoccurring phrases, making a parody comparison of the 'Cult of the Virgin Mary,' to operating Emacs in an intended humorous way. Apparently the gender specific is random, alternating between male, female, and on occasion being left out entirely. His meaning was simply parody. To interpret any other way is to ignore the meaning and the intent and requires a listener to deliberately inject their own personal views and interpretations upon that of the speaker.
As a comparison, consider the phrase, "These are black days indeed." We know the speaker is discussing troubling times: he is not intending to say that people who's skins have a dark pigment are associated with trouble, and therefore it is a racist construct. It takes just such a leap to consider that text sexist.
Next we have a common circular argument construct I see used far too often, by individuals who do not even realize the absurdity of their suggestions. The author indicates that questioning if the problem exists indicates that you are a contributor of the problem. In this, the implicit assumption is made: There is a problem, and to even question it places you in the opposing camp. He even cites correspondence with just such an individual as 'proof' that proves the assumption. We see this quite often with other arguments, but it is exceptionally popular with minority political issues; [you] are guilty of brand-x discrimination. Your denial of your guilt/suggestion that brand-x discrimination does not exist proves that brand-x discrimination exists and that you, being blind to it, are guilty of it.
It is clear this is not a rational argument.
I'll wrap this up with one a few statements regarding the
Well, troll threads do their job well. It's not like generalizations are actually of any worth.
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
If you live in a northeastern state maybe. Go anywhere where religiousness is decently above the average and you will see girls unable to work anywhere out of a dress and men with long hair beaten up. The worst one is discrimination against gays.
I know a guy that is gender confused, bi-sexual with long hair fairly gender neutral and lives in a religious community. Growing up he got beaten regularly by a wide variety of the city, including people stoning him. He had his jaw broken a few times, been shoved down flights of stairs (this is half by adults too not kids) and even stabbed.
Just because you happen to live in a nice part of the country don't think it is the same everywhere. Violent crimes over these things ramps up a lot as soon as you travel into the bible belt. I think defending 'equalists' (I much prefer equalists over feminists) is very important.
http://www.sacredfools.org/crimescene/casefiles/s2/shipoffoolsstory.htm
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.
Stallman and Shuttleworth were both giving keynotes speeches and they are both leaders of the movement. If it was some random guy first posting on slashdot, it wouldn't matter, but if the leaders of a movement are sexist, the movement is sexist.
I was reading these slashdot comments and I wanted examples too. Then I read some examples and now I'm convinced. Look at this Couch DB slideset:
http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2009/04/25/why-rails-is-still-a-ghetto/
(That page has the actual presentation slodes - with porn.)
Now, that is sexist. It really doesn't matter if there are 1000 slidesets without sexism to counter it.
Why do I need to be 'there', in order to name an example of sexism. Doesn't seem to be a requirement.
Why do I fail whenever I (or several others in the thread) try to explain that your defense in numbers of non-sexist posts is irrelevant.
You show all the signs of a troll. /signing out.
It is an awful thing for people to be able to make death threats against anyone without being called on it.
I hereby denounce you as a sexist!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"If men needed a culture of approval and acceptance and someone to remind them whenever possible that they are wanted and welcome"
Isn't that why we have moderation on Slashdot? So that the culture can reward those who conform to it.
He mentions geeks asking peer women out for a date as an example for being sexistic.
The textbook definition of sexism is discrimination on the grounds of gender. So, unless you ask out men as well, technically you are being sexist.
many people seem to be looking for evidence of sexism. this is the foss world, yes? we can look for the evidence in the source code and documentation. a quick grep through the docs folder for me turned up a few uses of exclusive "he" (though far outnumbered by inclusive "he/she" or "he or she") and no uses of exclusive "she," typically referring to the user. of course, you'll have to filter out legitimate uses of exclusive "he" and "she," such as when referring to an actual person (typically a developer), but everyone here should be able to see how latent the issue is (or not) themselves.
How exactly are you shocked when you suffer abuse after labeling an entire community with a pejorative word like "sexist". Also should we really take advice on discrimination from a guy who obviously thinks being called homosexual is abuse.
I can take that challenge because I'm not blinded by ideology as you are.
Read the LKML. There are thousands upon thousands of FOSS development comments there.
So far, the people crying "sexism" have only been able to produce one page with 54 examples of sexist comments.
So, with a single mailing list (out of many) I have demonstrated that fewer than 0.1% of the FOSS development comments are sexist.
Unless you, for some reason, do not believe that the LKML is really about FOSS development. But then, that's your problem.
Is this a troll (along with all the mods) or is the Slashdot community really that blind? What the fuck do you call Slashdot if not a massive male circle-jerk bonding party? In fact, the whole moderation system seems like this overindulgent 'female' system the AC is railing against.
That is absurd. I'm a white male, but I can say I definitely see enough racism or sexism around me to argue it is still something that needs discussion.
The idea that you need to intentionally discriminate to be racist or sexist makes no sense, actually. Modern discrimination usually comes from stereotyping rather than some sort of hatred.
And the answer is, "I'm not." But the problem is the person getting the question has to prove a negative and is simultaneously labeled.
The baseline premise is "Sexism exists in FOSS" and then comes the denials and the denials are variously flamed.
Are there very bad actors in FOSS? Yes. But it's not unique to FOSS or any other social group. Do they need to be admonished and probably 'banished' in some way? Yes. Because the behavior is entirely inappropriate regardless of gender.
If you want to approach issues like this as 'generally innapropriate behavior' I'm on board. If you want to correct someone by telling them, "Don't write X because to my group it means bad thing Y' I'm on board. I'm NOT on board when an article starts with a premise that cannot be altered.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
...extremists. Those who want to drive it further and further, despite having surpassed the healthy balance a long time ago and despite men AND women starting to more and more oppose them.
It's really strange. I myself are from the post-sexism generation. I am so far out of that old twist in mind, that I have problems to even imagine why anyone would add in a sexistic way. I mean, it does not make any sense. And to me it does also not make any sense to beat that dead and long gone horse. The only sexism I ever have seen or heard of, is from two sources:
1. Really really backwards cultures is some very religious areas of the world. (No matter what religion.)
2. Feminazis (no offense, because I've seen them call themselves with names like that) who hate all and everything about men, because they were very mistreated by some male asshole(s).
Whoever thinks that women would be treated bad in IT/FOSS culture, obviously has never seen how one women in a IT team can make all the men there their slaves who want to fulfill her every wish. If anything, then men would love to see more women in their teams.
The problem is, that those feminazis think, that all women *want* to become construction and steel workers, mathematicians, programmers and physicists, etc.
While in reality, nearly all women couldn't care less about those kinds of jobs. Sure there are exceptions, and that's nice. But exceptions prove the rule.
I mean it's as if some extremist men would complain that we want to do more of those jobs that women like to do. But actually we don't.
Both genders have different interests, different talents, different things they love.
But obviously that fact would interfere with their "payback" plan. So they are actually in denial.
The real problem is, that women still form their ideals on the base of male ideals. And see what they actually like as something weak and low. Which is understandable, because many women actually don't want to be strong all the time. They want to have some peace. Who can't comprehend that? Look at what games girls play.
So they like a man who knows what is right and wrong, what is good and bad. It's a wonderful feeling to feel safe in that way.
That means they intuitively buy into that male reality. Including male ideals.
But in reality, nothing of what women like is any "lower" that what we like. Especially when we don't like it.
I guess we should help our wives get some self-esteem for their own values. Then the whole sexism stuff will vanish from the front pages, and only in corner areas will you see the female sexist view or the male sexist view, as a natural part of the Gaussian curve.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I see no reason to meet them with anything other than a yawn. What does he propose to do, get a Federal court order requiring affirmative action?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yes, it's a perfect example of what the OP was talking about.
It's that too many people on open source projects are jerks and all too willing to jump from "your code's stupid" to "you're stupid" all too quickly. Now to allay all of the insecure ones' fears out there, not everyone working on FOSS projects are like this (and I've never been treated that way - I guess my code's OK enough). However, many FOSS project members, being geeks, well... let us simply say that "playing nice with others" has not always been high on their priority list. And it shows. You know, you can be respectful even when telling someone that their code sucks. Do that, and you'll have a lot more people, both men and women, contributing.
That is all.
but for proprietary software, not for FOSS.
FOSS community does not provide legal protection for sexual harassment because in most cases it is a hobby/volunteer work. However, most proprietary software developers are employments, therefore have full legal protection of the labor laws.
In the new age, it is going to be the women feeding the men.
New Economic Perspectives
The boy nerds doth protest too much, methinks.
You make it seem so damn simple, like confidence is the key to everything. That actually works really great when you're working with guys on the more enlightened side of the scale, the respectful team workers everyone wants to work with. The assholes are the problem, 'cause as much as they don't listen to anyone, they'll ignore girls even more so. All the grace and confidence in the world doesn't work all the time, neither does being bitchy. Look, I think handing out special favors to girls based on gender is idiotic and I hate it as much as any guy does. What would be awesome is if guys in tech could treat the girls as they do any guy, but I haven't seen nearly enough of that.
Men already have a culture of approval, as they're never the only guy in the room in science and tech. (The average upper level electrical-engineer course in my school has 3-5 girls for 30 guys.) Guys rarely go into female only fields like nursing or pre-school teaching for the same reasons girls don't do tech, so guys being tougher to social pressures is total bs. Even when guys do take female dominant classes like psychology, they often give macho excuses like they're doing it for the hot chicks.
open source modern art: laser taggi
I'd like to see an analysis of the instances quoted.
I'm going to predict that there will be fewer than 20 different instances quoted ... but those instances will be quoted in 50+ different posts each.
Or, to put it in the mandatory car analogy, Chevy's are unsafe because my friend sent me this link to a page that had a comment about a page that had a video of this crash. (comment repeated 50 times by 50 different people).
CouchDB
.
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
It is interesting to me that Bruce does not engage the criticism in his article other than to showcase it. Instead, it is implicit in his article that the mere fact of there being little recognition of the problem is itself damning evidence that there is a big problem. For all I know there might indeed be a huge problem, but the answer is not to vilify the people who make sexist remarks. This may make them shut up, yes, perhaps even apologize, and it will also make them resent what happened, sowing the seeds of actual resentment of women where nothing like that need have existed.
Bruce says that it is no matter if people intend to be sexist. It is a huge difference, because when you attack people, they come to hate you (Bruce) and the horse you rode in on (women). If someone intends no slight to women, is this really the way to go? I say no. The answer is to friendly (!) and calmly (!) explain to someone why you (!) think that their behavior is a problem. What Bruce could do is to tell them that you are working to get more women into computers, and having the field feel welcoming to them, and that this person can help do that by thinking about whether what they are doing in future will offend women, and that you understand that no offense was intended. See how that will go over better?
Somehow I think the way to get more women into this field is not to attack the men in the field on behalf of those women.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Here's a newsflash for you: there are idiots in the world. Just browse at -1 right here, right now.
What we have here is the classic "mountain out of a molehill" phenomena.
THAT is the real problem. And THAT is why so few examples of sexism can be presented but so many examples of non-sexist comments abound.
Just look at my post and Google for other sterling examples of Feminism and you'll see a LOT of sexism- and claiming it's just a pendulum swing is giving it more credit than it honestly deserves.
Yes, there was sexist stuff in the past. Most men have actually bent over backwards to correct the real problems and many of the perceived problems- only to get more and more accusations and more and more heinous things sought for by the crowd claiming to be "Feminist".
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Instead of being friendly and helpful, spending 30 seconds giving a kind answer to help another, these people instead gladly spend 5 minutes elaborating to another how stupid they are, how wrong they are, how inefficient their idea is, how bad their way of thinking is, how wrong they are for trying to learn things the way they do, how wrong they try to solve problems and solve their task, and, in the end, that they should just "rtfm/google" or similar.
I hang out on a variety of Freenode channels regularly, and I see an incident like that about once every three months. Nowadays, when I see people asking questions that would have yielded a detailed, step by step response if they'd typed it into Google instead of an IRC channel, the experienced people in the channel seem to go to the trouble of answering carefully even when they answer the exact same noob questions several times a day.
And yes, I do tell people to RTFM from time to time, especially when people clearly haven't read it before asking their question. I even tell them where to find the manual, and which section they might want to look in. This is because I personally have better things to do than copy and paste sections of manuals into IRC all day. Of course, if someone has read the manual, I'm very happy to help them in more detail.
I'm getting a definite sensation of, "I got an unhelpful response on an IRC channel once in 1998 and I'm still bitter about it," from you.
Pirate Party UK
Look, it's my way or the highway. That may be elitist. It may be insensitive. It could well be poor management. But there's nothing sexist or discriminatory about it. So get over yourselves.
Sexist and discriminatory are words reserved for folks who because of your gender won't give you a chance to play their way.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
it's funny how defensive guys get when their sexism is pointed out to them.
"Begging the question" -- Have you heard of it? Most rational people get flustered when they are presented with a vociferous but illogical argument.
The real problem with to few women in FOSS is the same as in many other places. Girls are mostly uninterested in computers in general and the inner workings in particular. The solution isnt to fundamentally change the enviroment to be "girly" but to get more women interested in technology in general. If the interest is there things sorts themselves out. I havent ever seen a girl being welcomed with anything but open arms in my line of work (sysadmin). They are judged by their knowledge and ability, nothing more nothing less.
To single out this as a FOSS problem is just insane since the "problem" exists in technology in general and is not confined to open source. The reason i write "problem" is that i dont see any defiances with people doing what interests them the most. Get more women interested and they will be welcomed just like anyone else jumping into FOSS, prove yourself first and then get the respect you deserve. Not the other way round.
HTTP/1.1 400
You're buying into his flawed analogy.
This isn't about one big cake that everyone has to share.
This is about thousands of cakes.
Who cares if some idiot mixes other stuff in his cake? You do NOT have to eat his cake. You have your own cake.
And that is where this discussion has problems. People keep posting about some guy who put feces in HIS cake (but not YOUR cake) and now we all have to agree that there is feces in the cakes.
Now, look at your cake. Is there any feces in it? No? Neither is there in mine. So let's look at what percentage of cakes really have feces before decrying the problem with feces being in OUR cakes.
And when we do that, you realize that there isn't a problem with feces in cakes. There is a problem with a few people and decisions that they make.
And you'll want to avoid dessert with them.
It's funny how people who are allegedly against stereotypes and bigotry have no problem condemning an entire group because of the moronic actions of a small minority.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Some might see it that way. Others, like AC, take advantage of the system by posting as AC when he doesn't feel like conforming. Others, like myself, post their thoughts with no regard to karma. Then, there are the karma whores who have studied what is rewarded on slashdot, and only post comments that are likely to be modded up.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
So called "sexism" in FOSS, etc., is the inevitable self perpetuating result of having mostly guys in a closed environment. When not actively working, guys talk about guy things and if you are a woman, many of the typical guy topics of conversation can make you uncomfortable. On the other hand, if a woman happens to have a thick skin, and can sling it as well as well as take it, they're bound to do quite well, have their contributions recognized, etc.
That's the bottom line. To succeed in FOSS as a woman, you have to have a thick skin, whereas if you are a man, thick skin isn't quite as necessary. Voila, instant gender imbalance.
I have a thick skin, and therefore I succeed. On a purely personal note, I don't have much sympathy for whiny people who can't take it, male or female. Everyone should be less sensitive to personal affronts, regardless of gender.
Friends help you move
Good friends help you move Bodies
Some guys get defensive because they might identify with a group (FOSS) and get labeled sexist (as above) while not exhibiting sexist behaviors. Some people consider this unjust and become offended when unjustly accused of something. Many women feel offended by sexist behaviors, just as some men feel offended by by being accused of being sexist simply by being a male and not because of any actions they have taken.
Allow me to answer your question, with a question.
If only 1.5% of your cake consisted of strawberries .... but fewer than 0.1% of your cake consisted of feces, what is the real problem with your cake?
I hate to tell you this, but there are standards that allow for a certain amount of rat feces in your food. The example I remember the best was for peanut butter, but I also recall such things being discussed for grains and flour. I don't know what the value is but there is an allowed amount.
Also, have you ever thought about what "organic" farmers use for fertilizer...
Your mention of strawberries is interesting as I can recall several incidents of off-season strawberries, shipped from Mexico, being recalled due to the use of human excrement as fertilizer.
So in answer to your question, yes there is an acceptable limit... even for that!
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
Why is feminism on dev teams even an issue? Most of this stuff is done via electronic exchanges where gender, race, or even weight or height issues can only become an issue if someone DECIDES to make it an issue. I've been doing this nonsense two decades now and I have never even considered the gender or race of the person I was communicating with unless that person had already chosen to make known their agenda.
Feminism has a history of being anti-male, and that agenda has had GREAT detrimental influence upon this culture. From child porn laws (go back 15 years and see just how many of the warnings about those laws perverting our culture have come to pass in spades) to the way our boys (and increasingly our girls) are drugged most of the way through school simply because of their otherwise normal juvenile hormonal and brain functions, the feminist agenda has proven itself a menace to whatever society it touches.
I think this almost entirely misses the point. Feminists say that the structure of society and individuals' prejudices make it more difficult for women to succeed in (e.g.) the workplace than men. Your response to that seems to be "Get used to it. You'll get a lot farther by growing a backbone than by bitching." This is only true in the short term, if its true at all. Tomorrow's women will be better off if we, today, address the prejudices than if today's women merely "grow a backbone.
It's also pretty shocking that you think it's mere "bitching" for women to point out and attempt to address the systematic disadvantages that they face in the workplace. Does this mean that women should only "bitch" and not try to work despite their disadvantages? Of course not. But we as a society would never get anywhere if oppressed/disadvantaged groups were expected to just deal with it without protesting the inequality. Would you have said the same thing, "Quit bitching and grow a backbone" to slaves? Where would our society be today if we all thought like you?
This is all to say nothing of your implicit premise that both men and women catch equal amounts of flak for taking up programming, which is, I think, obviously false.
caritj.org
Most people respond poorly when they are insulted with little or no proof, and their objections described as "denial." It is, among other things, condescending.
You sir, are full of it.
but if the leaders of a movement are sexist, the movement is sexist.
Wait, is that how it works? So if the leaders of the movement were homosexual, then the movement would also be homosexual? If they were Latino, then the movement would be Latino? If they preferred green tea, then the movement would prefer green tea? I'm not sure how that makes any sense.
I read what was written, and I was assuming it was a man who wrote it. I thought "what a bunch of bullshit". It turns out that it was a woman who wrote it, and so what was my new thought on the subject (tempered by sexism, of course) ? What a bunch of bullshit. FOSS isn't any different from any other area of life. There are sexists, racists, philanthropists, great guys and gals, and real asshats. To think otherwise is, shall we say, fossist ?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
People are oversensitive to a degree which is nothing short of insane, these days. I remember the unbelievable global flap that occurred in response to a couple of guys painting themselves black on Hey Hey It's Saturday last week.
Then there was a "sex scene," in the pilot of the latest Stargate series, which could not have been less graphic. You literally don't see anything at all, and I mean anything. A woman is looking a little sweaty, is breathing heavily, and has her legs wrapped around a guy's waist. That's it. No breasts, and not even a hint of such. Nothing else either. It also wasn't on the screen for more than probably a minute, tops. I caught myself after I saw it, because I was wondering whether that was what the article I read beforehand was referring to, or whether there was going to be something else. It was literally that tame.
Yet people were talking about how inappropriate it could potentially be, etc etc.
So to any women (and yes, I mean any) who were offended by any of the lame things said by Mark Shuttleworth or RMS, I have a song for you to listen to. I will also laugh with contempt at any response to this from enraged lesbians telling me that I'm obviously yet another pathologically chauvanistic male, so feel free.
If hearing Stallman talk about wanting to deflower female virgins during an Emacs speech, is the most psychologically scarring thing you've had to deal with in life, then all I can say is that you've had it a lot easier than most.
The technology industry, especially the FOSS community possibly because of its skewed younger demographic, is one large fraternity with avert and subtextual sexism at its heart.
One of course could lay the blame on internet anonymity or relegate the problem to just a small minority of actors, but you’d just be lying to yourself and ignoring the utterly pervasive sexist and fraternity like atmosphere that pervades throughout the whole FOSS community and the technology community at large. Code might be judged in open source projects by merit only, but that is as far as the egalitarian spirit goes. Not a single women in the technology industry, is judged by the wider male audience on her merits; instead it is how hot she is, or how she got her job because of her looks, or any other number of sexist judgements.
The problem doesn’t just stop there. It's the disparaging jokes, the sexual innuendo, the frat house culture, all of which we as a community seem to except and adopt as the social norm. It is a larger transgression to disparage some meaningless technology idea or method, than to spout sexist filth.
We have turned our community over to sexist assholes, not by any direct vote or action but by simply excepting herd-like the current social norms of the FOSS community. We really should be ashamed of ourselves.
This smacks of some (not all) women just wanting special perks, attention, and "the rules bend for me" type treatment. Or, could this be a nice little campaign from our friends in Redmond, to distract and delay? Per Occam's Razor, the Redmond angle is the most convincing to me. Fact is, with the nature of FOSS development, evangelism and practical application, you could be a purple alien with two heads and enjoy respect and success. Next topic please!
Congratulations on scratching the surface of a much bigger problem: why aren't there an equal number of women in technology careers as there are men? Typically men are more interested in electromechanical things because it's forced down our throughts from day 1. If you wonder what I'm talking about, when was the last time you saw someone buying their son a doll instead of a toy car? When daughters are born we dress them in pink and give them baby dolls to play with (or similar, I'm speaking generaly). When sons are born we dress them in blue and provide them with trucks and trains. Why? Because these fit our preconcieved images of boys and girls (read: it's not something we do conciously). These actions are also self reinforcing: the more little boys we see with planes and trains, the more we think they need planes and trains. To bring my point home, if you want to see more females in technology (both career and hobby wise) expose them to it as children and provide them with equal opportunities to explore it. My goal: to raise a daughter who's writing Android apps for the elementary school science fair.
I wasn't sure if the OP had a point until I read the thread
As the president of a campus Linux Users Group as well as working at a Fortune 100 for about a year, I've had a bit of experience with computer enthusiasts and their choices as well as the (my) work environment.
Obviously there is an imbalance, and I see a lot of folks saying "OK, whatever", but this is a discussion for people who care about this sort of thing. There are other issues as well, such as, why, in California, there are so few Latinos in either of these situations I'm in?
I'll go on to say that the issue is MUCH worse in the campus organization I've recently taken the reigns on than my workplace. Though, at my workplace I have several female coworkers, very few of these are in positions above standard "Software Engineer". At school though, we have very few girls come around. I think a lot of this could be attributed to the behaviour of the other members of the group. I think it may be more due to the "expected maturity level difference" between the two situations, ie, the relative amount of bullshit a woman would need to put up with in one situation vs. the other.
So, this speaks to me that I need to do what I can to perhaps persuade my members to be more "professional" as this might create a less antagonizing situation. But then I'm in a bit of a catch-22 as I've got more than a few mini-Stallmans in my group who are purposefully "anti-professional", even. Somehow the "hacker ethic" fails to include, even actively excludes women with the sort of behaviour and organizations that it spawns.
I know that bringing in more girls would actually make some of my fellow members uncomfortable. Linux is somewhat of a boys' clubhouse and while I've never seen people here treat women badly, they're not as capable, subconsciously, at making them feel welcome.
I think the behaviour at play in the guys in my group and FOSS is a much lower-level, clan-making, different-people excluding sort of impulse that is totally backwards and unhealthy. The attitude that this "doesnt matter" is one that will only lead to increased marginalization of the community, as well as continuing to exist without some great talent that will lie dormant in the meantime. What a huge boon it might be to open source projects..
I suspect, however, that these projects are happier to be unofficially mens only and will hopefully fade into irrelevance as maybe some of us direct our projects into less exclusive clubs. It's my hope that this is an 'old guard' sort of situation and that some new progressiveness, as it begins to encourage nerdiness in the female also will grow enough to supplant the current status quo.
Though the world and the US and California (Prop 8??????????????????) have continued to surprise me with their ongoing bigotry, so thats probably a pipe dream. Maybe I can at least change my small part of the software world
Long live the BSD license
"...the average men who would like to deny the importance of feminist issues in FOSS."
I'd like to defend the stance of denying the importance of feminist issues in FOSS. My point is very simple: FOSS is about software. What's important is the software. Code talks. Nobody cares if you're young, old, black, white, gay, straight, male, female, transsexual, communist, capitalist, or from the moon, and you're wrong for trying to push any of these issues to the forefront of FOSS politics. Frankly it's not anyone's business what you are; just write the code and put it out there. They won't accept you in their project? Fork it. They won't host your code? Host it yourself. If the code is good, people will use it. Projects that reject significant contributions from some group will not succeed in the end due to the natural flow of the system.
FOSS is not a unilateral organization in which you can dictate policies of nondiscrimination and inclusiveness or preach to people about sociopolitical issues. FOSS itself is inherently inclusive and nondiscriminatory, so what is there to complain about? FOSS is a free society; associate with whom you want or don't want. Think Mark Shuttleworth is a jerkface? Use Fedora.
The biggest threats to equality are the biases that you are unaware that you have.
I'm aware of social boundaries that I do not respect, so I find myself having to consciously avoid doing things like mixing professors with students or jocks with nerds at parties. If I had my druthers, I'd invite everyone, but different social circles do different things, and I don't want to make people uncomfortable. A lot of the time, it comes down to the fact that certain topics of discussion are not compatible with the people who don't have pertinant experiences. Men typically don't want to hear about menstruation, while the topic might come up at a party of all women. Conversely, women don't tend to want to hear about men's jock itch, but it's a common enough occurence among male athletes that the discussion might arise. A lot of nerds don't know much about sports, and a lot of jocks don't know the fine details of compiling Linux kernels, so putting them together might result in people stuggling for things to talk about that interest them all.
All of these things stem from stereotypes. Stereotypes are sometimes completely false, like the depiction of the Irish in the US in the 19th century. But generally, there's some grain of truth, if only resulting from some people's narrow and biased experiences. It's a fact, though, that humans like to create convenient categories and generalize. People have a natural tendency to think "all blacks are..." and "all women are...", because they have observed these things in what they perceive to be a majority of encounters.
I like to think of myself as being above these petty prejudices, but there's a danger in thinking this, because I can miss subtle biases. I grew up in a family that is clearly male-dominated. My father and I both have graduate degrees, while my mother and sister do not. When I was single, I had expressed a desire to find a partner who was my intellectual equal, but my family discouraged me, telling me that I would have a very hard time finding what I was after. Despite their bias, I ended up marrying a woman that I often think of as my intellectual superior. Still, there are a lot of subtle effects that stem from an implicit assumption that men are generally more intelligent than women, things that MUST have affected me in ways that I'm not aware of.
I remember a Star Trek episode where Janice Lester had wanted to become a starship captain (but they were not allowed) switched bodies with Kirk. In the end, Kirk makes some comment about how she could have had as full a life as any woman. Of course, our culture has matured significantly in the last 40 years. But in some ways, many people haven't really been taught that women are equal to men; they've only been trained to parrot a politically correct thing to say. They tell themselves that in the hypothetical a woman can be as capable as a man, but they don't believe it to be very LIKELY. And of course, since no one wants to admit to others or even themselves that they feel this way, what really happens is that they judgement is affected subconsciously in a way that they can't defeat.
Women end up being judged "statistically" (you've never met a woman who was strong in IT, so this one you're interviewing is unlikely to be good). And they're scrutinized more harshly (since you're more ready to accept that a man is smart, you're going to work harder to make damn sure that this woman is as smart, and what really happens is that you make the interview more difficult).
I have biases. Many of those biases are unfair. But the only way I can defeat them is to admit them. Not to others, because it's not PC to ever express bias openly, but to myself so I can explore them and recognize how my thoughts might be unfair if I were to act upon them.
So for instance, when interviewing, to avoid bias, I ask everyone the same questions. But I developed those questions partly by exploring my biases. For isntance, while I may assume that men and women have equal intelligence, I don't
the near-complete elimination of sexism and racism (which has been accomplished)
Let me guess, you're a white male American, aged 15-35?
You have no idea how pervasive sexism and racism still are. You don't consciously experience them, but they are there.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Nothing you haven't told her twice already.
Feminists are people that place women over men (to the point of coming up with silly names for their gender because it has "man" in the proper name for their language, never once considering the etymology...), claiming they seek equal rights for Women. Before you accost me on that assessment, folks, just look at what the luminaries of the Modern Feminist movement have said about things...
Most people, even many who would call themselves "feminists" would be horrified if someone said things like "All men are rapists that's all they are" or things like "As humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy."
However, that's what gets said all the time by people that the Feminist crowd hold near and dear to their hearts. And the parts of that crowd that sees nothing wrong with that sort of statement or conduct along those lines are typically the ones that raise the rallying cry of "sexist" or similar in the public discourse.
"Equalist" I believe in and stand by, as a male- when it makes sense. But only then. Anything else is going off of feelings and not facts. And while I do use my feelings as a guide, I don't let them rule me. Letting your feelings rule you tends to be a symptom of several mental illnesses that're among the more severe ones. Unfortunately, if you believe the figures they throw about these days on those illnesses, at least as many as 1 in 10 are afflicted by them.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I have been abused in every way possible — being called irrelevant, a saboteur, coward, homosexual, and even a betrayer of the community.
...
So... We have an anti-gay bigot calling people sexist?
http://outcampaign.org/
Per Occam's Razor, the Redmond angle is the most convincing to me.
No, that's due to your own paranoia. Claiming that it is anything remotely rational is not true.
Atheists really need to stop lying to themselves. You claim to be so rational and objective, when in reality you're not at all. You're just as irrational, paranoid, and/or emotively hysterical as any of the rest of us; you just redefine what the word "rational," means at your leisure, in order to cover yourselves.
According to Merriam-Webster sexism is either "prejudice or discrimination based on sex" or "behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex"
As far as the first definition, I haven't found anyone that didn't think people of their sex, male or female, wasn't superior to the other sex. I don't think there is much argument that men and women think differently and can't possibly identify with the opposite sex except in some narrow way. If you have learned to function with the abilities that come with your particular gender then your ego, in the healthy, clinical sense, will value those abilities. You can only evaluate life in the terms that you understand and can identify with so the other sex seems inferior just because they are lacking something that you, necessarily, consider valuable.
As far as the second condition, we all cling to stereotypes to help us function. We have to start somewhere in our relationships with others and in the beginning, all we know is probably what they look like and their gender. Based on past relationships we have built up some expectations, good and bad, for each gender and have to act on that until we discover more information. It's just bad luck for the first competent female programmer you meet if you're a guy who has never met a woman who had the slightest interest in programming or was any good at it. That guy might not think it was worth his time to find out if the female was good at programming or not because the odds favor finding a guy that is good at programming.
The whole concept of forcing people not to be sexist, or racist, or communist, or whatever "ist" they are is just not workable. People will change their overt behavior but not their belief. All it means is that people will be forced to lie to you to avoid punishment.
It sometimes takes a long time but people need to work out for themselves that their belief system is wrong and choose to make a change. Also, if people had the maturity and guts to find the community that works for them rather than trying to fight everyone that doesn't see things their way we would have a lot fewer problems. We already have laws against actions that hurt other people. What we don't need are "thought" laws that punish people for bad thinking that hurt feelings. It's time for more people to have some faith that there is a place, somewhere, that works for them. To summarize: STOP WHINING!!!
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
Slashdot is one of the least female-friendly places on the Internet, so this conversation is basically hopeless no matter what. But let me share with you some anti-feminist clichés (courtesy of jezebel.com) so we can at least get them out of the way now.
This post will no doubt get modded down to -1 practically instantaneously. But I don't care, because this is my industry too, and until you all get it, I won't be silent.
It makes me think that the equal employment opportunity laws are likely hampering the US economy by encouraging women to work in fields in which they are not particularly interested or show particular aptitude.
But hey, it's not like rational analysis of statistical facts has anything to do with flag-waving issues such as these, or even the US economy for that matter.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
haha, except it certainly looks like a near-unanimous majority who would rather attack the person who brought the issue up in the first place, insisting that she is incompetent, gay, crazy, and all the other names she correctly predicted she would be called.
i could live a little longer in this prison
You are providing an example of one thing the author talks about:
people who are not consciously sexist themselves tend to be unable to see institutionalized sexism around them
Is it possible to have a sexist environment even when no individual in that environment is the least bit sexist? Yes, it is.
Let's imagine, let's pretend using a deliberately contrived and perhaps almost cartoonish example, that for the moment that there's some biologically-driven difference between men and women in the way they make arguments related to dominance or leadership. That, due to biology, due to evolution, men are more willing to be confrontational when jockeying for management or leadership positions than women are. Let's say that given a particular hostile confrontational result, a man is more likely to intensify competition, and a women is more likely to remove herself from the arena. Now let's say you've got some sort of communication medium that hides gender, and limits social feedback and social cues.
What's going to happen? Who's going to end up in charge? Is the result sexist? Does the answer change even if we know that none of the participating individuals have any sexist thoughts? If the result is sexist, can anything be done about it? (No, saying "well, women just need to man up and deal" will not get you bonus points.)
Now, just imagine that the difference isn't nearly as clear-cut, and isn't even close to universal, and imagine that we do not know if the behavioral difference that allows this to perpetuate comes from biology or is taught by society in some way.
Yeah, it's amazing how defensive people get when their character is being assassinated.
Let me try a parable here.
Suppose you're a nice person, an upstanding member of the community. Maybe you even work in some altruistic job to help at-risk kids learn to read.
Now I come along and accuse you of being a child molester. I then say "and of course every child molester is going to deny it - they don't want to go to jail. And we all know that our society has a problem with child molestation." Yet I offer no evidence of any act committed by you, simply the fact that some people in society, at some points in time, have molested children.
Would you not feel defensive at the accusation? Would you not deny it?
Would you not worry that some people might start to treat you as suspect?
Would you not try to understand why a total stranger would be accusing you of something so horrible?
It seems to me you would do all of these things. It seems to me you would be fairly justified in thinking that your accuser is unhinged or has an agenda.
While accusations of sexism are not as serious as accusations of pedophilia, smears have consequences and people care about their reputation. When others start slinging mud, they're going to get upset.
Why should the "uniform and predictable" response of the unfairly accused be so "astonishing" to you?
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.
You're a moron. About the 2nd week of boot camp, I was taught that "A bitching sailor is a happy sailor". We didn't have any women around - zero. We didn't even have female nurses - the corpsmen were all male. Bitching is a non-gender activity which we all engage in.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Your generalization utterly fails to take into account the fact that there are plenty of whiny douchebag men out there who want nothing but recognition and approval. You also fail to take into account the fact that there are many women out there who are quite capable of standing on their own in the face of adversity. Take medicine, for example. Medical residents are probably one of the most mentally abused groups of people out there. They are frequently disapproved of (and called incompetent, among other things) by their superiors, and somehow a lot of women still make it through and become doctors. In that case, though, the abuse is doled out pretty much equally between the sexes.
I don't find the mere mention of pornography to be sexist -- however, if female developers can't work with a group without being constantly hit on, asked on dates, flirted with, or otherwise weirded out, you can't really expect them to stick around. They're liable to go somewhere where they're treated with equal respect, and I can't blame them.
I took a feminist stance in public
That is probably the problem. Equality should be the aim point, not pursuit of a feminist agenda. Sexism swings both ways, feminism is BAD for women when it degrades into male-bashing and turns people off of the idea of promoting equality.
You defend MikeeUSA's feelings by saying he has come to his extremist views from years of being exposed to extreme views.
So, how come that you cannot come to the same conclusion in reverse? That those women you quote (often out of context) have come to their view from the decades, centuries even millenia of extremist views women have endured?
Extremism grows best when opposed by extremist.
All men are rapist. It was once the law that a woman had to obey her husband without question. Submit to him regardless of her own wishes. How do you define rape else then forcing sex against someones will?
The marriage comment. Since we now regonize the right of a person to refuse sex even within marriage and that a woman is no longer the property of the husband, traditional marriage has indeed been abolished. It has been replaced by an entirely different version with competly different laws, just using the same name. The old was destroyed to make place for a new better more equal version.
To kill an infant. We do this all the time, the west owns it wealth and health to the fact that women no longer drop a new kid every year. It allows for very long, expensive education and a high concentration of best food and medical care, rather then waste it on a dozen kids, most who will die because they do not get the resources they need. Why do you think Africa does so poorly? Everytime they do a bit better, they get an explosion of new people who they can't feed or educate. Birth control IS the answer. Her proposal should be seen as a way to shake things up, overkill to get people thinking about just what it means for a family that has no control over the number of children.
to decontaminate the planet. Again, an extreem suggestion but the counter result of the extreem in which baby girls in china are killed because they are not valued.
We, western white males, all to easily forget just how extreem hatred can get. Watch a holocaust documentary and remember, this ain't all that long ago. Women only got the vote recently, only had the right to own property recently.
While a lot has changed, this has changed because people werewilling to talk extremist. Once, a woman who talked about the right to vote, could go to jail for this terrible crime.
You defend MikeeUSA for his extremist views, but deny the same excuse for the other side.
That is all to common sadly, but to give you a clear example of how one-sided this is. You would send a woman who kicked her rapist to jail for kicking him in the balls afterwards.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A comment that is completely unrelated to gender CANNOT BE SEXIST. It does not in any way, shape, or form "discriminate against or degrade any person based on sex", nor does it show any "prejudice based on sex". Therefore, any rational person can believe that such a comment is NON-SEXIST. Period. It is only a loon that could look at a statement that has no mention of gender of any kind and think "gee, is that statement sexist"? "Is there some hidden sexual connotations that show prejudice or discriminiation"?
Every time a loon makes such a ridiculous statement, they attach themselves to legitimate problems and cause people to think "they're all loonies". Put 83 loonies all out for a good time, drinking and mooning passersby onto a bus headed for a political demonstration, and the public will quite rightfully start to connect "loony" with whatever that political orientation is. In the meantime, every person the loons accuse of being sexist will react, naturally, with denial and ire, because they truly are not sexist and are appalled at being accused of such. The loons, of course, will use this denial as proof.
That's patently baloney. Every person who is intelligent enough to know that sex has nothing to do with FOSS will tend not to NOT post messages to FOSS mailing lists that make gratuitous references to sex, either positive or negative. NON-sexist participants will, by definition, not make many, if any, statements based on sex; it is only those who have some notion that sex is relevant that will comment in such a way. You are, then, by definition, self-selecting the members of your "poll" to have sexist tendencies, and thus dishonestly biasing the results. You will be using one person to prove that the entire movement is sexist, which is pretty clearly what is happening here. Stallman and someone else I've never heard of have made awful comments with the words "girls" in them, thus we are all sexist. I call "bullshit".
#!/usr/bin/env python
acceptable = ("m", "f")
x = None
while x not in acceptable:
x = raw_input("Are you male or female? [%s]? " % ', '.join(acceptable))
if x == 'f':
print "Sorry, you cannot use this program... you're dumb"
exit(1)
# ... rest of program ...
print 'hello world'
Yes, women should be more like men who don't have to deal with sexism. Its their fault they have problems with the rejection that men never face. Why rail against the culture when its so much easier to blame the victims! Not only that, we should accuse women of being bitchy and unable to cope with the stresses men face. +5 Insightful!
Fuck, I feel sorry for your ignorance.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
I can't come out of the woodwork every time FOSS is targeted by trolls, but every once in awhile I have to make an exception. FOSS is like a reverse-idiocracy. Those who are easily swayed by popular opinion will undoubtedly leave FOSS for more PR-competent grounds (Microsoft, etc.). Those of us who evaluate software on it's merits, instead of the failings of the spokespersons for that software, will continue to use FOSS and reap the benefits.
But let's get back to developers. If you are angered by the sexism displayed by certain members of the FOSS community, you will most likely be reluctant to contribute to the projects represented by those individuals. Thus, any public outcry against those individuals should be welcomed, but sadly most of the outcry is Microsoft FUD in disguise, which is not aimed at the individuals, but the FOSS movement as a whole.
I would hope that much of the FOSS community thinking Stallman is on crack by now.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
So if the leaders of the movement were homosexual, then the movement would also be homosexual?
Now you understand why Boy Scouts can't have gay leaders
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Oh please. Stallman is a nut job. Have you met the man? If you don't understand that perpetuating a joke like "The Church of EMACS" means he's completely out of touch and on his own little planet, you have your own problems.
There's bound to be some sexism in Open Source. Just as there is bound to be rascism. Just as there are bound to be mentally unstable people. Blowing any of these out of proportion to push an agenda is dishonest and quite frankly vile as you're basically exploiting the mentally unstable and socially maladjusted.
I have no problem with women in software development, open source or otherwise, and I do feel they deserve to be respected which means making them uncomfortable with sexist jokes and porn references is out. However I do have a problem with some women who call themselves "feminists" who's true agenda is ironically the oppression of men.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's really hard to see the bias against a group in society unless you're a member of it. You're not going to get all the crap that flies at a group unless you're a member of it; the unwanted comments, the insults. This applies to more problems than sexism; racism, discrimination against the poor... you name it. And discriminating against people on the basis of something other than their willingness to work on FOSS stuff *is* a problem for FOSS.
Of course it's easy to say that "none of this is a problem" if you're not a member of a group that gets treated badly by large sections of society.
And being a Republican doesn't count; to most of the outside world American politics look absolutely insane, and people can't tell you're a republican when they see you walking down the street.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
There's only one company that could benefit from this topic, and the predictable outcome of this thread causes no life. I cannot help but wonder how many are laughing at this thread in Redmond, and what other "delightful surprises" they are conjuring up using this thread as a medium for growth.
Racism/Sexism exists in the KKK type, sure, that is easy.
It is a bit different when you are for instance a jew and that has become a curse word. Oh, not openly but near constantly. You can keep quiet, (don't ask, don't tell) which is often then considered a show it ain't a problem at all.
Don't show you are different and you can just ignore it all and be happy.
But it is a very complex subject. We don't want to be an 'ism ourselves. Oh, you use the word gay NOT to describe someone happy or someone who likes members of the same sex, but something that you don't like. But you don't think all homosexuals should be castraded then killed, so you are okay and not a homophobe at all.
The real problem is that we are racist and sexist and it is VERY hard to honestly look at how our own behavior affects someone else.
Even if you attempt to compensate, that often can have a bad effect as well. And in these case death often occurs by a thousand cuts. It is not your slightly condecending remark, it is years and years of it.
And it ain't even always the opposite side who does it. How many comments would you as a guy get from your male friends if you became a nurse? How many comments to do you think a girl gets who goes into IT? Pushed away by one side, pulled by another, it takes a LOT to remain standing.
The real problem, is that it ain't just one problem. There is no easy fix. But that doesn't mean we can sit back and say "oh this is just the way it is".
So, take a long hard look at yourself. Have you ever thought when a woman asked for some help with a computer, "oh, god. no doubt she wanted to install barbie playhouse and put the CD in the wrong side up"? Then you are part of the problem and fixing it... well it is as hard as fixing the notion that men can't change a babies diaper. Harmless? Wait till you are fighting for custody for your kids from your wife who has a history of passing out drunk to the world. Then you will know how deadly sexism can be.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's also pretty shocking that you think it's mere "bitching" for women to point out and attempt to address the systematic disadvantages that they face in the workplace.
My take on the whole thing is that that group is just as biased and exclusionary as people are claiming that us engineers are. So, are you talking about feminists (who just want a fair shake) or the batshit crazy contingent that I ran into?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Wow. Do you really think that is ANYTHING like what women experience? Are you fucking insane?
My wife works in technology. Guess what... she has to play by the rules of the "boys club". It's an unfortunate side effect of how things work. She still enjoys it greatly, and banters with the guys because she just doesn't view herself as a victim of anything.
Ever worked in the nursing industry? Or some other female-dominated industry? It's very different. Men end up letting a lot of shit slide in general that women don't. My point is that shit happens. We don't have a right to not be offended. If it really is a hostile environment, then yes, you should be protected. But your feelings? Cry me a fucking river, learn to deal with the real world where not everyone is entitled to be happy all the time.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I've got a better suggestion for you. Stop calling yourself a feminist. The term itself is sexist. It implies that you are putting women's issues and needs ahead of men's. It also associates you with some extreme man hating and man bashing. Women who truly want equality need to place themselves under a different banner.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
...this is what's left.
http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm
To a couple of the women I've seen replying to this thread, the views expressed in the above link are completely fine, no doubt. Completely acceptable.
That's justice, you see. It's perfectly ok for women to express the sort of sickness in the above link, and yet supposedly, women are more compassionate.
Women can express the above; and yet war is the exclusive domain of men alone. Women aren't capable of hate. They're not capable of savagery. They're not capable of vindictiveness. They're certainly not capable of violence.
That's all just us guys, solely.
Best damn post in the whole thread.
I'm pretty sure it qualifies as a form of logical fallacy, although I can't think of what name it would most properly be known as.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Well, I work in software development, so there's almost no overlap with American culture. A significant percentage of Indian software developers are women, and all young Indian software developers I've asked (a growing sample) have gotten into the profession because "my parents chose it for me". Nothing to do with "geek culture" at all. While it's not close to 50-50 in my workplace yet, it's way past the stage where a female developer would be the only one in the room.
And the assholes don't listen to anyone that's why they're assholes. Learn how to work office politics to your advantage: either everyone else hates the assholes too, and you can bypass them, or recognize the sign that it's time to move to a better workplace.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, I think it should be obvious that I agree that there is a vast difference in degree between the oppression of women and the oppression of slaves. But the GP's logic is equally applicable to both. That was the point.
caritj.org
Why would I be agreeing with batshit crazy people? ;)
But, yes, I take your point. There are crazy feminists. I am intending to agree with the sane ones.
caritj.org
"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."
I think that is a much more likely explanation than attributing the low numbers of woman in foss with sexism. Not so much because of a 1 on 1 interaction where an anti-social male said something inappropriate to a female code contributor, but because a group of anti-social/autistic people are far less likely to form any sort of community.
A group of people working together on something isn't 'community' in its true sense. As foss coding is very much a hobby for most people, I would imagine that a woman would be more interested in participating in a hobby that has a sense of community.
Look at the numbers of women mmorpg players versus the numbers of say.. women counter-strike players. The game with the most community tends to have the most women. The same could be said of the coding game.
Well, if men were equally expected to keep all their men's locker room bullshit out of it, and just "code or don't," then that would be a fair deal. As it stands, women are expected to keep their "political bullshit" out of there while the men don't face any consequences for treating them like shit.
Are you adequate?
So far, so good.
No. I cannot agree with that. Perceptions can be wrong. Perceptions are OFTEN wrong.
And if 90% of the politicians were female, would it still be a "sexist field"?
It seems that you have the two items backwards. A field where the "vast majority" is not sexist is not the same as a "sexist field" where there are a few females.
Follow that with ...
Who is "them" in this case?
I post on /. and I have been called all kinds of names for my opinions. So? That's life on the Internet. You can avoid it or you can recognize that there will always be idiots in the world.
If 9,999 people on a FOSS project are not sexist ... but 1 person is ... how does that 1 person contaminate the other 9,999?
So you say. I disagree. Racism and sexism have been purged from our laws; every corporation has policies against them; and they are unanimously condemned as wrong. Racism and sexism are solely the province of the lunatic fringe... which can NEVER be eliminated.
Give proof that racism is widespread in the US today.
Tomorrow's women will be better off if we, today, address the prejudices than if today's women merely "grow a backbone.
He's saying it's all a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Men get a lot of flak for being geeks and nerds too. It's almost tradition to portray the programming nerd as socially awkward, unkempt, usually fat, sometimes balding, but always physically inferior. Tell me that's not prejudice, that it's not flak.
But men don't really bother to take notice of these things. When we want to do something, we do it. We don't ask for social acceptance. We don't look to our peers and wonder what they'd think of us, whether it's cool or hip or not.
GP is saying, if women held the same attitudes, they'd go much farther in life than if they continue to cling to the idea that a male-dominated society is keeping them down. Because that doesn't exist by and large (sure, there are the outliers, but that's all they are nowadays). The only thing that matters now is money; how much you have, and how much you can make.
And there have been studies concluding that a lack of self confidence directly causes poor performance.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Please remove your identity politics from my software.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
My question is, why is that perceived as a "problem"? Since when was it a natural law for every profession to have the same gender balance as society at large? As long as no one is coercing a person into choosing one path over another, what's the issue?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
F/OSS is the meritocracy par excellence. No diploma is required, your nationality does not matter, your actual name doesn't have to show up, looks do not matter -- hell you don't even have to show your face! --, even mental health does not matter either considering the number of functional autists in computing.
You just have to show your code. A minimal level of English helps but is by no means required.
That's it. There's no peer pressure unless you yourself make it an issue.
Contrast this with what minorities still have to face in the work place in many countries. I'm talking real discrimination, real racism. I've seen it here against Arabs, where very competent people get passed on for jobs where Europeans with the exact same qualifications are given the priority. Women? There isn't any* in computing, and none is being passed for a job. They don't have it hard; they're not even trying! It's a fact!
Which brings me to my point; people who want to find internal (to the F/OSS and tech at large community) causes for the poor number of women will always have to make shit up. They will come up with some inane+insane notion that women are intimidated by the attitude of computer people or some shit. Right. When was the last time you heard of a hazing in IT? Yet that's the kind of shit you used to find in newly feminized professions such as police.
Usually they end up asking that women be treated specially to make it easier for them ... which is utterly and ironically sexist in itself.
--
(*) obviously there are exceptions but the striking thing is how few those exceptions are. I'd wager there are more women truck drivers or other typically male professions than women programmers.
Wait a minute... women's participation in GEEK DATING is over seventeen times lower than it is in regular-men dating... so does that mean that geeks refuse dating women?
okay, that analogy is a bit exaggerated. I think everyone has SOME prejudice - I heard from a psychologist once, that we adapt the prejudices from our parents. I guess smart people are sooner prepared to abandon them and I guess that FOSS programmers don't care much about who wrote the code, they care more about the quality of the code... okay, they'll double-check the code for backdoors if it came from a muslim... or a chinese... or a russian... or an eastern european... or an african... or a frenchman...
well anyways - as someone who tutored some computer-science courses, it is my impression, that most women don't enjoy programming that much... they do what is neccessary to pass the exam, but none of the ones in my classes ever swept the board. Most of them don't seem to have the passion for it, so it makes sense to me, that they don't program on their leisure time...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
it's not like a game where they can take their ball home, and there's no game. You can make your OWN ball... If you can't get into a FOSS project because they object to 'cooties', then think up your OWN project. AND let them in even with THEIR 'cooties'. Heck CLONE their project and run it the way you see fit. Whoever you are.
Tom.
More than anything, work gets in the way of coding fer FOSS. Chick's should dominate the field... oh well, blame the feminists. There would no longer be issue if women just stayed in the home, taking care of the kids and working on that next open source port of mahjong.
You're Welcome....
- Among other incidents, at the school with the largest number of African-American students in the Ivy League, nooses and racial epithets have been anonymously scattered around professors' offices.
- Differential prosecution and punishment of drug offenses and other minor nonviolent offenses (with black men incarcerated at eight times the rate of white men).
- Black Americans were specifically targeted to receive sub-prime loans, even when they could have qualified for prime-rate loans, with a differential result that probably pushed a lot of African American families into losing their homes. (another on higher rates: here.)
- The USAF considers it still necessary to actively recruit minorities into the officer corps, which is over 80% white.
I could go on, but I've done enough research for you so far. Similar results can be found for differential treatment of other minorities, as well as women (who are actually a slim majority, but still the disempowered group).
Note that these are mostly instances of institutionalized racism or sexism -- where there is officially no difference on the law books or in the policies, but organizations still have cultures that privilege whiteness and maleness, and corresponding values and attitudes, above women and people of color. This is the kind of racism and sexism that is alive and well today, but is all the more insidious, because most of us white males are trained not to be even remotely aware of its existence, or (when confronted with it) to brush it off as isolated incidents, a few bad apples, etc. The biggest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist, as they say.
Also, this is all without getting into stereotypical portrayals in the media. For instance, when was the last time you saw a movie with an Asian American hero who didn't either (1) know kung fu or (2) flail helplessly in the clutches of his own geekery? When have you seen an Asian American love interest? (Outside of Harold & Kumar, which was explicitly intended as a corrective to that attitude in media portrayals). Have you ever noticed that if there's a black character in an action movie, he's almost certainly one of the first to die, and nearly guaranteed to be dead by the end? (c.f. Battlestar Galactica, with plenty of other instances easily discoverable). I won't go on, but these sorts of cases have a powerful effect on society's perception of people of color, and on PoC's perceptions of themselves, too.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Anyone and his dog can post anything, anywhere, saying whatever, no matter how offensive.
So you're easily offended? By proxy?
Well I find your generalizations and judgementalism offensive, way more offensive than any retarded sexist joke NOBODY GIVES A FUCK ABOUT
And btw no real example of such outrageously sexist behavior is given, especially not in any kind of statistical significance. That porn-themed presentation? I chuckled at the first few slides, then found it embarassing. But sexist? Give me a fucking break! This is so ridiculous it makes me want to cockpunch someone.
You clearly didn't read TFA. He said some _bad_ things:
"A release is an amazing thing; Im not talking about the happy ending.."
"Your printer, and your moms printer, and your grandmas printer"
"well have less trouble explaining to girls what we actually do"
Do you know who he is?
Among other things he designs (usually very nice) maps for Nexuiz. On European servers his maps have a disclaimer added at the beginning to the effect that he is a fascist douchebag and that his maps may contain offensive material.
I've never witnessed such material in game, but it picked my curiosity and I looked him up; that guy is GONE. Very, very far gone.
In other news I know that really crazy woman, and therefore French women are psychos.
Generalizations ... always wrong.
The third one is bad, yes. I don't understand the female reference in the first one, if there even is one.
The second one is stereotyping, but I've got to ask; if that only mentioned your printer, and your father's printer, and your grandfather's printer...would that then draw fire as well, for only talking about guys' printers? ;)
If it was 'your father's printer...' it'd draw fire for blatantly implying that only men would have printers.
The third one I don't see as being that bad, really. I see it as being less derogatory towards women and more towards geeks. But maybe I'm just trying to explain it to the wrong women...
(I've also not found any context yet)
I really don't believe, a psychological bullying — unless, maybe, done by a well-trained psychologist (such as a professional interrogator) — can have an impact comparable to physical beating. I'm sure it sucks, but it is not anywhere close, if only because in the case of beating the psychological impact is huge too, but it goes on top of the physical pain.
One is called "loser" and other names, is robbed of the lunch money, and then beaten up...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
And female participation in the tech fields rise every year too. Especially when there are financial incentives, which is also the same reason why guys go into nursing and the like. Nursing being a growing field takes away the stigma associated with it. I don't really care what the gender distro is, but I just don't believe the reasoning behind women not going into engineering is 'cause they're not tough enough to stick it out, which is what the parent poster implied.
open source modern art: laser taggi
I think you have a lot to learn about feminism, it seems like you have bought in to the whole FUD against feminists. We all hate zealots they are everywhere, e.g. you can't counter "hey lets not make sexist jokes" with "but they say we are rapist" it's not in the same ballpark. Kom igen läs på.
a>Trashbat dot cock?
b>It's registered in the Cook Islands.
Hmmm, I don't understand why this post was modded Troll. I guess it has to do with it being tossed up by AC, but it doesn't seem particularly inflammatory or abusive. I mean, it's an opinion not based on fact, sure, so maybe an offtopic mod is in order, but troll, really?
Ah well, just another day on slashdot I spose...
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Feminism stands for almost everything good that has happened for equality between the sexes. It's you who decides to interpret it like it's a bad thing, rewriting history.
Note that these are mostly instances of institutionalized racism or sexism
You would have to prove that those examples were intended to discriminate against blacks to claim that they are institutional racism.
Well, there are two ideas on what institutional racism is. One is that any disparity that shouldn't exist and isn't a product of individual racism is a product of institutional racism. The other says that institutional racism is simply a codification of racist views that is then practiced by a group. By the second definition, in your example of subprime loans, you would have to show that Wells Fargo made it a policy to give blacks subprime loans *in order to* screw over blacks, not merely to make a bigger profit themselves.
Maybe you were going for the first definition. I think that definition is worthless because it's merely a way for people to gloss over real problems and blame someone else. Why does group X commit more murders than group Y? Well, I don't know, let's not think about it -- we'll just blame society. It's institutional racism man! The disparity exists and it *shouldn't*! No thanks, too much like religion for me.
And whaddya know, it's "+5 Insightful".
on the internet nobody knows you're a dog.
This myth has been debunked so many times on Slashdot I can't even begin to count the number.
But this search link is suggestive:
site: yro:slashdot.org Internet profiling
It can be almost trivially easy to build a profile - age, sex, sexual preferences, employment, education - based on resources accessible to anyone on the net.
When a woman does it, it is bitching. When a man does it, it is being assertive.
Anarchists never rule
I went back and read the article and it' s predecessor, and indeed thought the faq he pointed to was interesting but . . .I think I have a certain degree of issue with the underlying assumption that the lack of a reasonable distribution implies sexism.
1.5% *is* disturbing if it is the result of sexism. But . . .
I don't have the records of what truly sexist percentages were in various industries - but my vague anecdotal recollections were that they were as low as 10% et al in the 80's
1.5% seems to me to be *too* strong a bias to be explained primarily by sexism. It may be a contributing factor, but without knowing what it's contributing to, it does very little good to be concerned about any sexism because trying to measure that effect without a proper understanding of the underlying primary effect may be like trying to measure which leg of a table is off in the midst of a magnitude 6 earthquake.
There may be a number of explanations, ranging from it turning out that *yes* only a certain type of woman is being taught the secret handshake, to it simply turning out that working on code for no pay isn't something women like to do. But the article seems to be begging the question by asserting only one explanation without any definitive support for it.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
There are certainly parts of this that I agree with. It's true that men are discouraged (at least in some ways) from becoming programmers. And, certainly, more self confidence helps one succeed.
But when you say that sex discrimination (and other social factors) are not to blame and pin the responsibility solely on women's emotional frailty is where we part ways pretty drastically. This is a very widespread attitude that is itself a hinderence to greater equality between men and women in our society.
Plenty of other commenters here have dug up instances of offensive conduct in the FOSS community and I don't think I need to repeat what they've said. And the response generally seems to have been much like yours: "it's just at the fringes." Maybe that's so, but imagine you're a women who is actually trying to be taken seriously by the community. Even if this is only fringe conduct, it's fringe conduct that women are systematically exposed to and that reinforces messages that they have likely been resisting their whole lives: that women aren't meant to be professionals, that women exist to please men, that women aren't to be taken seriously.
Can a strong woman resist these messages? Of course. Would it be a good thing if every woman were this strong? Certainly. But the fact remains that this is a hurdle that does not exist for men. If we want women to be able to contribute equally, we should all be fighting these attitudes and not making apologies for them.
caritj.org
Exactly. ...or protesting, or being an activist, or sticking up for himself, or taking a stand...
caritj.org
Speaking as a male nursing student, a good deal of that is due to the encouragement of a culture of acceptance, with posters recruiting nurses showing males and that sort of shit. Despite all that, its an uphill battle and I often do get shit on for my choice to pursue nursing.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
She still enjoys it greatly, and banters with the guys because she just doesn't view herself as a victim of anything.
Well that's great, and I'm happy for her. But you might want to think about all the other women who you are asking to bend their views of what it means to be respected in the workplace to conform with the frat boy behavior of what you call the "boys club." Maybe instead of focusing the debete on how women can learn to live with men's misbehavior, our efforts would be better spent telling the men responsible for this to not be such infants.
caritj.org
India certainly has its own culture differences with regard to the tech field(caste being one). While F/OSS is global, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying I know enough about India's culture, and its repercussions in relation to the tech field, to know I don't know enough to talk about it without talking out of my ass.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
Again, if politics was dominated (90%) by women, how could it be "sexist" (and I'm not talking about sexist against males)?
And that is the core problem.
There will ALWAYS be someone who is "sensitive" enough to be offended by SOMETHING. Why should that person be the determining factor for discussions?
And because we are talking about the sexist behaviour of males, that is socially acceptable.
But if you were talking about your perceptions of the criminal behaviour of black men based upon your observation of one incident regarding one black man ... that would NOT be socially acceptable. You would be ostracized for your "racism".
Even though, in both cases we are discussing your perceptions about a group based upon observed behaviour of a tiny segment of that group.
And THAT is why I will always prefer statistics over perceptions/opinions.
No. In the identified instances, the behaviour was clearly identified as sexist.
The difference is the opinion on whether the behaviour of those people contaminate me.
Like I keep saying. Read this forum at -1. You'll see all kinds of offensive comments. You'll also see that they're mod'ed down. Now just because I post on these forums does NOT mean that I share the opinions of the people who posted those comments. Nor am I responsible for their existence.
And I'm going to bet that you were not personally present when any of those comments were made.
Read the comments. No one is saying that those comments were NOT sexist. Almost everyone is saying that they WERE sexist.
So that part of your complaint is invalidated. The sexist nature of those comments has been acknowledged.
The point being that those comments are extremely rare.
Which is why those same comments are brought up again and again and again.
And again, read the comments. Those FEW instances have been identified as sexist by most people on this forum.
You can continue to focus on them or you can move on. But your complaint that they have not been acknowledged as sexist is invalid.
Let me clarify with what I think you're trying to say, excuse me if I take liberties. Pretty much, it isn't about the people or groups of people. Its about our moral obligation to fight sexism, as well as being in our economic interest.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
But men don't really bother to take notice of these things. When we want to do something, we do it. We don't ask for social acceptance. We don't look to our peers and wonder what they'd think of us, whether it's cool or hip or not.
Yes, you do. Everyone does, years of psychological and sociological study show this. It is a prime reason why we're even able to form society. There are outliers of course, and people don't always follow groupthink. But you are seriously deluded if you think that you don't have a deep seated need for some type of social acceptance.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
How can you be a feminist that is against sexism? That doesn't make any sense. Sexism is an ideology that favors one sex in over another. Feminism is an ideology that places a specific sex (female) over another; it is a word for a specific mode of sexism.
This whole topic is ridiculous. I'm reminded of the racism that some people call 'reverse racsim' (lol, as if it is any different) where blacks label themselves (or cars, etc) "Black Pride", latinos "Latin Pride" and natives "Native/Indian Pride". It is silly to think that a minority, subject to racial oppression from a majority, would serve to promote equality by embracing racism. All this really does is give oppressive racist majorities more reason to maintain racist beliefs.
If we stop acknowledging irrational differences of sex and race, we may *actually* begin to achieve equality. I find it funny that my race and sex actually matter when applying for schools and jobs in a country that is supposed to embrace equality. What does inequal treatment based on race do to achieve equality? Nothing; it takes us away from equality.
"A bitching sailor is a happy sailor"
Is that bitching as in complaining, or as in "That's a bitchin' ride, bro."?
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I know! All this 'black pride' and prevalence of organizaions that specifically serve to benefit those of specific races (like the NAACP) are maintaining racial preference (racism) like crazy!
The day we stop acknowledging race and sex is the day we will find equality. Feminism is sexism that favors women; and so it is sexism just like chauvenism is and does NOTHING to promote equality.
As I said there are exceptions. Very rare ones.
And you might just find more women in developing countries, because I believe that given a number of career choice, women don't choose IT.
There's definitely some interplay between caste and the Indian software developement culture - it occasionally makes for office politics that are completely opaque to me! But being a software developer in India today is socially much like being a doctor was in America 30+ years ago - a ticket to the upper middle class, but an extremely competitive environment as a result.
While there is still some genuine sexism (I've had to deal with it indirectly), it's counter-institutional. That is to say: people sometimes come in with an attitude of not wanting to work for a woman, or not taking female co-workers seriously, but companies agressively stop such BS (well, at least the companies I've worked for, I can't speak beyond that). And a much healthier percentage of Indian programmers are female, compared to American-born programmers (of course, my sample size for the latter over the past 5 years is vanishingly small), maybe 20%, and seemingly growing over time.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Realize that women have a very different social dynamic than men do. Hell, just read this. Choice quote:
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the women are feeling victimized, and reading a hell of a lot more into it than was actually intended, and that is at least partially their problem to deal with if they're going to work with a lot of men?
What you're asking is for all men in a given field to change the way they think and behave because some women feel uncomfortable. Excuse me, but fuck you. I, and every man I know, try by and large to be decent people. Unfortunately, there is culture clash. The only way through that is to have BOTH SIDES compromise a bit. Getting pissy about every perceived slight is NOT a good way to win friends. Being a frat-boy isn't, either. But I see a hell of a lot more victims feeling entitled to be "treated with respect" due to someone not living up to their expectations than I do 'Bluto' Blutarsky's just being misogynist assholes.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Make sure you promote the best and demote or keep static the rest.
Don't look at race, gender, creed, etc. just make sure that your system is fair.
That way, the competent rise, and you don't promote those who are incompetent AND ALSO from a protected group.
You both avoid discrimination, and anti-discrimination that ends up being revenge against the majority.
Futurist Traditionalism
I'm not sure if I agree with your formulation or not, but you're right that I could use to phrase my view more clearly, so here's a stab:
I take it as a premise that there is a pattern of offensive conduct towards women in the FOSS community (or the workplace, etc.).
But this is unacceptable for at least two reasons (and I think they're the ones you've picked out). An economic reason: it's good for everyone economically if women are able to participate more fully. And a moral reason: it's wrong to force women to choose between being routinely offended and working (this point has more force if we're talking about a conventional workplace than if we're talking about the FOSS community).
This being the case, something has to give. Either men need to stop behaving offensively, or women need to stop being so easily offended.
I'm finding that the latter is a popular suggestion here on /. and I wonder why that is. It seems to me that it's more reasonable to ask the people being immature to cut it out than to ask women to suck it up. (Again, for a few reasons: assignment of responsibility to track moral fault and assignment responsibility to the cheapest cost avoider come to mind)
I also think a lot of people are taken in by a false dichotomy here. Women can (and should) do both; they can do their best to function in our society as it is while challenging its inequities.
caritj.org
Angels on a pin (of indeterminate gender OF COURSE).
Of course - angels are androgynes since they don't reproduce, right?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Over 690 comments at time of writing. Yet the dire state of SSL gets about 200 comments. Are there any geeks left on this site ? Who gives a flying oriental fuck about "the state of sexism in the united states" or even elsewhere. I have no problem with women, most people I know have no problem with women. People are people. So explain the fuss ? Somebody needs a platform ? Don't waste my time !
Well, here is something we can agree on: a minority of men are responsible for most of the genuinely offensive conduct of men, and there is a minority of women who demand more deference to their sensibilities than they are owed. We can probably both agree that those groups people need to alter their behavior/expectations. Fair?
The tricky part is dealing with the situations in the middle where both the men and women are behaving like reasonable men and reasonable women. But, nonetheless, the women are offended by the men.
We have a choice here: we can tell the men to behave themselves, or we can tell the women to suck it up. I'm honestly floored by the fact that there is any question of which way to go in this case.
You seem to think that the question is resolved by pointing out that nobody is forcing the women to participate. And there's something to this. And if we were talking about something like a private club then I think you would absolutely be right. But there are real external social reasons for a woman to get involved with a FOSS project (like employment obligations, wanting to hone her skills, giving back to a project); it's not just that women want to get involved. So the question as I see it is this: is it fair to make women choose between being offended and furthering their career/improving their skills/ etc. when the ONLY cost of avoiding the dilemma is to ask men to behave like gentlemen.
(Btw, I'm a man. Not sure if that was clear.)
caritj.org
Mark didn't say the equivalent of Nigger. He didn't say, "When I want to talk to B*tches" or "When I want to talk to C*nts".
He said, "When I want to talk to girls". Why is girls offensive? Women call women girls all the time. "You go girl", "girl's night out", "my girlfriends". Similarly men are called boys all the time. "boys will be boys", "let's hear it for the boy", "boy's night out", "her boyfriend". It's a term of endearment. Of course, he could have just fully qualified every word and said "When I wish to speak to women whom I'm attracted and wish to know better, most of these women of whom I'm attracted because I'm heterosexual -- not that there is anything wrong with being gay -- are not in technology and thus could not be expected to know anything about compiling kernels, coding in Python, and all the billions of details in packaging an operating system. So I have a hard time explaining the intricate detail of my work."
He'd have to increase the length of his talk by an order of magnitude, however and the audience would be asleep through a death by qualification. People don't talk this way for a reason. Colloquialisms exist. Deal with it.
Let me guess, you're a white male American, aged 15-35?
You have no idea how pervasive sexism and racism still are. You don't consciously experience them, but they are there.
You can't blame us. Nobody ever tells us that the US is still racist and sexist. Folks think it was all fixed in the 60s, but it takes generations to wipe those memes out.
I wish we could get past the denial and anger phase, and skip straight to the "reverse racism" complaints.
It's also pretty shocking that you think it's mere "bitching" for women to point out and attempt to address the systematic disadvantages that they face in the workplace. Does this mean that women should only "bitch" and not try to work despite their disadvantages? Of course not. But we as a society would never get anywhere if oppressed/disadvantaged groups were expected to just deal with it without protesting the inequality. Would you have said the same thing, "Quit bitching and grow a backbone" to slaves? Where would our society be today if we all thought like you?
Did you seriously just equate women in the workplace to slaves? Really? And as for women being disadvantaged, please provide examples. If anything, I've seen incompetent women in IT last much longer than competent men. But, that's all anecdotal, I'm sure you can bring some back at me, too. What I and many other men on this forum are basically saying is that we don't normally see these differences.
This is all to say nothing of your implicit premise that both men and women catch equal amounts of flak for taking up programming, which is, I think, obviously false.
We all take flak for being geeks. I would love to see more women in IT. I'd like to see more viewpoints and maybe just to be around more women in this field(I know, you probably consider that sexist). Of all the women I've met in IT, only one was truly worth her salt.
I'm on the fence about this discussion, but I wish people would use a bit less hyperbole.
Bullish Machine Tzar
To all slashdot (male) commenters, I suggest they do a little experiment. Create a new (female) online identity, clearly female by the mail address and displayed name. Then start contributing to a project, or start discussing in a forum. Try to see the differences in how are you treated.
I suspect there are lots of women using male nicknames or neutral emails for this reason.
Did you seriously just equate women in the workplace to slaves?
No, in fact I didn't. What I said was that the GP's argument would have worked just as well as a defense of slavery. Of course I agree that slavery is much worse than the situation of women today. There's no comparison.
As for the evidence of discrimination, I'll leave you to look at some of the other posts for that but, there are quite a few. But you're exactly right that there isn't much we can accomplish by trading anecdotes, so all I'll say is this: it's important to remember that it doesn't take repeated, egregious cases of sexism to make a community hostile to women. A vocal fringe is all it takes.
Of course I agree that most men in these communities are not sexist (at least not noticeably so). The problem, as I see it, is that there is a vocal, immature minority of FOSS men who are always making sexist jokes, talking about porn, and asking women out on dates on message boards when they try to make serious contributions. This is a problem, and its a shame so many here on /. want to respond by asking women to grow a backbone instead of asking that men not beheve like middle schoolers.
caritj.org
As I'm sure you've figured out, if you're in such an environment, the only way to deal with this is to realize that the people who will legitimately give you shit (as opposed to teasing you in a friendly manner) are people who just aren't worth caring about. I mean, yes. There are assholes in the world. You may have no choice but to work for/with some of these losers, but they're obviously losers, and so their opinions have no value. You can't let your sense of self-worth be tied to the opinion of people who are themselves worthless.
If I understand this correctly, the only thing you could possibly believe is what you've witnessed yourself. In other words, you believe that your own personal anecdotes are data.
Even if the seemingly off the hip percent of one tenth is an accurate measure, one would have to read it in context of other off-topic conversations, as I'm sure degrading a sex or gender is not project related. How often does a conversation include political references? Attacks on unrelated attributes? I don't frequently participate in these discussions, but I'm guessing it might contribute to a tenth of conversation (hopefully a very liberal estimate). So, that only moves the trivially small to 1 in 100. But now consider authorship. Is it the case where one or two guys saying a sexist thing with some frequency is polluting our imaginary stat up to .1%, or is the case most guys inject random sexism without being particularly aware of it? The later would indicate a culture unaware of the oppression it perpetuates. This is the concern of the article's author. And, if it is the case, it would obviously implicate more community members. As such, the frequency of the comments is irrelevant as long as a significant number of the guys communicating have at least one sexist exchange without, as has been emphasized, regret or apology. That is, one sexist post without apology from a significant number is enough to build a hostile environment. In this way, whether it is .1% or 10% of the conversation, a large percent of those communicating have reviled themselves to be in line with the hegemonic discourse of western sexism.
Also, juxtaposing this .1% to the very small number of women is a confusing argument against the problem of sexism in FOSS communities. Would one not infer that if there were more women the .1% sexist comments would be higher. And, is the low number of women participants not evidence that the community is in some way hostile to their participation?
- The USAF considers it still necessary [74.125.93.132] to actively recruit minorities into the officer corps, which is over 80% white.
So what? An officer corp that's 80% white in a country that's 75% white doesn't bother me.
For instance, when was the last time you saw a movie with an Asian American hero who didn't either (1) know kung fu or (2) flail helplessly in the clutches of his own geekery?
Harold and Kumar comes to mind. Also, king of the hill.
When have you seen an Asian American love interest?
Why specifically Asian American? Lots of Asian women are a love interest, and Jackie Chan (not asian american) has been a love interest in a lot of his movies. The only thing that bugs me is all the asian people who end up playing Japanese characters - sort of an 'all look alike' thing combined with Japan's jackassery in the region makes me view it as insulting.
Have you ever noticed that if there's a black character in an action movie, he's almost certainly one of the first to die, and nearly guaranteed to be dead by the end?
See Denzel Washington for counterexamples.
I won't go on, but these sorts of cases have a powerful effect on society's perception of people of color, and on PoC's perceptions of themselves, too.
You mean Black people, right? You know what else influences black people's perception? The idea that studying hard and doing well in school is selling out and that the only/best way out of the projects is dealing drugs. The bling culture that rap popularizes can't be good either.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
My jaw is hitting the floor. After admitting that society puts roadblocks in the way of women succeeding as FOSS coders, your answer is that "women have to overcome that"? Why don't we, you know, fix society? We could start with you not putting the onus on women, for one thing.
You defend MikeeUSA's feelings by saying he has come to his extremist views from years of being exposed to extreme views.
So, how come that you cannot come to the same conclusion in reverse? That those women you quote (often out of context) have come to their view from the decades, centuries even millenia of extremist views women have endured?
I find it reasonable to conclude that that is the case for some of them. I also think it's irrelevant and does not at all justify hurtful speech targeted at a gender group... but then again, I wouldn't defend MikeUSA.
All men are rapist. It was once the law that a woman had to obey her husband without question. Submit to him regardless of her own wishes. How do you define rape else then forcing sex against someones will?
So all men did that? That's a fairly bold statement to make. I don't think it's reasonable to infer from a sexist law that all men forced their wives to have sex with them against their will. Besides, the statement was present tense. I am not a rapist. I am a man. Therefore, not all men are rapists. Now that we have established the statement's falsehood (that was easy), can we agree that calling a man a rapist is offensive and hurtful? And can we then agree that it is sexist to direct offensive and hurtful speech at a person based purely on that person's gender? I'm not sure why you're defending this comment...
The marriage comment. Since we now regonize the right of a person to refuse sex even within marriage and that a woman is no longer the property of the husband, traditional marriage has indeed been abolished. It has been replaced by an entirely different version with competly different laws, just using the same name. The old was destroyed to make place for a new better more equal version.
I admit to some ignorance here, but I somehow doubt that Sheila Cronin (whoever that is) made that comment back when women were legally considered the property of men. I doubt, in those days, that an organization like NOW would have been permitted to exist. So, consequently, I find it hard to believe that she was talking about anything other than the present incarnation of marriage. Not that I'm a big fan of marriage anyway, but some people like it, and I'm fairly sure it's fully opt-in.
To kill an infant. We do this all the time, the west owns it wealth and health to the fact that women no longer drop a new kid every year. It allows for very long, expensive education and a high concentration of best food and medical care, rather then waste it on a dozen kids, most who will die because they do not get the resources they need. Why do you think Africa does so poorly? Everytime they do a bit better, they get an explosion of new people who they can't feed or educate. Birth control IS the answer. Her proposal should be seen as a way to shake things up, overkill to get people thinking about just what it means for a family that has no control over the number of children.
My gosh that is a bold statement.... to put the entire success of the modern developed world squarely on the shoulders of contraception and abortion... Forget about evolution of political and economic thought. Forget about rule of law and civilizations founded on the principles of human rights. Apparently we owe our success to contraception. Hey, I won't even deny that it has helped, but come on...
to decontaminate the planet. Again, an extreem suggestion but the counter result of the extreem in which baby girls in china are killed because they are not valued.
Wait, aren't you just trying to distract us now? Formally, I guess that'd be tu quoque fallacy or something similar, but it basically just amounts to "Hmmm... yeah, that does sound bad.... but look at this, which is also bad" What's your point exactly? It doesn't make what she said *less* bad....
... is just a coincidence, I'm sure.
Right. Society steers women into relatively low-paying jobs, and men into relatively high paying jobs. No problem, right?
And women bear the children == sexism? Call me when you're serious. Women bearing children is biology. Women not being in science & engineering is because they're encouraged not to be.
....fewer than 0.1% of comments on development mailing lists are sexist ... what is the real "problem" that exists?
99.9% uptime isn't exactly a standard bearer for reliability in IT. 1 out of 1,000 comments are sexist? A dev list is about software development, right? Ostensibly the number should be near zero when excluding spam, etc. How many comments are on a dev lists per day? If it is 1000 per day, that would be one sexist remark every day.
Suppose the average person speaks 1,000 words in a day. If "only" one of those words is sexist -- is that not a "real problem"?
The whole denial issue about sexism/racism/etc is really quite simple. Institutions that believe they are magically immune from a cultural and society construct that is very old and ingrained are, as a matter of fact, in denial. The very nature of these ails is that only with concerted efforts against them is it possible to effectively mitigate their influence. FOSS has been conceited by the anonymity of the internet and lulled to believe that this has inoculated the community for society's ills. It is about time this discussion gets started in a serious way -- the road is long ahead.
I think yours is a really useful comment here, and I will try to build upon it.
Complaints about sexism tend to come down to a few components that you've identified here:
This comment and this one are perfect examples of the first point, where the posters completely fail to understand how women usually perceive being asked out by men. There are a few excellent responses here, here, here and here, which try to help the original poster put himself in the woman's shoes and understand how he would be seen if he were to make an advance on the woman without an appropriate context. He'd be one of dozens of men who signal an interest on nothing more than the fact that she's got breasts and a vagina, a good proportion of which are pushy and aggressive when they are turned down.
Now, this really just ought to be common sense, but if you want to have a productive interaction with somebody else you have to understand their point of view and accommodate it. That means that you're not supposed have things go exclusively your way at the expense of the other; you're supposed help the other person to get what they want in exchange for you getting what you want. Failure to abide by this norm gets you called names like "asshole."
It also just ought to be common sense that if you say something that offends somebody else and they complain about it, well, you might have failed to understand that person's point of view, and that you ought to at the very least demonstrate some effort to understand why they were offended. Of course that only goes so far (some people truly do take offense too easily), and you may judge that you don't have anything to apologize for, but you ought to at least act like you care about how other people think, and that you're not entitled to offend others. Hell, by effectively and sympathetically summarizing why the other person felt offended at what you did or said, you actually gain face among people who are not assholes. You come across somebody who's interested in taking responsibility for the effects of their actions even when some of those effects are unintended. People who are genuinely and justifiably offended tend to be satisfied when you act this way; people who are unjustifiably offended don't, but they tend to end up looking worse.
Again, all of this ought to just be common sense, part of the unwritten "How not to be an Asshole" manual. But the problem is that men are brought up to regularly be assholes to women, pure and simple, while women are brought up to allow men to get away with it. That is what institution
Are you adequate?
Yes, you can nutpick feminist comments all you want - for each one of these, you could dig up about a million ant-feminist nutjob comments (and no, I'm not going to bother to do so). But regardless of all that, the fact is that women are seriously discriminated against in the world of science and technology - the 1.5% figure ought to be somewhat convincing.
I seriously can't believe I'm even reading a defense of comments like those made by "mikeeUSA".
Folk wisdom wise, you're right. But in a broader sense, you can't really ignore social pressures. You can pretend to ignore them, but you're doing yourself a disservice if you think you're not affected by them.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
It doesn't take very many posts that imply "girls aren't welcome here" before girls take the point that they're not welcome here.
How do you know that a man would not let the unpopularity of his choice or what some online asshats say dissuade him from doing what he wanted? If men really had that much backbone, male nurses wouldn't be so uncommon.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
Your argument has already been rather devastatingly refuted above (see harlows_monkeys post on how many nigger/kike/etc posts are acceptable, given that most developers are white). Obviously, most posts in a technical forum are going to be technical. But it only takes a few posts that denigrate women to make women conclude that they're not welcome.
... when it's not targeted at you. You're very fond of throwing around the "tiny percentage" idea. Here's another one for you: only a tiny percentage of blacks were lynched following the civil war. So the rest should have just "manned up", right? The truth: it doesn't take very many instances of discrimination to intimidate an entire group.
Those who continue to say "we're not sexists! Everything's fine, dammit!" need to come up with some explanation as to why female participation in FOSS is so low. Unless, of course, they just don't give a damn... which is instructive in itself.
Ok, then tell me. If there's "no sexism", then why is it that there are practically no women involved in FOSS? Especially given that female participation in commercial software development is relatively high.
Right. Because trying not to offend people is a horrible crime that ought to be stamped out. I think you need to wake up, lady. I'm in the tech business too, and I see women getting condescended to about 10x as often as I see political correctness being a problem. And I'm a man.
Over 50% of the population is female. Something like 20% of all coders (including commercial software) are female. But only 1.5% of FOSS coders are female. Why is that? Can't be that there aren't enough women (the over 50% part). Can't be that women are inherently bad coders (lots in the commercial software world).
(slaps forehead) Now I get it... you just don't know what sexism IS. I've got news for you, partner - "putting porn in the powerpoint" IS "sexism the act". By definition. It's, you know, in the law and everything. Haven't you ever worked for a company? If so, better pay more attention during the "respect for others" training.
I would argue that the Wells Fargo thing is a third thing -- it's taking advantage of the socially underprivileged position of a group (black people who should qualify for prime loans but don't have access to enough information or market options in lenders to know that) in order to make a profit.
That's not twirling their moustaches and hoping to screw over black people; it's just taking advantage of a racially biased system.
People need to let go of the idea that racism has to be obviously self-interested or malicious in order to exist. The thing with institutional racism is that it exists without anybody needing to have consciously discriminatory attitudes at all. That's more like belief in quantum physics than in religion. I mean, the disparity does exist; let's look for an explanation for it. Just shrugging your shoulders and accepting it, that would be the "faith-based" (or intellectually uncurious) response.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
XKCD nailed, see also: http://truemeaningoflife.com/oldwisdom.php?topid=3184&responses=2
Sexism is something we shouldn't put up with and I lump it right along with M$ FUD, and the ever increasing FOSS FUD that I'm seeing. Call it out, you might not get the outcome you desire, especially concerning FOSS FUD, people just don't recognize it, kinda like sexism.
You are not an equalist, you are a bullshitter who bases his theories on strawmen and presents fictional characters and psychos as the examples of true feminism.
And yet you just did, funny that.
Maybe have a look at this: FDA Food Defect Levels Handbook. For instance, strawberries are allowed to be up to 45% moldy. Wheat flour is A-OK as long as it averages less than 75 insect fragments per 50 grams. Cocoa beans can contain 10mg of mammal feces per pound. The point is, perfection is not possible. The existence of some sexist comments among billions of internet postings doesn't justify condemning the entire community. I'll fully support you in condemning individuals for their own behaviors. However, I think most of us have realized that arguing with internet trolls is futile. So if some jackass statement in a forum isn't followed up with righteous indignation, don't assume everyone else agrees with them.
The sexist environment is not keeping women out. It is driving them away.
Find a female friend involved with computers and ask them what they think.
I know many female systems administrators that have left the field. And in talking to them the common theme is that they get tired of the macho environment.
To flip the coin how would you as guy feel about working in an environment where:
1) The after hours activities were knitting and quilting and if you missed these activities you were likely to miss important discussions about work.
2) The casual discussion was about how rude men were and their social blunders.
3) Where a casual off color comment was met with a: "tisk, tisk, tisk, we all know how immature men are"
4) Where you were judged by how neat and tidy your desk was: "you know Joe, if you put your papers away it would be so much nicer"
5) Where you were reminded of what a terrible date you would make.
6) You would overhear comments about what a slob you were every time your shirt came un-tucked.
I know that I would leave fairly quickly. I suspect that this is what sexism feels like.
Now these are not the same activities as male sexism but they relate:
1) Lets go the strip club when we get off
2) Comparing the looks, tits, legs of co-workers, girlfriends, stars
3) Casual sexual comments or slang that is sexual in nature
4) When someone talks about how hard something was to do or was a last minute rush being told that "real coders work best in all nighters".
5) Hitting on a coworker
6) Whistles, rude comments, nudges and winks.
It is not that we men are actively turning women away. We create an environment that is not pleasant for women to be around. They get tired of it and they leave. The split is made and we loose something.
We know men are men and we are big and tough. But... It is kind of a drag to work in a department of 5 men in a company with less than 10% women. But hey it is a social gaming site and that is a real sexist environment.
RLH
PS, I will be the first to admit that my female examples are sexist. A woman would have better examples.
If you want your cause to be taken seriously, focus on serious issues. Complaining because people use the phrase "So simple your grandmother could do it" is liable to make people roll their eyes and ignore everything else you have to say.
My dad says I was the only 14 year old girl he'd ever met to ask for a power drill for Christmas.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
... almost 50% of potential contributors - assuming there are approximately as many men as women in the world. That's what the 98% vs 2% tells me.
Maybe we could focus on that part and get some work done ?
What the fuck. You caught the insanity of the GP in the first paragraph, and then commit the very same error in the next paragraph by bringing up religion like it had anything to do with what he said.
I can only assume you believe that people who cite Occam's Razor in any capacity must be atheists. Which is not true (although naturally sometimes an atheist will cite Occam's Razor).
... but every time I ask her, she says she'd rather make me a sandwich.
Choose a non-gender-specific handle.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
I know it wont happen, it makes to much sense, I've preached this sort of thing for years. Women need to make a decision which type of woman they want to be, 12th or 21st century, either is fine, but stick with it in any given environment. It's ok to be one at home and the other at work, but you can't switch on a dime because it suites you better.
I'm also getting tired of the fact the white male is the only legally discriminated against portion of the population now. The universal scape goat - it sucks, and I've been denied jobs based on my race and sex because other quotas were not met yet.
This makes tons of sense - being a victim is 90% of a time a mentality - once the other 10% is gone the other 90% SHOULD follow it.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
People contribute to open source projects for a complex web of reasons, they may love the challenge or the joy of programming in itself, but high on that list of reasons is the sense of accomplishment and approval people require as social beings from their peers. It is a denial of human nature, our essence as social animals, to say men or women don't or shouldn't need this cultural approval.
If males weren’t accepted as themselves in the FOSS they’d move on. Why should women be any different?
If men needed a culture of approval and acceptance and someone to remind them whenever possible that they are wanted and welcome, and then and only then could they program if they wanted to, then they'd be just like women.
Whether men do need a culture of approval we'll never know, because they get that approval frequently...from other men.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
i personally hang out in #openbsd, #linux, #macdev, as well as 3-4 other channels of popular, large projects, and i see exactly what he or she speaks about, on a frequent basis as opposed to your observation. in #linux in particular i've been a visitor the past 4 years, spending much of my time "picking up" the people who go there to most often just get slagged down on for asking "stupid questions" as they try to learn.
Yes, you're one of the "nice guys" I mentioned. I'm often in #kde and #fedora, and the people there seem fairly helpful (although the #fedora folks have a penchant for telling people that they don't actually want to do whatever it is they're asking about).
Pirate Party UK
IT people are more socially inept than the norm.
Next article please.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
"On September 19th, the GNOME Foundation and the Free Software Foundation will host a mini-summit on how to increase women's participation in the free and open source software (FOSS) communities."
Not "increase talented developer participation", but "increase women's participation".
THIS AGENDA IS SEXIST. The Gnome Foundation's meeting agenda was to introduce sexism to FOSS.
Except that (guess what?) when men are the ones who are outside of the "culture of approval and acceptance," they have just the same problems. (cf. racism, homophobia, etc., and the very substantial effect they have/had of driving the affected people out of certain fields even without any legal or formal discrimination.) The problem here isn't that women have a need for approval and acceptance - that's a characteristic of the vast majority of humanity. We might not all get that from our workplace or the online environment, but it needs to come from somewhere.
Why should anybody be prepared to be discriminated against and abused in order to progress in any pursuit?
I find the misogynist attitudes of some truly telling.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What do you suggest? Compassionate conservatism?
The term PC is used by people who wished their prejudices would have free reign. The term is the refuge of the scoundrel, the proverbial hole in the sand where they firmly stick their head.
Many women are pointing out to this problem, as well as many statistics, and how they are ostracised when they raise the issue.
The typical answer is to point out that it is somehow their fault. Typical blame the victim mentality.
I have witnessed how female colleagues are literally hounded out of jobs because the men around them cant stomach the idea of working in a even field with a woman, and even more unthinkable, that they have to report to one.
I fail completely to see what is subversive about pointing out this issue, a real failing of the Computing and IT industry, to our collective shame.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
How ironic, and unsurprising.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That is Satanism, or something like that.
No sane Engineer will go and check everything himself. It is simply impractical, expensive and stupid.
If you really do what you are preaching I reckon you either are your own boss or have a very stupid one that is not doing his job.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"Are you raising the subject of sexism just based on the fact that only 1.5% of FOSS developers are women? I"
I frankly rest my case there.
How somebody can be so blind to such a statistic is beyond the realms of the understandable.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... and the people that fail to recognize that as a major problem.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
that is all what I see (irony aside).
People here saying I have not seen it, not realizing that people that actually bully women know it is worng, and in general will not publish it as a fine accomplishment.
As fro feminism being anti male, you frankly don't know what you are talking about. You should educate yourself first before saying something that is so clearly untrue, which you would know if you have cared to inform yourself at least minimally.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And this does not even compare to the mildest of hazings.
... is a clear a validation of a point as I have ever seen in Slashdot.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Only somebody seriously derided considers normal that 98 of each 100 people, doing an activity with no apparent barriers of entry, are male.
Check statistics in any other parts of the industry, or in any other industries, and you may get a clue.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And then people wonder what women find distasteful about dealing with males on this field.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... that most couples reach the same conclusion, often irrespective of the fact that the woman has better professional prospects.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Unsupported assertions...
Your comment is a typical example of sexist commentary.
To see how bad it really is replace Women with "blacks" or "gays" and see how well that sounds.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"Whoever thinks that women would be treated bad in IT/FOSS culture, obviously has never seen how one women in a IT team can make all the men there their slaves who want to fulfill her every wish. If anything, then men would love to see more women in their teams."
You see? This is exactly the kind of mentality that drive women away.
It is not normal that 1 out of 65 people doing something is a woman, that would be acceptable in Saudi Arabia, that people in Slashdot defend this state of affairs is an ominous indictment.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We must be reading a different website.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Why discussions should be always done in terms that satisfy the males participants? Why should people be interrupted for example?
Why are you mentioning "whininess" (sic) as an intrinsically female trait?
Sexism is very subtle, as your comments above demonstrate amply.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Who forced you to read the thread?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I did not read the link, but I know him _very_ well. He is shunned by pretty much everyone. As are a lot of other well-known bullies, be they sexist, racist or whateverist.
There will always be loud idiots blaring their mis-guided crap into the air. But that does _not_ mean that their blabbering is relevant to a given community.
The main thing, imo, is the latent "porn-is-cool" attitude in many FLOSS communities. But, as unfortunate as this may be, unless a lot of these people get laid on a regular basis, this will not change.
I hate it when a debate on equality of the sexes comes down to "stop moaning and compete with men by being more like them".
Somehow this seems to have become the accepted way for women to get on in their careers, and life in general. Be more like a man, speak more like a man, get some "attitude" like a man.
What we need is feminism. Feminism is about women being considered as equally valuable as men are, but based on their feminine qualities. Maybe it seems a bit counter-intuitive to judge women differently when they want equality, but it's actually just a simple acceptance that there are differences between the sexes. Two things can be different but of equal value in different ways.
Women are naturally social animals. If you look at the usage stats for social networking sites and non-violent MMORPGs you will find that at least 50%, usually more, of the users are women. It makes sense to employ women to help build and improve those systems, be it with design or coding skills.
Of course, either gender is capable of doing that sort of thing, but for some reason there are still more men than women doing it. If you accept that women are just as interested in these areas of IT then it seems reasonable to investigate why that is. Women have been telling us the answer for years - they find it hard to get on because of the way men treat them in IT. There are other factors, but prejudice is no trivial matter.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I suppose it isn't all that strange that there has been such strong reactions; most men don't themselves feel that they look down on women, and it simply feels deeply unjust to be called "sexist". However, that doesn't in itself mean that one can't reasonably be described as a sexist - after all, just to pick the most extreme example, a rapist will also try to justify his actions with "But women like it" - clearly the perpetrator of a behaviour is not always the best judge of his/her own actions. (BTW, if you now feel extremely angry over my words, please read them again - I am not saying that being mildly sexist is the same as rape!)
I think the right attitude, if one sincerely doesn't want to be sexist, is to say "I don't intend to be sexist - if you think I am, please explain to me how".
All this goes for other kinds of bigotry as well; as the British National Party would say - "We are not racists, we just can't stand ". Bigotry is easy - one could almost say natural - and until we live in a better world, it is something we actively need to learn to avoid, every day of our lives.
This being the case, something has to give. Either men need to stop behaving offensively, or women need to stop being so easily offended.
I'm finding that the latter is a popular suggestion here on /. and I wonder why that is. It seems to me that it's more reasonable to ask the people being immature to cut it out than to ask women to suck it up. (Again, for a few reasons: assignment of responsibility to track moral fault and assignment responsibility to the cheapest cost avoider come to mind)
I also think a lot of people are taken in by a false dichotomy here. Women can (and should) do both; they can do their best to function in our society as it is while challenging its inequities.
No need to wonder: men don't want to grow up, we want to be immature some times, at least I want to. Take away all the fun and games and dirty jokes and you get very dull experience for a male used to that, especially if the work/hobby is the last place where he can have fun. Also men are more competitive (or are we?) and part of that is downplaying of others, maybe with not so nice words.
Of course there are real chauvinists everywhere and competitiveness and immaturity can be overdone, but in my experience generally women are more sensitive to that. Calling me dickhead nets you finger and FU, but try calling female dickhead and see what happens.
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.
That's nothing, try suggesting that Linux is ready for mass adoption as a desktop OS.
#-#
Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
I enjoy the way you write, good English has a special feel. Regardless of the point of contention, "It certainly changes how the people saying them should be viewed, but it doesn't simply excuse their actions." leads down a troublesome path. One can respond to an action, one can't excuse an action. Only intent warrants excuse. Excusing an act deals with ethics and religion. It can deal with law, but only in narrow specific contexts. Actions are "things". Intents are outside the realm of the physical universe. So, in this case, what to do when people act like jerks, unintentionally? Slog through the swamp, either that or somehow find a way to become one of those people who affect the world instead of being affected by it. I don't know how to do this. I wish I did, and suspect that it has a lot with truly being an adult. Anyway, I like how you use the language.
No need to wonder: men don't want to grow up, we want to be immature some times
Well, right. I meant to be asking a rhetorical question. As a man I agree that it's a lot of fun to be an immature asshole. But I don't think it's reasonable to ask women to change to accomodate our desire to behave like imbeciles.
caritj.org
If in "feminism" you ask for men to change, you seem to want your cake and eat it, too. You don't want women to have to change, you want men to change so women feel more at home. Which is bullshit, and is not feminism. Feminism is empowering women to deal with adversity. It's not trying to make everyone else play nice because their poor widdle feewings might get hurt. Women tell us they don't get into IT because of the way they're treated... and people say they don't want to pay any taxes, either. But they sure as shit wouldn't want to pay for roads and other services directly. There are a number of women who get along fine in IT. They're treated with respect IF THEY SHOW THE SKILLS. IT is almost always a meritocracy, internally at least. If you can't compete and add value, you get made fun of or ignored. Happens to guys, too. That's not sexism, that's just how geeks work. Only difference is that it seems a couple women want to bitch about "equality" when that's exactly what is happening.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Does using abusive language count? Is it okay for a man to call another man an aHole or a dildo or a fTard but not okay to call a woman a cWord or bWord or a twat? Yes it's abusive but is it sexist?
Do these verbal abuses stop people from participating in the FLOSS community? Maybe if they are consistently the target of such and from all directions... but is it sexist?
Is pornographic imagery sexist? If you believe that pornography is sexist then you'll also believe that the imagery is sexist, but is it really... adult entertainment targeted at adults which caters in the majority to it's largest demographic. Is heterosexual porn imagery also homosexualist... in that it is offensive to homosexuals?
I'd say no to all of the above... it's not sexist. In poor taste, complete wastes of resources and time and counter-productive yes but targeted at women in an attempt to preclude them from participating in the FLOSS community, no.
What would be sexist?
Establishing groups, events, conferences, or otherwise instrumental community building events and then not inviting women of note to join, attend, speak or generally participate... that would be sexism.
You can't equate personal attacks against individuals who happen to be of a particular group with institutional bigotry against that group. If anything it means that the institution in question simply has their fair share of bigots and that those who feel that this has no place in the community should shun those individuals who are being counter-productive.
However, a failure to shun them is not an indication of institutional bigotry itself - more an unwillingness of the community to self-police or to bring such personal issues into the authority or responsibility of the community members and rather focus of their intended goals and allow such problems to be worked out separately from the community in question.
Not all problems in a community should be policed by that community - ie: not all members with drug problems should be forced into rehab before being allowed to participate, not all members with bad credit should have to pay off their creditors, not all members who are not registered to vote must register, etc. etc. and not all sexist members should be required to give up their personal opinions. However - members should be encouraged to leave such matters out of community affairs if they do not want to be held accountable for the disruptions they create.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Bruce assumed much in thinking that one idealism would promote high ideals in all other areas, even ones that are off some peoples radar. Open source people are not primarily saints. They're just people who are focused on fixing one piece of the pie -- the pie being an aggregate of all that is wrong with the world. They might just not get it "right" in all other areas. Who can?
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?
There's more women than men, you poor brainwashed fool.
Am 47 fucking years old. How old are you? You do not think life is the great educator?
I bet you're like 22. Probably still in school and brainwashed by "women's studies" classes.
Maybe not - maybe you're older... so lessee, why don't you discount the points I made? Your assertions I am wrong are meaningless when you give no effort at all toward discounting the proofs given; the agenda of feminism is to equate thoughts to an actual crime.
Oh, but you can't remove all those posts from the internet, can you? The editorials, the comments made by the legislators, the comments made by the pundits back when the first of the child porn laws were passed under the Clinton administration? Or the FACT our kids have become a revenue source to the drug industry by playing upon this fetishism of the american child?
"It takes a village." Yeah, fuck off - our kids are not your kids.
the amount of nerd rage and the magnitude of how seriously people take this are funny beyond words. It's stupidly simple. nerds and geeks are mostly deemed socially inept irl. That is not to say they are not social creatures, it only means they operate on a different set of social norms than what the rest of the world are operating on. Lots of women don't understand it, don't want to understand it, and don't want to accept it. what's wrong with assuming you to be male unless proven otherwise? It just the same as how your peers discriminated and avoided nerdy / geeky guys since grade school. The way i see it, it's a two way street, and you unfortunately are the lone "freak" in the middle of the crosswalk of this whole mess.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
Trouble is, if you do that...the guy is likely to get a harrassment suit slapped on him.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You are in denial about the way women are treated. It used to be a lot more obvious back in the 60s and 70s. Until the wars a woman's place was in the home. Go back far enough and women were not even allowed to vote.
Here's a true story. Back in the early 80s when women started to enter the Metropolitan Police's special divisions, it was common practice to stamp their arse with "Property of the Metropolitan Police". There were certainly some "initiation rights" for men too, but nothing so humiliating. Now, tell me how that sort of thing was a product of women not being assertive enough or not having the skills required of the job. It had nothing to do with that, and everything to do with the 99% male staff trying to assert their dominance.
I suppose you will try to argue that it was women's fault for not refusing to allow that sort of thing, but that doesn't justify it. Back in the real world we just call it bullying. Furthermore, why should a woman have to be that "tough"? Why can't men just accept working along side them and appreciate them for their skills and abilities, even if they are different from their own.
Things are much better now of course, but there are still problems. I think the US and to a large degree the UK are particularly bad, because we have treat everything as competition and are constantly looking out for ourselves. The Apprentice was an interesting example of that - there was no way a team could win, only an individual, so even when people were supposed to be working together they were simultaneously trying to better each other and protect themselves against the fallout if the team didn't win the challenge.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Frankly, I don't spend much time thinking about whether the person that I am typing a response is male or female since, it has no bearing at all on 99% of discussions. If you asked me if the person who wrote any given message was a man, I might get the feeling that its so, I might not. However, since women are underrepresented in many of these forums, it is correct most of the time to assume the person is a man. What of it?
People are creatures of habits and guesses. Sometimes those guesses are wrong.
This is a simple guess, based on experience, because we grew up with it being more normal to refer to people with gender based pronouns. In fact, some of us have had the experience of having people get pissy because we used a gender neutral pronoun (if you don't believe me, the next time you run into someone with a child and are unsure of the gender, see how quickly you get corrected when you refer to their child as "it")
and... "ze"? I am sorry that someone invented a new word that you like and it hasn't caught on yet. This is the first that I am even seeing "ze" as an english word. Yet you seem to take personal offense that people don't use it. You are not the first person to find human language to be resistant to intentional change... http://lmgtfy.com/?q=esperanto
Essentially, I am all for fighting real sexism. I am all for getting women into IT, and wherever else that they want to be and make themselves qualified to be. Some sports have talked of getting rid of the gender divide, in favor of weight classes, since it is a more fair way to divide competitors.
I wrestled in high school and thats exactly what we were doing 15 years ago. Were there still issues? You bet. Still are I bet. However, I tend to be of the opinion that this sort of social change happens through generations, rather than through winning over individuals.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Follow the comments and realize that the women would not have been as upset if the participants had not been 90% male, if the audience mix was more or less 50/50 male female the presentation would have just been labeled as being in extremely bad taste.
Some of this may be we (the open source community) have a problem, because we have a problem.
But that doesn't help fix the problem.
Work bio at MMWD
In the late 90s/early 00s, there was an article on Slashdot about how women were outnumbering men in the purchase of electronics and computing equipment. I remember jumping into the thread, thinking "Surely my enlightened brethren will celebrate this additional diversity in their field!"
Instead, I got comments about how women were clearly buying these things for their husbands, being misled by savvy (and male) salespeople, and some snarky comments about the nature of the "electronics" being purchased. (Either stoves, or washing machines, or something else that vibrates.) I got the feeling these techies were intimidated by someone else infringing on their territory. Yes, many of the comments were supposed to be funny, but they were clearly jokes laid thinly on top of sincere feelings. Now how do you think that made me feel about participating in this community?
Things have gotten much better since then, but don't you think the low percentage of women in the FOSS community may be related to some held-over, more open sexism from times past? Upon being burned once or twice, many women will just give up trying to be part of the boys' club. Additionally, though openly sexist comments are taboo now, the collective and subtle actions of an organization may all work together to feel a specific group feel unwelcome.
The commenters who are demanding specific examples of sexism (and when being provided with them, calling them single incidents not representative of the entire community) are misguided. The FOSS community doesn't need a witch hunt - it needs to look at the overall feel of the community and determine if something about that is exclusionary. It's not easy, and it's very warm-and-fuzzy, and many people in the FOSS community don't understand the problem if it doesn't consist of 0s and 1s.
ze is not a word. Use of he to refer to a person of unknown gender was prescribed by manuals of style and school textbooks from the early 19th century until around the 1960s. You could argue it's archaic, but using he as a general neutral pronoun is perfectly acceptable.
well, basically, if we don't come out of the closet about being women.
When women-bashing becomes as recognized a term as gay bashing, you can use that metaphor.
Archaic? No way in hell. Re-read what you wrote. Only the 19th century? "They" was in use as a singular gender-neutral pronoun 400 years before that! I'm pretty sure I said "they or ze" didn't I? Though, ya know, learning the term "ze" sure does make sense what with all the openly transgender people out there...
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
People need to let go of the idea that racism has to be obviously self-interested or malicious in order to exist.
Are you ready to say that racists are not self-interested or malicious? I doubt it. You probably want to keep the connotation of racist as-is because the word has power as-is.
That's not twirling their moustaches and hoping to screw over black people; it's just taking advantage of a racially biased system.
I'm glad you see that they're not being malicious but I don't understand how you make the leap that the system is racially biased. Wells Fargo is a prominent part OF the system, and we can probably conclude the same non-racism of each other member, so how is the system racially biased? I agree that the outcome of the system is racially skewed, but as is so commonly said here on slashdot, correlation is not causation. It's trivial to think of other issues that could be affecting the outcome rather than assuming there is racism within the particular system we're talking about (home loans).
Some possible reasons are racist -- you could say blacks just aren't as capable so they have worse outcomes. Other reasons are not racist -- blacks are caught in a cycle of poverty and poor education, it's not inherent in blacks but just circumstance. Whether you accept a racist or a non-racist reason, it has nothing to do with the home loan system. It's an external factor. I mean, I'm not saying it's either of those, but don't you admit that it's possible that it's not the home loan system that is racist? That it could be another reason? That's what I meant by faith vs. science. People like you say "The disparity exists so the system in question is racist, we're not going to even entertain any other possibilities."
In my opinion, any algorithm you come up with to assess risk is going to give higher risk to blacks, even if race itself is not an input. I mean blacks are disproportionately poor, disproportionately have criminal records, etc. Of course they're going to be disproportionately given subprime loans.
The thing with institutional racism is that it exists without anybody needing to have consciously discriminatory attitudes at all.
I haven't thought it out entirely, but I'm going to assert that it's not possible to have discriminatory attitudes that are not conscious. To me, that's because part of the definition of racism is intent, so I doubt you'll agree with me.
Take an example like drug sentencing laws, a common target for accusations of institutional racism. Do you really think it's possible, granting that there is racism encoded in the laws, that the dude who proposed a particular law is NOT consciously racist? I just don't see how that would work. "Hmm, I'm going to propose that this drug, disproportionately used by blacks, should be punished 10 times as harshly as this equivalent drug that's not used by blacks. That's totally coincidental, I'm definitely not racist."
(By the way I do think there is institutional racism in drug laws -- just not the home loan system.)
Anyone who calls females "girls" and not "ladies," "trolops," "bitches," "hos" or "wenches" is obviously a pedophile and deserves to be denounced to the authorities.
I mean, you're essentially saying you don't believe in institutional racism -- specifically a set of rules or a social system that seems equal but results in racially biased outcomes for non-legitimate reasons. But you don't need Klansmen to make something work that way; and just because institutions are racist, doesn't mean anybody needs to be stoned to death or agonize in unbearable guilt. It just means that non-justified reasons for racially biased outcomes should be fixed whenever possible.
So--
Are you ready to say that racists are not self-interested or malicious? I doubt it. You probably want to keep the connotation of racist as-is because the word has power as-is.
Of course racists are malicious (though not necessarily any more self-interested than anybody else; racism can work against people's self-interest, as argued by e.g. Tim Wise).
But with institutional racism, it's the system itself that is racist, even if none of the people involved are consciously biased. Think of it like the way a properly functioning market economy works to assign "correct" prices to commodities--none of the people involved are doing anything but trying to get the best deal for themselves, but by their collective action they achieve a very interesting unintentional result--just so, people can build systems that are intended to be fair, but (due to inadequate information, unconscious bias, historical artifact, or many other possible reasons) wind up treating people of color unfairly.
Which is besides the point at WF, since individuals there clearly were racist (I don't know what other conclusion we can draw from emails referring to "mud people"). But the institutional-racism part is that it was a scam specifically directed against people who were vulnerable because of their race (and correspondingly their lack of social networks and information about their qualifications for prime loans). Remember we're controlling for other factors here; these were black people who based on the lending algorithms should've gotten prime but were given subprime loans instead. And they fall for it because black communities don't have the same institutional knowledge of mortgages etc. that white families do; many of these people couldn't ask a parent or an uncle or whatever whether they were getting a fair deal, because those people wouldn't know (while they would be more likely to be able to provide guidance for white borrowers).
As for drug laws, I suppose I'd entertain the possibility that politicians proposed laws without having conscious racially discriminatory intent. I'm more interested in the race differential in policy enforcement and conviction rates for the same drugs, like pot.
But let's take a more interesting example -- legacy college admissions. I'm not talking about "daddy's name is on the library," just that many schools give preference to family members of alumni. That's definitely not a conscious attempt to be racist; it's intended to be a nice thing to keep family traditions intact, etc. But those alumni families are going to be disproportionately white -- so by giving preference to this category, you're tilting the scales away from people of color (and poorer people generally), meaning that an otherwise equally-qualified applicant is at a disadvantage competing for the same spot. Nobody intends to discriminate against black people; it just happens, as a product of how the rest of the system is set up. The result, though, is a disproportionate barrier to entry for people of color -- quite literally a grandfather clause. I don't know what else to call it than racist when people of one race, through no fault of their own, have a harder time competing for the same goal.
Anyway, a response to this --
"The disparity exists so the system in question is racist, we're not going to even entertain any other possibilities."
Essentia
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
I think there are two kinds of sexism. First can be categorized as general rudeness/social immaturity exhibited by young males, often longing for female attention. The second kind if more dangerous, it is the kind of ingrained sexism in an all-boys club setting with an unspoken glass celling. Luckely, I believe the second kind is largely not present in FS development. Generally speaking you can not buy high status with money or good looks, or poweful parents, social connections or a stack of PH.D diplomas. The barrier of entry is comically low and what counts is how well you can code and interact with other team members.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Thanks, I definitely understand your position better, and the points you brought up about WF are exactly what I was asking for in my original response.
At least, I think that when there is a racial disparity in outcomes, there's a burden of investigation there to make sure that that difference really is legitimate, rather than the product of a system with its thumb on the scales.
I agree with this, but it's very difficult in practice and that's why I approach these things with lots of skepticism. For instance, you mentioned about WF that "controlling for other factors here; these were black people who based on the lending algorithms should've gotten prime but were given subprime loans instead" -- what factors were controlled for? You imply that the strength of knowledgeable support networks was NOT controlled for ("they fall for it because black communities don't have the same institutional knowledge of mortgages"... if it had been controlled for, that wouldn't make a difference), so the question is, WHY wasn't it controlled for? It's certainly not an inherent property of race, right? So they're excluding certain factors from being used as statistical controls. If you exclude enough of these factors, then of course you'll find racism, though in reality, at this point the strongest statement is "There was a difference in outcome based on race AND the strength/existence of networks of financial knowledge" (and who knows what else they excluded from control).
Also, I'm curious about these two statements.
Statement 1:
I don't know what else to call it than racist when people of one race, through no fault of their own, have a harder time competing for the same goal.
Statement 2:
That doesn't mean any system that has racially disparate outcomes is necessarily racist;
Are you saying that there are times when the race has a legitimate fault of its own, and that's the time when the disparate outcomes are not necessarily racist?
Are you just callings things like the country music self-selection thing "faults", or are you talking about what might be more traditionally considered a fault, like an actual physical, mental, behavioral, or other type of problem? Are you saying that the faults are tied to race, or just coincidental with certain races?
If not, what is your criteria for determining whether the racially disparate outcomes are racist? You seem to be throwing intent out the window, so what's left if you assume no actual racial differences, and also disregard intent? I guess there's still disparate outcomes as a function of pure chance...
I approach these things with lots of skepticism
I think that's a perfectly fair position. Skepticism can be dangerous, in that it can discourage one from viewing social structures through the eyes of the ones they negatively affect (which is eye-opening, though I'm overusing that organ), but it ain't right to degenerate into mau-mauing or self-hatred on account of privilege.
controlling for other factors here
I see how this could be misleading; I was using the term a bit more loosely than that. This isn't a proper scientific study, of course; even 'natural experiment' might be giving it airs... I just mean that, per the official lending algorithm, these are people who should've gotten prime loans. They didn't, which indicates (1) that something outside the official algorithm was involved, and (2) that obvious confounding factors which frequently track with race, such as poverty, prison records, unreliable credit and work histories, etc., can't bear the weight of explaining the different treatment, in so much as these are all probably included in any sane credit-risk algorithm. So, while an average black person is more likely to be a worse credit risk than an average white person (mainly because of racially-correlated class issues), the comparison isn't with the overall racial average, but with people that the algorithm says were qualified.
From that, I don't see a conflict between speculation (can't dignify it as more than that) about social networks' and family networks' knowledge of credit, while saying that the algorithm-relevant factors were comparable.
Are you saying that there are times when the race has a legitimate fault of its own, and that's the time when the disparate outcomes are not necessarily racist?
Well, there are times that people have legitimate faults, which may be particularly prevalent within one race or another. Perfectly justifiable/reasonable lending algorithms probably do make it harder for The Average Black Person to get a prime mortgage. On the one hand, this is reasonable, to the extent that it reflects The Average Black Person being less likely to repay the loan. On the other hand, *that* fact is due to fallout from other problems affecting the black community (greater unemployment, wage inequalities, differential access to education thus careers, etc.); to the extent that's an underlying racial disparity in our society, it would indicate that society's institutions are racist (/sexist/classist/etc). So I don't at all think it's suspect for a company to use statistical models to give better loan terms to people more likely to repay; but I do think it's an indictment of our society that black people might on the whole be less likely to repay. It's both fair, and not, to take those factors in isolation in the derived case. :)
Rather than "inconsistent," I prefer to think of this as "nuanced"
What I'm really trying to point towards is a view of racism that's more complex than the "racism = klansmen, racism BAD!" view that most of us white people pick up as our main thoughts on the topic. Klansmen are bad, of course. But there's a whole range of racist behaviors, institutions, and cultural standards, many of which are subconscious (discomfort around people of different races, ferinstance, which can lead to things like jury biases, hiring biases...); some of which are perfectly understandable[1]; some of which are not even intentional, or not the conscious intent of any one person. Sometimes a racist system manifests itself more in terms of privileges accorded to one race but denied to another (obligatory famous essay, which is insightful if flawed). And I think that it is both fair and unfair to separate individual aspects of a system/set of institutions as racist, when the non-racist institutions are probably influenced by racially-motivated factors. The world is pr
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
If 1.5% were the norm in technical fields, then there wouldn't be such a problem, but the norm for technical fields is around 25 to 30 percent. Sexism isn't the only possible explanation for that particular numerical anomaly, but it is the most obvious and consistent with past instances of similar anomalies.
If the sample size were very small, say if there were less than 100 FOSS developers in the world, you could explain it away by saying the 1.5% number were based on a statistically insignificant sample. However I'm pretty sure the 1.5% number comes from a much larger sample size.
If the 1.5% number existed because a large number of female FOSS developers were deliberately misrepresenting their gender you might have a case. Unfortunately, most of the explanations of why female FOSS developers would choose to misrepresent their gender suggest an environment that is hostile to females, which lends credence to the sexism charge.
I am not a FOSS developer, so I will not say conclusively whether or not the FOSS community is sexist, but if the 1.5% number doesn't give members of that community reason to pause and reflect, then something is very, very wrong. At the very least they should be trying to find out why that number is so much lower than the tech community in general.
If I ever have a kid, I hope she's like you.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Awww thanks! :)
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
Now enter FOSS. I can't recall encountering a single female FOSS developer. Ever.
Nobody turns you down from being a FOSS developer if you can do the work. Just DO IT. 'Nuff said. The rest will attend to itself.
Now, as far as sexism in general, us men get a tough break. We're considered less than human; expendable. Who gets drafted? When they talk about causalities among the civilian population, they usually speak in terms of "women and children." What about the *men*? Don't they matter? I guess not.
Sexism floats both ways. Women will talk about men as "objects of desire" as much as men speak of women as the same. Yet, when a man does it, it's called "sexism". What is it called when women does it? Maybe I should go to a male revue and ask the ladies there.
So why do we have this double standard? Where did that come from? It's rather silly, really.
Now, having said that, there's another issue afoot. The extreme asymmetry of the number of women who participate in software development period, let alone FOSS. It's really sad in this day and age where nearly all barriers to women have been eliminated.
The article I read here did not cite any specific examples of sexism, but just whined about them. I think many things that gets called "sexism" isn't really. Especially when women do the *same thing themselves* in respect to men.
It's called human nature, and it has its evolutionary antecedents. Live with it. Enjoy it. Love it. And stop bitching about it.
If a woman is denied entry into the FOSS arena just for being a woman, that's one thing. But if someone makes an off-color statement, it's really not worth getting your nickers in a twist about it, right? Right. Because women make as many, if not more off-color statements about us men when we're not around to hear them -- and even sometimes when we are. Funny how no one brings the house down about that. Men are people too, you know, just in case you forgot.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Some people are just rude jerks, but be they slashdot trolls, real-life coworkers, or customers, or someone else whose views you find repugnant, sometimes all you can do is walk away.
FOSS has the perfect ways to do that, unlike your day job where you'll be fired if you cause a scene, you can tell some jerk off. You can also remain anonymous and simply be judged on merit alone. Discussion on IRC and such always has a way to ignore people...
These frat boys you want to simply stop being crude are in fact other people whose lives just focus on sex acts more than you find tasteful. Should we truly ask them to change, or censor themselves so you aren't offended, or should you learn to let live?
It's not that you should have to work with someone who annoys you, and in a job you could probably get reassigned simply for not liking them, but you shouldn't have the right to demand that they simply change just because you find them offensive.
No, we aren't missing the point though by just saying "grow a thick skin". It's not a blame the victim mentality. It's a recognition that even if you rubber-padded all the walls you could find you've merely confined yourself to a comfortable prison. The real world is outside - not everyone in it is nice. In some places, people will try to kill you. To go out unsuspecting and pampered is truly dangerous.
By padding the FOSS world and calling out any sexists we merely file one corner off a sharp world and do nothing to help. Any projects not yet brought into the light of appropriate behavior will still be inaccessible. But by armoring the participants, female and male, black and white, we let them go anywhere and tell off their own sexist/racist jerks.
Tell your dad some random dude on /. knows how lucky he is. ;-)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."