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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...
And I suspect a vast majority of FOSS people are dudes with a heartbeat and would react like the same overblown charges of racism that get directed towards non-progressives with heartbeats.
I think the male-female dynamic has much to argue over. In many areas there are cultural differences that keep women down and other areas where the natural differences of our mad ape ancestors merely express themselves in reality.
Many charges of sexism are valid, but some are so ridiculous they deserve the ire they generate.
No one is denying that there are idiots out there. Just browse at -1 here. You'll see every kind of comment for every kind of 'ism that you're looking for.
But let's look are real EXAMPLES of real COMMENTS. Okay?
And since we're talking about FOSS, we can look at the kernel mailing list. Hmmmmm, not a lot of sexist comments there. Particularly when taken as a percentage of total comments.
So if only 1.5% of developers are women ... but fewer than 0.1% of comments on development mailing lists are sexist ... what is the real "problem" that exists?
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..
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
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
> 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.
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"?
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
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"?
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"?
Girls that go out there and "just take care of business" find feminism as annoying as any guy might.
Quite often, you get the level of respect you earn. This can be true of old men that
you would expect to be the biggest chauvinists due to how old they are and the sorts
of ideas that were prevalent when they grew up. Even such anti-bellum sorts of
gentlemen respect the talent independent of the external trappings.
That said. Foot-in-mount disease must be fought wherever it is found.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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
echo "alias woman=man" >> ~/.bashrc
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.
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.
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?
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.
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. :(
Picking feminism to counter male-chauvinism with is like siding with Stalin to fight Hitler. I wanna drop the F-bomb on both kinds.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yes, it's a perfect example of what the OP was talking about.
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
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.
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.
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
You sir, are full of it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
When a woman does it, it is bitching. When a man does it, it is being assertive.
Anarchists never rule
the larger issue is that as a man you have no *inherent* frame of reference by which to decide whether they are right or wrong or how serious or trivial it is.
This is exactly the issue - namely that the criterion you're using is that if some woman somewhere dislikes something a man says, and calls "sexism", that makes the man sexist and there is no way for him to rebut the claim. I call bullshit. Adopting that line of thinking creates a race to the bottom in which any easily-offended person gets to define anything that bothers them as socially unacceptable speech. It's nonsense and an insult to those who care about REAL sexism.
My point is that you, as a man, are probably not an able judge of what is sexist and what is not. (Maybe YOU are, but this isn't personal. I'm talking about men generally.)
Any individual is allowed to be offended by anything. When you deny that they should be offended, you are basically dissing their point of view. That's not constructive. They may have very good reasons for being offended. If those reasons are compounded by a history of oppression, you look as if you are trying to deny more than just your individual offense, and that's just ugly.
For speech to be socially unacceptable it has to offend more than just a small group of easily-offended people, so I think you can put that fear to rest.
We do need to have some sense and understanding of each other. But let's admit that for generations (if not forever) men have been forcing their understanding on women, without allowing much in the other direction. So I think we can afford to chill out a little, step back and say "Huh. You think that was sexist? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be, and I'll put it differently next time." That's all.
It's not labeling. Just because someone says that what you said or did is sexist doesn't mean that you ARE sexist. It just means that it can be perceived that way. You can't argue with that, and you shouldn't try.
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
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
"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
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.
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
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.
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.