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Tackling Open Source's Gender Issues
angry tapir writes "Women's participation in open source development is at a far lower level than women's participation in proprietary software development. One of the groups that aims to change this is the Ada Initiative: A non-profit organization formed last year. I recently caught up with its two founders, Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora and comp sci PhD student Mary Gardiner, to discuss the project."
Because for women, it comes up every day.
It's not that you called two of them gold diggers that's sexist. It's that you said that there's no such thing as a woman who *isn't* a gold digger.
Can you spot the difference?
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area and working in software, I know many developers both male and female. I have a few personal female acquaintances that were (past-tense) previously active in the open source community, but left.
They were aggressively harassed by a very vocal online minority. This vocal minority would trash the ladies name on a large swath of online forums while using different names and accounts. Two received multiple anonymous threats of violence. This went on for years, and the ladies in question finally left the open source community.
This went above and beyond 'normal' flaming in online forums. This involved many forums, each cross referencing each other to lend validity to their (entirely fabricated) claims. And it went on for years, including insinuation that the female developer would come to harm at conferences.
It's very unlikely this happens in every case, but it takes more than a single nutjob attacking someone, or even many nutjobs attacking, to make someone leave the community. It takes good people like you and me to ignore the nutjobs, to not step in and say, "That's enough."
RMS also believes in legalizing pedophilia and possession of child pornography
This is as accurate as quoting Ahmadinejad as wanting to wipe Israel off the Earth... And actually both dudes make more sense than their insecure indignant "critics".
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Well, I'm not going to say "turnabout is fair play", but before you heap too much criticism on socially inept nerds, consider that one reason they are that way is that women universally reject them. Tell a woman you're a computer programmer, and her eyes glaze over. Tell her you like playing computer games, and she leaves. Tell her you like her, and she'll say "ugh". And now other women want to come to communities dominated by these kinds of men, who have been despised by women since the day they were old enough to be, and then wonder why they are not made as welcome as they'd like to be? Who is really the problem here, the nerds, or the culture that inculcates contempt for them?
From my experience in the tech world, I would say there are far less women who live and breathe computers even among those who work with them. While finding females in the IT industry is far less rare than it used to be, one thing I do notice is a larger portion of them tend to prefer specializing in one area, rather than an overall knowledge of subjects, and even fewer that I find that actually continue to enjoy spending time on computers outside of work. That is not to discredit or claim any of them are less smart than their male counterparts, in many ways many of them are far smarter in their respective specialization, but very few women that I have worked with tend to be the types that will sit on a computer at work all day long, and then go home and work on their personal computer related personal projects.
Saying something is a stereotype is not the same as saying it's never true. People often forget that.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Pretty much this. Males seem to excel at making an environment hostile towards women, which ok in the locker room, gentleman's clubs, and other places where men have every right to be alone.
Unfortunately, this often ends up happening where men don't have a right to be alone, but just are alone for any of the myriad of reasons that it happens. Suddenly, programming is a boy's club, or any other particular profession or hobby. Now, women have to overcome not only "crossing gender roles" in order to participate, but they find themselves in a hostile environment where men seem to expect that no women are allowed.
And then, heaven forbid any woman comment that such an attitude is sexist, lest they be roundly shouted out with anti-PC arguments, when asking for people to be PC is different from asking people to not be sexist.
Is it any wonder that the only women who make it into the highest levels of programming have learned to cope by pretending to be a guy, or acting the bitch just to get their way? :(
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
You expect to see proportional involvement across all activities because that's the way statistics suggests they should. If you selected people at random from the general population to fill 10,000 programming jobs, you would expect that the gender & ethnic composition of that 10,000 would largely be reflective of the population the random sampling was drawn from. When your composition varies - in this case widely - from the expected results, there is an interesting question of, "why?"
Is it because girls are bad at programming? I see no reason to think there's a gender-related basis for programming... do you? How do you explain it, if "being a woman" doesn't automatically mean someone's probably bad at programming? "Differences in interest" sounds like a nice way of saying "girls like dolls, boys like guns." There is no particular biological basis for this, so again, there'd be no reason to expect this to be the case, unless there is a cultural reason for it.
Now, you can certainly argue whether or not culturally-reinforced 'gender roles' are desirable or undesirable, but you've got a long way to go to establish any sort of *biological* reason for the disparity.
Society has to get over the preoccupation of having a 50/50 gender split on everything.
As a married father of a girl and two boys it is very clear that every child at a very early age (6 months) starts displaying very different interests and abilities. My two boys both took to boy things instantly but one loved swords (guns, sports etc) and the other took to mechanical stuff (cars, thomas the train etc.)
A rule is just a general principle, but, as a rule girls move into IT for reasons other than the love of coding. Claim that they are too smart to work for free, that they figured out that IT staff are abused, that nerds scare them away or whatever you want... but the truth is they just have other interests, get over it.
The conceit that all stereotypes have a grain of truth at their core is one that is mostly championed by the people who are both unaffected by stereotypes and also enjoy being prejudiced against others. Not to mention it's incorrect.
Saying something is a stereotype is not the same as saying it's never true. People often forget that.
People tend to conveniently "forget" anything that gives them an excuse to be offended.
For a certain kind of person who has little or no power elsewhere, being "offended" is extremely gratifying. It gives them an excuse to demand that someone else change their behavior. Your post practically served it to this type on a silver platter. It usually takes less temptation than you gave for their control motive to manifest.
Personally I thought your post was humorous but then I'm not looking to tell other people how they should live, what they should think, what they should say, how they should feel, etc. If I really had a problem with something you said, I would ignore you and move on to someone I prefer. Life is not politically correct, the world is not fair, and other people have this habit of not often doing what you wish they would do. I made my peace with that a long time ago.
If I want to provide a contrast, I do it by setting a better example. Otherwise I live and let live. So for me it's easy to see the bullshit behind "I'm offended" and its variants. The only time "I'm offended" is valid is when someone is forcing you to listen, and in that case, the problem is that they are forcing you to listen.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The problem with these positive discrimination efforts is that they don't stop. Now more women are graduating with degrees than men (see table 279 of the US Department of Education's 2010 Digest of Education Statistics), and they dominate some industries/fields (see table 620 of the 2012 US Census Bureau Statistical Abstract), but do you see programs assisting men but not women? Do you see women-only advancement efforts ending? Nope, they don't want equality, they want dominance. They want the same sexist system as men once ruled in the past, but with them in charge.
Positive discrimination is still discrimination, and no truly equal system can ever come of it.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Set theory looks good on paper. In practice I'd imagine it's pretty hard to ignore the 10 or 12 guys trying to get into your pants by living out a tech support related porn movie fantasy, in favor of the normal reasonable guys who probably aren't going out of their way to proclaim their normal reasonableness. It's probably made even worse by the realization that most of the ones trying to get into your pants are likely not actually bad guys, they just don't know how to act around polite society. Imagine going into a theater where 15% of your fellow patrons are screaming at the screen, talking on cell phones, or using laser pointers. Could you still enjoy the show since the other 85% of the audience are behaving well?
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Ah yes, because the sex that we're being told is biologically predisposed towards nurturing, consensus-building, sharing, caring behavior... ALL they care about is getting paid for everything they do. And the men, who are biologically predisposed towards aggression, competition, and dominance... all they care about is sharing their code and delighting other people with the free software they've helped create.
It's ironclad, I guess I have to concede defeat.
Everything is a gender or race issue. Why is this so important? No one is forcing women out of open source. Pretty much anyone can participate that WANTS to be there.
First, most participation comes without any idea of what the other person even looks like so the notion of gender or race probably is irrelevant. Am I man or a woman or an orange gorilla who escaped from his cage? You don't know.
Second, most of these heavily male communities are not lacking for females because they're intentionally driving them away. To the contrary, most of them want women if only to feel less like they're in an isolated research station on the moon. Psychologically men just prefer that. It doesn't even need a sexual component.
I guess I wonder if people are going to be playing the race and gender card 100 years from now? Does this thing expire ever? What effort needs to be made and then we can say "enough."... ever? Because if it's never enough then just out of simply pique I suggest we reverse that situation and start demanding male participation in female activities ESPECIALLY if men don't want to participate. See, some group is complaining because women have INTENTIONALLY chosen to not participate in certain activities. And this is somehow a male problem. Well, what about all the female groups that men don't have any interest in at all? Demand equal representation. Now you might only be able to get one man for every ten women that want to join such groups. But if you enforce equality it means that nine women have to be rejected for every one that is accepted into such groups and all men are accepted indifferent to any other qualification.
Sound like fun? Well, the men aren't enjoying this nonsense either. Just stop it. If you're actively being driven away because of your vagina then cite some evidence and we'll deal with it. But if all you've got is correlative gender statistics then please don't waste our time.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
That's actually a symptom of the situation, not evidence of a fundamental difference. There are men for whom programming is just business as well; back in the seventies they were called data processors and fancied themselves big-wig business guys who just happened to program. Just try to leave out that population in your mental model and you'll see the core disparity: the common programmer story (you'll need to scroll down a bit) that led to the love in the first place.
Slowly this is improving (I got lucky, my parents were very liberal) and other die-hard programmers of both sexes whom I've known all attribute it to a childhood environment that promoted a love of computers and science. There's a large drag coefficient on Rosie the Riveter (and her descendants) simply because of cultural inertia.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Well, I'm not going to say "turnabout is fair play", but before you heap too much criticism on socially inept nerds, consider that one reason they are that way is that women universally reject them. Tell a woman you're a computer programmer, and her eyes glaze over. Tell her you like playing computer games, and she leaves. Tell her you like her, and she'll say "ugh". And now other women want to come to communities dominated by these kinds of men, who have been despised by women since the day they were old enough to be, and then wonder why they are not made as welcome as they'd like to be? Who is really the problem here, the nerds, or the culture that inculcates contempt for them?
I've never had that problem (and I know many quote-n-quote geeks would say the same.) Seriously, the generalizations presented herein are such an overused cliche. It's all about communication skills with members of the opposite sex, presentation, etc. If you have experienced these problems, that's on you, not them.
An intelligent, educated woman is very unlikely to remain single for long. I suspect the root cause of the disparity between open source and proprietary participation of women on projects is due to the simple fact that once they go home from work, they have real lives to live, while many of "the guys" in the industry are techno-freaks with little or no social life and plenty of spare time to devote to OSS or Free projects.
Like myself. 47 and counting. *sigh*
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Stereotypes are social heuristics. The human brain can't treat every person it meets individually; It's cognitively less expensive to group people together and treat them in a particular way. You're interaction with the coffee barista at your local starbucks is based on stereotypes, and they're interaction with you is equally based on the stereotype of you being a customer. Only when you have sufficient repeat contact with a person can you begin to start differentiating them from the stereotype(s) you lumped them into. Most of the time, these sterotypes work for us, i.e. they facilitate social interaction with strangers. Some of the time though, just like in AI, you use a shitty heuristic. The problem is not dealing with people using sterotypes, it's being too rigid in your application of stereotypes and hampering social interaction.