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."

Comments

Community resistance

[bonch]

The reasons for the lack of female participation in open source are a touchy subject, and I probably risk offending some folks, but the fact is that the movement is largely made up of male computer nerds with few social skills and little female contact. My guess is that women fare better in proprietary software development because it implies a level of professionalism, since if you can't interact well socially with co-workers, you usually don't work there anymore.

Richard Stallman made some infamous remarks at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit about "EMAC virgins", explicitly defining them as women who needed to be "relieved" of their EMACS virginity as a "holy duty." RMS defended it as a parody of religion, missing the point that the complaints were about the sexism and not the religious satire (RMS also believes in legalizing pedophilia and possession of child pornography--probably not the most palatable spokesperson to get behind in the first place).

If you're a man who rarely hangs out with women, it's easy to forget what it's like for the other side, especially if they're in a field in which they're practically outsiders. Women didn't take too kindly to being singled out like that at a tech conference. The bigger problem is the backlash from male techies that always flares up when this issue is discussed, which was amplified in the case of RMS because his core supporters tend to be so rabid.

I'm subscribed to the Cocoa-dev mailing list, and one of the regular members there began submitting messages under her real name, revealing that she had previously been posting under a male name because they found that they got more direct responses and less obnoxious comments. And this is Apple platform development, where you might assume the more liberal elements of that particular demographic would lend itself to increased tolerance.

I really can't imagine what it must be like to be a female developer and hope some of them voice their opinions here.

Re:Community resistance

[Austerity Empowers]

I'd have shortened this to "the movement is largely made up of male computer nerds who pursue programming as a hobby, regardless of its income potential". While women in the field generally went there for the profession, not the hobby.

YMMV, etc. etc. But men seem far more inclined to indulge their inner geek while at home. Even ignoring open source software in particular, I do not know many women in technology in the workplace who spend their free time on ANY hands on technical pursuit. I know plenty who like to do research or follow technical journals though.

Re:Community resistance

[Sir_Sri]

In a proprietary workplace there are also a lot of other women who may not be 'developers' but they're on business, production, accounting, etc. With OSS it's basically a bunch of programming nerds talking to other programming nerds. That has its place, but there's no professional filter, a great programmer who sexually harasses female coworkers loses his job, but he can be on an OSS project with relatively little impediment.

I suspect, to be a tad sexist, women look at open source differently than men do. Open source is either something you do as part of your job, (intel, ibm) or it's something you do in your free time. If it's part of your job, why would you put up with discrimination and harassment when you can do something else, and not. And women look at free time differently than men. If they want to have kids, which is most of them, they have a ticking biological clock of 'another year lost is a lot of time', whereas a 35 year old guy can sit in his family room coding away and think 'meh, another year, no big deal'. If women want to have stereotypical lives they have to get on with it sooner rather than later. If you have kids your free time is much more about spending with the kids than it is writing code for some project, unless you're doing it professionally. It's not that you cannot contribute if you have kids, but you have a lot less time for it until your kids are getting grown up. And well, then we're into 'how many women were there in computer science in 1990?' sort of questions.

Re:Community resistance

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell a woman you're a computer programmer, and her eyes glaze over.

You're talking to the wrong women. I've met many women who are quite excited by technical talk from intelligent, educated men. I've dated a few of them, and married one of them.

Tell her you like playing computer games, and she leaves.

Well, yes, that can be a big red flag. Most women are looking for a mature adult, not an overgrown child. If you can demonstrate that you are definitively the former, despite still playing games, then she will likely overlook that trait. But if you're like most gaming nerds, who tend to be useless children in grown-up bodies, then yes, she will walk away.

Re:Community resistance

[MBGMorden]

Sexism is not biological, it's cultural - as you've just illustrated in amazing detail.

I'm not sure I'd agree. Turn on Discovery channel or Animal Planet and look at animal behavior. Many wild animals have a level of male dominance that is pretty extreme - PARTICULARLY among our fellow primates.

I'd argue that not only is sexism not wholly cultural, but the fight against sexism is mostly cultural. That's not a bad thing - indeed what makes or species great is that we're not a slave to simple biological programming. I'm just saying that to say that sexism is "not biological" is on some level wishful thinking.

Re:Community resistance

[Darinbob]

This varies a lot. Most of my jobs in the past have had some amount of women engineers, higher in some lower in others. And definitely I can say that the lower the number of women the more rude the behavior from the men. But when there are more women then men tend to behave better however I rarely saw any pushback; no one complained that they were being stifled by having to use mature language (ie, not swearing) or being quieter when telling the latest joke. And I have never seen any woman in engineering pretending to be one of the guys or acting bitchy (that's more a stereotype in upper management).

I would put a lot of blame on management when these problems come up though. Just don't let the team act like frat boys, keep the competition in check, etc, even if there are no females around.

If anything I would expect the corporate world to be worse, because in open source you never need to see the other person and they don't know anything about you in return. Face-to-face meetings in open source are relatively rare.

Re:Community resistance

[Shinobi]

Trust me, female-dominated professions are just as bad when it comes to sexism. The nurse profession for example. As a male, it's ok to be a paramedic, or a doctor. But if you even start studying to become a nurse, you're told from the get go that your only purpose as a male is to do the heavy lifts, you get marked down on exams, essays etc merely for being male. As a male, you can be top of your class in actual knowledge, with years of practical experience from warzones, traffic accidents etc, the woman who's afraid of needles, faints at the sight of blood etc will still get a higher grade, and be hired before you when you go looking for a job as a nurse.

Hence, many men drop out of nurse school and study to become doctors instead, which has lead to a rather hilarious policy which has even been used in official proclamations here in Sweden... It goes like this: A study finds that female nurses are heavily overrepresented when it comes to back injuries, due to heavy lifting. As a result of the physical requirements, more men need to be hired for those wards. Meanwhile, female nurses are heavily encouraged to train as lab nurses etc...

I only took those courses for 6 months, then I left, RIGHT before the would-be nurse afraid of needles and blood phobia could leech off of me in the group project where she had been assigned to me by the teacher, without me having any say whatsoever.

Institutional sexism is not limited to men. Women do it just as much.

I had been planning on switching profession from developer to nurse or similar, but I cancelled those plans. I still remain a volunteer paramedic.

Re:Community resistance

[djdanlib]

It was totally like that in all of the CS and engineering classes I took. So you have to look outside the classes, in that case. It's easy, and I'll tell you about it. You have a lot of windows of opportunity for these things in college. Some of them are still viable if you're not a college student, too. If you're afraid to be social, because you're too shy... well, figure on never seeing any of these people again, and it's a lot easier to not care what they think of you. Who cares, you have other things you can check out if it fails horribly. A lot of people have the capacity to break out of their shell, you might too! If you're technologically inclined, wouldn't you want to experiment and find out what you're capable of? You do the same thing when you build a new PC, you have to see what it can do. See what YOU can do.

Here are a dozen ideas to get started.

1. Freshman orientation classes - talk to the other students.
2. Going to the cafeteria with people on your floor.
3. Participating in floor/building events.
4. Going to Student Government sponsored events.
5. Putting your own events together (other than LAN parties and drinking parties) and actually creating those social opportunities college students are always complaining about. Movie night! International food night!
6. Local community service organizations. Not just fraternities, but the other ones in town. You'd be surprised at how few men actually participate in those.
7. Student clubs on campus, other than wargaming or other predominantly male clubs.
8. Take a few classes outside your discipline, like photography for non-majors, or a wellness class like some sort of dancing or exercise.
9. Young adult groups or smallgroups at a local church. Most of them have these and they're really social.
9b. Religious clubs on campus.
10. Start or attend something from meetup.com.
11. Start a Reddit meetup.
12. Look for events in your local City newspaper.

The thing is, if you stay in your comfort zone of your computer chair the whole time, you'll find that comfort zone gets smaller and smaller as you get older. You have to take charge of your life and get out there and do things. It's not really that hard and you don't even have to spend money or drive for most of these things!

You can always make smalltalk with random people waiting in line with you at places, or whoever sits around you. The opportunities are there, waiting.

Self Selection From Life Realities

[alexhmit01]

A project carrying an "open source" or "free software" license is not necessarily an "open source" project. Plenty of "Cathedral" projects with paid developers with an open source license that may (or may not) get downstream patches kicked up. Those projects are going to look like any other corporate development group. These are really the core projects.

The "open source projects" of people hacking code make up the bulk of developers in open source, and is the hobbyist developers. People that have a lot of time to devote to a hobby are either single, or older empty nesters. Men can hang out in the single realm and start a family @ 40, women cannot. This limits women from engaging in serious time commitments like open source projects.

The pool of women available to do this is pretty small.

That's without dealing with the fact that women tend to have tighter deviations from the norm in various areas, which means that any group that is selected from extreme outliers is going to be disproportionately male. This is true whether you are selecting politicians that reach Federal office, people that are extremely interested in programming to pursue as a hobby, moving to America as a day laboring immigrant, or criminally oriented men to form a gang. The outliers are predominately (but not exclusively) male.

In local politics, where the time commitment is NOT as extreme and the skill set needed to be elected is NOT that extreme, we have a pretty good mix of men and women on city counsels, school boards, mayoral seats, etc. Not 50-50, but a pretty good representation. We have plenty of female mayors, but we've NEVER had a female governor. Outliers in general are predominately male.

Re:First up, rename Man command

[Creepy]

You mean info? According to a female geek friend of mine, man has been deprecated for years (and she is married to my best friend...).

Some thoughts

[quantaman]

1. A lot of the creepy sexist behaviour in the open source community is more a result of the lack or women rather than the cause.

2. There seems to be a subset of communities, new atheism, rationality groups, loud political activism, that seem to have a mixture of exclusivity and deliberately being an outsider. For whatever reason (culture or biology) these tend to be massively male dominated. The Open Source movement feels like it belongs in this group.

3. Combining 2 with programmings pre-existing male dominance and you get a very skewed gender distribution.

I have no idea how to fix things, but that's my perspective on some of the causes of the issue.

Re:This again?

[Hatta]

I see no reason to think there's a gender-related basis for programming... do you?

Given the physical differences between male and female brains, I see no reason not to think that there's a gender related basis for 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

But, there is. Raise a biologically male child to play with dolls and he'll make them fight. Raise a biologically female child to play with action figures, and she'll play house with them.

This experiment has been done, and the results are in. Male psychology is different from female psychology for reasons that are unrelated to nurture. That leaves nature. The fact that we haven't pinpointed the exact brain structures that cause the difference is only due to our lack of understanding of the brain at this time.

Or, to put this another way... what you are claiming here is equivalent to claiming that transexuals have a choice.

Re:Good luck with that

[ortholattice]

Yet if you give her a choice between a pink shirt and a blue shirt she will pick pink.

That is due to stereotypes she was exposed to, not to something inherent in girls.

A century ago, pink was a "boys'" color. From 1918 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink#In_gender ): "The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl."

Re:Okay this may get me modded down to infinity, b

[Grishnakh]

Its like a study i read not too long ago (it was in a mag, sorry as i have NO clue which one) that had the results of a study that showed women's taste in men changed based on whether or not they were on birth control or had the ability to have children. those that couldn't have children or were on birth control favored softer, gentler "teddy bear" or pretty boy types, those that were fertile and not on birth control favored the rougher, more masculine "bad boy" types.

You left out the worst (but true) conclusions from this study: a given woman will frequently change her taste in men depending on where she is in her monthly cycle. So she'll marry a "teddy bear" guy who makes a good living and can provide well for her children, but then when she's ovulating, she'll cheat on him with one of the "bad boy" men and get pregnant, and pass off the kid as his.

This is extremely common, and some studies have found that something like 15% of people do not have the biological father they thought they had.

Very similar behavior is seen in many animals. So basically, women aren't any better than animals.

Re:Okay this may get me modded down to infinity, b

[pseudofrog]

I'm not going to argue against your main point that emotion sometimes gets in the way of science (it's absolutely right), but it's worth pointing out that your characterization of the science examining the difference between races is way off point.

Much of the research promoting the idea that there is a significant difference between different races' intelligence is dismissed not because it's "non-PC", but because it's utter drivel funded by paleo-conservative organizations that were heavily inspired by Nazi eugenics scientists. Seriously. [wikipedia.org]

If you want to read about some of the absurd crap that some of these guys pose as science, check out some of the many rebuttals to The Bell Curve.

And there's plenty of research, some of it also very bad, suggesting that all races have essentially equal intelligence.

We just can't say if there is a difference is intelligence between different races. Too many factors blur the picture. Hell, we can't even arrive at a reasonable definition of "intelligence".

The theory you propose explaining the possible difference in European / African intelligence seems like many evolutionary psychology theories -- a load of nonsense that kinda-sorta seems logical at face value. It's, frankly, laughable.