Slashdot Mirror
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."
Good luck trying to find a woman that doesn't care about money.
And if you do, please tell her that I'm looking for a new wife to help me support my first two.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
Women have a hard time being obnoxious, arrogant, self-centered fuckheads. They are willing to make compromises in the interest of forward progress. They also are not as good as men at doling out sexual innuendo and juvenile potty humor. In short, they are completely unsuited to the task.
I mean come on that's been a problem for years right?
No thanks. The open-source movement has a hard enough time without having the effort split on the gender line.
Because for women, it comes up every day.
Why does it seem like this comes up every few months?
Or every month...
They just don't post stupid questions to message boards because they RTFM.
When I use a piece of software the gender of its developers is the last thing I care about.
....like a woman with geek creds. [Looking at you, Jeri Ellsworth.]
I somehow doubt that the open-source movement is the only place you feel excluded from.
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Put another way: just because the general population has a makeup of a certain distribution, why do we assume some activity Y with a distribution different to that global distribution indicates some kind of undesirable situation?
I do agree that in some cases the difference is due to some kind of discriminatory behavior, but in others its just simply due to differences in interest. Has either situation been confirmed in this case?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
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."
Ok so you were going for the oh so funny 'all women are gold diggers' stereotype.
I'm not sure where you go to meet women, but you're definitely doing it wrong. My first girlfriend, although highly motivated by money, wanted to make her own. That is to say she was career oriented. My fiance is an academic/bibliophile type, and is one of the least materialistic people I know. It's a very attractive quality.
Can we lay off the stereotypes? And if your post reflects your actual life experience then I feel sorry for you.
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.
But I don't care what dangly bits are in your pants. I will probably never see you in person, you are just an ally, possibly a friend, in development.
I mean, the fundamental problem is that there are thousands of (general case) engineering major men who never interact with women because there IS a cultural divide on the front of women in engineering. Until the early years problem of women being indoctrinated into thinking the only way to live life is through socialization and pop culture knowledge dictates how good of a person you are, the fundamental problem won't be fixed. The open source community is full of people in the general sense that love developing software for everyone to use. That isn't a sex deterministic thing, and attraction to open source development shouldn't be sex derived.
The basic answer is that you won't change the thousands of men who think it is ok to sexually harass anyone with two X chromosomes on the internet. They just need to take the same stance on it that everyone else does on everything else - ignore them and they go away. If there are active developers on a project that would harass someone for having a 50% chance at birth roll one way instead of another, I wouldn't want to associate with them either.
But like I said, the problem is cultural. We might have laws saying women are equal in the workplace, but modern families raise kids on two distinct tracks depending on their chromosome composition, and it breeds this behavior. That needs to be fixed rather than trying to do damage control after the fact.
I must confess, after well over a decade in the industry, plus school before that ... the number of female programmers I've known is quite small.
I've known one or two women with PhDs who were more like the architects, not sure how much they coded any more. I've worked with a couple of women who were consultants ... very technical, again, very smart ... but I'm only talking about 1-2 people over 15 years. In university I remember a maximum of about 5 women who were pursuing CS as a major, and I'm pretty sure at least half of them transferred out.
But full on 'code monkey' kinda geeks with all that entails? I'm not sure I've actually ever known any. Does anybody have any accurate statistics as to what percentage of programmers are women?
In my experience, it has always been well below 10% .. not saying that's how it "should" be, just that in my experience you're already talking about a smaller percentage of all coders ... and then the number of people I've known actively involved in Open Source projects goes down by another huge jump.
Even the women I have known who work in tech have always manifested as a different 'kind' of geek ... more like the guy I knew who played university football but had a Master's in comp sci; smart, capable, but away from the office didn't have any of the 'geek' traits of the stereotype. Not as obsessed with the minutia of things or Star Trek, and generally with better developed social skills. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Try offering your women something other than money. Maybe culture, personality, ... . You'll attract a different, better type of woman.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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.
Tits or GTFO.. Tend's to drive women out.
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.
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.
The fact that brain function related to intelligence is not identical in men and women is well established, despite similarities in generalized intelligence measurements and political correctness. It's more nature than nurture; don't blame society. This has been debated by the experts, and the nature side won: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html (also note Pinker's references), as much as an inconvenience this is to some people. I expect to be modded down for this, as it's always easiest to shoot the messenger... cheers anyway, folks.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
So we shouldn't study the matter because you haven't seen a "rational explanation"?
Shouldn't investigating be the first step? Which is what it sounds like they're doing. Do you have a problem with that? Or did I miss something? It's hard to confirm anything if all you do is ignore matter and pretend it doesn't exist.
I think this misses what the parent's point actually was. He wasn't saying that all women are gold diggers and want your money, he said that women generally are motivated to work for money as opposed to working for free (love of the project) on an open source project. Your first girlfriend being motivated by money and wanting to work for her own would actually play right into that. Still a stereotype, but not quite the one you may think it is.
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.
I stole this Sig
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.
...that says more about *you* than the female sex.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Not speaking up signals to these fuckheads that their behavior is acceptable. It's not.
HAND.
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.
Because, in trying to explain it, you end up with a few undesirable/lacking/weak answers:
In the end, most of those are found to be lousy answers ... it seems preposterous that one group should be inherently better at the task if there's no provable difference in that kind of task ... if they've been socialized that way, they can be socialized the other way ... why should it be cultural?
It seems absurd to assume a normal distribution in all populations being measures ... but it also seems bizarre to see something grossly skewed to one side or the other.
So far, there's no credible evidence that women should fare less well at programming than men simply because they're women ... but, there's also not much in the way of a good, definable reason why women wouldn't be interested in it either, other than socialization or the fact that they've not done it yet.
Even in the early/mid 80's when I was getting into computers, people were wondering why it was that it was largely men who were pursuing it. Now almost 30 years later ... we still are.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's usually somewhere between difficult and impossible to determine before the effort has been made to integrate people of characteristic X into the community of people doing Y. I'll certainly say after reading replies on Slashdot to various stories regarding women, I can see where I might find the climate here and on similar sites hostile if I were a woman. Just look at the replies so far here. They're split about 3 even ways between: reasonable people who think that women avoid OSS because of reasons that are the fault of the community (Deliberate or inadvertent hostility, sexism, etc), reasonable people like you who question that assumption for fairly good reasons, and blatant woman hating or sexism. Granted there's always trolls in a Slashdot discussion, but the level of sheer vindictiveness always seems to go up when females in "geek" activities are the topic.
When the topic is an actual female geek, who has actively done something cool (Like that girl who did a "howto" on building your own iPod charger a couple of years ago), the comments jump from the creepily fawning to completely dismissive like a bipolar Chihuahua on a cup of espresso. I'm not saying that this is the only reason women don't participate much in OSS software. There might also be issues of interest or that sort of thing. The general attitude certainly can't be helpful though.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Good luck trying to find a woman that doesn't care about money.
Hah! That's easy! Just find a woman with a rich husband.
[ducks]
That's quite a stereotype you've got there...
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
In the abstract, you're right that we can't know a priori what the 'fair' distribution should look like. If everyone had equal opportunities to pursue their interests, free from any bias or pressure (either pressure to join or pressure to stay out), then the distribution within a sub-field could match the population at large (if interest in the sub-field is uncorrelated to the distribution parameter in question (ethnicity, gender, etc.)), or the distribution within a sub-field could be different from the population at large (if interest in the sub-field is somehow correlated to some parameter). An obvious example is age: the distribution of ages within a particular job do not match society at large. Nor would we expect them to: the ability and interests of people vary strongly with age.
Now that we've gotten that abstractness out of the way, let's consider the real world. In the general case answering these kinds of questions can be quite difficult, as bias can be stubbornly difficult to identify and quantify. On top of that, people's upbringing and sociological context will of course affect their opinions and interests. Is it enough for us to just provide equal opportunities? Or should it be a social goal to in particular reach out to people who, for whatever reason, don't realize that they would enjoy and be good at a work in a particular field?
But we can get more concrete still. Is the distribution of women in programming reflective of their true interest or is it somehow skewed by sociological biases/pressures/etc.? Well, here there is actually plenty of evidence. Firstly, that the gender differences in capabilities are either small or non-existent. The gender difference in, say, math skills between men and women are very small: far smaller than the distribution within the male population or female population, for instance. (This has been borne out in many studies.) Also, the gender differences are well-known to be varying as a function of time (getting smaller as social equality gets better), and to vary as a function of location and social context, suggesting that what differences are seen are due to environment and not due to intrinsic differences in capabilities. Taken together, all of this suggests that if we're just talking about capabilities, the distribution should be much closer to 50:50 than it is today.
Additionally, there is no lack of evidence for sexism still existing, and in particular still existing in high-education fields like math, science, and programming. So while it is difficult to say what the 'fair' distribution of men:women should be in the field of programming, we can be fairly sure that it is currently strongly skewed by the considerable sexism known to exist.
My point is that while it can be difficult in the really know what the fair distribution would look like (where everyone is making free, informed, unpressured choices)... we are demonstrably not yet at that point. There is still plenty of overt bias, sexism, and hostility. So until we have done a much better job of leveling the playing field, we shouldn't get sidetracked by esoteric 'ideal distribution' questions.
Is there a gender check in GIT? Is there a gender check in subversion? If I submit code under nothing more than a pseudonym then I have contributed to open source and taken part without a care in the world as to what my gender is. If I then get on freenode to talk to the developers; there's still no gender test. There's no gender test on reading the 'learn programing language X in 30 days'.
So there's absolutely nothing stopping women from joining open source; so why then is there 'issues' and 'problems' doesnt sound like a problem to me. Simple fact is that women arent in open source because the $ is better elsewhere. Engineering and drafting scholarships worth $25,000 for women; large corporations with 'hiring quotas' that give women any wage they ask for regardless of skill in the fields they are considered lacking. Sexism in other fields draw technical women away from open source and getting open source into the same sexist $ offering to draw women is just absurd.
Your commentary falls far short of any sort of proof, and also suggests you didn't read even the summary:
We're not talking strictly about "women in development jobs," we're talking about women in one type versus women in another type of development jobs.
Clearly, there is an additional factor dissuading them from participating in open source. What biological factor related to their brain development would you posit is related to this?
this attitude that because the women are not well suited to the work, the men should apply themselves or excel at it either because it makes the women look bad. Yes, let's make sure everything is the same right down the middle! And we can all look forward to going back to living in caves, except from now on all we'll have to eat will be dirt. Though I'm sure some ~~miraculous~~ woman is about to invent a perpetual motion machine any day now...
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
When the topic is an actual female geek, who has actively done something cool (Like that girl who did a "howto" on building your own iPod charger a couple of years ago), the comments jump from the creepily fawning to completely dismissive like a bipolar Chihuahua on a cup of espresso.
Mostly because the project in question would never have gotten anyones attention except for the fact that it's a tech project done by a female.
If any female hackers want to get recognized for their skills and not their gender, all it takes is a gender neutral handle.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
To take a stab at your dolls vs guns comment:
For a very long time there was a strong selection bias towards that, and our cultures reflect this.
This might be slowly changing, but you cannot say there was not a biological basis for it. It's been too soon for there not to be such a pressure for it to be discounted.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Step 1: Stop announcing such personal details to people who don't care
Step 2: Watch in amazement as the 'exclusion' drops away!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Nobody is.
Put another way: just because the general population has a makeup of a certain distribution, why do we assume some activity Y with a distribution different to that global distribution indicates some kind of undesirable situation?
Variety and balance of viewpoints gives more chance to get things right. We are talking about a situation where the involvement of women in proprietary software is pretty minimal in many places; that it's worse in OSS is undesirable but only in the sense that it would be better if more of them were involved.
I do agree that in some cases the difference is due to some kind of discriminatory behavior, but in others its just simply due to differences in interest. Has either situation been confirmed in this case?
Women tend to have a better ability in various fields related to computing (N.B. statistically significant average variations but below the level where it should influence your assessment of any particular given person). Women were dominant in various fields of computing through to about the 1980s with 40% of people involved being women then (this is the Wikipedia number though it matches my memory). There are pretty clear studies which show that when computing began being taught in school women were put off, especially through reduced access to the computers.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
There are plenty of men like that too, you might discover. The word you're looking for is "careerism." It's what you get when someone with few true intellectual loves in life discovers they have a talent for a given occupation (especially in the sciences or other white-collar work) at a later age, such as while they're entering college. When you discount careerists on both sides of the fence, you'll find the bared truth that cultural momentum from old stereotypes about gender roles is still responsible. We don't teach it formally any more, but it's still in the media and how older people expect younger people to act, and that's still creating substantial drag. Give it time, keep pushing, and you'll see the balance get asymptotically closer to egalitarian, permitting flex room for the unknowable portion of both men and women who are drawn towards other interests for all other imaginable reasons.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Yep, it has been. Go in any french software development company, and start counting male/female. You will be surprised...not happy, but who cares!
I don't really think there will be much of a change in the percentage of female involvement in open source coding no matter what we do (unless Mattel introduces Open Source Coding Barbie).
But barring that how about:
* Starting an all woman coding project.
* At conferences, instead of having evening happy hours with 100-to-1 guy girl ratios, split them up to hit the local bars to hit on women who are actually interested in being hit on and better looking that the ones that are of only interest because they are the only ones there. This will help take the focus off of the women beyond their coding competency.
* Level up the socially awkward geeks who are bugging these women because they are pretty much the only female contact in their life. Direct them to resources on how to lose weight, get in shape, dress better and improve their social skills & social life.
Any other solution I hear out there consists of yelling at men and calling them neckbeards instead of actually trying to find solutions. Of course this approach isn't well received and ultimately results in idiotic yelling matches between people who want nothing more than to insult each other based on gender issues. And yes, this is why most people ignore this shit. The people involved are more focused on degrading other people than building them up.
Actually, the DNA is exactly the same. You did not know it, right? It is okey, you are just a boy. Now go back to school and check again what is the difference.
Right away: It is called CATCH 22.
Another one: The unemployment rate in USA is bellow 10%. But it is based only on the paid EI benefits. So, if you are unemployed, and don't get any EI benefits, you are not unemployed.....whatever that means.
If you want to know why women aren't going into the open-source movement, looking at the men will give you all the answers you need. Seriously: this is something we cannot afford to kid ourselves about anymore.
There are plenty of decent, upstanding men in the movement. But there are also a disproportionate amount of people who, sad to say, fit the stereotypes that give us all a bad name. Call them basement-dwellers, neckbeards, louts, or whatever else you wish. And some of these people, as others have noted, are highly-respected figures in the movement: a fact that doesn't reflect so well on the rest of us. The fact is that these are people who push others away, and (as a group) women seem to find them especially creepy.
One of the most common cultural memes in existence is that women should beware of creepy men, for definitions of "creepy" that vary by culture and individual experience. Given what creepy men can do, it's tough to blame women for that. But it's so deeply ingrained that for many, avoiding creepy men becomes a powerful (if not always conscious) factor in decisions both major and minor. Every time you see someone who might have had promise in this industry turn away saying that she wasn't "nerdy enough" for it or that she "couldn't deal with the geeks," you're seeing someone for whom avoiding creepy men played a role in that decision. Every time you see someone online yelling "TITS OR GTFO" or "Make me a sammich," her decision is vindicated.
None of our attempts to do something about the gender imbalance is ever going to work until this is addressed: if this is worth doing, then there's no way around fixing the broken people who have become the face of the movement. But how does one even do that? I don't have an answer for that question. Any step toward doing this means rejecting some people out of hand, and the accepting nature of this movement has always been among its greatest strengths: no matter what we decide to reject means throwing a lot of metaphorical babies out with the bathwater. On the other hand, the current situation isn't really all that much different: the roles are reversed, as they reject us, but rejection still occurs, and by and large, the movement is still the driving force even if it isn't the one doing the actual rejecting. And so bathwater still gets thrown out, and so it goes that there are still babies in it.
What to do? We're not even really at the point of deciding that. We're still in the process of recognizing where the problem is. But that step has to come, one way or another.
I'm not offering any proof, I'm saying the biological hypothesis shouldn't be rejected out of hand without proof. There are actual physical differences in the brains of males and females that lead to functional differences. There's no reason to assume that these don't matter.
I will say that on the whole most of our gender differences are clearly cultural, and in this case probably overwhelmingly so. But I disagree that we can ignore the influence of biology.
Clearly, there is an additional factor dissuading them from participating in open source. What biological factor related to their brain development would you posit is related to this?
You're asking for wild speculation, so you'll get it. Women might be biologically more social than men, perhaps because they raise children more often than men. If social parents are more successful than anti-social parents, then that would provide selective pressure for females to be more social then men. If that's the case, then women may choose to spend more of their free time socializing, than writing open source code in their basements.
Now I don't think this is a correct explanation, but it's plausible and deserves to be examined before discarding it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Actually, the DNA is exactly the same. You did not know it, right? It is okey, you are just a boy. Now go back to school and check again what is the difference.
The DNA is exactly the same... between boys and girls? I suspect you missed a biology lesson about X and Y chromosomes somewhere along the way.
Actually women have two X chromosomes and men have one X and one Y chromosome, leading to fundamental differences in body makeup between the sexes and different hormones running around their respective bodies. This can, and often does influence brain chemistry and can skew statistics towards a gender bias.
That said, this says nothing about capability or capacity, and certainly there are still far too many instances of unjust gender discrimination which must be stopped. But to say that our gender has no effect on us whatsoever is utterly disingenuous.
Then explain to me, as I commented above, why the sex that is, in your opinion, biologically predisposed to community building, consensus building, sharing, and doing things for the good of others, is dramatically UNDER-represented in a community whose entire goal is the creation of community resources that can be shared by all freely?
And why that same selfless community of sharers is dominated by the gender that you're suggesting is biologically predisposed to a competitive, aggressive, confrontational nature?
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.
Stallman at Gran Canaria DID NOT TARGET his emacs virgins joke to women! His comments were gender neutral and applied to men as well as women. He has made the same dumb joke for 30 years in public speeches, only now there was willful intent to twist his words - by who? By the owner of the 'opensourcetogo' blog one David "Lefty" Schlesinhger a notorious sexist himself who has published pornographic (never before public in any way and acquired by shady means) of men and women who disagree with him, at their extreme protest to which he replies "Sue me!" David "Lefty" Schlesinger aka 'stonemirror' is the last person in the world who should be quoted in defense of feminism - he is a documented harasser of women (ask Kathy Sutphen about how he stalked her so severely she suffered severe physical and psychological medical problems), a pornographer and the Blackest of Trolls!
With all of the comments talking about socially awkward men in programming, I can't help but share two experiences. The first is from my senior year at university, a female classmate started venting to me about some social situations she had recently had. A year earlier we had been on a few dates, but I didn't find us to be a great pair before anything serious really happened, and as a result we were still friends. For some reason she didn't want to come out and say how most of the other CS majors lacked social skills (probably a dead beaten horse at that point), and while she was looking for the right words she was twirling her hair with one finger I suggested the phrase she was looking for was "people with longer hair." She agreed and summed up her frustration with "Many of the other CS majors need learn how to talk to people with longer hair". A few years earlier in my Introduction to Programming I witnessed, at the end of the class, two extra nerdy/unnatractive guys talking to one of the female TA's. I heard one of the say that since she was a girl she shouldn't be in CS. I really wanted to hit guy, but sadly my physique does not lend itself to those types of activities.
"We'd accept women into our community with open arms, if only they'd hide the fact that they're women, so as to avoid distracting us with thoughts of boobies and such."
Dare to share some of your code? I just want to treat you based on your code quality, not on your whining, and complaining, and bitching around...
Maybe try another.
Correlation does not imply causality. They're looking for the cause why it appears that women are underrepresented.
I reject your implication that women are part of your experience; normal or otherwise. Bathing in projected images is not experience.
Oh, I see. Thanks for clearing it up.
"Open Source is a magical land where everybody strives for excellence, and so women are inherently disinclined or disadvantaged when it comes to that type of work, whereas men practically piss excellence by comparison."
You're right, I clearly fail to comprehend the communities.
You know a stereotype is based - usually - on the behavior of the majority of a group.
No, it's not.
Ok That settles it Tatsu said so.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
A behavior stereotype is usually based on the behavior of some of the members of a group. The bad thing is that, being a stereotype, it is blindly applied to all members of the group. It has nonetheless a grain of truth.
See? For it to be issued from a grain of truth doesn't make it good. It's still bad.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Right, it came out all wrong. Apologies.
*go proof-read next post*
Write boring code, not shiny code!
You know what is DNA? And chromosome? Keep reading...
Gender performance in mathetmatics (certainly relevant to computer science and programming, no?) shows fairly little gender variance until secondary schooling, and in recent years, that gap has closed as women are encouraged to participate in greater numbers in the more advanced math classes on offer. Some studies find boys test better on SATs... other studies find girls do better in classroom studies. There's very little to suggest that girls are "biologically" disinclined to participate in math and science as a career.
I'd agree that the notion shouldn't be rejected out of hand, but there's also a pretty strong body of evidence that indicates that, as far as math and science learning is concerned, there's not a lot of difference inherent to the genders - it's not really a "boys only" or "girls only" thing. There are huge swaths of evidence suggesting that sexism, cultural norms, and social pressures contribute to these disparities. This certainly suggests a parallel to the situation here, where programming, and especially Open Source programming, is a "boys club," where social pressures, rather than biological, keep female participation low.
Ellen Spertus has a page on gender and computing that includes a link to the ADA Initiative as well as other research she's done and collected on similar 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.
That's a fair criticism. Women shouldn't get any special treatment. Whether that's creepy behavior when they get acknowledged for their technical skill, or for when they get extra recognition for simply having any technical skill at all. Both are sexist.
Alas, we live in reality where women do get treated differently. Hiding your identity is one pragmatic way to deal with that.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There are plenty of men like that too, you might discover
Exactly. I'm fairly sure that motivation to work for money applies equally to both genders.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
As a woman and professional developer, my reason for not participating in OSS is lack of time / energy to devote to it. I have other priorities for the hours I'm not at work, such as going to the gym, cleaning, cooking / baking, spending time on family and romantic relationships, reading, etc. I assume these priorities have been shaped by my upbringing and culture, and in my experience they differ from average American male priorities. I feel less pressure to achieve a prestigious career or a high level of competence in a hobby, but more pressure to keep a clean attractive home, to spend time on my appearance, to help organize / cook for family events, and to accommodate / support my SO's career goals. Personally I don't resent the time spent on housework, it is my choice to change the sheets and vacuum regularly rather than nagging my SO or tolerating a messy home, but I do believe these choices are the result of my upbringing as a "girl" and the cultural pressure to be "feminine" and a "homemaker" even, or maybe especially, while pursuing a career in a male-dominated field.
Totally agree on that point. And yes, anonymity is a pragmatic way of dealing with it... but it does seem to suggest that there's something "wrong" in a culture in which that's viewed as the "best solution" for a woman to participate without practically needing a restraining order.
I never understood why people refuse to believe something could ever be the case because its labeled as a stereotype, lets take the goldigger example. Women have a biological imperative to find a mate capable of supporting her offspring, we see this behavior in just about every species out there, so why do we think the human female would be ANY different in this regard? 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. The conclusion is pretty obvious, as far as evolution goes the stronger more dominant male is more likely top of the food chain and therefor better able to provide for her offspring. the fact that this doesn't hold true in modern society doesn't magically undo 20,000 years of evolution.
And I'll probably get hate for pointing this out but if nationally its the same as locally its true, you see more blacks in sports because they are practicing voluntary eugenics and breeding for athletic ability. I was the tutor for most of the HS football team and their parents made no bones about it, they chose their mates based on athletic ability. One was quite proud that after 2 years of searching he was able to woo a top track and field star, their kids were constantly at the top of every athletic roster and three out of their four children got full scholarships based on their skills on the field (the fourth went MMA) and they were quite proud of that and bragged quite often. love frankly had nothing to do with their initial selection, it was all based on athletic skill.
As for TFA most women simply don't care for geekier jobs, does that make them stupid? Nooo, it simply means that it doesn't appeal to them. They will kick a guy's ass when it comes to verbal languages or anything where being able to read body language comes into play such as negotiator, I've also found women make better cops and are able to more often diffuse a situation without needing violence. this whole "women and men are equal so there numbers should be equal" is a fallacy that assumes a female is simply a male with different genitalia and nothing could be further from the truth, just as a man might be able to lift more but a woman will be more agile so too is there jobs where it will appeal to a woman's natural abilities and some that will appeal to a man's. That doesn't mean that the women are being run off or are incapable of doing the job, simply that they don't want it. I don't see anything sexist in simply acknowledging we are different.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Because, when it comes to gender, intelligence is uniform. Also, it is not so much about uniform involvement but respect. I mean, groping of women participants at conference? Conferences allowing sexual innuendo that would get you fired anywhere (Golden Gate Ruby Conference 2009)?
The reality is that when it comes to science/engineering fields, lack of professionalism is rampant among software practitioners. I've personally known of very embarrassing cases in Academia (in particular STEM fields) where female students and lecturers have been exposed to harassing behavior that, again, would get you fired on the spot at any company (tenure == lifelong impunity). But in software, it is worse, specially in conferences and FOSS projects, both of which are free from federal and state regulations against hostile work environments.
We are a vulgar, condescending bunch when it comes to the women (talented or otherwise) that work among us. There is no debate about that, and we should not need a reasonable explanation of why this is wrong.
In order to get an interest in an issue, you have to identify what the problem is. And non-conformance to an arbitrary number, such as any specific gender ratio isn't a problem. It has to have some negative effect.
I don't care if you are male or female, I care about the job you do, the software you write, the art you create, whatever it is you do. And I refuse to get gender issues pushed on me with no explanation as to why they are problematic. Maybe women just don't care about this kind of stuff, just like girls care a lot more about riding and horses than boys do?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
I'm much more interested in an Open Culture than I am in Open Source software -- and I *love* Open Source software.
I have seen (and been involved in) disputes over womens involvement in programming, Open Source culture, etc.,. I have to say: It gets really personal, really fast.
I don't think this is about "Woman good, man bad." I don't think this is even about "Woman good, some men bad."
We are not a culture that thinks much about love and romance -- we tend to retreat into talking about software.
But I think we really need to talk about love and romance.
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.
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?"
And is this a problem serious enough to try and solve it with yet another "initiative" every several months? Is this even a problem at all or just observation?
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?
No need to get defensive. You also see "no reason" for significantly smaller woman participation and yet it happens. Why do you immediately start jumping up and down claiming that one possible reason just cannot be true. If you have link to statistical study of code quality produced by men and women, please share it. Until then, I have no data to say anything one way or another.
"Differences in interest" sounds like a nice way of saying "girls like dolls, boys like guns."
So? Don't mistake political correctness for reality.
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.
How do you know there is no biological basis? There are physical differences between genders: different body build, musculature optimized for different things, different hormonal balance, even a little different brain (difference in volume for example). Considering that fact, why every politically correct drone goes batshit insane when someone suggests that physical differences may be also accompanied by mental ones? It would not make much sense for evolution to only optimize genders for certain tasks only physically, but not mentally as well.
Well, the reaction to Obama's election showed that, while less prevalent and open than in the 1950's and 1960's, hidden racism against blacks is still pretty strong in the USA. So, in that context, is there any surprise that blacks would try to give their offspring a chance in a field (sports) which is a strong meritocracy and where they are less affected by racist undercurrents? Reduce the racist obstacles and I suspect they will eventually start to select for skills that don't wear out your body as quickly. However, it might take a generation or two to undo the effects of centuries.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Not really because most women don't want to be developers and open source won't become a women's paradise if men abandon it.
Could it be that professional developers don't want to come home and program? Most people, male or female, want a change of pace after working all day. Not everyone can live and breathe software without a break. So, insulting professional developers is just kind of distracting because you actually made a good point and it reminded me of something I didn't say when I posted anonymously earlier.
Open Source projects are usually started by someone with a passionate interest in a problem, or maybe just an itch to scratch. Others joining the projects again have some kind of personal interest in it - either to get requested features implemented, share patches, or even evangelize if the software made that much of a difference to them. (The few times I might have been tempted to try my hand at OSS, the software was written in a different language and not one I wanted to learn. Doesn't mean I don't love my OSS, though.)
So, you're right in that these are 2 different questions. Women in IT/STEM in general isn't a useful place to start when discussing OSS participation. Maybe women don't participate in OSS as much because they don't use it as much as men do, who knows?
What might be better to study is how to motivate people to actually finish or maintain code that they throw out in Sourceforge or Google Code.
If women want to participate and are good contributors then more power to them. If they aren't interested, who cares? Equal opportunity is what matters, not equal outcome. For whatever reason (genetic, cultural, etc.), women aren't as interested and that is fine. If a woman is interested and capable but is blocked by something outside of her control, then you have me interested.
I think that by "unaffected by stereotypes" he means "not unfairly labelled with a stereotype that doesn't apply you". Had you been unjustly judged based on a stereotype, you may have been more sensitive to the fact that, even if stereotypes do apply to a large segment of some populations, the reminder is often unfairly grouped in and judged with that sterotype. For example: DWB. If you were affected by a stereotype, you might be more sensitive to the idea that, while that stereotype may provide a useful caution, many or most individuals in that population do not fit that stereotype. You need to judge the individual. Stereotypes are often reduced to guilt by association, even if the association is as tenuous as skin colour.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Most women I know would disagree. And to be honest, I have slightly more female friends than male friends, mostly because I couldn't care less about soccer and formula one.
Some women either make gender issues their pet subject (and when you are on the lookout for something, you sure as hell see it everywhere), or they are in an environment where indeed it comes up constantly. Such environments exist. But, you know, the beauty of life in the western world is that you generally have a choice. You can dedicate your life to gender issues, or you can walk away and change the environment.
No, I'm not claiming we have 100% gender equality in all but a few bad environments. But there are certainly more than enough to choose from where it's not "the" big topic and you can get by perfectly without having to worry about it every day.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Here's rationality: the more people who help your cause, the more likely it is to be successful. It's reasonable to ask: how can we make it easier for (members of large underutilized group) to participate? Making this 50/50% isn't what it's about.
I do agree that in some cases the difference is due to some kind of discriminatory behavior, but in others its just simply due to differences in interest. Has either situation been confirmed in this case?
Look to history: videogames use to be an exclusively male hobby, now it's close to achieving parity (depending on which stats you look at). Those firms who were "bothered" by the gender imbalance did the research and took the risks to bring games to an entirely new market segment that others had written off. Think that's a different situation? Not really... marketing goods and marketing volunteerism/causes are pretty similar endeavors.
Our mindset--if we care about the causes of Free and Open Source Software--should not be focused on intrinsic differences (though some of those exist, statistically) or the reasons that women will never want to join us en masse. Instead, we should be thinking about how to attract and leverage all the talent we can get.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Now we're talking. I agree with all of this. Cultural factors are the overwhelming influence in almost all gender roles. I just feel that assuming biology is irrelevant is counter productive, because deniers will always point to that assumption. If instead we accept that biology matters, and measure how much it matters, then we have the evidence to assert that culture matters more.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I never understood why people refuse to believe something could ever be the case because its labeled as a stereotype, lets take the goldigger example. Women have a biological imperative to find a mate capable of supporting her offspring, we see this behavior in just about every species out there, so why do we think the human female would be ANY different in this regard?
I remember once an AC answered a post like yours. It was an AC or else I'd give a proper attribution.
The response was "you're using reason to counter an emotional argument. Sadly, this will not work, because those who will be swayed by emotional arguments are not mature enough to be reasoned with in an adult manner."
I don't see anything sexist in simply acknowledging we are different.
Academic careers have been ruined simply for suggesting that the female brain is "wired" differently from the male brain. I wish I were making this up. No amount of incontrovertible physical evidence will stop this kind of hyper-emotional over-reaction. What you're dealing with is like a religion and anyone who does not adhere to it is a heretic. I know many would like to believe we abandoned this type of approach after the Dark Ages but the reality is that it simply changed form.
Narrow-minded types always tend to believe things like "equality implies same-ness", causing them to feel threatened by any valid claim of differences (which incidentally is why weak-minded people worship conformity). As far as they're concerned, any difference you point out is the same as saying one is inferior to the other. That's the doctrine of this religion.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I enjoy reading Slasdot, but I'm all but done trying to submit articles here, because they rarely get aggregated.
The most meaningful one I tried to post, was a survey on Aspergers/ASD, which could might have helped people.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
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.
Wrong, a stereotype is just a generalization with bad connotations. It can also be a completely false generalization, but any generalization can be false if it's based on faulty observations.
While I think it's wrong that ALL stereotypes have a grain of truth at their core, I think it's true that most of them do. These things come from somewhere.
For humor, let's look at the stereotype about black people and liking watermelon. For those who don't know, there's a stereotype that black people love watermelon, much more so than other people. The truth, however, isn't quite the same; in reality, most people like watermelon, regardless of skin color (honestly, WTF doesn't like watermelon?). But where did this crazy thing come from? Simple: back in the slave days, black people were frequently put to work farming watermelons (it wasn't all tobacco and cotton), and of course being out in the hot fields all day, a watermelon makes a nice, sweet, and hydrating snack, so they obviously took a few for themselves. Even better, these watermelons came over from Africa with them; they were unknown in Europe before slavery, so it may have been a familiar crop to some of them. So, there's your grain of truth; obviously, the stereotype is pretty silly, but there is a grain of truth there.
I'd say that most people generally want money in exchange for their work; if someone isn't going to pay them for it, they'll waste their time doing something else like watching sports, going shopping, hanging out with friends, etc. This is true for both men and women. It would be ridiculous to think that a majority of men have any interest in writing open-source software; it's a tiny, tiny minority. But it's a much bigger minority, evidently, than the percentage of women who have any such interest. We can debate the reasons for this all day; I'd say much of it has to do with there being more grown men who have a lot of free time on their hands, typically due to being single and having no children, having never gotten involved in a relationship (frequently because they aren't very socially talented). Cue the stereotype of the 40-year-old virgin living in his parents' basement. This phenomenon is almost non-existent in females. Females don't have to be socially talented to find a boyfriend, the men come to them even if they don't open their mouths. Then, even if the boyfriend is short-lived, it's not uncommon for females to fall pregnant. When the man disappears, guess who has to spend all her spare time raising the kid? Even in two-parent households, it's a frequent complaint that the women have to do all the housework, even if they also have a job, while the husband does his job, then comes home and veges on the couch while his wife makes dinner. For whatever reason, adult men typically have more free time than adult women, so a small percentage of these men spend their time pursuing a hobby of working on OSS projects (other men drink beer and watch sports, while the more productive ones build things out of wood in their garage, or play in a band, etc.).
Of course, lots of OSS is written by professionals these days. But here again, the dynamics are very different. Many of these professionals were probably computer hobbyists when they were younger, in college or high school, and were less socially-inclined so they spent their vast amounts of free time becoming "computer nerds"; getting involved in OSS and then getting a CS degree and making a career out of it were natural progressions. Not many young girls get involved in computers as a hobby, especially back in the 80s or 90s; they're generally more interested in spending time with friends.
I wonder how many of the "asshats" who are openly derisive towards women online in these OSS discussions are from non-western cultures where gender roles are more rigid?
There, I said it.
In fact, ANY barriers of entry into FOSS development - devskills aside - are *very* low when it comes to 'types of people', be they male, female, handycapped, black, asian, white, stutterers, deaf, blind or whatnot.
The truth is, you can work for years on end without people even knowing that you're a woman, 95% spastic, tied to a wheelchair with no means what so ever to articulate yourselves without a keyboard. A friend of mine worked on a non-trivial FOSS project for a few years, and only after quite some time came to find out that one of the devs had a serious stutter. ... Of course, stuttering doesn't show in E-Mails and IRC.
The very same thing goes for being a woman. For all I know, entire subsystems of the Linux kernel could be developed by women and we wouldn't even know ... or really care for that matter. After all, in the end, it's the results that matter.
No, I call bullshit on this whole 'barriers of entry' non-sense. Any women who is interested in FOSS dev'ing is two clicks away from joining a projects mailing list, and if she makes no big deal of her gender until her first 100 commits as a core-team member there isn't even a chance that gender could cause an issue. And even if that should come up, I doubt that in any serious project it would be much of a big deal.
I suspect stronger evolutionary or society forces at work here. Diving into the minute details of the millionth PHP CMS project or yet another PL for the Java VM is a thing for the sexually frustrated / unchallenged male looking for yet another avantgarde frontier where he can prove himself and grow the self-esteem to eventually, if he is lucky, be able to interact in more generic social situations - i.e. those with sexual subtexts involved - at eye-level with more 'dumb' but handsome men, in places where also the ladies are at.
Doing what most of us do requires a sort of hunter/ADHD/ausbergers type of brain and those are know to be found more in men than with women. ... But that's just one theory from the top of my head. Maybe in 20 years from now we'll have women dev'ing just like they are playing video-games today. ... Or reading comics/mangas. Also something unthinkable 20 years ago. ... No, the new and avantgarde always has been interesting for excess men who weren't in some womens hands already. Jazz came from black males and not white women, despite black males being way more at a disadvantage 150 years ago, *especially* in terms of basic human rights, spare time and musical education. Goes to show that evolution does still have a little say in things, doesn't it?
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Women's tastes in men are even more precise. They will change due to what point in their menstrual cycle they are.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The more chicks the more better ('specially if they're hot!). :)
Take these little gems as evidence of a real, vicious problem in geek culture:
"It’s by far the worst coding-related experience I ever went through. That made me retire from Open Source." http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/when-software-offends-the-pantyshot-package-controversy/509
“I was trying not to, but it needed to be said.” http://skepchick.org/2011/12/reddit-makes-me-hate-atheists/
"c'mon. you're not a girl if u don't show us pics." http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_17/109-OMG-Girlz-Dont-Exist-on-teh-Intarweb-1
The women obviously prefer to get paid! Right on! :)
Seriously, I don't care. Open software is great, and anyone who wants to write it can go ahead and write it. Do you honestly expect me to worry about whether or not the person who wrote my software has a penis or a vagina? It's not going to make the code better.
Besides, having both genders involved will lead to more interaction between open source programmers and members of the opposite sex, which would be disastrous. Before you know it they'll be having sex with each other and producing children, and the more time they spend copulating and raising their children, the less time they will have to code. I would hate to see such great talent go to waste.
...is how few men there are in quilting clubs!
I once dated a woman who ran a quilt shop and every time I visited the store I would hear comments about how strange it was for me to be there.
I understand the reference to the Countess of Lovelace, but given Ada is best known (in this country, anyhow) as being something of a dead language I'm not sure I'd have gone with that name.
Sure, social gender roles (and gender is a social construct) certainly have an influence.
But you are probably meaning to ask about a biological sex-related basis for programming. Which probably exists as well. There is fairly strong evidence of sex-based differences in cognition, including in various areas related to mathematical reasoning that could reasonably be expected to impact programming ability.
There are also at least some published evidence of sex-linked differences in cognition that directly relate to preferred models of software development; this is particularly important because it implies that any dominance of one sex in the open source community will tend to be "sticky", since once the field is dominated by one sex, it will be less accessible to the other sex due to the establishment of less-favorable (to the excluded sex) development models.
... OK, I'll bite at the troll -- and I have not stopped beating my wife.
First, just how many women do you expect? Looking a closed-source companies is a bad comparison since all the large ones are under a form of voluntary "Affirmative Action". Defensively against lawsuits, they try to hire according to the source population (college grad) gender numbers. I know, I've done it.
Second, why do you think "open source" is all warm'n'fuzzy, kinder, gentler? I know, I've done that too -- both run a project and tried to get kernel patches accepted. F/OS is _ruthlessly_ competitive and heavily slanted towards negative feedback when you are lucky enough to get any. For good reason, the kernel maintainers are busy and justifiably concerned about code overgrowth. You have to like beating your head against the wall. And then hit just the right problem with just the right code at just the right time to get in. Get lucky a few times, and you get more attention. But its a dogged uphill battle. Perhaps not one many women [egalitairian, risk averse] are motivated to engage. But how or why should it be otherwise? Please tell. IS F/OS short of development? Would the instability of greater development be an improvment?
Finally, the only time gender is a legitimate inquiry, sexual orientation is equally important. Is there any evidence the F/OS is homophobic, racist or discriminates on other axes? Then why assume it discriminates just because there are few women?
Sadly I know what you say is true, look at how they have practically blacklisted those scientists that published a study that showed Asians were smarter than whites and whites smarter than blacks. Now if one were to look at that with logic instead of emotion one would probably conclude it had to do with environment and available food sources. the Asians had rougher living conditions in the mountains of Asia than the northern plains of Europe, the whites had a rougher winter climate in the plains of Europe than the warm fertile lands of Africa, therefor the need for brains simply wasn't as needed for survival because the food wasn't as scarce. Simple, logical, but not allowed because it isn't "PC" to say anything other than all races are exactly the same except for skin tone, or that males and females are the exact same except for different genitalia.
Its sad that science despite our supposedly "enlightened" societies still can't tackle truly tough questions about the human animal without having to follow political correctness and dogma. Look at the hate and stink caused by anyone that says the climate could be affected by anything other than AGW, they are called names and accused of being "plants" of some nefarious group when the simple fact is we live on an incredibly complex planet that has had some seriously huge changes long before man could affect squat, see the medieval warming period or the little ice age for just two examples. Does that mean we shouldn't strive to be cleaner? of course not if for no other reason than smog is bad on the lungs, but that doesn't mean one should send the entire society back to the dark ages to 'save the planet" (while making several of those screaming about AGW instant billionaires) either. It means we should do what ALL good science should do, we should study, discuss, ask questions and search for answers.
its just a shame that heresy has been replaced with political correctness as there is still quite a bit we need to learn about the human animal to better understand ourselves but when there are questions you simply aren't allowed to ask then our progress is stifled.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No, if DNA was exactly the same we would LOOK exactly the same. DNA isn't the same even between two men (unless they're identical twins, I suppose).
And yes, I do get your point "we all have the same DNA that makes us human". But you can't deny that women and men are not the same, biologically or mentally. We clearly have differences. And those are due to differences in our genetic codes. Minuscule differences, it's true, but differences all the same.
Actually I don't even know why I'm bothering to reply. You're either completely ignorant on what you're saying, and thus will argue it until you're blue in the face, or you're trolling. Your poor grammar seems to point to the latter...
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Are you talking about men or women here?
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
I'm not a female, but I've lost interest in contributing to open-source projects for reasons that I suspect also drive away many women.
I've submitted patches to projects before. Some have been accepted; others not. The rejected patches were of decent quality, clean, and solid. I've looked for a pattern to the rejected patches, and the common factor seems to be that they were pounced upon at random by a Self-Appointed Someone because the patch failed to address his Pet Issue, even if the changes were a clear improvement otherwise. Rather than taking time to collaboratively improve my patch or offer alternatives I am told that my work is idiotic.
I even met one of these Self-Appointed Someones once, and while pleasant enough in person, they turn the ass-hat knob to 11 online. It's not just my perception either -- my coworkers have to deal with him and his last name has become shorthand for "gratuitous buttholery". I've witnessed developers intentionally avoid dealing with him by waiting to submit patches until they know he's going on vacation or travelling, or through alternate routes into the source base that bypass him entirely (thankfully he's not the project leader).
This type of behavior seems to be widely tolerated by the open source community. Since nobody, particularly project leaders, has the gumption to call people to task for their project-related behavior, it drives away people who aren't geared toward confrontation. The only counter-examples I've witnessed are when behavior went clearly beyond the pale, and even then you see some people defending the outrageous behavior. In a private enterprise these behaviors would be nipped in the bud -- I've witnessed two outstanding developers lose their jobs for ongoing patterns of antisocial behavior. The employer incentive to reduce/remove these antisocial behaviors results in a non-threatening environment, and good but non-confrontational developers can get their job done effectively.
This is the downside of open source project communities operating as technocracies: In order to attract as much technical talent as possible, odious behavior is tolerated. Unfortunately the flip side of tolerating antisocial behaviors to tap this talent is that you lose the talent of people who don't want to deal with it. I believe it would be worthwhile for open source project leaders to keep an eye out for community members who demonstrate antisocial behavior and correct them, first gently in private, but publicly and more forcefully if the pattern persists. Project leaders should remember that silently tolerating obnoxious behavior becomes a de-facto endorsement of that behavior in the eyes of more casual contributors.
When it becomes taboo to be a jerk in open source communities I believe you will see more contributions from women and those like me who've opted to avoid the drama.
Yep, so, as you said, technically speaking, even the DNA between two males is different......so what was the question again!!!
Because you said that the DNA is exactly the same..... Unless you were being sarcastic when you said that? (My brain isn't working at top speed this late in the day, so it's possible I missed the sarcasm completely).
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
"Wanting a professional life doesn't have to involve making money you know."
Yes it does.
Given current society, your professional life will in most probability take you more than half you awaken time which means you *need* to make money out of it or else you won't be able to afford so much devoted time.
It was not always the case: see how many scientists, adventurers or sportmen from the eighteen/nineteen century didn't need to worry to earn a life, so they were able to pursue their non-money producing goals. Even now, some people can do it for a while, while living at their parents basement (it might be your case), or even their whole life for a minimal elite of rich heirs.
"I'd say that most people generally want money in exchange for their work"
I don't think so. Most people generally want respect, being able to survive and have some commodities. It happens that money usually is quite a worthy currency and measure for them.
Is it because girls are bad at programming? I see no reason to think there's a gender-related basis for programming... do you?
It could be. So far, you haven't eliminated that possibility.
I know it's not politically correct to say, but there is probably a biological reason why males are much more likely to be diagnosed as color-blind, stutterers, autistic, or as having aspergers syndrome, than women.
...but you've got a long way to go to establish any sort of *biological* reason for the disparity.
But that's the thing, I don't have to prove anything. You're the one who's claiming that the gender gap in computer programming is not natural. So you're the one who has to prove your case.
Besides, it's not like society really wants us to study this too closely. As soon as the President of Harvard said he wanted to study if women were not as good in Math as men, he was vilified in the press and fired from his post.
You were probably thinking of Cracked.
DATABASE WOW WOW
If there's one thing that winds me up more than men saying women can't do something as well because they're female (or women saying men can't do something because they're male), it's someone saying they can't do it because they're the wrong gender. That's fine if all you're talking about is pissing over a fence while standing straight up, but for anything else?
Indeed... I get annoyed at men who think that laundry shouldn't be their job either. Gender splits in general are bogus.
I actually dated a guy for awhile, and he did the laundry, and I did the handy-work jobs, like assembling his A/C unit, and setting up TVs the cable, etc. Why? In his words, because I'm smarter than him. v_v
Whatever, at least we weren't dividing jobs based on gender. ;)
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
..and those gender roles are defined by our biology, which has a multibillion year history (if you go back to the beginnings of bi-gender species). some would argue that our current attempts at suppressing these traits is making both genders miserable, both in work/play and in relationships (any kind really, not just sex).
are you sure about the media? these days I can flip on the tv and within 5 minutes see some commercial or sitcom stereotyping the shit out of a male during the requisite two minutes hate (err excuse me I mean 'girl power moment'), usually done by a female (or a group of females). in other cases, any time there's a traditional positive male role to play (a leader, a gunslinger, a martial artist, a cop) the show goes way out of its way to make sure that role is played by a woman, or that the men in these roles are under the submissive control of a woman who then proceeds to ridicule them for drama and/or comedic value at every opportunity. ..of course negative male stereotypes are amplified at the same time, depicting men as serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, or other generic undesirables, even when real-life statistics suggests a different picture. other examples include commercials with little boys playing with girls toys and fathers treated like children and/or idiots by their wives in front of their children. the only time women are depicted negatively in this way is when there's a male pulling the strings somewhere that can be blamed. it's like the directors are playing leaf-frog-feminism on their way to doormat 'heaven'. this crap started in the 80s, then got into high gear in the early 90s.. in the last 10 years its' gone into an overdriven double think fantasy no one's allowed to question.
I see lots of 'flex' given to women in business settings, but men are still expected to do the dog-work like they always were, except now it's not ok for them to expect some default-respect for this that goes along with this default expectation. on top of that, they are 'encouraged' to 'help' women out by passing off the credit whenever it's politically advantageous, usually by other men (talk about stockholm syndrome)! this is in part due to old chivalrist attitudes that have been coopted by feminism to give women the upper hand (a "victory for women").
if you want an egalitarian society, you need judgment (something else politically correct types can't handle) of relevant attributes to win out over emotional wrangling. activists need to quit making it about gender, race, or other irrelevancies (unless of course such attributes ARE relevant, which is yet another taboo subject atm). as long as they trot those attributes out, front and center, they're helping them stay in peoples's minds, reenforcing their use as the primary differentiators, rational or not..
I find it funny/sad/sickingly familiar that the most ardent feminists are often the ones that have no problem pushing society to treat men exactly the same way they demand they not be treated, while claiming they're all about 'equality' and 'fairness'. Besides outright misandry, this can take the form of suggesting they are 'pro-male' as long as they get to redefine masculinity as they choose (this redefinition attempt plays out in the media every day). this style of manipulation is an age-old game that less capable men have played throughout history to get their way in leadership and power, as the truly capable need not stoop to this. preaching the high road while taking the underpass is nothing new for such people, male or female, but the ubiquity of this hypocritical attitude in feminist women nowadays does make me wonder if men do have a one up on women in at least one statistical area: integrity.
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.
Put another way: just because the general population has a makeup of a certain distribution, why do we assume some activity Y with a distribution different to that global distribution indicates some kind of undesirable situation?
Assuming you like and use a certain OSS project to which 100 male & 2 female coders contribute, wouldn't it be *desirable* if that the ratio would be closer to 1:1? In the ideal case that would mean 200 coders working on better, almost-twice-as-feature-rich software for the community.
..or that women are consumers and men are the differentiators/providers?
I won't lie, it's a problem. From my position, not as much of a problem as you're making it out to be, but still a problem. Just cross your fingers and remind yourself that the so-called "sex war" will eventually swing the other way once the excusatory cries of "Misogyny!" have worn itself out in such situations, and hopefully the whole shebang will diminish toward peace.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
403 Hotlinking is forbidden. got the actual link?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Oops...link fail. Seriously == The Pioneer Fund
I was in a criminology class that got a visit from a female correctional officer (was a classmate's mother)
I asked her how she felt working in a male prison, she said it avoided machismo "something to prove" conflicts like sometimes happens versus a male guard.
I agree with the general concept that males and females have different characteristics that make them better suited to different things. The law enforcement mention was an interesting example of how that can show up even within the same occupation.
However, one must be careful to not blow it out of proportion and be accepting of the cases that differ from the norm.
I have heard the thing about birth control changing womens' taste in men. Some males may adjust their behavior to what women are looking for (makes sense, right). I wonder if it's healthy to have all those girlie men around
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Then we should fund a study and put the issue to rest, don't you think? Seems simple and logical enough to me, but as you would see if you actually tried it you would be labeled a monster for even THINKING of checking such a thing out, because "it's racist" to say anything other than everyone is exactly the same, no matter what race, sex, or environment they came from. Why everyone can be rocket scientists with the right education!
Do i think they are right or wrong? Honestly I have no idea, but I think ANY question shouldn't be considered taboo to ask and that was what i was pointing out. look at how many are now pushing young girls take careers in math, what if they simply don't want it? What if they would prefer language? Well that doesn't matter because girls are just boys with penises turned inside out, which BTW once upon a time medicine taught as truth. I simply think anything that helps us to learn more about the human condition should be available for serious study, and that "PC" belongs in politic and not in science. Don't you agree?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It was a shemale.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
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.
The figure I saw was around a third, not 15%.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I have been flamed down as newbie on Linux forum and I am male. "read the man page". Great. Except the man page is unclear on what exactly I need to do, or my Wifi card is not properly functioning or my TV card not etc... The community is *extremely* hostile to newbie in general, I don#t think it is only to female.
Furthermore , I work in a software development firm and there is in my department 2 male programmer (some guy and me) and 5 female. Fortran (main frame)+java programming. None of them is interested into programming as a hobby or for open source. They come in, they do their job they go out, it is over. And I know other female programmer from other department and male programmer. NONE, absolutely NONE of the female are interested into programming itself outside of the job. When I described them open source and community they just shrugged and told me they prefer to do other activity after work.
I have the sneaky feeling that indeed , there is less female, not because the community is hostile, but because they simply aren't interrested. That is not to say that the community is not sexist. it probably is, most male are sexist in nature, or rather see sex in everything, thinking of sex every 2 minutes. There is probably some female turned off by the community. But I think the MAIN reason female don't participate is that simply they are NOT interested.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It's still cultural really.
Just because we're biologically to always try to be the Alpha or at least try to exert our dominance in an attempt to find our station... and often to resort to back handed methods to rise in the chain, culture trains us not to run around with clubs in our hands and pound each other over their heads.
Women aren't programmed to try to exert dominance, therefore, they don't let hormones get in the way of making wiser decisions which is to have the dominant role without exerting it competitively. Even this response to your response is at least on some level an example of me, a relatively mellow kind of guy who actually doesn't like sports purely because the concept of competition requires that for one opponent to win, it must be at the expense of another opponent, I still am exerting my personal superiority in a bait to have a deeper competition and to prove my dominance by forcing you to either adopt my opinion (right or wrong) or submit. Women would probably either read your comment and move on or just take a moment to slap you around with a dead fish and move on.
I am very willing (especially after raising both a son and a daughter) to suggest that much of our upbringing is about exerting environment over instinct. I have watched many boys who were quite aggressive in their first few years mold into much more relaxed and polite people in the next 5 years. This comes from people teaching them "right from wrong". I have also watched the children of highly aggressive parent become more aggressive since their parents consider it natural to train their children to attempt to club people over the heads to show how important they are (oddly thinking of a cop/soccer coach's kid in this instance specifically).
The real initial point I had intended to make is that sexism itself is not a biological thing. It's cultural because boys are biologically and instinctively competitive against everyone and misinterpret lack of competition from others as weakness on their behalf. Therefore the fact that most females are less likely to see value in the competition and therefore choose to ignore the invitation to compete by their male counterparts, it does not mean they submit and are weaker, it's just that less intelligent people misinterpret it as such. Though, the same could be said for example about my own son who is non-competitive, though strong enough to snap most of his peers due to his viking blood and build. He's more like the big dog sitting quietly inside the house as opposed to the little one with something to prove who barks 24 hours a day. Though because he is so quiet, the little dogs keep trying to bite his ears to prove how much tougher they are than him. And if the big dog just lays there and ignores the little dogs jibe, the little dog eventually walks away with an air of accomplishment for showing his strength.
This type of behavior isn't strictly sexist, it's an issue that sexist people tend to bark loudly about all the people they feel dominant over... justified or not. The fact that there are far more women that aren't willing to rise to the bait then there are men, they'll single women out as being less than them. Funny thing is how many of those guys eventually end up married to a women who beats them senseless with a rolling pin.
Oh please. On a mailing list, or forum, or website no one knows you're a dog... er, a woman. I mean, if women wanted they would participate, there is NO problem for them. Create an account and submit yor code, period. Because of non-profit nature of many open source project and hence lack of government intervention the percentage of women is perfectly natural contrary to proprietary software firms which are subject to stupid feminist laws and quotas. I'm Russian and during my whole carrier I met ZERO female developers (there were testers and managers, though) and not because of some discrimintation but because of lack of applicants. Yes, I never saw a woman rejected because none applied. So there is just NO gender problem. On the other hand forcing businessmen to hire some underrepresented "minority", be it blacks, disabled people, or women just fills the enterprize with freeloaders who just suck your money and whom you can't get rid of.
There aren't many Tibetan open source developers, either. Why not try to cater to that market while we're at it?
Do you have a reference for a serious study of this ?
To "support" your argument, my mother-in-law was a university professor in biology. She was for a while giving genetics tutorials where students would determine their blood group and comparing it to their parents. Sure enough she had to stop doing this because several students found out that way that their blood group was not compatible with being an actual offspring of their parents, which led to some trouble. However I do not have any statistics regarding how many students were involved.
the fact that this doesn't hold true in modern society doesn't magically undo 20,000 years of evolution.
It might be a few more years than that.
No sig today...
The problem is that that "grain of truth" is often universal, and applies to people outside the groups. Many Jews are greedy and influential in the media? Well guess what, the same applies to people of all faiths.
You will frequently find that the stereotypes that "have a grain of truth" are often similar to stereotypes other people are exposed to. What you hear people in the US say about Mexicans, you frequently hear in Europe as well, except that over here it is not Mexicans that are the target.
That's ok, it's not as if people here have any level of scepticism towards claims that align with their opinions anyway.
Wtf? You want to redesign programming languages specially for women? Maybe you would like to redesign mathematics while you are at it.
Saying something is a stereotype is not the same as saying it's never true. People often forget that.
Yes, but your original post said "good luck trying to find a woman that doesn't care about money" which implies that the stereotype is almost always true.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So your attitude to life is to swan along and ignore everything short of physical coercion as being beneath your mighty gaze?
Language creates effects in the real world, otherwise there'd be little point in speaking or writing anything.
There is also the fact that just because something is oh-so-bravely non-politically-correct doesn't mean it's factually correct, and personally I prefer truth to its opposite. It's nothing to do with indulging in being offended for its own sake.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
In other news....women looking for ways to grow neckbeards.....details at 6.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Fair enough. I tend to handle the following jobs: mowing the lawn, taking out the garbage, shoveling the drive way, and the laundry. My fiance, conversely, tends to handle cleaning the washrooms, doing the gardening, and tends to do more of the other jobs (vacuuming, dishes, and what not) than I do.
In fairness, each of those splits has a reason. I mow the lawn because I'm the only one with mowing experience (my fiance never had to learn as her father took care of that, whereas my father pawned the job off on his 3 sons ASAP). I shovel the drive way because she has asthma and would get physically sick trying to exert herself in the cold (I live in Ottawa, and it gets cold). I take out the garbage because no one else in the house will remember. And I do the laundry because she works retail and I have free time on weekends to handle that sort of thing.
She does the gardening because it's her garden, and I made it clear that I will have nothing to do with it. She cleans the washrooms because she finds that I do too poor a job (different standards, I guess), and she tends to do more of the other jobs simply because she notices the mess long before I do. The rest? We split equally, more or less.
Cynical Idealist
This is the best sarcastic rebuttal I have read in a damn long time.
That being said, money could be a factor. Namely, men make more of it. Since they make more of it, they can spend some of it on making their life easier, and free up time to work on projects.
Cynical Idealist
I never understood why people refuse to believe something could ever be the case because its labeled as a stereotype, lets take the goldigger example.
You perfectly illustrate the idiocy of believing in stereotypes. Yes, some women are golddiggers. No, some women are not golddiggers. Yes, some men are golddiggers. No, some men are not golddiggers. So some men and women are golddiggers, and some are not. Wow.
So unless you can provide some sort of empirical statistical justification for your statement, it is meaningless. And even if you could find the statistical justification, it still wouldn't tell you any thing about a particular person.
Even if 99% of women were golddiggers it wouldn't mean my wife was.
As for your racial generalisation, it makes about as much sense as saying that pretty girls mate with handsome males, or that intellectual males marry intellectual females. Again, some do, some don't.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Its sad that science despite our supposedly "enlightened" societies still can't tackle truly tough questions about the human animal without having to follow political correctness and dogma.
Because, as we all know, the world is run by well meaning left-wing intellectuals, who are busily suppressing the poor downtrodden immensely wealthy establishment right wing capitalists and politicians.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
It's shocking how those women go around raping innocent men to get them pregnant .
Very similar behavior is seen in many animals. So basically, women aren't any better than animals.
Yes! Also, male dogs scratch their nuts, so do male humans. So basically, men aren't any better than dogs.
Only on slashdot could such crap be moderated as interesting..
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"I'd say that most people generally want money in exchange for their work"
I don't think so. Most people generally want respect, being able to survive and have some commodities. It happens that money usually is quite a worthy currency and measure for them.
No offence, but if you think that money either measures or buys respect (other than in the trivial gangster sense) you're a fucking moron.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I see lots of 'flex' given to women in business settings
It's a bit fucking odd how half of CEOs and so on aren't women then isn't it, if they've got it so easy, and it's so tough being a poor widdle man in business these days?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Most of the bleating by men about nasty women here seems to be from US-sounding men. The dreaded "political correctness" is a US/Western concept isn't it?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Don't forget that a lot of people posting here are fourteen year olds who have no concept of money or real work. It's the only explanation for the absurdly ignorant and stereotypical attitude towards women, apart from anything else.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
While I agree that a lot of woman, and man (please don't forget that), are very materialistic, there are quite a few that are not, if you can't find them it's more of a personal problem, and if they don't want to start a relationship with you its a bigger personal problem, and if they meet you and leave you, probably a bigger one too :D
I'm happily married for almost 8 years, with 2 little girls, we are not rich, but we have more than enough, and we value what we got right now, if we don't have as much in the future, it might be an inconvenience, but surely not the reason to break apart our family.
So, pretty much, learn to seek on the right places.
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
Because, as we all know, the world is run by well meaning left-wing intellectuals, who are busily suppressing the poor downtrodden immensely wealthy establishment right wing capitalists and politicians.
I think the world is run by people who might conceivably have occasional meetings and get-togethers. If you were nearby during those meetings, you might overhear phrases like:
"HAHAHAHA man, they STILL think that whole left-right spectrum thing is valid and provides any real answers to anything. Oh man, that's a good one! When we came up with that I was skeptical to say the least but it really took hold. It might even keep them in the dark, squabbling with each other over meaningless trivialities, for another century! Just in the nick of time too since they finally rejected feudalism and centralized religious rule. Long as we can divide them we can keep conquering them, just like in the old days of bread-and-circus. Genius!"
Two points and a line defines one dimension. One-dimensional thinking is properly understood as a weakness, a tragic and artificial limitation of the possibilities of human thought and perception. I dearly hope it won't take a Fourth Reich for the mainstream to figure that out...
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
So basically, women aren't any better than animals.
Of course not. They are animals, and we men, too -- we are all just primates! :)
This is a UDP joke, I don't care if you get it or not...
Don't be stupid. 15% of people not having the father they thought they did isn't because of rape, it's mostly because of cheating. Women who get raped generally have abortions, give it up for adoption, etc., plus the chances of having a successful conception during rape are poor (it's not like the rapist grabs the woman's ovulation calendar and plans the rape for that day). Women are naturally more horny on their unsafe days, so those are the times they're more likely to cheat.
Really? I don't know, because I don't really spend much time on OSS message boards, but the last time I looked into a publicized incident that hit the OSS press, I could have sworn the asshole men making misogynist comments had Russian or eastern-European-sounding names.
Exactly. I never said men were better, we're just different. Go hang around a prison, or a ghetto among gang members, to see men at their worst.
And to see a place where there's both men and women (though granted, a larger portion of men, but still plenty of women with equal power), which represents humanity at its very, very worst, just go to the US Capitol building in Washington, DC. Or the Hewlett-Packard corporate boardroom.
Here's one quick link I found while Googling:
http://menshealth.about.com/od/lifestyle/a/paternity.htm
This article, from 2005, says that "experts agree" that the number of men unknowingly bringing up another man's child is below 10%, but that the number of men getting paternity tests for their kids is rising fast.
Unfortunately, he's right to a certain extent. Why do a lot of people buy bigger houses, nicer cars, etc.? A lot of times, it's to "keep up with the Joneses". I wouldn't say that "most" people do that, but a lot do.
It's not just middle-class people in suburbia; you see it with poor people all the time: they have some shitty car worth about $400, but then they go buy rims for $2000 (on credit no less!) to put on it to impress their friends in the ghetto. Rich people do it too: they buy massively overpriced bottles of rare wine to show off to their friends, champagne with pieces of gold in it, or they buy bigger yachts to impress people. People are constantly trying to one-up their peers with material goods, and that seems to qualify as "buying respect" to me.
Commecial companies with a certain size have a women-quote, they NEED to employ some women to fulfill this. Most Opensource Projects just live from volunteers.
It was. Then facebook came around, and it was cyberhighschool.
Depends on the games you play. I've made friends online with several ladies that play MMOs while their babies sleep - they'll go AFK for a nappy change, a feed, etc.
Nobody gives them any grief, nobody mocks them, similarly nobody blinks when one of the men in our guild goes "sorry guys, baby's just woken up, I'd better go feed her before she wakes the wife".
Indeed... I get annoyed at men who think that laundry shouldn't be their job either.
I got unnecessarily distressed last year at a woman thinking it was ok to mock me because I do my own laundry.
Gender splits in general are bogus.
Breast-feeding aside, I'd agree.
No real effort to address the problem. Jokes, insults, and inanity.
Jokes, insults and inanity are standard responses to any Ask Slashdot.
There'd be more effort to address the problem if everybody thought there was a problem.
Why make an open source contribution if I have no expectation of it being taken seriously
So start your own open source project. Contribute anonymously (as you just have, to this discussion). Stand your ground and defend your contribution against any bigots.
If you don't _want_ to contibute then don't. Just don't complain when one of the most egalitarian communities on the planet doesn't bend over backwards to meet your needs.
So who asked you to contribute? Nobody asked any of those men to contribute either - they either attempted to meet a need nobody else was meeting or spotted an opportunity to give back to a community that had served them well.
The open source development I've done was both excellent fun and also a way of giving back to a community I'd benefited from. Everybody wins, and we had female developers in that community providing equal value and getting equal recognition.
If you don't want to use open source software, that's ok. If you don't want to contribute to making it better, that's ok too. If you don't want women trying to get more women into open source programming then I'm just not sure of your motivations.
A friend of mine is one of those "bad boys". He's usually doing two different married women at any point in his life.
He likes married women because they don't try to tie him down (it's just a fling, after all), and they eventually move on, leaving him free to find someone else. Meanwhile, they have an outlet for all their repressed emotions and fantasies, which he's happy to oblige for some truly amazing sex.
These women are people whom you'd NEVER suspect of cheating. There is quite literally no way of knowing, unless she gets careless.
Well, let's consider this question for a moment. People have pointed out that women's involvement in open source development is *extremely* low, despite the fact that, even in non-OSS development, women have a much higher proportion of representation. So... is it a problem that a significant portion of people eligible to contribute to OSS development are electing not to? You tell me!
For me, I'd say yes, to the extent that anybody who COULD contribute, and who might be interested in contributing to a community, but who is instead driven away by actively hostile elements of that community's culture, there is a "problem." If you want to say "It's a boy's club, girls not welcome," that's fine. But let's not pretend that women aren't participating because their poor little heads just explode like Lucy & Ethel at the candy factory.
Ah, so you view "girls like dolls, boys like guns" as an immutable biological reality? I see why you can't see the problem now... you're part of it.
Because study after study have shown little-to-no statistically significant disparity between the performance of boys and girls in areas of math and science, areas which computer science most certainly relates to. And yet time and again, apologists like you trot out this "you don't know there's no biological basis." I never said "there wasn't any," I said that you've got "a long way to go to establish any sort of biological reason for this disparity." Proceed to establish your biological basis with facts, not half-assed stereotypes paired with an anecdote from when you were 7 years old, and I'll be happy to listen.
I thought nerds were supposed to be rational and fact based... yet you're asking me to prove a negative, and clinging to your own prejudices and stereotypes when faced with ACTUAL EVIDENCE that there is no supporting data for a "gender gap" in terms of performance and ability in math and science.
Because, of course, he was wrong , not just spouting an unpopular opinion. No significant gender gap appears in studies until secondary education, and that gap closes as more females participate in the advanced math classes. In other words: the gender gap only appears because women weren't pursuing mathematics, and rapidly closes as more women are encouraged to participate. You could, perhaps start educating yourself on the issue here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080724192258.htm
Yes, they're called sex-linked traits, and are generally tied at least in part to mutations on the X or Y chromosomes. Of course, we can empirically determine that more men than women are subject to color blindness; we have not yet empirically determined that women are "bad at math and science." It's a question of *participation* not one of *ability*.
And yet a simple google search shows scholarly and serious articles discussing the issue of men's under-representation in nursing, including a very official-sounding organization known as the AAMN whose first goal is "Encourage men of all ages to become nurses and join together with all nurses in strengthening and humanizing health care."
https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Men+in+nursing
http://aamn.org/aamn.shtml
I guess we should just conclude that these people are misguided, and that men are BIOLOGICALLY unsuited for nursing careers, rather than culturally and socially influenced. I guess we should also just conclude that the over-representation of young black men in jail also has a basis in their biology, rather than in the very real social and cultural issues affecting the black community? Hell, let's just declare every problem biological in nature, and wash our hands of it. Poverty? You're biologically unsuited to making money! Can't find a job? You must be biologically unsuited for it!
Would that be the reaction where all the white Democrats switched to the Republican ticket and Obama lost?
Or the reaction where all the white Republicans didn't like a black Democratic president? Just like how all the white Democrats didn't like the previous white Republican president?
Sure we can't properly define intelligence, but there are enough tests with racial differences in achievement that the results point to a difference in intelligence. There are enough tests that taken in total, most people would look at them and say in most cases they correlate well with intelligence. Yeah you'll get the 1 in a million who is clearly a genius but fails every test.. that's probably statistically insignificant. So why aren't the existing tests good enough? It seems a case of arguing from a conclusion that you don't like -- one refuses to believe race impacts intelligence, so every test that shows a racial difference is not really measuring intelligence.
People say we can't properly define race either, but I don't buy that. Self-identification seems good enough. Just guessing but probably 95% of self-assessments meet with 95% approval from a random sample of others. In other words, you don't find many people who self-identify as white who are not identified by others as white. Why isn't that good enough?
Surely there's a rigorous approach to dealing statistics on things that are poorly defined but on which there is widespread "fuzzy" agreement. There's got to be, I just don't know the proper name for it.
I think men from western cultures aren't upset about women, but about authoritarian approaches to furthering women at the expense of men. Which makes perfect sense when you're from a culture that values equality.
In my experience, women from non-western cultures are much more likely to be involved in computers and math than women from western cultures. The difference seems, to me, to be that non-western women take it for what it is. They don't want the whole computer industry to change to accommodate them, they are willing to change to accommodate it. That means being nerdy and uncool sometimes, or putting in long hours and sacrificing a bit of family if you're talking about work instead of school.
In my experience, women from non-western cultures are much more likely to be involved in computers and math than women from western cultures.
I disagree with this. I think non-western cultures are not uniform, and differ from each other in giant ways. So, for instance, I see tons and tons of Indian women involved in computers and math; I also see a fair number of Chinese women. But I can't say I've ever seen any Russian or Eastern European women, though I've seen tons and tons of men from those areas involved in computers. I don't think I've seen any Arabic women involved in them either.
Your link didn't get formatted properly, can you please re-post it?
But I can't say I've ever seen any Russian or Eastern European women, though I've seen tons and tons of men from those areas involved in computers.
I was married to one for a long time, so yeah, they do exist.
But gender discrimination in Russia is much more real, even if the laws on the books are mostly same as U.S.; they just lack teeth. Job posting reading "seeking a C++ programmer, male, ..." is exceedingly common.
There was a lot of angst (still is) that young women don't often go into engineering or software fields.
As part of this, we would poll the young'uns about what they wanted to be. Keeping in mind that this was largely sons and daughters of academic and engineering types, you might think that there would be a lot more "I want to be an engineer" form the young ladies
Most all of the young ladies aspired to be lawyers, doctors or veterinarians, if they were interested in a professional field. Not an engineer or software person in the batch.
Anyhow, these were smart girls, who were interested in a career. They weren't the stereotype of girls who had gender issues forced upon them. They just didn't think that the "geek" fields were all that interesting.
So what to do? Do we force women into the fields? If we try to recruit, is it a failure if we don't get more, or could there be something else? Are there certain fields that a woman might be attracted to or not attracted to? It is interesting that the two physician field fit into a nurturing type personality. And the lawyer profession does attract people who are interested in social justice.
Certainly not some sort of exhortation against becoming a geek, if a woman wants to be any particular field, she should not face stereotype blocks to get there. I just fear that there may be some gender specific differences that send people to differing fields, and that it will be difficult to change those traits.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Exactly my point: different non-western cultures are different. I dated an Indian girl for 4 years, and have worked with Indian men and women a lot. They definitely have their gender discrimination, but it doesn't seem to extend much into the workplace; i.e. men and women each have their gender roles, but there doesn't appear to be anything in the culture against women having tech jobs, other professional jobs, or even political jobs. Instead, it appears to be highly valued; when looking for a wife for an arranged marriage, an educated, degreed man and his family will want a woman who's also educated and degreed.
Obviously, this is rather different from Russian culture as you point out. Why India, still considered a backwards 3rd-world country in many ways, is so much better on this point than Russia (an industrialized country with probably the strongest space program on the planet now and a long history of leading in science and technology) or even the USA, is probably a complex topic that maybe some sociologist could write a doctoral dissertation on.
There is also the ego part of it. Geek cred, if you will. They may not be rockstars in real life, but submit enough code, patches and bug reports and you can be the all-star of the community. If the project takes off, even better. If not, you still get the satisfaction of doing something, even if it is just for you.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
"No offence, but if you think that money either measures or buys respect (other than in the trivial gangster sense) you're a fucking moron."
No offence, but it might be the case that you are the fucking moron that neither thought in the slightiest how money can be a symbol of respect nor knows to keep his mouth shout prior to throw harsh words to others.
On one hand, as another poster already said, money can obviously buy you status which certainly relates to respect (the "awesome" kind of respect rich people get).
On the other hand, why do you think that people isn't glad to know that a colleague with their same job in the same company makes more than them? The amount of money your company pays you is the easiest way for the company to show respect to you -or at least, that's part of its percieved value.
That one.
The Democrats didn't like what Bush did. The Republicans attacked Obama's citizenship through an emphasis on his (half) black roots, and by emphasizing his middle name to create a religious association that didn't exist. Can you seriously claim that those easily disproved crackpot theories didn't get widespread support due to an undercurrent of racism when they clearly appeal to racist/bigoted sentiments?
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Well, let's consider this question for a moment. People have pointed out that women's involvement in open source development is *extremely* low, despite the fact that, even in non-OSS development, women have a much higher proportion of representation. So... is it a problem that a significant portion of people eligible to contribute to OSS development are electing not to? You tell me!
So what? Check out any knitting club and you will see almost 100% females. And yet I don't see anyone getting too bent out of shape over this.
For me, I'd say yes, to the extent that anybody who COULD contribute, and who might be interested in contributing to a community, but who is instead driven away by actively hostile elements of that community's culture, there is a "problem." If you want to say "It's a boy's club, girls not welcome," that's fine. But let's not pretend that women aren't participating because their poor little heads just explode like Lucy & Ethel at the candy factory.
Ah, so you view "girls like dolls, boys like guns" as an immutable biological reality? I see why you can't see the problem now... you're part of it.
And here we have main fault of this kind of "studies". They start with already made conclusion that problem is those nasty nerds who drive poor females away. And of course anybody who does not immediately agree is "part of the problem". That's how you conduct religious cult, not research.
How do you know there is no biological basis?
Because study after study have shown little-to-no statistically significant disparity between the performance of boys and girls in areas of math and science, areas which computer science most certainly relates to. And yet time and again, apologists like you trot out this "you don't know there's no biological basis." I never said "there wasn't any," I said that you've got "a long way to go to establish any sort of biological reason for this disparity."
No, you did not. Here is a quote: "There is no particular biological basis for this" . To me it seems like expression of certainty.
Proceed to establish your biological basis with facts, not half-assed stereotypes paired with an anecdote from when you were 7 years old, and I'll be happy to listen.
Somehow I doubt it considering that you mostly argue with yourself. "Anecdote from when I was 7" ? Where the hell do you see any anecdotes in my posts?
I thought nerds were supposed to be rational and fact based... yet you're asking me to prove a negative, and clinging to your own prejudices and stereotypes when faced with ACTUAL EVIDENCE that there is no supporting data for a "gender gap" in terms of performance and ability in math and science.
I am not talking about ability - I don't see any reason to think that code produced by female programmers is any worse or better on average. I suggest that mental differences (you want biological basis - how about 50 000 years of evolutionary selection for *different* tasks?) may cause certain activities to be less desirable for one gender than they are for other.
Are you really that stupid? Seriously? Let's look at the facts of the situation:
1) Women pursue development careers, and work as software engineers, in reasonably large (though still disproportionate) numbers - in 2009, 25% of computing jobs were held by women. (source)
2) That number is *decreasing* - in 1985, 37% of Undergrad CS degrees were awarded to women. In 2009, 18% of undergrad CS degrees were awarded to women. (source)
3) Most studies of Open Source communities show women's involvement at anywhere from ~1.5% to 5%. (source)
In other words: EVEN allowing for a "biological" difference to explain for the relatively low (and further declining) participation of women in Computer Science, the open source community shows an even sharper disparity - if 25% of computing jobs were held by women, and if 18% of undergrad CS degress are being awarded to women, why are so few of the qualified women choosing to further participate in the Open Source community? And why does that number continue to decline? Please explain the biological basis for some new evolutionary event that happened back around 1985 that would explain this?
Cute bumper sticker, but of course, you've provided no facts to back up your assertion that there's a biological basis for this disparity, either. You've hand-waved a lot of "uh girls have brain differences, so therefore maybe they don't like computers," mumbo-jumbo, and I've pointed out that there is absolutely no body of evidence to support this conclusion, and there is significant evidence that the disparities are cultural and social. Let's be clear: we're talking about very minor differences between two genders of the same species, not trying to argue that there's a biological basis for primates being tool makers on account of primates having opposable thumbs.
Yes, if you take what I wrote out of context to support your straw man, I'm sure it might seem that way. What I wrote was this: "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."
The "this" that I'm saying there's no particular biological basis to support is the "girls like dolls, boys like guns" assertion. If you'd like to point out some evidence for the elusive "liking guns" gene being sex-linked, I'd be more than happy to concede I was wrong on that point... but having studied biology, I'm fairly certain that you're not going to be able to provide any evidence for it.
It was a challenge to you, not a statement that you used an anecdote. Provide *evidence* for your assertion that there's a biological basis for the disparities we're talking about, or start listening to the facts that suggest a cultural & social explanation for it.
Wow, wait till you hit 40, you're gonna look back at that post and weep. Unless you're female, in which case you're probably going to be laughing into your cappuccino. Two words for you my son. Monthly Payments.
Actually I'd say its a cultural thing. As I said I was the tutor for the HS football team for four years and while the white players were looking at sports as a way to earn a free college education (and get the hot chicks) the blacks saw it as an end unto itself. In their culture athletes are looked up to whereas the education seekers are 'uppity" "acting white" or "Uncle Toms". Sadly I saw this several times, education for the sake of knowledge is looked down upon, its almost like anyone smarter than they are makes them feel inferior so they would tear them down.
Personally I never got that, my oldest is going on his second year at college to be a doctor and i'll be the first to admit he kicks my 156 IQ ass when it comes to brains but that makes me happy as hell personally. He has noble goal like becoming one of the doctors without borders and his strong faith and work ethic (and by faith I mean in the classical Jesus sense, as in helping the poor and downtrodden NOT the bigotry that is passed off as Christianity nowadays) will help him to be a kick ass healer. but if he was black he'd be getting more than half of the community actively treating him like shit, I've again seen it with my own eyes, i just don't get it. But that seems to be ingrained in their culture, music and athletics is encouraged, educational advancement is not. Crazy huh?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I had a friend that was the same way for more than 20 years, he's now sleeping on a couch and working at Lowe's because 3 of them got knocked up and he got stuck with child support. Karma, it is a bitch. The flipside is of course how culture can affect outlook, my GF is Cherokee and after that many generations of being trodden on with the reservations frankly they are a broken people. her two previous marriages were both abusive and now she is constantly frightened i'm gonna "throw her away" for someone better and its hell getting her to stand up for herself. It'll probably take years to undo the damage her culture has done to her if I ever can.
It still amazes her that there are guys like me out there that will stand up for her WITHOUT using her as a punching bag or trying to sleep with her friends but it just shows you that some times stereotypes don't fit, i'm sure i look like a teddy bear but i spent many a year playing behind chicken wire and biking my ass all over the south. My favorite backup bass still has several dents from guys that didn't know when to back off and if any tried shit at some club I'm playing with my Cherokee princess that bass will be getting another battle scar. But just because I protect what's mine does NOT mean I would ever raise a hand in anger to a female, that shit just don't fly and I was raised a traditional southern gentleman, we don't do that shit.
But I'm happy and if it takes years to slowly build her back up i'll spend the time, my family all think the world of my princess and are being supportive. You do what you gotta do, ya know?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I agree that, at face value, it's self defeating in terms of promoting self advancement. But it's also quite understandable. As I said above, for 30 years athletics has been one of the few fields where success is based on objective metrics (how fast you run, how far you jump/throw/bat, how many times you scored) and that has helped black athletes become successful role models. That success is about as common as winning the lottery but it's often done on those athletes' own terms (with classic examples like Jessie Owens, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Carl Lewis, Michael Jordan, or Dennis Rodman). The same thing applies to musical greats in blues and jazz and pop: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzie Gillespie, John Coltrane, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, BB King, Billie Holliday, Etta James, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson. They composed music on their own terms and many were self-taught.
Contrast that with anybody who takes an academic track, be it in medicine, law, or just post secondary research and teaching. First, it was financially out of reach for most. Secondly all of those involve professional exams and licensing boards that could be very subjective: bar exams, residency periods, medical exams, PhD oral defense, engineering supervised work periods. Those could be heavily manipulated by bigoted board members to keep out black applicants, with the result that much time would have been spent preparing only to be denied the ability to practice. Or even if you managed to get a licence, partnership structures in law, accounting, and other large professional firms would limit your advancement possibilities regardless of your achievements, and the old boys network would prevent you from getting big clients if you started your own firm. How many high profile blacks can you name from those professions? Johnnie Cochran, Clarence Thomas, the Obamas, Anybody else? Do you think one of them might fit that Uncle Tom stereotype a bit? It's not surprising that the "cultural wisdom" would develop that only chumps and Uncle Toms would attempts that track. For decades before and after the Civil Rights battle of the 60s, those opportunities were denied to most blacks unless they were either really lucky or ready to kiss some serious ass. Nowadays the probability of success has likely increased to where the invested effort is likely to pay off. However the perception stays ingrained in the culture because of generational overlap, with 2 generations still alive remembering and passing on their memories of heavy bigotry and discrimination, and because the success stories are few and far between. This is reinforced by constant reminders that the bigotry still exists, from regular racial profiling of young black men by police, to the fact that rich and successful black men still get harassed for DWBs if they are driving better models of vehicles.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire