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.
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.
They just don't post stupid questions to message boards because they RTFM.
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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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?
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!
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!
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.
Ah yes, because the sex that we're being told is biologically predisposed towards nurturing, consensus-building, sharing, caring behavior... ALL they care about is getting paid for everything they do. And the men, who are biologically predisposed towards aggression, competition, and dominance... all they care about is sharing their code and delighting other people with the free software they've helped create.
It's ironclad, I guess I have to concede defeat.
Everything is a gender or race issue. Why is this so important? No one is forcing women out of open source. Pretty much anyone can participate that WANTS to be there.
First, most participation comes without any idea of what the other person even looks like so the notion of gender or race probably is irrelevant. Am I man or a woman or an orange gorilla who escaped from his cage? You don't know.
Second, most of these heavily male communities are not lacking for females because they're intentionally driving them away. To the contrary, most of them want women if only to feel less like they're in an isolated research station on the moon. Psychologically men just prefer that. It doesn't even need a sexual component.
I guess I wonder if people are going to be playing the race and gender card 100 years from now? Does this thing expire ever? What effort needs to be made and then we can say "enough."... ever? Because if it's never enough then just out of simply pique I suggest we reverse that situation and start demanding male participation in female activities ESPECIALLY if men don't want to participate. See, some group is complaining because women have INTENTIONALLY chosen to not participate in certain activities. And this is somehow a male problem. Well, what about all the female groups that men don't have any interest in at all? Demand equal representation. Now you might only be able to get one man for every ten women that want to join such groups. But if you enforce equality it means that nine women have to be rejected for every one that is accepted into such groups and all men are accepted indifferent to any other qualification.
Sound like fun? Well, the men aren't enjoying this nonsense either. Just stop it. If you're actively being driven away because of your vagina then cite some evidence and we'll deal with it. But if all you've got is correlative gender statistics then please don't waste our time.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Correlation does not imply causality. They're looking for the cause why it appears that women are underrepresented.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
An intelligent, educated woman is very unlikely to remain single for long. I suspect the root cause of the disparity between open source and proprietary participation of women on projects is due to the simple fact that once they go home from work, they have real lives to live, while many of "the guys" in the industry are techno-freaks with little or no social life and plenty of spare time to devote to OSS or Free projects.
Like myself. 47 and counting. *sigh*
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Stereotypes are social heuristics. The human brain can't treat every person it meets individually; It's cognitively less expensive to group people together and treat them in a particular way. You're interaction with the coffee barista at your local starbucks is based on stereotypes, and they're interaction with you is equally based on the stereotype of you being a customer. Only when you have sufficient repeat contact with a person can you begin to start differentiating them from the stereotype(s) you lumped them into. Most of the time, these sterotypes work for us, i.e. they facilitate social interaction with strangers. Some of the time though, just like in AI, you use a shitty heuristic. The problem is not dealing with people using sterotypes, it's being too rigid in your application of stereotypes and hampering social interaction.
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
Maybe try another.
It's hard not to sound a little preachy when you're dealing with such emotionally-driven unreasonable people who think they're so justified. Try it yourself sometime; I'd be interested in whether you remain as calm and centered. While I understand your complaint, it goes with that territory. You may as well complain about the strong breeze every time you go skydiving.
... my better example is that I don't pretend to be "hurt" by the words of another person so I can guilt-trip or shame them into modifying their behavior to suit my personal tastes. Not even when I really, really don't like what they said and why they said it. That's mine to get over because their freedom of expression trumps my personal likes and dislikes.
To answer the question you posed
Unless someone tries to use force or fraud to cause me material harm, I have absolutely no reason to look for ways to make them do anything. "I'm offended!" is how cowards aspire to be bullies.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25ejlP0uWeI#t=2m8s
Quote: "The virgin of emacs is any female who has not yet learned how to use emacs. And in the church of emacs we believe that taking her emacs virginity away is a blessed act.".
That's not gender neutral, that's very specific.
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
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
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.
You were probably thinking of Cracked.
DATABASE WOW WOW
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.
their freedom of expression trumps my personal likes and dislikes.
So racism is ok...?
It's more of a "two wrongs don't make a right" situation.
No, racism is not ok; it is wrong. But does a racist have the right to free speech just as you and I have the right to free speech? Yes. What's your alternative? The wrong of censorship by force (or threat of force, i.e. law) is even worse than a racist you don't have to listen to. It would be like curing the disease by killing the patient.
If you allow a few racists to destroy free speech, you have given them more power than they ever dreamed of. I like the way it currently works: if you are a racist or other kind of bigot, people will quickly stop listening to you and you become essentially invisible. This isn't broken and doesn't need fixing.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
If someone has the right to freedom of expression to offend against my personal beliefs, surely I have the right to freedom of expression to express my sense of offence/outrage or whatever? It's not like saying that you can't offend me, merely that you can't offend me without expecting some sort of response.
Sure, but remember that many times a response is exactly what they want from you. As an analogy, how much trolling do you suppose would happen today if no one ever, EVER, under any circumstances, fed the trolls? Then there's the question of how secure you are about your beliefs. If you reject a mainstream point of view in favor of a better one, you might catch some flak for it. Do you have the strength to accept that or do you need the approval of random strangers?
When you predictably receive some flak for challenging a worldview, are you surprised and offended and shocked by that? If not, then where's the outrage and offense? Is it that not everyone agrees with you? There are over 6.5 billion people in the world. At any given time, at least some of them will disagree with you or decide they don't like you. There's nothing you can do about that. Are you then going to be offended and upset 24/7? Or at some point do you have to find your own peace and your own security? If you have that, you'll be surprised at just how difficult it is for anyone to offend you. The nastier they get with you, the more they are telling the world about themselves and not about you.
Unlike some people on slashdot, my definition of freedom of speech is not "I can say what I like without any possibility of repurcussions". You can annoy someone with your speech so much that they will kill you for it, it's always a good idea to remember that.
Sure, and in gang-infested cities there are people who would menace or even shoot somebody just for making eye contact. Obviously that doesn't make it right. So we make an effort to maintain law and civility. It's not a perfect effort and crimes do happen. But what you're describing there is a crime for a legitimate reason. What you're describing there gives the target the right to defend himself for a legitimate reason. This isn't some bullshit copyright law or victimless crime.
The reason I think law-abiding citizens should have guns is because of the truth in that saying: when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. But then, I digress.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein