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Tackling Open Source's Gender Issues
angry tapir writes "Women's participation in open source development is at a far lower level than women's participation in proprietary software development. One of the groups that aims to change this is the Ada Initiative: A non-profit organization formed last year. I recently caught up with its two founders, Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora and comp sci PhD student Mary Gardiner, to discuss the project."
Because for women, it comes up every day.
It's not that you called two of them gold diggers that's sexist. It's that you said that there's no such thing as a woman who *isn't* a gold digger.
Can you spot the difference?
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area and working in software, I know many developers both male and female. I have a few personal female acquaintances that were (past-tense) previously active in the open source community, but left.
They were aggressively harassed by a very vocal online minority. This vocal minority would trash the ladies name on a large swath of online forums while using different names and accounts. Two received multiple anonymous threats of violence. This went on for years, and the ladies in question finally left the open source community.
This went above and beyond 'normal' flaming in online forums. This involved many forums, each cross referencing each other to lend validity to their (entirely fabricated) claims. And it went on for years, including insinuation that the female developer would come to harm at conferences.
It's very unlikely this happens in every case, but it takes more than a single nutjob attacking someone, or even many nutjobs attacking, to make someone leave the community. It takes good people like you and me to ignore the nutjobs, to not step in and say, "That's enough."
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.
Not speaking up signals to these fuckheads that their behavior is acceptable. It's not.
HAND.
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!
That's quite a stereotype you've got there...
That's actually a symptom of the situation, not evidence of a fundamental difference. There are men for whom programming is just business as well; back in the seventies they were called data processors and fancied themselves big-wig business guys who just happened to program. Just try to leave out that population in your mental model and you'll see the core disparity: the common programmer story (you'll need to scroll down a bit) that led to the love in the first place.
Slowly this is improving (I got lucky, my parents were very liberal) and other die-hard programmers of both sexes whom I've known all attribute it to a childhood environment that promoted a love of computers and science. There's a large drag coefficient on Rosie the Riveter (and her descendants) simply because of cultural inertia.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!