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The Empathy Gap and Why Women Are Treated So Badly In Open Source Projects (perens.com)
Bruce Perens writes: There's no shortage of stories of horrible treatment of women in Open Source projects. But how did we get here? How did we ever get a community where a vocal minority of males behave in the most boorish, misogynistic, objectifying manner toward women? I have a theory: "It’s unfortunately the case that software development in general and Open Source communities are frequented by males who have social development issues. I once complained online about how offended I was by a news story that said many software developers were on the autism spectrum. To my embarrassment, there were many replies to my complaint by people who wrote 'no, I really am on the spectrum and I’m not alone here.'
It’s still an open issue whether males and females have built-in biases that, for example, lead fewer women to be programmers, or if such biases only develop as a response to social signals. There is more science to be done. But it’s difficult to do that sort of science because we can’t separate the individuals from the social signals they’ve grown up with. Certainly we can improve the situation for the women who would be programmers except for the social signals."
It’s still an open issue whether males and females have built-in biases that, for example, lead fewer women to be programmers, or if such biases only develop as a response to social signals. There is more science to be done. But it’s difficult to do that sort of science because we can’t separate the individuals from the social signals they’ve grown up with. Certainly we can improve the situation for the women who would be programmers except for the social signals."
The summarry makes it look like I'm blaming folks with Asperger's, which is not the case. It's a social development issue but not attributed to the people with pathology.
Click through the link to get the whole story.
Bruce Perens.
There are certainly plenty of odd developers, and although we might seem rude or argumentative to outsiders, on the whole I'd actually say that women tend to get better treatment from technical people. Some people just get offended by everything these days. People who have been stuck talking to computers for ten or fifteen years are going to become slightly literal, pedantic, or concise in their method of communication. This may not aways appeal to very sociable young women, but women when they are interested, can be excellent developers too. Just don't read hostility into communication where it wasn't intended. Software is an area where we do sacrifice time on social graces for quick and productive decision making - although that doesn't mean that anyone should be individually victimised, which is definitely unacceptable, and sackable, or that there should be deliberate nastyness.
Who is Bruce Perens?
Bruce Perens.... created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond.
The original announcement of The Open Source Definition was made on February 9, 1998 on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Perens is an amateur radio operator, with call sign K6BP [who] promotes open radio communications standards.
Perens founded No-Code International in 1998 with the goal of ending the Morse Code test then required for an Amateur Radio license. His rationale was that Amateur Radio should be a tool for young people to learn advanced technology and networking, rather than something that preserved antiquity and required new hams to master outmoded technology before they were allowed on the air.
Perens worked for seven years at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab. After that, he worked at Pixar for 12 years, from 1987 to 1999. He is credited as a studio tools engineer on the Pixar films A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999).
From 2002 to 2006, Prentice Hall PTR published the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series, a set of 24 books covering various open source software tools, for which Perens served as the series editor. It was the first book series to be published under an open license.
Bruce Perens
A couple of points...
How about, to start, that all sexual abuse and harassment will be considered strictly unacceptable?
Newsflash: it's considered unacceptable by most people. However, *considering* something unacceptable, and it actually *being* unacceptable are two very different things. It's not like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the end of a cliff, looks down, and the law of gravity "considers it unacceptable that he's standing in the middle of the air", and takes action to prohibit it. Social conventions are not the same things as the laws of physics.
For example, the kinds of things that Linus Torvalds has said on mailing lists is stuff that would get any employee of a company instantly fired. Yet in his arrogance he thinks that because he's some super-duper-important OSS guru guy that the same code of conduct doesn't apply to him, which is a pretty disgusting way to think.
Except... it demonstrably does not, in fact, apply to him. When he is making pronouncements from the throne, he isn't an employee, he's a king, and short of armed insurrection, it's almost impossible to involuntarily remove a king from power.
So yeah, for the foundation, how about stopping harassment and abuse?
"Patches welcome".
You can engineer social systems, and you can even engineer emergent properties into social systems, if you have a deep understanding of what you are doing. But the problem with feedback mechanisms in social constructs is that the feedback designed to correct the aberrant behaviour from the normative baseline within any design, is that the feedback has to be non-ignorable. It has to take away something that the person or persons receiving the feedback value, as a punitive measure, and (as studies on gambling addition and slot machine design have shown), it has to have intermittent positive reinforcement that is valued by the recipient as well.
So at this point, you might as well be saying "how about stopping terrorism?", since we've been just as ineffective at that.
As for Autisim Spectrum stuff, I believe that it is very common among all people in this world, male, female, black, white, yellow, green.
This is, at best, a speculative statement, since study after study has shown autism to be more prevalent in males than females:
http://www.autism.org.uk/about...
I don't think that necessarily has any bearing upon whether a person would treat others badly.
No, but it certainly increases the perception by non-autistic persons that they are being treated badly by autistic persons. It doesn't matter whether or not they are actually being treated badly, if it's their perception that they are. Objective facts will not change subjective perceptions.
I notice a lot of Japanese dramas have characters who often are in the autistic spectrum and those characters actually make the dramas more interesting and are almost always depicted as being exceptional in more than one way, often with incredible gifts and ability to influence people positively.
Autistic savants comprise only about 10% of those with autism. They tend to make for interesting stories for those without autism, since savants occur in the non-autist population a less than 10 times that rate -- less than 1%. Thus, it's no surprise that they appear more in fiction than they do in reality.
While they may be interesting, realize that 9 out of 10 people with autism will therefore not be savants, and if that's not your expectation, the expectation needs to be adjusted, since the myth "all people with autism have savant abilities in some area" is harmful, and is based primarily in an expectation that the universe has a built-in inherent fairness.
https://www.autism.com/underst...