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."

Comments

Careful with distinctions here...

[Improv]

There are some people who really are awful to women, and they're often (but not always) really awful to work with in other ways too. Finding ways to get them to either improve or get out is tricky because they exist in the same career ladders as people who want a decent place to work.

Then there's a subset of people opposing them who insist on overly narrow notions of how people should be allowed to act, talk, and think. They take it on themselves to police speech and behaviour far more than is reasonable or necessary. In their effort to deal with a legitimate problem, they become another kind of problem.

Making all this less clear is that the boundaries between these are unclear and they tend (but don't always) to line up with political views, and political witchhunts in the workplace (or broader society) are dangerous and ill-advised.

It's messy enough that it'd be tempting to just step back from the whole thing, but the stakes are too high for that. We neither should want to waste the potential of half our population (or other subsets of the population) nor should we create a work environment or society where most kinds of differing views on gender or jokes are curtailed. So navigating this is damned tough.

Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link.

[LaurenCates]

Why does this have to be a "male" problem versus an "asshole" problem?

If you say there are unpleasant women to work with, doesn't that kind of transcend gender?

One Woman's Experience

[CAOgdin]

As a woman who's been in the electronics/computer field for more than 55 years, now, I read with much disgust the attempts by some in this thread to discount women, and then claim that, somehow, "It ain't true."

Believe me, I've been there. After three books, hundreds of published papers and articles, and decades of consulting to Fortune 500 firms, I have been on the receiving end of the misogynistic "swinging dicks" who couldn't write a competent subroutine or draw a working circuit if their lives depended on it. I can (and, in the past, have) named names and identified organizations where women dare not go. What's interesting is having the CEO of a Fortune 500 company hire me (at $2,500/day) and then have twerps three years out of school decide they know more than I and refuse my counsel because my anatomy is different from theirs. Usually, there's a competent male around who steps in and shuts the abuse down. When there's not, I have developed a strong skill in suckering such blithering idiots into cul de sacs of their own ignorant reasoning, until they are reduced to mumbling to themselves. But, why should I ever have had to DEVELOP that skill?

We are all born the same way, and discover our gender as we grow up...but, due to family influences (e.g., drunken men abusing their wives, "men of the house" who want their women "barefoot and pregnant"), some males grow up with a tacit belief that women are, somehow, inferior to men. There's a name for these people: They are BIGOTS (and it often extends to other differences, like cultural heritage, skin color, education, that are patently irrelevant to judging whether the person is "human" or not).

Fortunately, not all men are chained to this philosphers' wall, drawing conclusions from shadows and accepting them as fact. There are many men who exhibit humanity and treat ALL others with respect and dignity...and they are a delight to work alongside. Unfortunately, they are outnumbered by the dolts, in my experience.

Re:Priorities

[Ol Olsoc]

I have an idea for starters. How about, to start, that all sexual abuse and harassment will be considered strictly unacceptable?

Define that. In my first sexual harassment class back in the late 80's, a fellow asked the counselor what sexual harassment was defined as.

Her answer? "Anything any woman thinks is sexual harassment - is sexual harassment.

As you might imagine, a hush fell over the room. How does one have any interaction with a woman if she can interpret "hello" as sexual harassment?

I did ask a coworker what she considered as harassment - she said "It depends". Keep in mind this was a woman who used to find it funny to goose me when I was using a glove box and couldn't move or get hy hands loose.

But back to our counselor we were told that remarks on how the woman looked, saying we liked her jewelry, or her dress, or her hairstyle, or any mention of anything physical or anything that could be interpreted as sexual in nature would very likely result in us getting fired.

Know what effect that had on most every man there? We avoided women like the plague. We made certain that nothing other than business was discussed when we absolutely had to deal with them, and we very often made certain to have a witness along with us.

Know what effect that had on the assholes? None.

Want to know what effect that had on 99 percent of the women there? Pissed them off royally. Our staff assistant had the dirtiest mind I've ever known. Silly small talk. She was devastated when the guys started avoiding her. Because despite what a few folks think, women actually think about sex, talk about sex, and make jokes about it.

Some years later, after seeing the unproductive chill this had put on campus inter-gender relations, not to mention actual real cases remained unchanged in number, these draconian guidelines were relaxed a good bit.

I'm not certain if the incident had anything to do with the change of heart, but not too long before this happened, one of the machinists was taken to task because someone saw in his toolbox, a photograph of a cheerleader. Since photographs of women in cute little outfits were considered harassment of other women, he was turned into HR.

The offensive photograph that was so demeaning to women and considered sexual harassment? It was a photo of his daughter, who had made the high school cheerleading team. He did note that if he was disciplined, he was going to take it to the legal system, as denying hime to post a school photo of his daughter, not unlike the ones the HR people had on their desks, surely looked like discrimination.

So be careful what you ask for. In your ideal world where women cannot hear anything regarding sex, you could end up with...http://feminist.org/education/SexSegregation.asp

or http://www.tolerance.org/magaz...

https://62e528761d0685343e1c-f...

http://cdn.inquisitr.com/wp-co...

or even.....http://www.relativityonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/12653311_img9939.jpg