Slashdot Mirror
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.
This crap again?
Gender has no role in online interactions unless you make it.
We're all pixels. we have no race. no nationality. no gender. no sexuality.
I'm not sure what online community you're taking part in, that this is happening in but i suggest you leave it =)
There's no shortage of stories of horrible treatment of women in Open Source projects. Liar.
It’s still an open issue whether males and females have built-in biases that, for example, lead fewer women to be programmers,
I disagree that it's still open. We all know that the built in biases are there. Where do you think the "social stigma" would have come from?
I fully concur. The problem is autism and it is contagious in the worst way. We need more safespaces for the unafflicted and the government should consider closing all sources until the disease is eradicated.
Every time I see a story about how women are treated badly online, I just imagine the millions of things I've been called as if being man or woman makes a difference. Plus women are just as brutal to everyone as men are. Anonymity makes everyone 10 times more douchey and woman are even bigger douchebags in real life especially to other women, because they are allowed to get away with it.
Stop Editors. Stop Slashdot. Stop Dice. Stop Bruce Perens. Stop This.
Stop hazing the tech sector. Stop making us out to be hostile to women, or racists, or all white male misogynerds. We're just regular people, regular geeks. Yes we like to play D&D, and pretend we're dwarves, or warlocks, or elf-maids, but that does not make us supporters of rape culture. Yes we like to write computer programs and make geeky websites about science stuff or cat videos. But that does not makes us anti-immigrant bigots. Yes we disagree with you and politely explain our reasons why, but that does not make us harassing MRA online stalkers.
The lies and hazing have to stop. The tech sector does not have a problem with women. The media has a problem with the tech sector.
There's no shortage of stories of horrible treatment of women in Open Source projects.
There's also no shortage of stories about the September 11th attacks being conducted by the US government.
We're still waiting on evidence in both cases.
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.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
"It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what." -- Stephen Fry
Circumcision is child abuse.
I disagree. I don't think the open source community, or rather nerds in general have a special problem with sexism or racism or homophobia for that matter.
Society has a problem. There is a vocal minority of assholes everywhere. Including in technology.
Also there is generally a healthy dose of racism and sexism in all of us. Is it natural? I dunno. But I do believe it can really hurt people and it does cloud our judgement. We deal with it in different ways. Some recognize it, try to be educated about it and try to avoid expressing it and keep it from clouding their judgement. Some others don't even see it. Some even celebrate it.
But no matter if you see something or not. Or if you ignore it. It doesn't go away. And it doesn't help victims, if you tell them that it doesn't exist. Every time there is a story on sexism on Slashdot, most comments are either outright sexist or they deny the existence of sexism. That is the problem, IMHO.
Case in point:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Nope, not even putting my name to this one, I don't feel like getting vaporized this early in the morning.
Reason One: Let's face the truth, here. The 'vocal minority' in technology-related endeavors tend to be the guys who are the most unattractive to women, both physically and (lack of) personality-wise, and by the time they've reached adulthood, they've been rejected so many times, that they make a choice between suicide and deciding 'all women are whores' and hating on them, steadfastly refusing to take the blame for being disgusting. I could be much more descriptive here about the many many faults of the individuals I am referring to, and believe me it's taking a heroic effort not to, but let's just leave it at 'even their mothers have a hard time loving them'.
Reason Two: There are Feminists. Then there are Feminazis. The difference is the former wants to be treated as equals, and the latter wants supremacy. The 'gentlemen' described above are low-hanging fruit for attacks by Feminazis, since they embody everything that's wrong with men, in a concentrated form. Feminazis will polarize a situation as fast as anyone possibly could because of this. Furthermore Feminazis may or may not actually be technically qualified to be working on a project, but if they're not, that fact is of no moment to them, they'll insist that they're not being treated fairly if anyone suggests that maybe they're not. Welcome to the downward spiral! The whole situation starts deteriorating.
Reason Three: Women who are actually qualified, and are not Feminazis or even overtly feminists? They get left in the dust by everybody else, because society raises and conditions them to not speak up, not raise their voices, not stand out, and for god's sake, don't get in a man's way! All of which is total bullshit, of course, if they're qualified they SHOULD step forward -- but they tend not to. Which just reinforces the average mans' opinion that women just can't do STEM.
Reason Four: Human beings, in general are still more dumb animals than we are truly sentient, civilized beings. This problem goes way beyond the tiny scope of the posted article; look out into the world at how humans treat other humans, in general; people treat other people worse than dog shit. We're sitting here right now discussing how women aren't treated fairly in some project or other, meanwhile in innumerable other places in the world, women are being beaten by their husbands, who firmly believe that she's his property, he can do whatever he likes to her, it's nobodys' business, and if he thinks she needs to die for whatever offense she's (apparently) committed against him, then that's OK. Little girls getting acid thrown in their faces because they dared to want to go to school. Young women being beaten and raped because they dared to not cover their hair, or their faces, or whatever absolutely rediculous reason. Female circumcision. The list goes on, that's JUST things being done to women. We're not truly civilized yet, far from it, when we live in a world where things like this are happening. Misogynistic fat neckbeards giving women a hard time in the workplace or in some technical project is really Amateur Night compared to all the other shit that goes on in the world, but it's a symptom of the root cause.
*****
Naturally I expect to be modded down immediately to (-1, Troll) or (-1, Flamebait), because the truth hurts, even if it doesn't apply directly to you, and nobody wants to admit that all your illusions about the Human Race are just that: illusions. But you can't un-read what was presented here, either. Get correct or get wrecked, Humanity. You're behind the curve and you're embarassing yourselves.
Peace, out.
Who is Bruce Perens? Why should I care what he says? And why should we trust a man to discuss women's issues?
Haven't you heard? - "Bruce" recently began her transition to become "Caitlyn."
Women are about 50% of the population and the majority of college graduates. Women could easily create women-dominated computer science programs, companies, and open source projects, run according to whatever preferences they have, if they wanted to. When it comes to open source development, none of the usual barriers feminists postulate to explain underrepresentation of women in certain fields apply: if pimply maladjusted male teenagers living in their mom's basement can create open source projects, surely intelligent, educated, empathetic women can do so as well. And if women's empathetic and communication styles result in superior project performance, they'd quickly take over the open source world.
Instead, Perens seems to view women as so weak and inferior that the only way they can create open source software is under male guidance and tutelage, within male-dominated projects. Perens and people like him are the real misogynists and sexists, because he obviously deep down still believes that women are the weaker sex and need protection and help from males like him.
And the real irony behind arguments like Perens's is that on the one hand, he acknowledges deep biological differences between men and women, but then thinks that society should somehow shoe-horn and reeducate people in such a way that despite those differences, outcomes are still statistically equal in a few select areas that he happens to care about.
where the man is an evil thing and the woman is the pristine victim of the bestial male. This doesn't make man a beast or a women virginal purity.
There's no "Empathy Gap". There's a story being written and the geek is the least protected class, male, weak, strange and acts mostly alone, and this is a valuable target.
No, really it is. You don't need to look far for piles and piles of peer validated, long running, empirical studies showing how women get the short end of the stick in lots of social, economic, and employment situations.
I knew all of the above but the clue bat really didn't knock my personal set of teeth out until early in 2015.
I work for a small-ish nonprofit providing all kinds of IT services, but in a small outfit you end up wearing all kinds of hats. I was asked to move my office to one adjoining a large floor that's essentially free public access computers for job search.
Why? The reason that was literally told to me was "We need a male presence out there"
Nonprofit public service tends to attract a lot of female employees, so my workplace is about 95% female. (And working there almost 15 years gives you some real insights in to the dynamics of women in the workplace) Having the above told to me verbatim by the female director of our organization was eye-opening to say the least.
But not as eye opening as what I experienced in the first week in my new office.
As you might imagine from what I've said above, the staff helping job seekers on the floor are women. They're all wonderfully qualified and extremely patient. They deal with everyone off the street - From the homeless to the people shunted over from the practically un-staffed unemployment office to the old men who lost their lifetime jobs at the lumber mill that just closed and found that their pension has been raided. (They're unhappy is the point I'm trying to make)
Some people, a surprisingly large number of people, simply do not respect women. At all. Even other women.
Sometimes my job is to simply pick up my cup off coffee, walk out on to the floor, and just stand there. When things are getting out of hand, everybody calms down. Sometimes my job is to repeat exactly what my co worker said to an upset job seeker - And suddenly they believe it. Sometimes a troubled soul will come into my office (The door is always open), sit down in a chair, and vent his or her troubles. I listen and nod politely and then direct them back to the people that were helping them 10 minutes ago. (And this works!)
It's creepy. I'm just the IT guy. When I'm done doing my new job as Y chromosome holder I go back to my desk and resume testing backups and managing EC2 instances and updating the website.
Women do get treated poorly, even in 2016. Just .. Be aware.
Being autistic (or on the spectrum somewhere) is no excuse for deliberately being a cock towards women.
I'm almost certainly autistic, I have all the possible traits of it. But I'll be fucked if I judge a woman coder over any other. Hell, if anything, the social aspects of such conditions mean that you wouldn't conform to such obvious social stereotypes and prejudices.
Nobody can stop you being a cock, overall. But being a cock towards women rather than men is just a deliberate, targeted prejudice no matter what you claim to be suffering from.
Stop conflating "autism" with certain social disorders or with racist / sexist / ageist dickheads. If anything, people like myself treat all people equally - with complete apathy.
Why was he embarrassed? Was he embarrassed because he was wrong or because he believed that those who claimed to be on the autism spectrum were wrong? I've read the paragraph a number of times and I'm just can't tell what the source of his embarrassment was.
What poor, defenceless women would do without white knight riding to the rescue?
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.
What's with all the Bruce hate? What is wrong with discussing a "gender empathy gap", why it might exist and what we might do about it? If you disagree with his point then offer sensible counterpoints of your own, but when you insult him or his ideas you're just reinforcing his point that the tech world is full of socially challenged asshats.
I would also think that Bruce's contributions to open software would merit some reflective humility, to maybe sit back and think a bit about what he's saying. Haven't you seen misogynistic behavior online? Why do you think that exists? Are you okay with it? If not, what can be done about it?
Thank you Bruce for openly speaking your concerns and ideas. I hope we can find a way to foster a more humane and empathetic open source community.
"Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
- Deep Thought
Being an expert in a particular area means that you have neglected learning in other areas. You only have so much time to learn things. To many technically oriented people all of the vagueness of social interactions is not logical, it cannot be derived from first principles. If is culture and it is that way because that is the way it is. This isn't interesting to many technical people so we spend our time on more interesting things. So while you may bitch that technical people don't have social skills what you really mean is that instead of learning social skills they spent that time becoming an expert in a technical field. You have spent your time learning social skills and then complain the reason you don't have technical skills is because those with them are mean. That's like me after spending my life learning English moving to a Spanish speaking country and bitching that I could learn Spanish much easier if all of these people would just learn English to help me. Sorry but that's not how it works.
I am an excellent mechanical design engineer that has spend over 20 years learning and honing my skills. This includes studying in my spare time and even my hobbies contribute in some way. Even entertainment I like watching "How it's made" so I can see examples of automation equipment for ideas. Some bosses have asked me to put together a 30 minute talk to help people learn to become a good design engineer. I laugh (maybe my lack of social skills) and say I only need a minute. I'd tell the people to dedicate their lives and spend 20 years learning this stuff and you can be just like me! Most people don't want to do that and spend their time with other things. That's fine, but don't come complaining that I lack budgeting or scheduling skills. No kidding, I have no interest in management. That's your job.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Safe spaces are a symptom yes, but you're wrong about the disease.
The disease: Raising kids to believe that women are always right and men are always wrong, giving every kid a trophy just for showing up, and helicopter parents holding kids' hands their entire lives. We know have a generation of legal adults that require "trigger warnings" before they hear anything the least bit upsetting during university lectures.
So why are you carrying water for a group that prefer to whinge, complain, and force others to act the way they want, instead of getting off their ass and downloading source to start their own projects?
Cover your ears (trigger warning): You're too old to buy into this bullshit, and I believe this is a troll to get back in the headlines.
Everything you said could have just as easily been said about people like Brendan Eich, who've been told "there is no place for someone with views like yours in our community." You want inclusivity? Then practice it on everything, including ideology. Until then, you are worse than people like weev because at least they admit that they reject "equality" and "inclusion" as ideals. You reject it on ideology, then someone else is free to reject it wherever they please. It really is an all-or-nothing proposition.
Lack of empathy isn't just the fault of autism, it's also due to the nature of the business.
When I'm coding I'm in a creative, but heavily logical space. My brain is just crunching paths, 1s and 0s and firmly sat on the reptile side of the fence. If I want to go out and socialise with people and relax the mammalian, emotional, side will need some warming up, especially after 9 hours of heavy logical, reptile thinking.
This is the nature of normal people's brains, male or female.
To have someone firmly using the logical side of their brain and then expect them to be immediately empathic is just not going to work, regardless of gender and focus.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Enough with this... If people want to get ultra sensitive about gender then we can point out that women are often insensitive to male behavior patterns. Do we want to go over that or is this only a problem when men don't automatically take their coats off and let the ladies walk over puddles?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
But as men we have to deal with it. If this is a feminist issue, then a logical consequence might be that women need protecting from men because they are too weak to protect themselves, i.e. men and women aren't equal... but this exactly the opposite of most lines of feminist thinking. Smells like a proof by contradiction.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
That's a pretty comprehensive list of the worst people on the Internet.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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
Ian was a really bright and capable guy with a dark side. Unfortunately, at times he had difficulty dealing with anger, debilitating depression, and blame projection. He was arrested for battery and illegal confinement in 2009, this event with SFPD wasn't the first time.
I was his friend once, although that was more than a decade ago. I absolutely hate that he died without a friend left in the world to help him and in such an undignified, unfair, senseless way. But that's what happened. The police were not to blame.
Bruce Perens.
I"ve sometimes wondered if this behavior is similar to the mobbing behavior you see in certain species such as Monk Seals:
http://www.pinnipeds.org/seal-...
"Mobbing" refers to a pathological behavior that occurs when the gender ratio becomes skewed, with an excess of males versus females. The adult males become increasingly aggressive towards females (and immature pups), and will injure and even kill them, as multiple males gang up to play out a violent parody of their normal mating behavior. This problem becomes self-perpetuating as females are hunted down, with natural populations having observed to be driven into ratios as extreme as 3 males for every 1 surviving female.
First of all, don't postulate something without proof. In other words, first you show THAT women are treated badly in OSS projects. Then I read the rest of that diatribe.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hey, relax. Even the London Times has its funny pages, why shouldn't /.?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sounds like a great example of specialisation. Let's leave them to it then.
Which of you humorless cusses moderated this "Troll" instead of "Funny"?
You're thinking old school feminists. The ones that were determined to prove that women don't need men and that they are at the very least equal if not superior to men. And prove it by merit.
The current batch is more a whiny bunch of professional victims that complain and lament about how unfair the white patriarchy is while doing zip jack to actually improve their situation, instead being professional victims and demanding preferential treatment, freebies and handouts and if you don't agree that they should get for free what you worked for, you're a misogynist bastard and want to oppress women.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just what are you doing? Denying there's a problem?
Isn't that what us humans, as a whole race, tend to do?
Not just; We also tend to build things up; Very often depending on our own interests in a situation. E.g. a woman who is being picked on might decide to make a problem louder. A friend of a person responsible for a nasty comment might try to minimise the situation.
What's going on here is a mixture of various true problems with a huge amount of troll feeding. Basically the easiest most guaranteed way to start a huge flame war is to a) do a sexist / transist attack on someone b) try to impose an overly restrictive and dangerous code of conduct which tries to limit legitimate free speech.
Don't feed the trolls:
In social matters, moreso than anything else, majority rules.
That is unfortunate for those who are not members of the majority.
Poo flinging monkeys rule.
Literally.
Those who are considered more "advanced" at social skills soon dominate a group.
Interesting take on this behaviour:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
contributing to open source projects, try being a dog!
I have an idea for starters. How about, to start, that all sexual abuse and harassment will be considered strictly unacceptable? 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.
So yeah, for the foundation, how about stopping harassment and abuse? Because that would be an important, major, and requisite first step to accomplishing even better things, like having OS projects actually seem appealing to women.
As for Autisim Spectrum stuff, I believe that it is very common among all people in this world, male, female, black, white, yellow, green. I don't think that necessarily has any bearing upon whether a person would treat others badly. It may just make them seem a little spaced out perhaps but still a nice/good person. 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. So I think at least some of the concern/criticism about autism spectrum people is just a cultural take on it.
not this again :/
Recent talk by Sheldon Cooper sums this topic pretty nicely (around 35.30 minutes in) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We DONT CARE about feelings, we care about absolutes. I wont cater to some alien (to me) social norms just because you are a precious snowflake, I will tell you outright what is wrong ('this code is garbage' etc).
This is also pretty good and on topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I don't know where you've been, but "comedians" does not equal "humor". If you doubt that, just check out the comedy videos on Netflix.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Men: (doing their jobs/ having fun)
Women: "Stop! This isn't about me! Pay attention to ME, NOW! How dare you do something that doesn't involve worshipping the vagina! 77 cents on the dollar! 1 in 4 raped! Systematic oppression!"
Men: Go with the social pressure, making another retarded concession to radfem nutcases that drives society back by another inch
And people wonder why more and more men are turning to faggotry and masturbatory fantasies, with some even going full dick-chopping tranny. Feminism will be what finally destroys the human species.
It's official, on Jan 1 2016, Bruce Perens jumped the shark and earned his SJW Badge Of Honor.
Bruce will be remembered fondly by those of us that knew him before he started posting tripe-laden nonsense about how a lot of guys are basically socially-inept assholes and how it's all their fault for not being more in tune with someone else's feelings, especially the poor, downtrodden women they oppress at work.
Bruce will be interred alongside Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn, all of who will scream at him for eternity from the Afterlife for encroaching on their Safe Space in the PZ Meyers memorial wing in the Rachel Dolezal Cemetery.
I wouldn't give a shit if Grace Hopper wrote it. It's still bullshit.
All this proves is that Bruce Perens lives in Silicon Valley, and that Silicon Valley has become absolutely infected with the SJW cancer.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
No, women make up a very tiny percentage of programmers - an even smaller a percentage of programmers capable of contributing meaningful code (which the open source community is particularly big on.)
I guess #codergate is going to be a thing too now...
I consider programming to be a brutal, soul crunching excursion to the outer depths of chaos itself. It is not a place for hand-holding and sympathy.
While I find programming interesting, creative and nice, I do agree that it is most decidedly not an activity where hand-holding has any place. It is difficult enough that you need to find your personal style or you will never be any good at it. That precludes hand-holding. It also means that only people that have reached a certain level of skill will be able to understand what experienced programmers are talking about. Because of this, it is very meritocratic. Unless you say something worthwhile (and doing that is hard) you will get ignored. If you insist, you may get shouted at. That is very much at odds with what some women expect. On the other hand, if you say something worthwhile, nobody even cares what you are, serious coders would welcome a talking teakettle if it was a good coder and had something to contribute.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
I had that drilled into me as a kid.
But it doesn't work. I'm an outlier. Most people take offense at the very things that I find helpful.
Until I learned that I had a blind spot and the normal rules of behavior such as the Golden Rule don't apply to me, I ticked people off without even knowing it.
It's very possible, even likely, that guys - especially relatively young or immature guys - have blind spots regarding women they don't know about. They (we) may be treating women in ways that we would welcome, unaware that it just drives the women away from us and makes them not want to play in our sandboxes.
If that's the case, then maybe the "fix" is to teach kids and teenagers that not everyone sees the world like they do and they should try to empathize with those who see the world differently rather than assuming everyone is like them or assuming those who "think and act differently" (whether it's because of a gender-correlated difference or not) "are 'the other'/have a problem/are wrong/etc." and "should just get over it/think and act like me/are unworthy of respect/aren't worth spending time and effort to accommodate/etc."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Women on dating websites complain of constantly receiving dick pics.
This is the one valid complaint that I think probably applies to women far more than to men. Although I'll admit I haven't asked gay friends whether the same thing happens on their specialist sites too.
This is so 2015.
Why does this war always target educated white males?
There are literally streets in my country (the United States of America) where the likelihood of such women being raped or murdered at night is astrocomical.
Why are men expected to deal with female culture on campus and on social media (my feelings > your right to an opinion OR ELSE I'LL GET YOU FIRED) but wherever women are expected to fit into an existing, male-dominated, culture we get articles like this?
C'mon guys, it's 2016. Let the ladies deal with reality.
Obvious troll is obvious.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's good that you were very clear you're not saying ALL men are this way or ALL women are that way. Certainly that wouldn't be true.
I understand there ARE studies which suggest that when men and women are "assholes", men are MORE LIKELY to be an asshole to your face, while women are MORE LIKELY to do it behind your back. It might be that some men feel more comfortable being a "tough guy", while many women prefer to maintain the illusion of being "nice", that women's social cues tend to value getting along while men's tend to value, or at least accept, a degree of machismo.
Neither is better or worse, IMHO. My wife writes the holiday cards (she can be nice) while I handle the abusive bill collectors and anyone trying to take advantage of us (I can be tough). She COULD be tough and I COULD be nice, but being a bit adversarial and brosque and comes more naturally to me and being sweet and "getting along" comes more naturally to her.
Bruce,
I read your article, The Empathy Gap, and Why Women are Treated Badly in Open Source Communities. (I saw it on Slashdot.)
It seems to me that I have some useful comments:
You said, "How did we ever get to the point that a vocal minority of males in Open Source communities behave in the most boorish, misogynistic, objectifying manner toward women?"
A vocal minority of males on Slashdot, for example, behave in the most boorish, objectifying manner toward each other.
An example of a programmer being boorish: Linus Torvalds fires off angry 'compiler-masturbation' rant. Yes, Linus is a wonderful leader, but he can also be boorish.
The 1953 translation to English of the book, The Second Sex, began decades of open hostility of women toward men in the United States.
The 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, began decades of a new kind of sneaky hostility of women toward men in the United States.
Most men don't know how to deal with the hostility of women in the United States. They don't see any reason for it. The also don't detect it clearly.
The issues are far more complicated than indicated by those few statements.
I'm writing a book about how people use their brains. The book will have a much more complete explanation of the relationships between women and men.
Michael Jennings
Thanks for sticking up for me but sadly, I've gotten used to that sort of thing around here. Sometimes I put in a disclaimer in the vein of "Note to humor-impaired moderators." However, in this case, I thought the (tasteless) humor of the thing was so obvious that no disclaimer was needed. Regardless, my apologies go to any members of the LGBT-moderator community whom I may have offended.
BTW, I always dislike the rating of "Troll." I never use that myself because it implies that you know that the intent of the poster was to rile people. As my "funny" (YMMV) comment above illustrates, it's generally a losing proposition to try to discern the intent of the poster. So, anytime I suspect a Troll when I'm in the moderator seat, I just mark it as "Overrated."
(Note to humor-impaired moderators: the first paragraph was irony - a device of mild humor - but the second paragraph was serious. Sorry if I'm "Trolling" again...)
FWIW, I just noticed on my "Comment Moderation" page that my "Caitlyn" comment above got marked twice as a Troll and twice as "Funny." So, my current theory is that I offended one transgender person, one Bruce Perens fan, and amused two folks who are neither - or both.
Feminism has proven that the cultural assumption people held of women being the empathetic gender was wrong. Every perceived slight against women is taken seriously,whether real or not. Society is really gynocentric, meaning it revolves around women as they are the biological limiter on reproduction. This worked to some degree when jobs were grueling and women took the bargain of less direct power for the safety of more comfort at home, doing less strenuous jobs while wielding power through proxy. With modern technology, this changed the environment and now women have equal access, while still holding onto the societal biases of the past which gave them special status and considerations as protected people, less rights, less accountability and responsibility was transferred to the nearest man. Women/feminists cherry picked their way into the power structures of men, and society didn't fully reassess women's status. This is why irresponsible men who have children they cannot or will not pay for are thrown in jail, while the mothers who had every hand in the decision to irresponsibly bring children in to the world they cannot or would not pay for simply get a hand out. Accountability and judgement is not equally applied, and this has led to all this gender strife we've been seeing. Feminists are now cherry picking grievances when they are really demanding entitlement to the special treatment they are used to. I think a study showed that treating women equal to men in many cases was seen as misogynistic, this is the ugly reality of the situation. Tech is a hard one for feminists because merit applies, if your code is bad, can you really blame the patriarchy? These aren't soft sciences where total bs gets a pass because of identity politics, skill matters, and so they've had more trouble imposing their will on this sector. But they still try, while ignoring the gender differences which lead to the disparity. More men are on the autism spectrum and thus attracted to these fields, there is no way around that. Beyond that, people should question this demand for more women as if it were anything good. We got to the moon by harnessing the minds of the best, even some rather horrible people, former nazi's, and look how our scientific progress has stagnated as people have fixated more on what a person is than what they can do. Women aren't treated badly in anything, there are simply women who misconstrue equal treatment with not being catered to as they have become accustomed to as a special class in society. The men in open source need to serve women, they have to be more charming, they have to be this or that, they have to white knight for women, raise them up when frankly women should rise on their own merits. The special class in society for women is undeniable. Why do you think women wear heels, make up, long hair, all the impractical adornment is is an indicator of class, or an aspiration of a class which seeks to be above menial labor. The problem comes when this is not acknowledge and becomes toxic female entitlement which leads to accusations like these that women aren't being made "welcome". You are always welcome to work if your work is good, let alone for free, its an absurd statement to make. The proof of this low standard is seen in who is held up as representative of "women in tech". Have people not noticed the Zoe Quinn's of the world? Someone who is so untalented they had to use an open source tool named twine which requires zero programming knowledge to write their choose your own adventure text game. And because this person without a degree or any relevant tech experience claims harassment as a woman, they are now a "woman in tech", and they've been speaking as representative for over a year now, even ending up in front of the UN. Complete hacks lie Quinn and Sarkeesian end up at the UN, their stories aren't questioned or their credentials, because there is this special standard for women in society of benevolent sexism no one wants to address to this very day, instead we have yet another "women aren'
Eh, I disagree. Props to Bruce for calling it as he sees it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Wall of text, did not read.
Anyway, empathy has become a snarl word to be used against nerds, much like claims of social underdevelopment or social awkwardness. It's common to see screeds claiming nerds lack "empathy" while at the same time belittling them and explicitly declaring that their problems are unimportant compared to those of the writer.
The irony seems to be lost on those writers... or, and this is my theory, it's intentional and is intended to signal the fact that the writer holds so much relative status that they can pull off a blatantly hypocritical attack and still have their version accepted. Much like a bully grabbing someone's arm and slapping them with their own hand while saying "Stop hitting yourself". Or slamming their head multiple times against a police car while saying "watch your head".
Unless there's a motivation such as clickbait and not a random factor.
However I'd still say not every one, mostly just ones where the news was not already old in time for a story to be blown out of proportion on a Friday for clickbait. Those stories collect a LOT of comments so presumably a lot of people are exposed to the advertising.
I think this analysis is overinflated.
Yes, a lot of people in tech show autistic behaviours. Some of it is because autism and tech go well together, another I'd say is that dealing with tech makes you somewhat autistic and difficult to bear in social situations, simply because most of your brainpower goes into tech and not into social interaction.
It's true: Good social interaction takes work and energy. Energy that is then missing solving hard tech problems. I'd say this is the case for most humans.
As for bad behaviour in FOSS towards women:
It probably exists in places and perhaps prominently so, but I consider it habitual more than disorder related. Some of the notably juvenile remarks of Linux Torwalds come to mind as an example. He's married to a nice wife and has children. And while he's a tech expert he doesn't seem that inept in social things to me. I'd subscribe potentially misogynistic remarks simply to bad behaviour and lack of sensibility in the communication department I would also consider these problems to be largely a US thing and perhaps a phenomenon of certain 'old-school' FOSS communities.
I can hardly imagine such behaviour passing beyond a thread and more than once in more modern/hip FOSS communities such as WordPress or some other current-tech web-dev community. Gimp too has women working on the project for decades and the CCC has many women, some of them doing serious high-tech work and leading expert projects. I was at the local Duesseldorf CCC Chapter just the other day, watching Chaos Communication Congress Videolivefeeds of talks and there at least 3 women in a room of less than ten. No way would misgyny go by unnoticed or without inmediate repurcussions, and the CCC has been around for decades and is about as nerdy a community it gets.
No, the problem exists on a per-project basis.
Some FOSS crews, including the kernel team, just have to learn not to write like idiots or use juvenile wording when expressing their opinions. That would solve about 95% of the issues causing all the bad press lately.
Conclusion: TFA goes overboard with this problem. No need to fall back into the silly autism or Linus' abysmally poor '"I'm from a disfunctional family" excuse. I know autistic people who are perfectly well behaved around women. Tell the crews to learn some manners, give Linus some flak for his wording and lets make this embarrasing episode a thing of the past ASAP.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
With respect I think Bruce Perens is using the dictionary instead of gut feeling and guesswork.
WTF is it with people and personal definitions? Has "shock jock" radio or similar fucked up people's heads?
That high school situation was a fuckup where the instructor intended to use an image of a playboy model's face for the class project, but didn't have the image file and instructed his students to google for it. They didn't just get the face but the whole centerfold. The only backlash from that was a comment in a blog from a girl who said she didn't like the results of that fuckup, which resulted in a story here that resembled a hurricane in a teacup.
I can see how inner city small animal stuff would attract the girls and give you such a strange impression if you never get out of the city, but WTF does such a weird mistake on your part have to do with the topic?
In summary it was really just a lot of whining blaming a strawman for some personal issues that were not disclosed - what an utter waste of time.
People find that stuff out and the bullying happens obviously instead of your very contrived fake guess and "bro" shit.
Why do you feel threatened by my simple statement about the bullies above?
There are no shortages of claims made by professional victims, but they do have a shortage of facts. These claims only survive with the assistance of administrative action (e.g. Reddit, Tumblr, Fark, Twitter's abuse department) and fall flat anywhere else.
Such advocacy can only serve as a shibboleth - that Perens wants to declare his alignment with professional victims. He isn't starting with facts or logic.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Even before Bruce wrote this timely article, I wondered whether more women in open source might be a cause or an effect of better moderation. My brief time working with the late Telsa Gwynn at GUADEC 2003 suggested that moderation was one of her under-appreciated roles. But she was attacked by the misogynistic mob (AKA the open source community.) Were it not for Telsa's thick skin and an overdeveloped sense of forgiveness, none of us would have benefited from her work. Many other women and others outside of a particularly narrow age/race/religion/gender profile have experienced similar when attempting to contribute and most gave up. We tolerate Linus's rantings and ignore that only timing and humility separated Linus from countless other early *nix hackers. We tolerate Gangolf Jobb's racist license and Trumpish rantings because he is a good coder. My family and remote team members met at GUADEC Istanbul where a very well-known opensource developer spewed misogynistic rantings that embarrassed and offended me, projected a terrible impression of Christians and Euro/American society to my global team who were experiencing western society for the first time. He came very near to inspiring at least one person to push him into the Bosporus. Why does this happen? Part of it is the same reason Whitney Houston and other rock , movie and sports superstars are bat shit insane. Society should be a counterbalance to the Id, but when we worship people as superstars, there is no counterbalance and Id rules. The defence mechanism takes over when the inner demons unleashed by bad decisions are externalized, possibly as police brutality. Similar forces were at play when Hans Reiser became our OJ Simpson.
In the past that role of moderation was performed by a central government (e.g. the FCC), a tight group of highly educated individuals, a class/caste system. Twitter and Facebook use something close to a democracy but the S/N ratio can quickly fall to the level of CB radio, AOL and usenet. The more sophisticated merit-based moderation system used by Slashdot, some opensource projects and creative sites such as worth1000 works well, at least above a certain threshold. But these systems must be designed to prevent individuals or small groups from becoming immune to criticism. Within government legal frameworks the censor or impeachment is a mechanism for moderation. We could do something within opensource communities where an individual's ethics could taint their contributions. Each of us would be able to choose whether we want to contribute or use ethically-tainted patches.
Back in the 1980s when I may have been the last male to wirewrap a PDP-11 core memory board, a friend commented, "Did you ever notice that men in the comp-sci program are (80s equivalent of "Meh") but the women are brilliant?" Yes, I did notice that. But whatever happened to Karen Norwood, Maureen T, Kathy Christiansen, Norah K, and the sole woman in our Physics program?
This is where overloading the == operator comes in. Equality is an overloaded word. Here in Ireland, the word was a slogan for LBGT marriage rights which passed referendum with an overwhelming majority. But the word "equality" doesn't apply to gender, race, religion or immigration issues here. But do we really want women to become equal to 20-something males who live in their parent's basement who have the moral and emotional depth of comic book and video game heros? I don't. Let's take the best woman have to offer and not try to force them into our broken mold.
Imagine trying to train a large group of chimps not to perform any of their mating displays, not to attempt to mate and to generally ignore the opposite sex. This is what is being attempted with us - we're just naked apes, with bigger brains, granted - but still utterly in thrall to our evolution. Men and Women are simultaneously infuriated and fascinated by each other, which is no recipe for a quiet life, and it's not going to change any time soon.
We often talk as if the men who act boorishly towards women are a representative sample of the men in any online community, but this is almost always going to be untrue, because boors by definition act in ways that are obnoxiously more noticeable than the norm.
It may well be that "software development in general and Open Source communities are frequented by males who have social development issues" ... but what does that mean we can infer about typical males in those communities? Almost nothing, because the proportion of boors in a population doesn't have to be particularly high before they begin to sour the tone.
This goes both ways, by the way. Hating men is not the norm for feminists, but the law of large numbers means that in any sufficiently large community that attracts feminists you're guaranteed to have enough man-haters to make things uncomfortable for many men. Remember that woman who recorded all the harassment she received walking around NYC? Well later a man did the same thing, and he caught it from both women AND men. In either case if you figure the number of people you encounter in eight or ten hours of walking around Manhattan, it's clear that the rate of boorish behavior in Manhattan is extraordinarily low, while at the same time the frequency with which you encounter it is uncomfortably high.
So we shouldn't be worrying about an empathy gap, because there isn't necessarily any such gap. What we need to be worrying about is policing boorish behavior.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Two important questions must be answered first.
First, we must ask if there is true correlation between the autism spectrum placement and coding skills. If there is, then it may be reasonable to use autism spectrum location as a screening variable when hiring coders (note, correlation is not causation, so be careful here).
Second, is it harder for women to grow into or be born into that pocket of coding creativity? If it is, then we should expect the ratio of successful programmers to be imbalanced, just as there is clear imbalance in the NBA based on height.
It is the worst sort of unicorn-buying for our institutions to try to "correct" such an imbalance without understanding these aspects of the problem.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
I would moderate this up as +insightful
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
I have a great idea - let's allow developers to settle their disagreements by physical combat, just like in the Middle Ages. Set up a conference room properly, have a ref to enforce MMA rules, and if someone calls someone else out, set a time and they can have at it. If you complain that this would be unfair to women, short people, or fat people, I can trot out dozens of counter-examples - just google short / female / fat MMA fighter for a bunch of them.
The problems with this are the same as with the caustic social environment in some open source groups - (a) certain groups are more vulnerable than others; in other words, there are attacks which work against one group and don't work against another, and defenses available to some groups and not others, and (b) the ability to deliver and withstand this sort of abuse has NOTHING to do with engineering ability or how good your ideas are.
When you reach a certain level of seniority you start realizing that one of the roles you need to take at meetings is to defend the shy junior person with a good idea against the outspoken jerk who is opposing it reflexively. Unfortunately we live in a world where four times out of five that person is going to be female, and the jerk is a lot less likely to oppose the same idea proposed by a junior, shy, but male engineer.
It’s unfortunately the case that software development in general and Open Source communities are frequented by males who have *software* development issues. Maybe they are afraid women will definitely realize the true value of the stuff they produce.
Handholding has its place.
If you're working with inexperienced fresh grads (every sizable team should have a few), you want them to be asking questions and seeking guidance when they need it. Better that they should work more slowly and develop their skills, than work full speed ahead churning out dog crap.
If you have someone making their first-ever contribution to a Free Software project, you want to be encouraging to them even if their initial pull request wasn't so great. Better to be patient and grow the community, than to be a hothead and drive away someone who wanted to contribute.
Otoh, if you have someone with years of experience who needs handholding.. maybe they'd be better off in a different role.
Seriously, if a "fresh grad" still needs hand-holding at this, then they do not have what it takes to ever be good at it. Same for a first-ever contributor to a FOSS project. Investing in these people in this role is a complete waste of time and harmful on top. Growing a community on the incompetent and the semi-competent is a sure way to destroy it. That is why so many people think all great programmers are self-taught (not true, but most are): Unless you come with a high level of aptitude and motivation, you really should go into a different field. While it is en-vogue again to claim that programming can be taught to anybody, that is just unmitigated nonsense. It is mostly nature and a only tiny and optional bit of nurture that makes great coders and anybody who denies that has not actually seen how incompetent and harmful most coders are in reality. Those are the ones that got educated and hand-held for most of the process. These are the ones that make software unreliable, insecure and hard to maintain. These are the ones that make projects fail.
And no, I do not like that it is this way. I am just not blind to the realities.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Eh... 100% self-taught programmer here, fwiw.
So let's say someone contributes a basically useful pull request to one of my projects. But it doesn't have any test coverage, and some aspect of the code is less than ideal. There are a couple ways I could respond.
I could say "fuck you, get lost you incompetent shitlord!" and refuse the PR.
Or I could say something more or less like this:
The former response gets me: a) no new functionality for my package; and b) at least one formerly-supportive person who now hates my guts and wants nothing to do with helping my project.
The latter response gets me: a) cool new functionality; and b) a contributor who (hopefully) has a fairly good impression of the project.
Seems obvious to me, at least, which is the more beneficial approach.
As you assume a "basically useful" pull request, we have left hand-holding with respect to coding already far behind.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Would Beetlejuice announce his retirement?