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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.
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 =)
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?
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 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...
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.
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.
There's no shortage of stories of horrible treatment of men in Open Source projects either, but those don't show up on Slashdot every week.
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.
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!!!!!
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.
That's because you don't feel sorry for guys getting their feelings hurt but you get almost teary eyed when women cry. Its sort of the essence of being a man.
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.
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...
I have an idea for starters. How about, to start, that all sexual abuse and harassment will be considered strictly unacceptable?
How about for starters, we define clearly what does (and doesn't) constitute "sexual abuse and harassment?" Because in the United States, both are already considered not only social unacceptable, but also illegal.
The problem isn't in getting people to agree to the premise that "all sexual abuse and harassment will be considered strictly unacceptable." The problem is that SJW's would redefine both of those terms so broadly as to include almost all social interactions between men and women.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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
Are you still in school? If so you are in for a bit of a shock when you enter the workforce.
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
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.