Oh, I get it! If only we could somehow get the corporate kleptocracy, God's Voters, and the libertarian fringe to somehow form a coalition, we could finally get some national health care and a minimum-wage increase!:D
...because his government isn't representing him, it's representing the people in the states that take in more tax money than they pay.
Tax distribution is a zero-sum game. That has nothing to do with the size of the government. The same size government that takes money from California gives money to Louisiana.
And no federal government yet has represented California's interests. Hell we don't even get 80 cents on the dollar back in federal tax money, and what we do get is so wrapped in pork and idiotic regulations it costs almost as much as we get to use.
I hope you realize that's your own damn fault for voting for politicians that seek to expand Government.
I hope you realize that this is completely irrelevant to the parent's point. "My government is not representative" != "My government is TOO BIG!"
I think that's a perfectly fair position. Skepticism can be dangerous, in that it can discourage one from viewing social structures through the eyes of the ones they negatively affect (which is eye-opening, though I'm overusing that organ), but it ain't right to degenerate into mau-mauing or self-hatred on account of privilege.
controlling for other factors here
I see how this could be misleading; I was using the term a bit more loosely than that. This isn't a proper scientific study, of course; even 'natural experiment' might be giving it airs... I just mean that, per the official lending algorithm, these are people who should've gotten prime loans. They didn't, which indicates (1) that something outside the official algorithm was involved, and (2) that obvious confounding factors which frequently track with race, such as poverty, prison records, unreliable credit and work histories, etc., can't bear the weight of explaining the different treatment, in so much as these are all probably included in any sane credit-risk algorithm. So, while an average black person is more likely to be a worse credit risk than an average white person (mainly because of racially-correlated class issues), the comparison isn't with the overall racial average, but with people that the algorithm says were qualified. From that, I don't see a conflict between speculation (can't dignify it as more than that) about social networks' and family networks' knowledge of credit, while saying that the algorithm-relevant factors were comparable.
Are you saying that there are times when the race has a legitimate fault of its own, and that's the time when the disparate outcomes are not necessarily racist?
Well, there are times that people have legitimate faults, which may be particularly prevalent within one race or another. Perfectly justifiable/reasonable lending algorithms probably do make it harder for The Average Black Person to get a prime mortgage. On the one hand, this is reasonable, to the extent that it reflects The Average Black Person being less likely to repay the loan. On the other hand, *that* fact is due to fallout from other problems affecting the black community (greater unemployment, wage inequalities, differential access to education thus careers, etc.); to the extent that's an underlying racial disparity in our society, it would indicate that society's institutions are racist (/sexist/classist/etc). So I don't at all think it's suspect for a company to use statistical models to give better loan terms to people more likely to repay; but I do think it's an indictment of our society that black people might on the whole be less likely to repay. It's both fair, and not, to take those factors in isolation in the derived case. Rather than "inconsistent," I prefer to think of this as "nuanced":)
What I'm really trying to point towards is a view of racism that's more complex than the "racism = klansmen, racism BAD!" view that most of us white people pick up as our main thoughts on the topic. Klansmen are bad, of course. But there's a whole range of racist behaviors, institutions, and cultural standards, many of which are subconscious (discomfort around people of different races, ferinstance, which can lead to things like jury biases, hiring biases...); some of which are perfectly understandable[1]; some of which are not even intentional, or not the conscious intent of any one person. Sometimes a racist system manifests itself more in terms of privileges accorded to one race but denied to another (obligatory famous essay, which is insightful if flawed). And I think that it is both fair and unfair to separate individual aspects of a system/set of institutions as racist, when the non-racist institutions are probably influenced by racially-motivated factors. The world is pr
Actually, only some economists say that increased liquidity is an absolute gain. And even then, economists deal more in theories than in reality.
One could make a very convincing case that the Asian Financial Crisis of the late '90s was greatly exacerbated by excessive liquidity in the markets, which strengthened the self-sustaining collapse in currency values. Countries handled it better when they established regulations preventing investors from pulling capital out of their economies, halting the crash.
It really doesn't take much effort on the part of men to avoid the kind of behaviors that make women feel uncomfortable. Frankly, I wouldn't miss anybody who felt they'd been "driven out" by requests not to make jokes about women being porn stars or sex dispensers, or hitting on anything whose handle suggests she might have breasts, to name the most egregious offenders, but I suspect few men would feel the need to leave just from being asked to show basic respect. (Few grown-ups, anyway.)
I mean, you're essentially saying you don't believe in institutional racism -- specifically a set of rules or a social system that seems equal but results in racially biased outcomes for non-legitimate reasons. But you don't need Klansmen to make something work that way; and just because institutions are racist, doesn't mean anybody needs to be stoned to death or agonize in unbearable guilt. It just means that non-justified reasons for racially biased outcomes should be fixed whenever possible.
So--
Are you ready to say that racists are not self-interested or malicious? I doubt it. You probably want to keep the connotation of racist as-is because the word has power as-is.
Of course racists are malicious (though not necessarily any more self-interested than anybody else; racism can work against people's self-interest, as argued by e.g. Tim Wise). But with institutional racism, it's the system itself that is racist, even if none of the people involved are consciously biased. Think of it like the way a properly functioning market economy works to assign "correct" prices to commodities--none of the people involved are doing anything but trying to get the best deal for themselves, but by their collective action they achieve a very interesting unintentional result--just so, people can build systems that are intended to be fair, but (due to inadequate information, unconscious bias, historical artifact, or many other possible reasons) wind up treating people of color unfairly.
Which is besides the point at WF, since individuals there clearly were racist (I don't know what other conclusion we can draw from emails referring to "mud people"). But the institutional-racism part is that it was a scam specifically directed against people who were vulnerable because of their race (and correspondingly their lack of social networks and information about their qualifications for prime loans). Remember we're controlling for other factors here; these were black people who based on the lending algorithms should've gotten prime but were given subprime loans instead. And they fall for it because black communities don't have the same institutional knowledge of mortgages etc. that white families do; many of these people couldn't ask a parent or an uncle or whatever whether they were getting a fair deal, because those people wouldn't know (while they would be more likely to be able to provide guidance for white borrowers).
As for drug laws, I suppose I'd entertain the possibility that politicians proposed laws without having conscious racially discriminatory intent. I'm more interested in the race differential in policy enforcement and conviction rates for the same drugs, like pot. But let's take a more interesting example -- legacy college admissions. I'm not talking about "daddy's name is on the library," just that many schools give preference to family members of alumni. That's definitely not a conscious attempt to be racist; it's intended to be a nice thing to keep family traditions intact, etc. But those alumni families are going to be disproportionately white -- so by giving preference to this category, you're tilting the scales away from people of color (and poorer people generally), meaning that an otherwise equally-qualified applicant is at a disadvantage competing for the same spot. Nobody intends to discriminate against black people; it just happens, as a product of how the rest of the system is set up. The result, though, is a disproportionate barrier to entry for people of color -- quite literally a grandfather clause. I don't know what else to call it than racist when people of one race, through no fault of their own, have a harder time competing for the same goal.
Anyway, a response to this --
"The disparity exists so the system in question is racist, we're not going to even entertain any other possibilities."
Telling racy jokes in a casual environment is not discrimination, or sexism, or any kind of *ism at all, it is simply vulgar.
Telling racy jokes in a casual environment is exactly the kind of behavior that discourages female participation in FOSS. Most women feel uncomfortable with jokes like Stallman's (which was pretty mild really), ESPECIALLY in male-dominated environments, and the stuff on this list was considerably less mild than that. I can totally appreciate how it would drive women away.
And the fact that you're standing around saying, "No, it's okay, I'm just joking" -- as (I'm assuming) a man, defining what a woman has a right to be offended by -- is a further demonstration of institutionalized sexism.
I'm sure that guys telling crude jokes would welcome women. I doubt that the women would feel welcome, or be likely to come participate.
I would argue that the Wells Fargo thing is a third thing -- it's taking advantage of the socially underprivileged position of a group (black people who should qualify for prime loans but don't have access to enough information or market options in lenders to know that) in order to make a profit.
That's not twirling their moustaches and hoping to screw over black people; it's just taking advantage of a racially biased system.
People need to let go of the idea that racism has to be obviously self-interested or malicious in order to exist. The thing with institutional racism is that it exists without anybody needing to have consciously discriminatory attitudes at all. That's more like belief in quantum physics than in religion. I mean, the disparity does exist; let's look for an explanation for it. Just shrugging your shoulders and accepting it, that would be the "faith-based" (or intellectually uncurious) response.
- Among other incidents, at the school with the largest number of African-American students in the Ivy League, nooses and racial epithets have been anonymously scattered around professors' offices.
- Differential prosecution and punishment of drug offenses and other minor nonviolent offenses (with black men incarcerated at eight times the rate of white men).
- Black Americans were specifically targeted to receive sub-prime loans, even when they could have qualified for prime-rate loans, with a differential result that probably pushed a lot of African American families into losing their homes. (another on higher rates: here.)
- The USAF considers it still necessary to actively recruit minorities into the officer corps, which is over 80% white.
I could go on, but I've done enough research for you so far. Similar results can be found for differential treatment of other minorities, as well as women (who are actually a slim majority, but still the disempowered group).
Note that these are mostly instances of institutionalized racism or sexism -- where there is officially no difference on the law books or in the policies, but organizations still have cultures that privilege whiteness and maleness, and corresponding values and attitudes, above women and people of color. This is the kind of racism and sexism that is alive and well today, but is all the more insidious, because most of us white males are trained not to be even remotely aware of its existence, or (when confronted with it) to brush it off as isolated incidents, a few bad apples, etc. The biggest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist, as they say.
Also, this is all without getting into stereotypical portrayals in the media. For instance, when was the last time you saw a movie with an Asian American hero who didn't either (1) know kung fu or (2) flail helplessly in the clutches of his own geekery? When have you seen an Asian American love interest? (Outside of Harold & Kumar, which was explicitly intended as a corrective to that attitude in media portrayals). Have you ever noticed that if there's a black character in an action movie, he's almost certainly one of the first to die, and nearly guaranteed to be dead by the end? (c.f. Battlestar Galactica, with plenty of other instances easily discoverable). I won't go on, but these sorts of cases have a powerful effect on society's perception of people of color, and on PoC's perceptions of themselves, too.
I do not participate in a whole lot of FOSS mailing lists, not near as much as I'd like (I lurk on more than I participate in), and it's specifically the Debian lists where I've seen issues. (Most of my perl lists are sadly inactive, actually...) As a participant myself, I certainly wouldn't claim to be condemning you -- this is not about individual action, but about the overall culture of different communities or institutions (so, institutionalized sexism, rather than so-and-so being a prick). That in turn is more about what behavior is accepted by community norms than about individual actions.
So that out of the way, I think at that point you have to step back and consider the really striking sex-based differential in participation. That is a fact that we would like to be able to explain. Even if the explanation is sex-based disinterest in FOSS among women, I think it would still merit exploring to see if that interest tracks with the extent to which the community is welcoming to female participants (not in a warm-fuzzy-emotional-validation way, but in a "you won't get hit on or see people like you treated like a sex vending machine" way). I also definitely think you would need to look at community norms to explain the 20-times-greater participation of women in the corporate-coding space than the FOSS-coding space (since that difference can't be explained based on differential interest in the subject matter or basic skills).
So the question to me would then become, are instances of sexism or woman-negative-interactions happening more frequently in the FOSS community than in other communities where women are more prevalent? Not the community at large, but than communities where women are more represented. After all, if society at large is hostile to women, then meeting just that standard wouldn't be enough to encourage female participation within the FOSS community in their spare time; they'd go somewhere they feel *more* welcome than society at large.
At this point we've hit a snag, being unable to separate cause from effect. Naturally groups with larger female representation will be more welcoming to women, through familiarity if nothing else; but that's precisely the issue with institutionalized sexism--guys who never talk to women have no idea what to say and (understandably!) look at the women like they have antlers, which creeps the women out, who then leave, reducing everybody's learning experiences and diversity and all that. The cause is the effect, at a level of existence as well as analysis.
None of which is to say that welcomingness-to-women is necessarily the right variable to isolate, or that our inability to think of another one would mean that it was the right variable. But when we have high-profile instances of women indicating it as one reason for them not to participate equally in the community, it's at least worthy of consideration. And to break down the institutional biases, we'd need to be *more* attentive to ways in which the culture might repel women, and be *more* welcoming to women than society-at-large is, in order to attract them to a society where they're underrepresented.
That's a lot of theory and not much in the way of statistics, but hey, I'm at work! Does it at least make clear where folks who think like me might be coming from?
That was a lot of fancy terminology, but the GP is using an entirely false analogy. The kernel-dev mailing list is not representative of the Linux community as a whole being significantly more narrowly focused on technical development issues than the lists that any average linux user (male or female) ever interacts with.
Moreover, the appropriate unit of comparison is not the post, but the thread. The number of posts exceeds the number of threads by an order of magnitude or more, but a single post is likely to taint a thread in the viewer's eye.
All of which is besides the point. There are actual documented instances of sexist threads in various user and dev lists causing women to leave the community (at least on the Debian lists), so the statistical mumbo-jumbo is just an attempt to deny that a problem exists.
the near-complete elimination of sexism and racism (which has been accomplished)
Let me guess, you're a white male American, aged 15-35? You have no idea how pervasive sexism and racism still are. You don't consciously experience them, but they are there.
Well, but how would you feel if you joined a group that was 98.5% gay men, and you (as a straight man, I'm assuming) suddenly got hit on every time you posted a message to the mailing list? Would you be making a lot of posts, even though it was a list about stuff you were really interested in? I'm guessing no.
Who the hell keeps modding you up for posting the same non-point over and over?
I'll tell you about the Linux Kernel Mailing List which has thousands of non-sexist comments. Thousands.... Or is it that you do not understand what 0.1% means?
Let's say that your father has THOUSANDS of perfectly normal and loving interactions with you, twenty a day for over twenty years. Surely that's enough that you won't notice the one time he snuck in your room at night and raped you, right?
Again, when 1.5% of the developers are women, and only 0.1% of the comments are sexist, what is the REAL problem that you are trying to "solve"?
Because obviously a few comments couldn't possibly be indicative of an overall cultural attitude, and of course one or two comments couldn't be enough to drive women away in droves.
Get a grip on yourself.
This reminds me of an instance on the Debian mailing list a couple months back -- not this one, hmm... can't find it right now -- where a woman on the list dared to speak up against some sexist comments that were going on, and got flamed out of existence (certainly out of the Debian community) while the list "regulars" went on to make sex jokes for the next several days. And we wonder why there aren't more women in Linux.
Not a good parallel either; the "compensation" demanded in that case is release of your code, which you actually are depriving others of if you distribute. A closer parallel to the piracy case would be to set the alternatives as you creating a GPL'ed program and not distributing it at all, versus not creating the program to begin with. In that case, your decision to take your action (creating the software) has no bearing on whether compensation will ever reach the IP holder.
Though, I don't see that you'll convince many people with that one, since the GPL permits both those alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I get it! If only we could somehow get the corporate kleptocracy, God's Voters, and the libertarian fringe to somehow form a coalition, we could finally get some national health care and a minimum-wage increase! :D
...because his government isn't representing him, it's representing the people in the states that take in more tax money than they pay.
Tax distribution is a zero-sum game. That has nothing to do with the size of the government. The same size government that takes money from California gives money to Louisiana.
I feel that interesting comparisons could probably be made between the list of states according to their representation levels (click the button to sort by pop per House seat) and the list of states according to their taxes paid/received ratios, but eh, I'm not that interested in bothering. Suffice it to say none of the ten best-represented states get less than $1 received on the dollar paid.
now that the left is in power
...left? In America?
And no federal government yet has represented California's interests. Hell we don't even get 80 cents on the dollar back in federal tax money, and what we do get is so wrapped in pork and idiotic regulations it costs almost as much as we get to use.
I hope you realize that's your own damn fault for voting for politicians that seek to expand Government.
I hope you realize that this is completely irrelevant to the parent's point.
"My government is not representative" != "My government is TOO BIG!"
I approach these things with lots of skepticism
I think that's a perfectly fair position. Skepticism can be dangerous, in that it can discourage one from viewing social structures through the eyes of the ones they negatively affect (which is eye-opening, though I'm overusing that organ), but it ain't right to degenerate into mau-mauing or self-hatred on account of privilege.
controlling for other factors here
I see how this could be misleading; I was using the term a bit more loosely than that. This isn't a proper scientific study, of course; even 'natural experiment' might be giving it airs... I just mean that, per the official lending algorithm, these are people who should've gotten prime loans. They didn't, which indicates (1) that something outside the official algorithm was involved, and (2) that obvious confounding factors which frequently track with race, such as poverty, prison records, unreliable credit and work histories, etc., can't bear the weight of explaining the different treatment, in so much as these are all probably included in any sane credit-risk algorithm. So, while an average black person is more likely to be a worse credit risk than an average white person (mainly because of racially-correlated class issues), the comparison isn't with the overall racial average, but with people that the algorithm says were qualified.
From that, I don't see a conflict between speculation (can't dignify it as more than that) about social networks' and family networks' knowledge of credit, while saying that the algorithm-relevant factors were comparable.
Are you saying that there are times when the race has a legitimate fault of its own, and that's the time when the disparate outcomes are not necessarily racist?
Well, there are times that people have legitimate faults, which may be particularly prevalent within one race or another. Perfectly justifiable/reasonable lending algorithms probably do make it harder for The Average Black Person to get a prime mortgage. On the one hand, this is reasonable, to the extent that it reflects The Average Black Person being less likely to repay the loan. On the other hand, *that* fact is due to fallout from other problems affecting the black community (greater unemployment, wage inequalities, differential access to education thus careers, etc.); to the extent that's an underlying racial disparity in our society, it would indicate that society's institutions are racist (/sexist/classist/etc). So I don't at all think it's suspect for a company to use statistical models to give better loan terms to people more likely to repay; but I do think it's an indictment of our society that black people might on the whole be less likely to repay. It's both fair, and not, to take those factors in isolation in the derived case. :)
Rather than "inconsistent," I prefer to think of this as "nuanced"
What I'm really trying to point towards is a view of racism that's more complex than the "racism = klansmen, racism BAD!" view that most of us white people pick up as our main thoughts on the topic. Klansmen are bad, of course. But there's a whole range of racist behaviors, institutions, and cultural standards, many of which are subconscious (discomfort around people of different races, ferinstance, which can lead to things like jury biases, hiring biases...); some of which are perfectly understandable[1]; some of which are not even intentional, or not the conscious intent of any one person. Sometimes a racist system manifests itself more in terms of privileges accorded to one race but denied to another (obligatory famous essay, which is insightful if flawed). And I think that it is both fair and unfair to separate individual aspects of a system/set of institutions as racist, when the non-racist institutions are probably influenced by racially-motivated factors. The world is pr
Rugged individualism is a myth. Thoreau borrowed his axe.
Actually, only some economists say that increased liquidity is an absolute gain. And even then, economists deal more in theories than in reality.
One could make a very convincing case that the Asian Financial Crisis of the late '90s was greatly exacerbated by excessive liquidity in the markets, which strengthened the self-sustaining collapse in currency values. Countries handled it better when they established regulations preventing investors from pulling capital out of their economies, halting the crash.
Um, I didn't get bailed out recently either, but that doesn't mean I'm suddenly contributing a lot to society...
It really doesn't take much effort on the part of men to avoid the kind of behaviors that make women feel uncomfortable. Frankly, I wouldn't miss anybody who felt they'd been "driven out" by requests not to make jokes about women being porn stars or sex dispensers, or hitting on anything whose handle suggests she might have breasts, to name the most egregious offenders, but I suspect few men would feel the need to leave just from being asked to show basic respect. (Few grown-ups, anyway.)
I mean, you're essentially saying you don't believe in institutional racism -- specifically a set of rules or a social system that seems equal but results in racially biased outcomes for non-legitimate reasons. But you don't need Klansmen to make something work that way; and just because institutions are racist, doesn't mean anybody needs to be stoned to death or agonize in unbearable guilt. It just means that non-justified reasons for racially biased outcomes should be fixed whenever possible.
So--
Are you ready to say that racists are not self-interested or malicious? I doubt it. You probably want to keep the connotation of racist as-is because the word has power as-is.
Of course racists are malicious (though not necessarily any more self-interested than anybody else; racism can work against people's self-interest, as argued by e.g. Tim Wise).
But with institutional racism, it's the system itself that is racist, even if none of the people involved are consciously biased. Think of it like the way a properly functioning market economy works to assign "correct" prices to commodities--none of the people involved are doing anything but trying to get the best deal for themselves, but by their collective action they achieve a very interesting unintentional result--just so, people can build systems that are intended to be fair, but (due to inadequate information, unconscious bias, historical artifact, or many other possible reasons) wind up treating people of color unfairly.
Which is besides the point at WF, since individuals there clearly were racist (I don't know what other conclusion we can draw from emails referring to "mud people"). But the institutional-racism part is that it was a scam specifically directed against people who were vulnerable because of their race (and correspondingly their lack of social networks and information about their qualifications for prime loans). Remember we're controlling for other factors here; these were black people who based on the lending algorithms should've gotten prime but were given subprime loans instead. And they fall for it because black communities don't have the same institutional knowledge of mortgages etc. that white families do; many of these people couldn't ask a parent or an uncle or whatever whether they were getting a fair deal, because those people wouldn't know (while they would be more likely to be able to provide guidance for white borrowers).
As for drug laws, I suppose I'd entertain the possibility that politicians proposed laws without having conscious racially discriminatory intent. I'm more interested in the race differential in policy enforcement and conviction rates for the same drugs, like pot.
But let's take a more interesting example -- legacy college admissions. I'm not talking about "daddy's name is on the library," just that many schools give preference to family members of alumni. That's definitely not a conscious attempt to be racist; it's intended to be a nice thing to keep family traditions intact, etc. But those alumni families are going to be disproportionately white -- so by giving preference to this category, you're tilting the scales away from people of color (and poorer people generally), meaning that an otherwise equally-qualified applicant is at a disadvantage competing for the same spot. Nobody intends to discriminate against black people; it just happens, as a product of how the rest of the system is set up. The result, though, is a disproportionate barrier to entry for people of color -- quite literally a grandfather clause. I don't know what else to call it than racist when people of one race, through no fault of their own, have a harder time competing for the same goal.
Anyway, a response to this --
"The disparity exists so the system in question is racist, we're not going to even entertain any other possibilities."
Essentia
Touche.
Telling racy jokes in a casual environment is not discrimination, or sexism, or any kind of *ism at all, it is simply vulgar.
Telling racy jokes in a casual environment is exactly the kind of behavior that discourages female participation in FOSS. Most women feel uncomfortable with jokes like Stallman's (which was pretty mild really), ESPECIALLY in male-dominated environments, and the stuff on this list was considerably less mild than that. I can totally appreciate how it would drive women away.
And the fact that you're standing around saying, "No, it's okay, I'm just joking" -- as (I'm assuming) a man, defining what a woman has a right to be offended by -- is a further demonstration of institutionalized sexism.
I'm sure that guys telling crude jokes would welcome women. I doubt that the women would feel welcome, or be likely to come participate.
I think people just need to grow a thicker skin. No, you don't have the right not to be offended.
And again, why exactly is this attitude supposed to encourage women to come play in the OSS community?
"Man up, ladies!" is not exactly creating a welcoming environment.
So "boys will be boys" means there isn't sexism in OSS, and attitudes that might discourage women from participating?
I think you just proved my point.
I would argue that the Wells Fargo thing is a third thing -- it's taking advantage of the socially underprivileged position of a group (black people who should qualify for prime loans but don't have access to enough information or market options in lenders to know that) in order to make a profit.
That's not twirling their moustaches and hoping to screw over black people; it's just taking advantage of a racially biased system.
People need to let go of the idea that racism has to be obviously self-interested or malicious in order to exist. The thing with institutional racism is that it exists without anybody needing to have consciously discriminatory attitudes at all. That's more like belief in quantum physics than in religion. I mean, the disparity does exist; let's look for an explanation for it. Just shrugging your shoulders and accepting it, that would be the "faith-based" (or intellectually uncurious) response.
- Among other incidents, at the school with the largest number of African-American students in the Ivy League, nooses and racial epithets have been anonymously scattered around professors' offices.
- Differential prosecution and punishment of drug offenses and other minor nonviolent offenses (with black men incarcerated at eight times the rate of white men).
- Black Americans were specifically targeted to receive sub-prime loans, even when they could have qualified for prime-rate loans, with a differential result that probably pushed a lot of African American families into losing their homes. (another on higher rates: here.)
- The USAF considers it still necessary to actively recruit minorities into the officer corps, which is over 80% white.
I could go on, but I've done enough research for you so far. Similar results can be found for differential treatment of other minorities, as well as women (who are actually a slim majority, but still the disempowered group).
Note that these are mostly instances of institutionalized racism or sexism -- where there is officially no difference on the law books or in the policies, but organizations still have cultures that privilege whiteness and maleness, and corresponding values and attitudes, above women and people of color. This is the kind of racism and sexism that is alive and well today, but is all the more insidious, because most of us white males are trained not to be even remotely aware of its existence, or (when confronted with it) to brush it off as isolated incidents, a few bad apples, etc. The biggest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist, as they say.
Also, this is all without getting into stereotypical portrayals in the media. For instance, when was the last time you saw a movie with an Asian American hero who didn't either (1) know kung fu or (2) flail helplessly in the clutches of his own geekery? When have you seen an Asian American love interest? (Outside of Harold & Kumar, which was explicitly intended as a corrective to that attitude in media portrayals). Have you ever noticed that if there's a black character in an action movie, he's almost certainly one of the first to die, and nearly guaranteed to be dead by the end? (c.f. Battlestar Galactica, with plenty of other instances easily discoverable). I won't go on, but these sorts of cases have a powerful effect on society's perception of people of color, and on PoC's perceptions of themselves, too.
I do not participate in a whole lot of FOSS mailing lists, not near as much as I'd like (I lurk on more than I participate in), and it's specifically the Debian lists where I've seen issues. (Most of my perl lists are sadly inactive, actually...) As a participant myself, I certainly wouldn't claim to be condemning you -- this is not about individual action, but about the overall culture of different communities or institutions (so, institutionalized sexism, rather than so-and-so being a prick). That in turn is more about what behavior is accepted by community norms than about individual actions.
So that out of the way, I think at that point you have to step back and consider the really striking sex-based differential in participation. That is a fact that we would like to be able to explain. Even if the explanation is sex-based disinterest in FOSS among women, I think it would still merit exploring to see if that interest tracks with the extent to which the community is welcoming to female participants (not in a warm-fuzzy-emotional-validation way, but in a "you won't get hit on or see people like you treated like a sex vending machine" way). I also definitely think you would need to look at community norms to explain the 20-times-greater participation of women in the corporate-coding space than the FOSS-coding space (since that difference can't be explained based on differential interest in the subject matter or basic skills).
So the question to me would then become, are instances of sexism or woman-negative-interactions happening more frequently in the FOSS community than in other communities where women are more prevalent? Not the community at large, but than communities where women are more represented. After all, if society at large is hostile to women, then meeting just that standard wouldn't be enough to encourage female participation within the FOSS community in their spare time; they'd go somewhere they feel *more* welcome than society at large.
At this point we've hit a snag, being unable to separate cause from effect. Naturally groups with larger female representation will be more welcoming to women, through familiarity if nothing else; but that's precisely the issue with institutionalized sexism--guys who never talk to women have no idea what to say and (understandably!) look at the women like they have antlers, which creeps the women out, who then leave, reducing everybody's learning experiences and diversity and all that. The cause is the effect, at a level of existence as well as analysis.
None of which is to say that welcomingness-to-women is necessarily the right variable to isolate, or that our inability to think of another one would mean that it was the right variable. But when we have high-profile instances of women indicating it as one reason for them not to participate equally in the community, it's at least worthy of consideration. And to break down the institutional biases, we'd need to be *more* attentive to ways in which the culture might repel women, and be *more* welcoming to women than society-at-large is, in order to attract them to a society where they're underrepresented.
That's a lot of theory and not much in the way of statistics, but hey, I'm at work! Does it at least make clear where folks who think like me might be coming from?
That was a lot of fancy terminology, but the GP is using an entirely false analogy. The kernel-dev mailing list is not representative of the Linux community as a whole being significantly more narrowly focused on technical development issues than the lists that any average linux user (male or female) ever interacts with.
Moreover, the appropriate unit of comparison is not the post, but the thread. The number of posts exceeds the number of threads by an order of magnitude or more, but a single post is likely to taint a thread in the viewer's eye.
All of which is besides the point. There are actual documented instances of sexist threads in various user and dev lists causing women to leave the community (at least on the Debian lists), so the statistical mumbo-jumbo is just an attempt to deny that a problem exists.
the near-complete elimination of sexism and racism (which has been accomplished)
Let me guess, you're a white male American, aged 15-35?
You have no idea how pervasive sexism and racism still are. You don't consciously experience them, but they are there.
Well, but how would you feel if you joined a group that was 98.5% gay men, and you (as a straight man, I'm assuming) suddenly got hit on every time you posted a message to the mailing list? Would you be making a lot of posts, even though it was a list about stuff you were really interested in? I'm guessing no.
Because he's talking about institutional sexism, which of necessity is a property of cultures (including geek/hacker culture).
See e.g. here.
women are just as likely to be abusers as men
Source?
so often those accusations are used as a tool to further women's position at the expense of men's
Has this ever actually happened in the FOSS community? How?
Who the hell keeps modding you up for posting the same non-point over and over?
I'll tell you about the Linux Kernel Mailing List which has thousands of non-sexist comments. Thousands.... Or is it that you do not understand what 0.1% means?
Let's say that your father has THOUSANDS of perfectly normal and loving interactions with you, twenty a day for over twenty years. Surely that's enough that you won't notice the one time he snuck in your room at night and raped you, right?
Again, when 1.5% of the developers are women, and only 0.1% of the comments are sexist, what is the REAL problem that you are trying to "solve"?
Because obviously a few comments couldn't possibly be indicative of an overall cultural attitude, and of course one or two comments couldn't be enough to drive women away in droves.
Get a grip on yourself.
This reminds me of an instance on the Debian mailing list a couple months back -- not this one, hmm... can't find it right now -- where a woman on the list dared to speak up against some sexist comments that were going on, and got flamed out of existence (certainly out of the Debian community) while the list "regulars" went on to make sex jokes for the next several days.
And we wonder why there aren't more women in Linux.
Not a good parallel either; the "compensation" demanded in that case is release of your code, which you actually are depriving others of if you distribute.
A closer parallel to the piracy case would be to set the alternatives as you creating a GPL'ed program and not distributing it at all, versus not creating the program to begin with. In that case, your decision to take your action (creating the software) has no bearing on whether compensation will ever reach the IP holder.
Though, I don't see that you'll convince many people with that one, since the GPL permits both those alternatives.