I wonder how it's possible to misread it so bad... [LWN.net]

I wonder how it's possible to misread it so bad...

Posted Oct 4, 2007 13:22 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: The most important problem was omitted entirely - from article and you reasoning too by ekj
Parent article: Yet another male perspective on women in free software

You stereotype male OSS-participators as being "ostracized and rejected for years", a stereotype that never applied to all of us, indeed I strongly suspect it doesn't even apply for the majority.

Please explain to me where I've talked about majority of FOSS developers. I've explicitly talked about "people who have themselves been rejected by and excluded from wider society, in many cases, at a young age". And only about them. If you want full story... It applies to may be 3-5% of FOSS developers. May be even less. It's enough. It's more then enough.

The story goes this way:
1. Normal person "A" (often a woman) comes in and politely asks something.
2. Jerk of the community "B" explains how wrong this fucker (or bitch) is and where he (or she) should shove her ideas.
3. "A" is offended and is trying to make jerk behave.
4. Silent majority either does nothing or supports "B" (he's a jerk, but he's our jerk).
5. At some point question is escalated to explicit: "A" or "B". Here the cases diverge: sometimes (rare) "silent majority" stops being silent and "B" is reined in. But in a lot of cases "silent majority" either persist in being silent or explicitly explain why "A" is in the wrong here ("B" is valuable contributor here while "A" did nothing so far so of course we'll pick "B", what do you expect).
6. "A" says "good buy" and leaves. Game over.

You go on to compound that by claiming this is because we "lack tact" and "ignore manners".

Yup. The people in question often lack tact and ignore manners. True. Again: where have I said that all people in FOSS lack tact and ignore manners ?

I don't recognize myself in either of these characterisations either, and suspect it's the kind of thing you -wouldn't- say to anyones face.

To the person who indeed lacks tact and ignore manners ? In a heartbeat. They will not understand any allegories.

You then claim, indirectly, that FOSS communities generally "reject all normal people who are insisting on using manners and tact", another gross insult.

It may be insult, but it's a fact. I do not say it's what FOSS communities are trying to do. It's the end result.

Did you ever consider that if it's sexist to make general statements *negative* towards women, then it's equally sexist to do the reverse ?

Is it sexist to agree with what women themselves say ? The women who are less social then average (rare as they are) are participating in FOSS already.

If it's unacceptable and insulting to generally state that, for example, women are less technically competent, why is it then OK to state, like you just did, that men are less socially competent ?

It's acceptable and not insulting to say the truth. Women are less technically competent in average and men are less socially competent in average. We can try to change this and make women more technically competent and men more socially competent and may be in the future situation will change, but right it's how things stay.

I'm in favor of normal politeness in general (though not in favor of putting politeness above truth in general), but please, if that's what you're preaching: atleast consider following your own advice.

Who said I preach this ? I just explain what all these "let's make FOSS communities more comfortable for women" campaigns lack. I myself is perfectly happy with current situation, but if we truly do want to bring more women in FOSS then "jerks in FOSS" (yup - including me) must be weeded out or reformed. And to achieve this "the silent majority" must decide that it'd worth it and act accordingly. Note that these "jerks from FOSS" include a lot of high-profile guys (like Linus and RMS) so it'll not be easy.

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I wonder how it's possible to misread it so bad...

Posted Oct 4, 2007 18:23 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

There's a problem. If females in general avoided all areas where 3-5% ("maybe even less") of the people are rude or otherwise behave in a way that you don't approve of, then there wouldn't be many human areas where women can participate.

Going to the disco ? Nope. Odds are a minority of the people there will behave rudely somehow.

Working ? Nope. Odds are you'll experience rude people. In some jobs with rather a lot of women in them, you need to interact with rather a -lot- of rude people.

Team sports of any kind ? Nope. Odds are you'll be "driven away" there too.

Go on vacation to oh, say, italy ? No chance. You'll *certainly* suffer regular sexist remarks and stupid pickup attempts regularily.

Play in a band ? No chance in hell, are you dreaming ?

The women I know participate in all of these, and more though. So clearly, your map fails to match the actual terrain. If the bar for getting more women to participate is eradicating every last rude person, then frankly, that's not doable in any forum, certainly not one that is open and tolerant. You can do it if you're say dictator over a mailing-list, but that then tends to mean driving away the large majority of free-speech loving hackers (of which there are, frankly, more than there are female hackers)

I don't see jerks getting any more support in FLOSS communities than elsewhere. There's lots of VERY jerky people tolerated in team-sports for example, if they're good in sports.

It's not a "FACT" that FLOSS-communities in general have the effect you claim they have. Some may. Too many may, even. But there's a step from that (and a large one) to claiming they do in general.

There's a difference, by the way, between claiming that women/men are -on-the-average- more/less technically skilled and claiming that women/men are more/less technically skilled. The first only claims to deal with averages, the second is a general statement, and is -untrue- unless it fits for all women/men. (or atleast close)

In short -- I don't think your core idea: that the low female participation can be explained to a large degree trough having 3-5% ("maybe even less") of participants that are socially maladapted is sound. I don't think that even comes close to explaining anything.

I do agree it's a cultural thing, though. But it's the culture of the majority, in AND OUTSIDE of floss, not the work of a few isolated guys.

I also just plain don't see the claimed distinction between FLOSS communities and say professional software development. It's possible that part genuinely is different in the USA though.

Not just the trolls' fault

Posted Oct 5, 2007 17:33 UTC (Fri) by wilck (subscriber, #29844) [Link]

Very good point. Women are used to experience rudeness and sexism in almost every area of society. Whether or not that drives women away is a function of how attractive the activity itself is. Work, for example, isn't easy to avoid, and (using your example) discos attract more women than FLOSS forums.

I agree that rudeness itself is not the main problem. However, if someone is being rude, the reactions of the others matter a lot - it's good if many participants express their dissent. Otherwise, it's natural for the victim to interpret the silence as consent, and, consequently, feel attacked by the community as a whole.

What else? Besides the trolls, there's less evident sexism in the behavior of the majority of FLOSS participants. It's probably harder for female contributors to get appreciation for their work, and get respected as a hacker, not a woman in the first place.

Even that disregarded - it's possible that the resasons why people participate in our community simply don't appeal much to women.
The main motivations I can think of: dislike for proprietary software, enthusiasm for hacking, desire for the rewards the meritocracy has to offer (mainly respect from other members) - at least for the latter two, it seems plausible that they appeal more to men than women, in the social environment that most people are living in today.

Not just the trolls' fault

Posted Oct 11, 2007 8:43 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

desire for the rewards the meritocracy has to offer

One note here about women being "more social": This stereotype is only seeing one part of the picture. The stereotypical "social" woman tries to generate "harmony" in the society she's in. Problems are avoided, solutions tend to be compromises. Women prefer to share work equally, i.e. in a round-robin scheme, or everybody sits together and does the same thing. Our ape ancestors also have different hierarchies: Female apes have their position in the hierarchy by how long they have been in the group, and who was their mother. Female chimps can only raise in hierarchy when some upper female dies or is driven out of the group (female social monkeys regularly change groups, mostly at young age, for better genetic diversity, but they have to start at the bottom of the hierarchy ladder there). Male apes fight for their position in the hierarchy. Female chimps often do all they can to calm down these fights (by lousing the males), and sometimes, they reject the winner of a fight if he was to jerky. As a consequence, a meritocracy is something alien to women.

The stereotypical "social" man lives in a different social system. His male society rewards fights, because you can change your position in hierarchy. Work is shared by dividing it into different portions - the typical male specialist teamwork. Territories are guarded and protected. This is all social behavior, but it's different from female social behavior.

Now, these are all stereotypes, the human being is very adaptive, and can change behavior much more than chimps or macaques. However, when we talk about sexism, the allegedly typical "male" unsocial behavior (alleged by women) isn't unsocial. It's just not "female" social behavior, it's different. It has different tradeoffs, and needs different environments to work out. We see that how over time boys and girls have different success rates in coed school systems. Some decades ago, competitive behavior was rewarded, and boys were generally better. Now, being cooperate with the teacher is rewarded, and girls are generally better, while boys are perceived more as "troublemakers".

In a mostly male environment, like FLOSS development, we see a lot of stereotypical male social behavior. People fight over things, people specialize, and fence their territories. If you want to have a case study, look at the staircase scheduler vs. CFS. Ingo is the territory owner (he wrote the O(1) scheduler). Con is an outsider. There are valid technical considerations why CFS got in finally, but during the years before CFS was written, the situation was quite different. Before, it was typical male ape (human jerk) social behavior.

Regardless if this will attract more women or not: We ought to change that. Fencing territories is not the right thing to do in FLOSS. Specializing and dividing work into different portions is welcome. Competition is fine, dog-fights aren't. Social is what's adequate to the problems of a group. It's not always nature which gives us the most adequate social behavior - neither men nor women have the right social behavior for modern society in there genes. That's what we have our large brains for.

Not just the trolls' fault

Posted Oct 16, 2007 4:34 UTC (Tue) by einhverfr (guest, #44407) [Link]

A lot o your complaints really are aimed at a dictator model or similar model, You can see
Linux kernel development as following an almost military structure (Linus as general, his
Liutenants, etc. all the way down to the common foot-coder). Which is their choice.

LedgerSMB (my main project) took a very different approach, based in part on the PostgreSQL
community. We have a core development team (6 members) which make decisions about
infrastructure, project direction, release milestones, etc. THen there is a larger number of
people with commit access, and an even larger number of people who submit patches via
Sourceforge. We are organized more like a Greek city-state than like an army.

Although most areas of the core team have taken lead roles in various areas, some specialize
more than others. One guy does mostly db stuff. Another guy has been a strong reference of
Perl language, another member is a lead on application security, and I am the lead on
accounting logic. Interestingy, only a few people really heavily specialize in a small area
of the software and most people are involved in everything. I will point out a few things
that should be obvious:

1) Territorial theories (about men being more territorial) are misapplied. Everyone will
defend his/her territory, but men and women do this differently.

2) Everyone, men and women alike, want to feel like valued community members. Gender doesn't
change that.

3) different people have different talents and may want to contribute differently.

Anyway, I am looking heavily at questions of open source community management. I may start to
put my findings together into a whitepaper of sorts.

Fundamentally disagree

Posted Oct 16, 2007 4:07 UTC (Tue) by einhverfr (guest, #44407) [Link]

First, the very fact that we are asking "why aren't there more women involved in FOSS" is a
part of the problem.  I may be male, but I hear a *common* complaint from women in FOSS that
they are constantly asked that question.  My grandmother was a physicist and she felt the same
way.  So by making an issue of it, we create a problem.

Point 1:  Don't let gender matter.

A second point is that there are a *lot* of badly run FOSS projects out there (SQL-Ledger
comes to mind...) where the main developer actively drives away would-be contributors because
he (I don't know of any female cases off the top of my head) doesn't want competition. 

Point 2:  Many equal, competent, and talented voices are better than one.  Have a core
community which debates, deliberates, and decides core project issues.  If you must go with a
dictatorship model, do what Linus did and stay away from commercial involvement.

Finally, every piece of software lives or dies based on community.  This community is three
tiered:  Core management, contributors and advocates, and users.  Focus aggressively on
building the community an make all contributors feel welcome.

Point 3:  Community is what matters most.  Make the most of it.

I seriously think that if we start looking at every individual as someone who can get involved
and  benefit both him/herself and the community by doing so, the question will become
meaningless and it will correct itself.

Female jerks

Posted Oct 6, 2007 10:41 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Not to speak about the possible existence of "female jerks" who have been rejected and ostracized by everyone, just as "male jerks"; and who are technically brilliant. Do they just not behave as "jerks" at all? Or are there subclasses of "jerks"?

At my university I saw a lot of socially inept people (including me). We did not participate in social events while in high school, we did not get invited to parties, and yet we were not any more or less rude than the rest. We (men and women alike) were just worse at being social, something which has almost always been corrected in adult life.