Yet another male perspective on women in free software [LWN.net]

Yet another male perspective on women in free software

Posted Oct 4, 2007 21:56 UTC (Thu) by sflintham (subscriber, #47422)
Parent article: Yet another male perspective on women in free software

I can't help thinking women are really a bit of a red herring here. My take on this (disclaimer: I am not actively involved in any kind of free software development, I based this on general lurking) is:

- a lot of mailing lists etc are hostile environments in general
- that probably puts some people off participating (e.g. I used to lurk on debian-devel as a non-developer, and just never felt it worthwhile posting in part because of the nature of the environment)
- therefore the 'community' loses out, because some people with valuable contributions to make are put off (not that I'm necessarily any great loss, but I think there are people with my personality type who have things to contribute)

I think the women angle boils down to:
- women are an easily definable subset of people (it's easy to observe 'women are underrepresented', whereas 'people with a lets-call-it-shy-for-the-sake-of-terminology' personality type are not such a well defined subset, but I bet you'd find them underrepresented at well)
- there's an idea (which may or may not be backed up by facts, it strikes me as vaguely patronising but I don't want to take a position here) that women tend to have that kind of personality, and so they provide a good poster boy (sorry!) for calls to change the 'culture' on these mailing lists, backed up by a general social idea that it's bad to exclude women (whereas there's no corresponding idea that it's bad to exclude 'shy' people)

Not sure this is as well reasoned as it could be, but I felt I had to say something...

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Yet another male perspective on women in free software

Posted Oct 5, 2007 1:17 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]

Not a big secret, but one of those indisputable truths many forget: people (whatever sex) stay where they feel good at.

A rude environment will only attract other rude enough people. The fact women percentage is lower than in the corporative world is just obvious because woman culture doesn't favor the "rude" type.

Yet another male perspective on women in free software

Posted Oct 11, 2007 14:41 UTC (Thu) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]

Well, I don't think that women or all angelic beings, or even most of them ;-)

So I think it's better to say that they don't favor the _male_ "rude" type.

The same way a lot of men won't feel comfortable in situations that are normally dominated by women.

Yet another male perspective on women in free software

Posted Oct 5, 2007 3:11 UTC (Fri) by tuxchick (guest, #42009) [Link]

I mostly agree with you. Women were the first ones to make a public fuss about both sexism and misogyny in FOSS, as well as general asshattedness. And to get attacked for saying anything. If we were to judge by the quantities of flameage, it would look like FOSS is 90% hostile jerks. I'm guessing it's really a minority, but they sure are noisy.