Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really?? [LWN.net]

Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really??

Posted Aug 31, 2009 12:50 UTC (Mon) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

If I misread it, then I apologize -- as I said, I don't know what you intended. But you said, quote, "we need to rethink" the idea that women are driven away by the bad behavior, and we need to, quote, "shift our attention to what not makes women be interested in the first place". Rethinking something is what you do when your understanding of something is wrong. Shifting attention means that attention goes away from one thing (the "barrier" of "bad behavior", in this case), and towards another.

Those are the words that my response was based on; I don't see where I'm extrapolating. Is there some other way to read your words? Can you explain?

> People will still sometimes strongly disagree, and some discussions will keep being heated and not that civil. I think this is normal in any community of people. Working towards making sexist behavior go away keeps being a very important goal, nevertheless.

I definitely agree. I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to attack you personally with my remarks above, but just continue educating people on how to understand and deal with these issues. (Not that I know everything about it either, but apparently I know more than some, and that's enough to be useful...)

Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really??

Posted Aug 31, 2009 13:24 UTC (Mon) by kov (subscriber, #7423) [Link]

> If I misread it, then I apologize -- as I said, I don't know what you
intended. But you said, quote, "we need to rethink" the idea that women are
driven away by the bad behavior, and we need to, quote, "shift our
attention to what not makes women be interested in the first place".
Rethinking something is what you do when your understanding of something is
wrong. Shifting attention means that attention goes away from one thing
(the "barrier" of "bad behavior", in this case), and towards another.

I believe we need to rethink our belief that there is a large number of
women who are interested and got held back by these issues - perhaps that
is not the larger issue, and would even be comparable to that of men who
are not attracted to the community. It doesn't mean we should stop fixing
this issue, at all.

When I say shift the atention, I actually mean shifting our focus. It
doesn't mean 'drop everything else'.

I believe seeing the world as black and white is one of the problems we
usually have in these discussions, and I can see how my words could be
misinterpreted if you use a binary view of the world.

In some cases, we are so passionate, and so frigging tired of meeting
people who are just dumb, and who think this is a male area by definition,
that when someone questions anything, that one is surely one of the dumb
guys who are our enemies.

Why am I saying this? Because I think lots of interesting ideas have been
raised here that not necessarily mean 'women do not exist', nor 'this is
not your place', nor 'there is no problem', but these ideas have been
mostly shot down on the spot because they _looked_ like ideas you would
hear from an enemy. I mean, when one says 'maybe the main problem is not
this one', this is very different from saying 'there is no problem at all'
=).

Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really??

Posted Aug 31, 2009 22:15 UTC (Mon) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

> I believe seeing the world as black and white is one of the problems we usually have in these discussions, and I can see how my words could be misinterpreted if you use a binary view of the world.

That's... very generous of you?

If you re-read my original post in this thread, you'll notice that my point was that we *don't* have to choose. I'm not making things up because I have a binary view of the world; I'm pointing out that the plain meaning of the original term "shift our attention" -- and also your clarifying term, "shifting our focus" -- is to *reduce* the attentional focus we give to one matter so as to give it to another. Not drop to nothing, necessarily, but de-emphasize. You think that maybe there aren't actually all that many women who "got held back by these issues", and maybe we shouldn't worry about them as much as we are.

I disagree with that. I think that we as a community don't put nearly enough effort into dealing with "these issues". I also think we should put more effort into dealing with other issues, sure, but that that's no reason to reduce our (already paltry) efforts in this area.

> when someone questions anything, that one is surely one of the dumb guys who are our enemies.

I definitely see where you're coming from here. But I think you misunderstand our position. Dumb guys aren't enemies, they just need to... learn some stuff so they aren't dumb anymore :-). Everyone's a newb at some point, no shame in that.

> Because I think lots of interesting ideas have been raised here [...] but these ideas have been mostly shot down on the spot because they _looked_ like ideas you would hear from an enemy.

I don't know which specific comments you're looking at, so I can't respond to them. But I can say that in general, when I personally have critiqued people's responses, my goal hasn't been to shoot them down and make them go away. My goal is to draw out problematic assumptions and show just how unconscious and common they are, in the hopes that people will learn something, dust themselves off, and do better next time.

And I know that sometimes having someone do that to you is painful and sucks -- I've been on the other side of such comments, and probably will be again! -- but I don't see any alternative.

> I mean, when one says 'maybe the main problem is not this one', this is very different from saying 'there is no problem at all'

And the other problem is that on the internet, it's hard to tell who has good intentions. You're right that those are different statements. But people who argue in bad faith will often bring up some other issue as an attempt to change the subject and stop discussion of the original issue. And even people arguing in good faith will do this accidentally. In either case, the end result is that the conversation wanders around and doesn't accomplish anything. Since this is so common, and since these conversations are so exhausting in the first place, those of us with more of an investment in accomplishing something will therefore tend to jump on such topic shifts very quickly.

Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really??

Posted Sep 1, 2009 23:39 UTC (Tue) by kov (subscriber, #7423) [Link]

> If you re-read my original post in this thread, you'll notice that my point was that we *don't* have to choose.

Exactly! We don't have to choose to forget an issue for the other, but there's no way we can make everything the focus, otherwise we have no focus at all. We are tired of knowing that if everything is a priority, there's no priority (specially if you have to deal with customers who have no idea of what planning actually is =P).

Our current focus is on looking to the inside; I don't think we should shoot down questioning whether this is helping we further our common goals as well as we could. Doing that by no means denies problems; questioning status quo is essential to improve.

> In either case, the end result is that the conversation wanders around and doesn't accomplish anything. Since this is so common, and since these conversations are so exhausting in the first place, those of us with more of an investment in accomplishing something will therefore tend to jump on such topic shifts very quickly.

This is exactly my point. Just look at the threads. People spend so much time saying "that's not what I said", that many times questions or points that would otherwise have produced useful ideas are forgotten.