LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus [LWN.net]

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 10, 2010 1:28 UTC (Wed) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link]

I also think that the main reason there is not many women is simply because Women naturally (in general terms) aren't as interested in technical/practical subjects such as Mechanical Engineering and Computing.

Oh come on. Your or my opinions on whether women or any other arbitrary group are interested in a particular subject are meaningless. In addition there is a hidden causal assumption behind your (possibly false) observation of this (unproven) correlation.

The best thing any of us can do to address the obvious imbalance is to try to remove anything which could possibly signal: "no women here". So, it's a good thing that efforts such as the women's caucus are being organized by women to represent their own interests.

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 10, 2010 2:28 UTC (Wed) by DDevine (subscriber, #60717) [Link]

I agree that we should remove barriers which repel Women, as for the for the validity of my statements - "That's my two cents" justifies them.

Opinions are worthless

Posted Mar 10, 2010 3:02 UTC (Wed) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link]

While making speculative claims may be a fun exorcise in rhetoric, it's not very productive. If you're not convinced of the validity of your statements, it's best to just not make them. Or phrase them as a question, so that someone with facts can answer them.

Opinions are worthless

Posted Mar 11, 2010 2:18 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

Might it be fallacious to assume that some things even have provable facts associated with them? And to use the statement "I think" is not a valid nice way to express an opinion? It is not OK to express an opinion? Sheesh.

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 10, 2010 4:32 UTC (Wed) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]

>I also think that the main reason there is not
>many women is simply because Women naturally (in general terms)
>aren't as interested in technical/practical subjects such as
>Mechanical Engineering and Computing. Ergo, not many Women in
>IT and F/OSS.

I don't believe that's true AT ALL. There are MANY other highly technical & practical fields where the ratio is virtually identical.

The reason the ratio isn't much closer (at least in much of the western world) is due partly to the stigma that exists around computing: it's for geeky (or nerdy, both have interchangeable definitions) guys. That stigma is slowly dying, as evident with increasing numbers of female gamers (gaming in general is becoming more mainstream/accepted), but it still exists quite strongly: look at most any tv show or movie out of hollywood and look how they treat the 'computer expert' or 'gamer'- generally they're highly geeky (/nerdy) characters shown to be either flat out anti-social, or with the biggest/most obvious social issues in the show/movie.

Again, I think these stigmas are slowly fading away, but claims that 'women aren't (translation: shouldn't be) interested in' computing will only push people away. I've seen people respond to this in the past saying 'well if that pushes them away, they weren't serious about it anyways', which is a really foolish statement since women generally have FAR more (social/cultural) barriers to cross to be able to get involved.

There exists absolutely zero *inherent* barriers to women getting involved in computing, all the barriers are artificial products of culture and society.

>Many do not get onto the mailing list and shout the fact that
>they are a Woman out - and why should they? I believe there is
>slightly more Women than we realize.

I think you're quite right with this one, partly due to people not wearing their gender on their sleeve, and partly due to fear of how they'll be treated (either of harassment 'omg a girl!!!!1111', or of being looked down upon with contempt/coddling). I'd bet good money that if we had accurate numbers, we'd see the rate of females entering the computing field increase far faster (since the truth can trump the stigma).

>I think we also have to be careful that we present Women *equal*
>status and opportunities not "equal plus extra because you are a
>woman" because obviously that is sexist towards men. People often
>forget that you *can* actually be sexist and abusive towards men
>as well.

It's not just sexist against men, it's sexist against women (a double whammy!). It says to women that they can't accomplish the things men can when on equal ground, and women that *women need a handicap* to compete. It will also give the impression that they're being looked down upon, or treated like children.

Something I've been seeing recently is in an IT department I (unfortunately) have to deal with regularly, they have several groups of students working on projects, and the head put all the female students on one team (explicitly because of gender). The head has also been consistently telling all the guy teams that they aren't as good as the females (since even before they had done a single thing), and has been setting the bar to be whatever the females do. This obviously has created resentment from the other teams, which has been mostly directed towards the head, but I get the feeling that at least some spills over to the females from jealousy of their special treatment. Not to mention, the females are being screwed over by the head by being deprived of the opportunity to be pushed to do better. So like normal when people are 'equal but some are more equal than others', generally everyone gets screwed over in the name of 'equality' (discriminatory equality?).

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 10, 2010 5:13 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

I think Women are an essential part of the Open Source community.I also think that the main reason there is not many women is simply because Women naturally (in general terms) aren't as interested in technical/practical subjects such as Mechanical Engineering and Computing. Ergo, not many Women in IT and F/OSS.

Every time this subject comes up, someone trots that out. Every. Single. Time.

And every time, someone else has to spend time and effort knocking it down as unfounded and specious.

Can we maybe just stop rehashing it? There is no evidence for such essentialist thinking, and plenty of evidence against it, such as the fact that women clearly are clamoring to get into science and engineering fields more and more today.

Really, given how variable and mouldable is the human brain and mind, we should not jump to assuming genetic or other naturalistic causes for variations between people, without first elimintating cultural and environmental causes.

No evidence?

Posted Mar 10, 2010 11:58 UTC (Wed) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

Yes, every time someone comes up with it. But the "no evidence" is simply wrong. We have a strong evidence: Statistics. Our counts reveal 2-5% female participants. 2-5%. This is a very strong evidence that there must be more than one huge road-block, since we are in the three-sigma range. When there are gender-specific road-blocks, the onces that block entry of females into FOSS must be extremely huge, and it quite likely is not just a single problem, but multiple. We definitely have a huge social problem (geeks considered "parias"), which interferes with the conforming attitude of females. We have the pioneer obstacle (let's face it: FOSS is being pioneered, it's not established), which commonly mostly excludes females, whatever thing is pioneered. We might have a talent obstacle; honestly, even established related sciences have only few females in it. Some things will go - the pioneer phase will end, the social acceptance of geeks will grow. The talent problem is a matter of tools - come on, the huge crowd of male PHP programmers aren't really talented, either. And we have a potential motivation problem: all we tried so far for motivating people to write FOSS is based on "scratching an itch".

So we have to identify all potential problems, evaluate, whether they really are one, and try to solve or work around them (like I said: even the worst: lack of talent wouldn't be a problem if we can create tools and associated tasks that can be solved with less talent - we have the talent problem in the male population, too. I'd say that 99% of all males on this planet lack the talent to write Linux kernel code, even when they had perfect education on that subject). And some problems simply can't be solved from the inside. How to overcome the "geek" perception problem? Make sure that the geek in a movie is the person which deserves a lot of sympathy (like in "Stargate Universe" - hey, that's something we watch, not the audience we want to convert!)?

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 10, 2010 5:55 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

I also think that the main reason there is not many women is simply because Women naturally (in general terms) aren't as interested in technical/practical subjects such as Mechanical Engineering and Computing.

As someone else mentioned, this has been heavily debunked, and the way that you feel totally comfortable just plunking down your "2 cents" in total ignorance of the relevant facts or previous discussion just grates of privilege, which is itself off-putting to those of us who have become sensitized to it. (Mostly that ends up meaning, off-putting to women, since one of the, well, *privileges* of privilege is being able to get by in blissful ignorance of privilege.)

But, anyway. If you look at the numbers for basically any technical/practical/engineering/scientific field, they all have an order of magnitude higher female participation than FOSS does. Therefore, it can't just be lack of interest in technical subjects. Furthermore, if you talk to women in FOSS, they can cite lots of concrete examples of off-putting and sexist behavior.

I believe there is slightly more Women than we realize

If there are, then they hide it very well. Every formal survey, informal survey, head-count at a conference, etc., gives basically the same number: in the 2-5% range. That's lower than, say, construction workers.

I think we also have to be careful that we present Women *equal* status and opportunities not "equal plus extra because you are a woman" because obviously that is sexist towards men. People often forget that you *can* actually be sexist and abusive towards men as well.

Sure. But I'd also like to note that I've seen a hell of a lot more men worrying about this than examples of it actually occurring. Which isn't to say that it never occurs... but let's worry about that when you see a specific initiative that actually makes this error?

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 11, 2010 2:35 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

"If you look at the numbers for basically any technical/practical/engineering/scientific field, they all have an order of magnitude higher female participation than FOSS does." ... "Every formal survey, informal survey, head-count at a conference, etc., gives basically the same number: in the 2-5% range."

Wow, I didn't realize that my EE college classes consisted of 20~50% women. I guess I need to take a better look at my graduating class, because I sure as hell don't remember that many women in it.

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 11, 2010 7:38 UTC (Thu) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

I'm not making any claim about your graduating class, so no need to get sarcastic. I'm reporting that every time I've looked up statistics on the labor market, that's what I saw. And yeah, in those statistics 20% was about the lowest number for female participation (I forget for what -- maybe professors of pure math?).

Now, maybe things are different where you are; I've mostly seen US statistics. Feel free to find the local statistics for where you are -- there's surely someone keeping track. That'd be a lot more useful than hearing your memory of your class at your institution in your year. I'd be honestly fascinated if you can find a technical field with, say, less than 20% female participation, and this not attributable to some kind of gender inequality.

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 11, 2010 17:17 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

Sorry, not trying to be overly sarcastic, but rather trying to point out that your claims do not match with my perception of things. When "supposed" statistics do not match with my perception, it is a good time to either look harder around me and/or to question the statistics. I just took a walk around my office and counted 44 men and 4 women. Of all the technical places that I have worked, I "feel" (I know not a good data source) that I have more women coworkers here. So, I will take a harder look (I wasn't joking above,) but when what I see does not match what I am being told, no matter where it is coming from, I am more likely to trust what I see, not what I am told.

Naturally, if a true discrepancy is noted, I will then try to figure out why. Is there a chance that the people telling me bad information are simply gathering their data wrong? Are they counting all the women in support positions at IT companies (there is some evidence online that this is the case). Do these people have an agenda (also very likely)?... So, I will look up more statistics, but may I suggest that you gather some of your own instead of blindly trusting what you look up?

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 14, 2010 6:39 UTC (Sun) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

Sure, fair enough. But you may want to consider whether looking around your office is the best way you can get information -- obviously any given office may not be a representative sample, and then there's certainly geographic variation -- FOSS is a world-wide thing, your office is in just one place. If you were in nix's office upthread, then you'd see 40% women, and then what? Which of you is right?

But as to your questions -- I'm looking at sites like census.gov or http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/. You don't have to believe what you red in internet comment threads; you can check the source yourself. Certainly if you're worried about their methodology you can read about exactly how they gather their data, but the people compiling these numbers are trained professionals and certainly have no agenda vis-a-vis FOSS. If you're worried about what exactly they're counting -- and you're right, labor market statistics often don't make this clear -- then you can check out the NSF statistics to see, say, the proportion of CS professorships in the US that are held by women, or the proportion of CS graduate students that are women. This isn't the same as counting professional software developers, but certainly it refutes the OP's claim that women aren't in FOSS because they just aren't into technical subjects, and you can be certain that no-one is mixing up professorships and support staff. I do object to your calling me "blindly trusting". Not only is it not true, but those are charged words, that somehow imply that I believe what I believe because of an irrational bias or naivete -- why do you think that? I can't see how anything I've said would suggest that -- especially when you're the one arguing that I should discard data in favor of gathering anecdotes! (And even if I were to prefer anecdotes, my own experience is the same either way; I run into tons of women in technical areas but never in FOSS.)

And finally, can I just point out that even if we work from your own numbers, comparing the 9% women in your office to the 3% in FOSS (the estimate from the EU's FLOSS project)... that may not look like much in absolute terms, but it means that male developers are somehow more than 3 times as likely to get involved in FOSS.

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 15, 2010 22:48 UTC (Mon) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

"especially when you're the one arguing that I should discard data in favor of gathering anecdotes!"

No, I argued that you should do both and compare them. If you did not, you would be "blindly trusting" one over the other.

But discarding personal observations as anecdotes is a bit elitist, don't you think? Observations are after all a fundamental part of the scientific method. Naturally, while comparing your observations to other's statistics (peer review) is valuable, it is NOT a cornerstone to the scientific method: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 16, 2010 1:22 UTC (Tue) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

We could debate exactly what the scientific method calls for, the virtues and flaws of anecdotes, etc, but AFAICT at this point it would be irrelevant to the actual topic at hand, and I'd rather not derail the discussion.

It would be irrelevant because none of this changes the fact that no-one seems to be able to find any shred of evidence that women aren't underrepresented in FOSS, no matter what standard we use for "under". Sure, one can quibble about the evidence we do have, but it exists, it comes in lots of different forms, and it all points the same way. I think at this point that if someone wants to say that there's no problem, they really need *some* sort of positive evidence to back that up.

Are you aware of any such evidence?

m am LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 16, 2010 2:51 UTC (Tue) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

I certainly wasn't trying to derail anything. Your original post made some
very strong statistical claims. I was merely shedding my doubts on those
numbers and suggesting that they have the feel of agenda pushing. You then
quickly dismissed the numbers as irrelevant, but yet conclusive.

m am LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 16, 2010 4:49 UTC (Tue) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

So then you're not aware of any evidence that my claim (again, that women are particularly underrepresented in FOSS) is wrong?

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 10, 2010 10:57 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I think Women are an essential part of the Open Source community.I also think that the main reason there is not many women is simply because Women naturally (in general terms) aren't as interested in technical/practical subjects such as Mechanical Engineering and Computing. Ergo, not many Women in IT and F/OSS.

Ah yes. Let's look around me now for proof. Women sitting across the desk from me, to the left of me, and behind me, all programmers except for one who's a DBA. M:F ratio approximately 3:2.

This of course is a ratio that the free software world can only dream of. The difference: I'm currently slaving in the proprietary software mines.

But perhaps women are merely not as interested in free software! Doesn't that sound plausible?

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 10, 2010 12:08 UTC (Wed) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

In Denmark, the ratio seems pretty equal to F/OSS levels.

In the Engineering College I went to, there was maybe 1/20 women. In the company I am now, there is 0/20 female programmers and 2/6 female testers (all foreigners, btw).

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 13, 2010 12:47 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yes, there were very few women in my CS course: about 1/10th. But the
women around me at work didn't come up via CS (to be honest neither did
most of the men). They mostly started out (in this job, or others) doing
testing or documentation, realised it wasn't for them (mind-numbingly
boring, perhaps, or too much documenting/testing what *other* people were
doing) and jumped into development.

Maybe those routes are sealed off for some reason in the free software
world? (Smaller projects certainly don't generally have people who just do
documentation or testing, and often if someone tries their work gets
ignored because it's not code. :/ this appears to be a non-gender-specific
problem which may affect women in particular. I'd estimate that about
1/5th of the attempts I've made to improve free software documentation
have gone anywhere: the rest got ignored, even if the patches are
repeatedly resent. :/ )

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 10, 2010 17:06 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

I also think that the main reason there is not many women [in FLOSS] is simply because Women naturally (in general terms) aren't as interested in technical/practical subjects such as Mechanical Engineering and Computing.

You've clearly never worked in any representative, industry computer company (e.g. a small company with a representative make-up, or any computer company large enough for its internal mix to have to be close-ish to representative by dint of size). If so you'd know the number of women in FOSS is much lower than the number out there in industry generally. Further, you needn't have worked in such a company if you'd kept informed of the issue by, say, reading about it here on LWN, cause then you'd already know there were surveys showing women were under-represented in FOSS relative to industry.

(If you don't have useful experience and if you havn't informed yourself about the matter, why even reply? Why not "shut up" as you put it? The answer to that likely will be off-topic).

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 11, 2010 5:52 UTC (Thu) by cjb (guest, #40354) [Link]

Hi,

I don't mean to single you out in particular, but I think you should try to (at least) take responsibility for using incorrect facts, and preferably for showing a lack of understanding of the problem space in general. Namely:

Women naturally (in general terms) aren't as interested in technical/practical subjects such as Mechanical Engineering and Computing. Ergo, not many Women in IT and F/OSS.

The IT industry has around 20-30% participation by women, and the FOSS community as a whole has around 1% participation by women (see the FLOSSPOLS study for one source of this data). Your statement implies that there are as many women, proportionally, in FOSS as in IT. This is totally, indefensibly, wrong. You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.

Another issue is actually visibility of Women. Many do not get onto the mailing list and shout the fact that they are a Woman out - and why should they?

One reason they don't identify themselves as women is that they often experience harassment, ranging from minor obnoxious behavior, to stalking, and all the way up to repeated personal death threats over the span of five years for being women in a free software project. Many people, upon receiving death threats, would decide to just leave a project quietly, don't you think? How is your "they were just less interested" explanation looking now?

I think we also have to be careful that we present Women *equal* status and opportunities not "equal plus extra because you are a woman" because obviously that is sexist towards men.

This is an overly-simple view of equality. Equal opportunity, and equal consideration, often do involve treating a group differently if they have different needs to your own -- for example, it is not sexist for an employer to give maternity leave to women, because equality may involve giving extra if your starting point was "let's just do whatever works best for men and then say we're treating everyone equally", which was obviously the wrong point for us to be starting from anyway. The preferences of women deserve equal consideration to the preferences of men, even if that does not result in equal treatment afterwards.

People often forget that you *can* actually be sexist and abusive towards men as well.

It is easy, and actually reasonable, to forget this when dealing with the problem of sexism towards women in computing. The problem of sexism towards men in computing is so relatively insignificant as to be incomparable and not worth mentioning.

In summary, there are many times (20x, at minimum) fewer women, proportionally, in FOSS than the IT industry. The 1% of female FOSS participants we do have have received significant abuse of a kind not seen (as a group) towards the men in FOSS, yet many of us are prepared to sweep both of these discrepancies under the rug and say that this is just the natural order of things.

It is a damned shame.

LibrePlanet 2010 conference to feature Women's Caucus

Posted Mar 11, 2010 14:18 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

I wish that we could hurry up and get to the utopian "gender doesn't matter" stage of evolution already.

Ignoring the pop-cultural usage of the term "evolution" when "culture" is actually the correct term, I guess such a culture is going to be some time coming, given that you're close to saying that women should be happy to be able to participate in open source projects as long as they keep their gender a secret. It's like saying, "This George Eliot guy is a great writer, we should have more people in the writing business like him."

Some people really need to grow up or shut up.

That's quite an attitude, and fairly reminiscent of some responses to one of the "conference porn" scandals a while ago which could be summed up as "What's the problem? I'm completely groovy with this kind of thing and so are my friends." Any questioning of other people's maturity doesn't seem credible on the back of that kind of attitude unless you're referring in frustration to the general "geek culture" (which I personally abhor) - in which case, complaints about people trying to change things seem somewhat misguided.