| |||||||||||||
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for WomenPosted Feb 2, 2013 12:28 UTC (Sat) by xan (subscriber, #58606)In reply to: 25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women by blujay Parent article: 25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women
I'm going to be extremely clear. You are a disgusting sexist. People like you are part of the reason, a big part, why women are not involved in technology as much as they could, or should.
Women have been, as a group, discriminated against for *thousands of years*, always being relegated to tasks that were considered second rate and physically, culturally and legally prevented from accessing the sphere of public life, higher education and the vast majority of jobs. It's been, literally, a few decades since most legal barriers were overcome, but we still carry a vast legacy that discriminates against women in many, many ways. And this is the best case, plenty of countries all around the planet still have not even reached that very preliminary starting point. Knee-jerk reactions against programs of this kind for the integration of women in our community just prove how much we still have to struggle, and how committed some men are to stop their privilege from being taken away.
People like you make this and other forums an hostile environment for women, and it is my humble opinion that such kind of language and attitude should be, at the very least, condemned with the strongest possible words every single it dares to rear its ugly head from the pestilent pits entrenched misogyny.
(Log in to post comments)
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 2, 2013 17:25 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
And by not engaging in dialog, how do you ever expect to change this? I don't know if the topic poster has learned anything, but I've seen a number of excellent rebuttals of his arguments which could/would be very informative for people who are at least somewhat open for discussion.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 2, 2013 20:13 UTC (Sat) by xan (subscriber, #58606) [Link]
The idea that every forum must welcome with warm greetings everyone regardless of their repulsive ideas just so that they can be "educated" is something that, in my experience, only privileged people that are not affected by those same ideas consider a great plan. The price we pay for doing what you suggest is that LWN, GNOME, and any other community, becomes a hostile environment for women or other discriminated groups.
My *personal* opinion is that I'd rather lose a hundred misogynists if by doing so I make this forum a better place for *one* woman, but that's just my opinion and not what I said in my comment. What I have advocated is a strong condemnation of the kind of blatant sexism that could decide programmes for the inclusion of women in free software are evil and pernicious. Seems like they least we can do.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 2, 2013 21:39 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> The idea that every forum must welcome with warm greetings everyone regardless of their repulsive ideas just so that they can be "educated" is something that, in my experience, only privileged people that are not affected by those same ideas consider a great plan.
You are right of course and I won't insult you by denying it. I have some dim inkling of the ways that I am privileged but the default is to be blind to it, something I am slowly learning more about as I age.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 3, 2013 22:14 UTC (Sun) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
I agree that dialog is better. In this case I haven't noticed a real dialog though despite some trying to start one.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 2, 2013 18:29 UTC (Sat) by bolle (guest, #73676) [Link]
Honestly, I am quite astonished that a comment on GNOME's outreach program for women which actually states the obvious can cause this ad hominem reply.
Moreover I beg to differ regarding the history of mankind. The picture you paint may well describe the world in terms of today's prevalent feminist ideology where women take the role of innocent victims of evil men and where we all will face a bright future only after these male evil doers have been properly brainwashed and re-educated to stop discriminating their mothers, sisters and wifes. But maybe it was not such a bad idea in those dark ages of gender inequality to let the girls warm the cave and take care of the kids while the boys were hunting for the mammoth instead of vice versa;-).
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 3, 2013 22:16 UTC (Sun) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Citation needed for the things you state. I really don't get what your intention is with this reply. I hope it is a weird kind of sarcasm?
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 4, 2013 19:16 UTC (Mon) by bolle (guest, #73676) [Link]
Well, my comment was not meant to be a scientific paper therefore I did not give any citation - similar to my parent poster. By the way - wouldn't it be at first hand the task of those who promote such women-only programs to back up their claim that the relatively low percentage of women in open source projects is a result of active discrimination by men?
Couldn't this gender disproportion be simply the result of gender typical interests? I work as a software developer for quite some years now. In the various groups I worked I had and have female colleagues. Throughout all these years I do not remember any case of sexual harassment or anything that could be seen as a discrimination against women. In fact you could argue that it is quite the opposite now: as a reaction of the political pressure from EU and national government my company has committed itself to increase the percentage of women in managing positions within the next couple of years. So as woman you have actually better chances to be promoted than as a man. But that's another story. What is however striking is that none of my female colleagues seemed to have interest in any software or hardware related stuff in their spare time. No female colleague ever talked to me about her current software hobby project or her latest experiments with her new Raspberry Pi - as my male colleagues occasionally do. Of course this is not a bad thing at all - but related to the question why so few women volunteer for open source projects it might give a hint. The interesting question is whether these differences in interests have their root cause in social traditions or in biological dispositions. For that I finally I have a citation:
"The Gender Equality Paradox"
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 3, 2013 11:31 UTC (Sun) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
I am going to be extremely clear, too. I am absolutely disgusted by your comment, since I see absolutely nothing sexist in the parent post.
Your outrage is completely pointless. I objectively do not see much discrimination against women in computing community - at least in those parts I work and act in. Maybe FSF conferences are a different beast, but then you should describe what their problems are and stop being outraged by things completely not worth an outrage.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 3, 2013 13:41 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
Your blindness is not the fault of others. And if you really don't see discrimination in the area of exact sciences in general or computing in particular, there is no other word to describe it.
Search news for brogrammier culture, difficulties of communication for women in electronic forums, inappropriate behavior towards women in software conferences, and other similar topics. Even LWN has some interesting articles to that respect.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 3, 2013 13:49 UTC (Sun) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
You accuse me of blindness when I report what I see around me.
I don't need to tell you who behaves rudely here.
You might have a point or not, I frankly do not care since I do not mean to continue discussing with you in your tone.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 3, 2013 14:15 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
I am truly sorry if I came across as rude. I did not have the intention of being rude. But I *did* have the intention of being blunt and absolutely without subtlety.
That being said:
> You accuse me of blindness when I report what I see around me.
I am reporting differently. Many, many others are reporting differently. So, if you want to see and evaluate things more objectively, it is *your* duty to look harder. Search the terms I indicated, talk to your female coworkers, hear out for what are the problems that women in tech complain all the time.
I used to think like you. "Hey, we are in the 21st century, discrimination is over". Then, good friends showed me that not only discrimination against women in every field is not over, but in the tech field it can be even worse. They showed me many things I thought and did were subtly discriminatory. They showed me that a toy story is a whole world of gender inequality. Ditto for school, in all grades. Social pressures everywhere steer Genial women away from exact sciences. Then I opened my eyes. I suggest you do the same. That's it.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 3, 2013 22:18 UTC (Sun) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
I've noticed loads and loads of behaviour that prevents loads of women participating in technology. They never joined any "computing community" as a result.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 4, 2013 8:51 UTC (Mon) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
Well, if you notice lots of such behavior, obviously "women outreach" program won't help you. You need "men outreach" program to educate colleagues how not to be jerks. I don't think women should be forced into the field, through artificial quotas (I don't think that's what GNOME outreach program does, but lot of such programs do, and this is one reason I don't find initial blujay's post entirely unreasonable. I do think however that any jerky behavior should be discouraged and not tolerated, as currently often is the case. This is enough to make sure women (or anyone else for the matter) gets a just opportunity in the field.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 4, 2013 9:45 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
I find it interesting that you:
* assume that the initial behaviour can be fixed by GNOME * that the behaviour is displayed by my colleagues * that the only way to get more women is to change behaviour which happened way before I ever met those women
I'm not talking about being a jerk towards or anything like that. It is things like often being questioned why they're interested in computers. Hearing crap as "I'm probably not good in this as I'm a woman". Various women I've talked to have been discouraged in some way their entire lifetime.
In any case blujay's post is a response to GNOME's outreach program for women. We do not discourage anyone else from participating. We have other programs we participate in. As such, yes, I find it unreasonable. There is 0 reason to suddenly start talking that someones response might be appropriate for another program. That's like picking arguments as you go along. He was talking about this program.
I do understand the hesitation. I had huge doubts about this program. I also wondered for a long time why not to fix things at the source (technically, this feels like a workaround rather than fixing it at the root cause). But this program seems to work, and brings benefits *now*.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 4, 2013 10:25 UTC (Mon) by efraim (subscriber, #65977) [Link]
I never assumed anything. That's just the picture I got from your previous comments: I don't know how about you but I do find "You are probably not good in this as you are a woman" to be a jerkish comment. Do you disagree? I sure would not say one to any woman and I do find it hard to believe one any of my co-workers would.
Furthermore, I do not assume the initial behavior can be fixed by GNOME, and I furthermore think that this is not a universal "women-in-computing" problem but a society-specific problem, which should be solved in those societies which exhibit it and not through universal organizations like GNOME.
So, I guess I disagree with:
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 4, 2013 22:01 UTC (Mon) by marinaz (subscriber, #72670) [Link]
" So, I guess I disagree with:
1. The claim there is a universal women-in-computing problem. There are society-wide problems. (I guess it is different between countries and even specific neighborhoods) And therefor 2. I doubt GNOME can do much to resolve the problem."
1. The problem of very few women becoming Free Software contributors affects all societies, regardless of the percentage of women who work on the proprietary software. Otherwise we would evidently have a large representation of women from a particular society, something I'm not aware of.
2. What GNOME and the Free Software community can do is help women who are teetering on the edge of the Free Software community integrate more fully, raise awareness of the value of Free Software contributions and the friendliness of the large parts of the Free Software community among women in technology, provide women contributing to different projects in Free Software a support network so that they don't feel so alone, and show that there are more women interested in contributing to Free Software than are already contributing. This solves problems on a certain level and helps specific people who have reached that level now (namely the 72 interns the program had so far).
Programs like this one also add to the general conversation on the subject and are *part* of the solution. No one effort can be *the* solution for something as complex as this. On other levels there are geeky parents ( http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2012/11/07/flip-all-the-pronouns ), building toys made attractive to girls already conditioned to like pink (Goldie Blox, Lego Friends), all sorts of math, science, technology, and robotics outreach for girls in school, and finally in Free Software OpenHatch that makes and extra effort to reach out to women with introduction to Free Software events in colleges and the Ada Initiative that helps make all Free Software conferences safer for women and fosters a community of women and their supporters in Free Software.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 7, 2013 12:48 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Your end with a #1 and a #2, but they don't align, so I don't understand what you're saying.
You disagree that "I doubt GNOME can do much to resolve the problem". So you agree that GNOME can change society? Or does "the problem" refer to something else? Or did you not align things properly and you mean I should ignore the "I disagree with".
In any case: "I never assumed anything. That's just the picture I got from your previous comments". I never said anything about my colleagues, you assumed I was talking about colleagues. Calling an assumption a picture does not really matter IMO.
In any case, I refute that GNOME should not fix this. But at least it is clear that society specific problems should not be actioned by specific societies. I don't get at all why you need to direct people on what they must not do, really.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 5, 2013 15:23 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
"Women have been, as a group, discriminated against for *thousands of years*, always being relegated to tasks that were considered second rate and physically, culturally and legally prevented from accessing the sphere of public life, higher education and the vast majority of jobs."
I'm mostly playing the devil's advocate here, but I think, I can illustrate the core of the problem:
I am male. I never in my life discriminated against any woman let alone for thousands of years. I did do nothing wrong.
Yet I'm being discriminated against at numerous occasions. If I apply for a job and there's female competition with about the same qualification as me, she will get it. If I ponder getting involved with development of GNOME but finances just won't allow spending the time, I won't get involved with GNOME because as a male I do not get the same chances as women do.
To sum it up: I'm innocent, yet I'm punished.
I think this is the core reason why this discussion will flame up every time a program like the one in the article is mentioned. And I think it would be wise to address this directly. Otherwise these well intentioned and important outreach programs will always leave a certain inflammatory after taste.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 5, 2013 16:18 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
"I never in my life discriminated against any woman let alone for thousands of years."
You've never consciously discriminated against any woman. The massively overwhelming probability is that you've done so unconsciously. That's not something you should be punished for, but it is something that won't be fixed unless compensating biases are put in place.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 5, 2013 16:33 UTC (Tue) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
> I'm mostly playing the devil's advocate here, but I think, I can illustrate the core of the problem:
> I am male. I never in my life discriminated against any woman let alone for thousands of years. I did do nothing wrong.
> Yet I'm being discriminated against at numerous occasions...
This is a serious problem with reparation schemes or any situation in which a minority group is given preference -at the expense of- other groups. But that's not what GNOME thing is. If it wasn't a targeted program for women in open source, it's not like there'd be some equivalent non-targeted thing. The point is not just to find developers, but to improve network effects, change the atmosphere and tone of the open-source, and otherwise make the open-source world a more appealing place for women.
And the endgame of -that- is to increase the net developer power, not change its composition. There is no excess of open source developers. Nobody will be displaced by un-alienating alienated groups.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 5, 2013 17:19 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> I am male. I never in my life discriminated against any woman let alone for thousands of years. I did do nothing wrong.
But of course you've taken advantage of your privileged position, I'm certain I have, probably without even being aware of it, and have had discrimination fall in your favor, which is much more common than for a male to be discriminated against. As a member of a privileged class you get to live life on easy mode compared to someone else with the same basic qualities but who looks different. There really aren't many moustache-twirling villans out there who actively try and put people down, and no one thinks that of you, the reality is much more insidious.
25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women Posted Feb 5, 2013 18:14 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] Yet I'm being discriminated against at numerous occasions. If I apply for a job and there's female competition with about the same qualification as me, she will get it. If I ponder getting involved with development of GNOME but finances just won't allow spending the time, I won't get involved with GNOME because as a male I do not get the same chances as women do.I call bullshit.
|
|||||||||||||