To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

[Posted September 28, 2007 by ris]

In this article from O'Reilly's Women in Technology series Selena Deckelmann shares some suggestions for how to get more women involved in open source. "We can learn from research about increasing diversity. I'm sure smart people have summarized, put together lists of bullet points, and made handbooks to show how to do it. Certainly, organizations dedicated to fixing inequalities will be touchstones for change. But we need more than leadership to change our culture. We each can take steps now to make women feel like there is a place for them in our communities."

to post comments

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 28, 2007 23:45 UTC (Fri) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (70 responses)

This is maybe terribly impolite to point out, and I doubt it really changes any important aspect in the article... Just a honest mistake from author's part, and easy to make.

Audrey Tang is probably not a good example of a woman in technology.

Definitely brought some unintentional humor into the text, though.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 0:03 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (9 responses)

Why isn't Audrey Tang a good example of a woman in technology?

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 0:22 UTC (Sat) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] (8 responses)

Audrey Tang is a transsexual. "She" was born as a man.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 0:36 UTC (Sat) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (6 responses)

At the risk of creating a huge flamewar (I hope it does not) you may want to reconsider your application of scarequotes in this circumstance. It ... is disrespectful, regardless of your opinions.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 17:51 UTC (Sat) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link] (5 responses)

It's not disrespectful. If Audrey is biologically a man then he's a man, even if he wants to say he's a woman.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 21:21 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

You're really getting into a nest of snakes here, not least because the
division of the sexes in biology is nowhere near as nice and neat as you
seem to think.

e.g. one of my friends is, outwardly, a very nice lady. By chance she
discovered when she was about seventeen that she's a completely
androgen-insensitive XY (the absolute absence of periods is a good sign
that something is up). I wouldn't call her `really male'; she's
genetically male with a moderately common mutation, mentally female (to
whatever extent that means anything), and biologically... *mostly* female.

Now obviously humans instinctively classify other humans by gender, so
there's not much point saying `everyone, treat me as a woman' if you're
six feet tall and bearded with a deep voice (nobody will be able to, try
as they might): but surgery exists to make you look like whatever gender
you please, and after that, I'd say it *is* insulting to have people say
you're not `really' your chosen gender.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 30, 2007 3:02 UTC (Sun) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link]

"androgen-insensitive XY"

Also known as "testicular feminization syndrome" if I remember my undergraduate medical genetics courses correctly. It turns out that phenotypically many of the traits currently considered highly desirable in women in our culture are expressed more highly by possessors of this karyotype.

Chances are that many of us that have admired a super-model for their "obviously" "female" characteristics have been appreciating exactly this phenotype!

The contention that "man" is a biologically defined as opposed to socially is not really tenable and the fact that it should matter so much to anyone as opposed to how the human performs as a colleague speaks volumes about the problem.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 30, 2007 20:28 UTC (Sun) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

It is disrespectful because the nature of scarequotes is such that this implies that Audrey is a liar. About her own sense of self-identity.

But more than that, the device is dismissive, belittling. Even if you wanted to take this sort of a very pointed (and I believe unnecessary) stand, you could do it with some modicum of decorum.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 16:59 UTC (Mon) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link] (1 responses)

> It is disrespectful because the nature of scarequotes is such that this
> implies that Audrey is a liar. About her own sense of self-identity.

I think I see what's happening here. In the United States, which is where I live, there is no established social norm for how gender is indentified. Each person is left to their own methods of determination. From your post it sounds like you use a person's self-identity to evaluate the gender. If a person self-identifies as a woman then they are a woman. Am I correct that this is your viewpoint? In that sense I could see how the statement could be offensive for the reason you stated above.

From my point of view gender is defined by ones physiological and biological makeup, not ones sense of self-identity. Tang could self-identify as a woman and even go so far as to have surgery to alter her appearance and it would not change my interpretation of her gender. If I were to meet her I would address her with a feminine pronoun as she has requested in her blog[1] and would treat her as a woman. Yet if the question of her specific gender was raised I would not be able to say honestly that she is female because the criteria that I use to establish gender would say categorically that Tang's gender is male. From my viewpoint, it is a fact, not an opinion, that Audrey Tang is male. Biological science has not yet reached the point at which that fact could be changed.

In my case I didn't find the original poster's statement to be offensive because the statement made an empirical observation. It is demonstrably true given my criteria for what constitutes gender. I interpreted the poster's quotes as a means to emphasize the word 'she' because the written word lacks the auditory and visual cues that face to face communication has. I percieved the emphasis on that word to say, "I'm using this pronoun although I know it's not correct."

1. http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2005/12/runtime_typecas.html

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 18:48 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

As in other posts, gender means different things. Phenotype, genotype, social role, self identity, identity others perceive. All these things are gender-related. I think it is reasonable to match the identity I perceive others as with their self-perceived identity.

I believe that people who are genetically male but see themselves as somehow intrinsically female have real reasons for doing so, and so I buy into world view! The same is true for those who are genetically female but view themselves as male. It's not really very hard, of course, because these people take various measures to reduce the cognitive leap one has to make.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 10:27 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Audrey Tang's example does suggest a simple way to get more women to participate in free software development. Any volunteers?

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 0:09 UTC (Sat) by graydon (guest, #5009) [Link] (58 responses)

It certainly strikes me as impolite to point out, yes.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 1:03 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (45 responses)

I was actually quite impressed by her, because I conversed with her sometimes on the ircnet #Perl channel and I was quite taken by her intelligence at that time. I only realized many months later due to a chance article on perl.com which talked of her as a man that there was something odd about her.

Sadly, the world made a lot more sense after that. My personal opinion is (excuse me while I put on the asbestos underwear) that her acrobatic intelligence would be very rare for a woman, but not that uncommon for a man.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 1:19 UTC (Sat) by joey (guest, #328) [Link] (22 responses)

LWN needs killfiles. Badly.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 1:31 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (19 responses)

Oh yeah, big scary taboo issue up, gender inequality!

Seriously though, I wanted to explain why I felt the need to mention this issue at all.

Whatever I personally believe about male and female IQ distribution and whether it's correct, well, whatever. I'm not really in much mood for arguing about that. It wasn't central to what I set out to convey, but it was part of how I experienced the whole thing. I regularly meet men intelligent in the way I understand intelligence, but rarely meet women who are intelligent in the same way. So she made a big impression to me, alright? When I saw that she was really a man, then it of course made perfect sense.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 3:36 UTC (Sat) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (2 responses)

Sounds like you don't meet very many women. Wonder what could cause *that*.

*rolls eyes*.

(Here, I'll write your reply for you: "Nuh-uh! I know lots of women! Some of my best friends are women! One time, I almost kissed one!")

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 11:02 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, I don't meet many women.

Let's take a look at it. My personal interests are musically related in some emulation projects like UADE and sidplay2. Hey, music! Oh no, it's the beep-beep chips from 80s computers. I've heard a rumour that there's maybe one female person that listens to kohina.com feed.

Perl. Should be a no-brainer? Well, nothing prevents women to join ircnet #Perl and indeed there have been a couple who have actually been perl programmers. But they are usually beginner-intermediate level and don't stick around. Maybe because they try to strike up social chatter and it just drives all the introverted guys nuts, and there usually aren't other women to talk to, so it just doesn't work out, see? I realize I'm strongly simplifying this but clearly, #Perl isn't one of the hottest places of the universe to go find women.

At work. More Perl. We are something like 15 guys and there's one female project manager. When we are hiring, not a single woman even send us her resume. It's common for project managers and HR people to be women, but for technical positions, they don't even apply. I guess that pool is quite dry as well. In fact, historically we once got a female's resume but her perl skills were not very good based on the coding sample she sent, so we didn't end up hiring her. Maybe that was a bad decision. Had I known the rarity of women at that time, I perhaps ought to have even interviewed her.

So let's see: my interest fields happen to be quite noninteresting for women, and my work looks like the same, so clearly I don't meet many women. Bravo, sir, you somehow deduced all that.

When I talk about this to my girlfriend ("oh my god, he has got a girlfriend!!!"), she usually says something like this:

* it's "unfair" that technical positions require you to invest your whole life in tech. She doesn't personally care about tech in that way, and doesn't want to. Me, I am most definitely a techie to heart.

* she would want to be very competent from the outset, like learn the subject matter on school first. I say, there aren't schools for most of the stuff, you just have to pick it up as you go, but it is uncomfortable an idea to her.

Well, that isn't very helpful, but it does illuminate how different are the worlds that we live in.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 15:16 UTC (Sat) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

Where I work, I have personally and individually run into women who are as hardcore techie as anybody else you could imagine. They speak the language, they know their salts, and they have the "intelligence" (insofar as high skill with Perl and high knowledge of Unix hackery is a measure of intelligence) of anybody else, if not more so. And it's not one-- it's multiple.

The fact that you don't think that there are many women out there with the "intelligence" of computer hacker men says far more about the culture of computer geekdom than it does about women!

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 3:36 UTC (Sat) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (15 responses)

You describe her as "really" a man. I suspect she, and indeed other people, would find that offensive. If you persist in being offensive, I think it is reasonable to want a killfile feature.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 10:12 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (14 responses)

Please enlighten me how you would say completely unoffensively that her genetic makeup is not, you know, XX but XY.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 10:42 UTC (Sat) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (13 responses)

Easy. You could just describe her as "genetically male". Note that it's perfectly valid (and polite!) to use the pronoun for the gender that people identify as, irrespective of their biology or genetics.

Hope that helps.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 11:11 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (2 responses)

All right. So imagine that I said "genetically male" instead of "really a man". It is precisely what I meant, no insult whatsoever was intended. I did not realize that people would be so hypersensitive about this sort of thing.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 11:39 UTC (Sat) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

Sometimes when we think someone is being hypersensitive, it is in fact we who are insensitive.

sexist

Posted Oct 1, 2007 11:43 UTC (Mon) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link]

It's possible (and I'm not defending the guy outright here) that what he meant by 'really a man' was 'born genetically male' or 'used to be seen as a man' and just used a sloppy ambiguous short-hand. In fairness this whole area is a minefield even for the well-intentioned because of the nuances in gender. I appreciate your comments though, they are invariable well-thought out and interesting.

sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 18:30 UTC (Sat) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] (9 responses)

I self-identify as African American, though genetically I'm caucasian. I'd prefer you to call me by my identified ethnicity, and I'd like access to all the entitlement programs those of African descent are eligible for. Please don't be offensive by calling me 'white', because I don't identify that way.

Thanks

sexist

Posted Sep 30, 2007 1:11 UTC (Sun) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah, because we all know that ethnicity and gender are exactly the same thing. Nice try, troll.

sexist

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:44 UTC (Sun) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] (1 responses)

In the sense that they're both empirical truths with a genetic basis, yes. You are either [white/black/male/female] or you aren't, regardless of how you might wish to identify.

sexist

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:52 UTC (Sun) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link]

I'm sorry you live in such an Aristotelian world. Come and join the modern world of infinite complexity and grey areas some day; you'll find that very few things are actually sharply defined once you look at them closely.

More specifically, whether people are "white" or "black" is even less of an empirical truth than their gender. Not only that, but declaring that only genetics matters is bigoted, racist, sexist, and downright rude.

self-identification

Posted Sep 30, 2007 19:04 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (4 responses)

You're entitled to identify as African-American, I couldn't care less and the only context in which I could imagine collecting that information would be as part of the diversity survey process if (someone else from) my company had hired you.

So far as I know in my country there are no "entitlement programs" for being of African descent, but you would not be elligible for such unless you actually proved you were immediately descended from African immigrants rather than simply identifying as African-American.

We actually measure lots of cultural artefacts by self-identification, sex and sexual preference, ethnicity, and first language are among them. If someone fills out the census to say they're Female, Native American and Homosexual and speak Welsh at home then the results will reflect that without anyone coming back to peak through their bedroom window and check if it's true. Of course it's a criminal offense to lie, not to mention a silly thing to do.

In theory we could measure all these things directly, we could take a blood sample to identify biological gender, and use genetic markers to find a blood line (each such line is loosely associated with what we call "race" traced back through our ancient ancestors) and we could insist on observing people without their knowledge to determine which language they use, and use an old psychology trick to measure their interest in attractive male vs female bodies in various states of undress. But all these things would be unnecessarily intrusive, which is to say rude, not to mention they might not really measure what we're interested in.

self-identification

Posted Sep 30, 2007 22:07 UTC (Sun) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] (3 responses)

I could also self-identify as a hyper-intelligent, immortal Martian and I doubt the majority of other people would care too much. However it would be just as false as self-identifying in opposition to any other observable, demonstrable characteristic.

In other words, an individual's psychology (or, perhaps, damage to it) may influence them to adopt such self-loathing that they completely refuse to accept an aspect of who they are. It's unfortunate that politically correct culture makes it taboo to question such behavior.

self-identification

Posted Oct 1, 2007 0:44 UTC (Mon) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (1 responses)

Please don't troll on LWN. And if you're actually serious, please learn why so-called "political correctness" is mostly about accepting people and being polite.

self-identification

Posted Oct 1, 2007 13:49 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

Nah, "poltical correctness" is about hiding under the surface the tensions
that should not exist to begin with.

self-identification

Posted Oct 1, 2007 2:25 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Why do you think that you are better informed about issues of biological gender and gender identity than the psychiatrists in this arena who generally agree that such a distinction exists? The experts in the field believe it is real, the people who are affected believe it is real. Just because your gender identity and biological gender and gender phenotype all line up doesn't mean these aren't real things.

sexist

Posted Oct 3, 2007 3:01 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Regarding your racism "equivalence" troll, there are people who are recognized as caucasian by skin-tone, but yet who self-identify as african-american because their entire family is african-american, but via the fun of recessive or unusual genetics are light-skinned.

They are socialized, as much as such a term can apply, as african-american and their self-identity derives from this.

As for genetics, the border of the so-called races is so broad and the variation within supposedly clear groups is so great that from a statistical perspective races mostly do not exist genetically.

We cannot therefore determine that a person is "black" reliably from either DNA sequencing nor from their skintone. Therefore what system of classification (should we need one!) would you propose other than asking them and believing the answer?

sexist

Posted Sep 30, 2007 17:25 UTC (Sun) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link]

Here's the source code that you can use to make your LWN killfile:

http://lwn.net/Articles/249618/

web site comments

Posted Sep 30, 2007 23:43 UTC (Sun) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

mod parent up!!!! Joey, I think you're running into a piece of the web site comments suck more than Usenet does problem.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 2:41 UTC (Sat) by MisterIO (guest, #36192) [Link] (18 responses)

I somehow agree with you.I sure do not have any empirical proof of it,but it's certain that men's brain is generally bigger(not much but it is)than women's brain.Humans have more intelligence than animals because they have a bigger brain,why shouldn't this be true even between men and women?
That said I knew a lot of women more intelligent than a lot of men,so in general the difference shouldn't be so exactly marked.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 3:40 UTC (Sat) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (12 responses)

Actually, it turns out that brain size isn't directly correlated with intelligence. If it were, elephants, whales and other animals would clearly be intellectually far superior to humans. So the "men have bigger brains" argument is pretty much irrelevant.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 3:47 UTC (Sat) by MisterIO (guest, #36192) [Link] (11 responses)

It was obviously in proportion to the size of the body.I thought this was obvious!

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 5:24 UTC (Sat) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (6 responses)

OK then:

Brain Size and Intelligence from Neuroscience, 2nd Edition, Dale Purves et al., ed.
Brain size does not predict general cognitive ability within families, PNAS Vol. 97, Issue 9, 4932-4937, April 25, 2000

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 14:28 UTC (Sat) by MisterIO (guest, #36192) [Link] (5 responses)

Look,I've found at least 4 scientific studies published from 2006 to 2007 that say exactly what I said before,just do a google search and you'll find them.Anyway I really don't see the big problem.Companies want to make money,so when they search for a new IT professional,they search for a good IT professional.Who cares if that IT professional is a man or a woman?I've had a lot of female IT collegues and nobody has ever discriminated them.But I don't like the idea to treat female IT professionals as a species that needs to b protected.

bad references

Posted Sep 29, 2007 22:05 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (3 responses)

Your google must be broken, or you would have found about the encephalization quotient pretty quickly. And the surrounding controversy, but at least you would be past "brain size to body mass", knowing that mice do better than people there.

I've had a lot of female IT collegues and nobody has ever discriminated them.

Nobody discriminates those small-brain female creatures, do they? Apart from considering them as inferior brainwise, we can trust corporate greediness to overcome those prejudices, right? Wow, that is really a recipe to fairness.

bad references

Posted Sep 30, 2007 4:43 UTC (Sun) by MisterIO (guest, #36192) [Link] (1 responses)

There's a difference between discrimination as it is generally considered wrong,and a normal discrimination as you would mean simply to discern between 2 different things.If I say that men and women are different,I'm not discriminating.I would be discriminating if I had not given a job to a woman just because she's a woman.

I have some questions

Posted Sep 30, 2007 8:57 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

If you could enlighten me about a few issues: consider the following red herring.

I sure do not have any empirical proof of it,but it's certain that men's brain is generally bigger(not much but it is)than women's brain.Humans have more intelligence than animals because they have a bigger brain,why shouldn't this be true even between men and women?

Is it discrimination of the "good" kind, or of the "bad" kind? Does it inspire you to have no prejudices when you have to interview a woman? Do you think you are an isolated case in your company?

bad references

Posted Sep 30, 2007 11:47 UTC (Sun) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link]

Interesting link, though it does not address those who suffer from osteo-encephalitis (inflammation of the brain due to a bone in the head). Which pretty much describes this thread.

Pointing out the he was a she (reminds me of the song Take a Walk on the Wild side or whatever it was) is about as useful as pointing out someones race, religion, etc. I frankly don't care.

This explains a mystery to me

Posted Oct 1, 2007 15:06 UTC (Mon) by utoddl (guest, #1232) [Link]

I've never been comfortable with Perl's use of '.' as a concatenation operator, but evidently it comes quite naturally to some people. Thanks for your post.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 8:18 UTC (Mon) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] (3 responses)

This "body size proportion" is the most stupid idea I've ever heard. Let's just take this absurd theory into analogy with robots: Take robot A, which is a huge caterpillar robot (weights 80 tons) and a 5kg brain (cooling and hard disk all included). It's supposed to be idiot-level, since the brain takes such a small fraction of the body weight. Now we use the same robot brain inside a small soccer robot (10kg total), so that robot would be highly intelligent, since half of its weight is brain.

Come on, nobody would argue like that. It's exactly the same brain. There's no relationship whatsoever between how a brain works and the body size. The only thing there is is that smaller bodies have an evolutionary pressure to utilize their brain better, because they simply can't afford more brain. It's unlikely that during human evolution, no attempt to make the brain more efficient had happend.

Anyway, if efficiency is the only point, there's probably little difference between the male and the female brain. The only think we know for sure is that there's different specialization. A significant amount of the 100g more weight of the male brain is used to think about sex. That's one of the reasons why standard IQ tests don't detect a difference - sexual "intelligence" isn't tested ;-). The other reason is that the tests are carefully calibrated to average to 100 for both males and females.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 9:12 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (2 responses)

I think the argument is a bit more involved. For instance, consider skin surface. All those neurons firing from your skin so that you can sense from the full area of the body will require some brain volume to handle, probably proportional to the skin area, but the relationship could be different, who knows.

As to why brain size is often compared to body *volume*, I got no idea. Large parts of the body seem to work autonomously, so it would seem nonsensical to do so indeed. I completely believe, however, that a larger body uses more brain power merely to keep track of what is happening in, on and around it. It's the details, as usual, that are difficult.

The argument doesn't seem to be without merit, the specific equation of brain mass divided by body volume is bad.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 11:32 UTC (Mon) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] (1 responses)

The "skin size" has nothing to do with the number of neurons there. If you draw a human and reshape it so that the sensitivity neurons have the same area density, you'll see something with large hands and testicles, and almost no back at all. The number of neurons per area depend on how important that part of the body is for sensing things, not how big you are. There are a number of things which compensate each other. E.g. a small animal can react quickly and move its legs fast. It needs short neural connections for that, and due to the low dead time of its body, it needs to operate fast to balance things out. Large animals however have high dead times and long "wires", so they can't react so fast, and also they don't have to. An elephant moves in slow motion. You don't need a better brain for that - you can run your brain slower. Elephants use their large brains to remember a lot, not to be artistic.

IMHO the point of the brain size/body volume equation was because someone figured out that we don't have the largest brain on the planet, but think we are the most intelligent life form. So there comes the brain size/body volume equation, which puts us in advantage of elephants, whales, and especially fat Americans (for which then somebody invented the fat-free encephalization quotient ;-). However, it also puts mice as equal to us, and small birds far ahead.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 12:23 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

Fair enough, you gave my argument a good beating. I have no real comments to reply back to you about that. We both agree that the size of the animal does matter, and that is what I wanted to tease out of you.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 6:19 UTC (Sat) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link] (4 responses)

I have to laugh. The sheer irony of someone suggesting a correlation between brain (processor) size and brain (processor) capability, on a site like this, is profound.

Indeed PET scans and the like of people performing mental tasks suggest that the differences are more related to architecture than size -- people more adept at certain mental tasks engage fewer neurons and use less energy doing so than less adept people for the same tasks.

In other words, like certain other anatomical features, it's not (just) a matter of how big it is but how well you use it.

Why the sudden need to create and attack strawman ?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 7:30 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

While it's certainly true that "it's not just a matter of how big it is but how well you use it" (some geniuses had tiny brain and some idiots had huge one) the fact still remains: sheer size of brain is a statistically reliable factor - at least among representatives of the same species. Why all these derogatory comments all of sudden ?

Because it is false

Posted Sep 29, 2007 22:24 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, because it is not true at all. Big people have bigger brains; small people have comparatively bigger brains as related to body mass. Fat people have worse ratios. You can account for those differences as in the encephalization quotient, and it works fairly well for big differences between species. But within a species you are lost: there are so many ways to account for the differences that once you are finished your bias is more likely to show up than any meaningful statistics. Across genders things are only worse.

It is bad enough to relate engineering capability to brain size of any kind, but to compare genders is utter nonsense. It is really surprising that it should show up here. Next we will be comparing penises in the showers to decide who is the boss.

False ? Are you sure ?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 23:22 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

You've pointed above to this article. If you'll bother to read it to the "see also" list you'll find this link where you can read that "modern studies using MRI have shown that brain size shows substantial and consistent correlation ( r = .35 to .43 in various studies) with IQ among adults of the same sex" - with pointers to said studies. As for adults of different sexes - it's much harder to measure without bias, but it's not clear why there should not be a difference...

Of course "there's a lot inside a skull other than just the brain" and social factors are 100 times more effective segregation factor then small inborn difference in intelligence...

Pretty much

Posted Sep 30, 2007 8:49 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

True, there is a controversy, and while some studies find a weak correlation, others don't. However, as you say, across genders the correlation is not measurable. Among other things because IQ is calibrated exactly so that males and females have the same mean score, 100. Therefore, any correlation that involves gender and IQ score is biased to start with.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 17:01 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Acrobatic intelligence very rare in women?

Bwahaha. You've never known my relatives, boyo: men timid, dull and staid
to a fault and rather unimaginative (anti-blowing my own trumpet here),
women ultrabright assertive quick thinkers. (Some of them are also insane,
but that's neither here nor there.)

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 9:28 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe you could put me in contact with one of your hot sisters? Preferably not the crazy ones, though.

Now, seriously. I want to stress that it's all about _my_ experience. Anyone could flame me all they want, but both you and I have to realize that in this instance I'm looking at the world through this particular peephole called my eyes.

So when I say that I just don't meet the sort of bright women, it doesn't mean they don't exist. It could simply mean that they are somewhere else and do something different. And that is why A. Tang seemed so remarkable to me, which combined with the mistake (also made by article's author) made me comment about it.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 2, 2007 4:10 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

>Now, seriously. I want to stress that it's all about _my_ experience. Anyone could flame me all they want, but both you and I have to realize that in this instance I'm looking at the world through this particular peephole called my eyes.

And I for one would like to thank you for your thoughtful comments on the matter. I think your taking a position that is otherwise occupied mostly by complete boors may have caused some shortened triggers to go off, and it's nice to see someone willing to have a discussion, rather than just rant.

>So when I say that I just don't meet the sort of bright women, it doesn't mean they don't exist. It could simply mean that they are somewhere else and do something different.

I think what most of us are trying to say is that yes, in our experience, that's exactly what's happening. Keeping in mind that very few people of any kind are as smart as Audrey Tang, it's not surprising if your limited sample of female acquaintances don't include any. But, as a point of information, in fact women in other fields (the ones that actually have women in them) seem just as likely to be "acrobatically brilliant" as men... so why hardly any of them are getting into IT, and especially FOSS, is another question still seeking an answer.

Hope that helps.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 6:19 UTC (Sat) by lynoure (guest, #45484) [Link] (11 responses)

Impolite or not, Audrey Tang is not really a good example because they got
involved in open source while they were being a man. That route is not
open to most women.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 10:24 UTC (Sat) by bluss (guest, #47454) [Link] (10 responses)

Yes and despite Audrey's view of her gender, if she was precieved as a man by others, that left a much easier way into IT for her.

Not related to this discussion is the possibility of the stigma a transsexual in IT might face, which probably means Audrey knows and understands how less privileged groups in her area feel.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 11:47 UTC (Sat) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

My personal experience is that transgendered folk experience a good deal of success in the computer/technology field, but this may say far more about me than the field. That is, I am in that field. I know many people in that field. I live in the San Francisco Bay area. I am connected with several gay social circles of various stripes who despite their many failings have on the average less need to crap on transgered folks than the average bear.

So, my life selects for being able to openly talk to transgendered folks, and it selects for people in technology. At least in my life they seem to be fairly well represented in that field as compared to other fields, which is the opposite of the situation for women.

My anecdotal experience.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 30, 2007 10:59 UTC (Sun) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]

You might find this old interview interesting:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/files/Next-Generation-On...

...and an interview around the same time with Jay Fenton (regarding past projects):
http://web.archive.org/web/19990824082214/http://www.emuu...

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 16:52 UTC (Sat) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] (7 responses)

Check this out. It's a story of a woman mathematician who became a man later in her career. What happened? Suddenly other people, who didn't realize that he was a transsexual, started responding more positively to his work. The money quote: "After he began living as a man in 1997, Prof Barres overheard another scientist say: 'Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister's work.'"

To hell with any intrinsic genetic or natural difference. It's blatantly clear that the reception and recognition of your work is tremendously affected by how others perceive your gender.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 20:42 UTC (Sat) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link] (6 responses)

To play devil's advocate, it could be that he was more experienced as a mathematician at that later point in time than when he was a woman. The example you gave is too anecdotal to draw conclusions from. I'd be curious if there have been any formal studies on how people perceive work done by women versus men.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 22:26 UTC (Sat) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

> I'd be curious if there have been any formal studies on how people perceive work done by women versus men.

C'mon, you shouldn't expect feminists to use any formal studies to prove their vague points. Personal experience, perhaps unbiased in a few cases, is the best you can find. Just have a look at the epigraph to this O'Reilly's series: "When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change"...

PS. In most cases, even when one is interested in the gender of an author of a scientific paper, it's impossible since often the first names are given abbreviated.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 30, 2007 22:04 UTC (Sun) by mepr (guest, #4819) [Link] (3 responses)

To be more specific, the mathematician in question submitted several papers under both his old female name and new male name, after the operation, and found that the papers were being accepted under the male name and rejected under the female name. Mark

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 13:07 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (2 responses)

Which indicates that with these works, attaching a specific female label to them was detrimental to their acceptance. Do we also have any comments from the reviewers as to why they thought the work was not so valuable, when it came with that label?

I'm just wondering what the process that happened inside reviewers' heads were. What the hell could they be thinking? If the work is the same, then a purely objective process ought to have given them the same exposure. As that wasn't the case, I'd love to hear some analysis for why the female name affected them as it did.

The following tests to the result should also be checked:

The study had to be competently enough carried: for instance, I hope the publishers for which the work was submitted under male name were chosen in random, experiment repeated with different papers to reduce effects of chance, the signal clearly visible (for instance, very different percentages for accepting the work could be established) etc.

There's also the other problem that scientific publishing is generally highly conservative. For instance, if there is some tarnishment of reputation such as previous fringe research, association to kooky theories, etc. reviewers might be skeptical because of the *name* itself. (Since this is mathematics, I'm not sure if fringe/kooky research really exists. I guess working with unproved assumptions might get you such an impression, or something.)

For best results, each probe work should be published under two random names, which are by database searches not associated to any previous work, to rule out reviewers confusing the author for someone else. A positive result would prove that fresh female mathematicians face additional hurdles not encountered by their male colleagues; their work would seem to be measured by some harsher criteria.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 2, 2007 8:12 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] (1 responses)

I guess working with unproved assumptions might get you such an impression

Oh no, not in math. People work with unproved assumptions all the time, since most important assumptions happen to be very difficult to prove. However, your unproven assumption should be well established.

What's more likely the case is that a new name ("his sister") triggers some more sceptical view. Mathematicians don't treat newbies lightly, as well. If you have an established reputation, and people of the same field probably know you in person, it's easier to get a paper passed.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 14, 2007 13:55 UTC (Sun) by kreutzm (guest, #4700) [Link]

Strange, but the "sister" was there first in this case, so her name should be established, not his.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 12:23 UTC (Mon) by tbrkic (guest, #9186) [Link]

Actually nowadays in US most concert musician tests are made
so that the judges can see who is playing. So that gener/race bias dont affect their judgement. After that was introduced, suddenly alot more women
got hired.

This is according to the book Blink anyway. You could probably google the
result.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 21:00 UTC (Sat) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]

Don't bother apologizing. The specter of political correctness has made it so that no one can express their true feelings about anything anymore. Say what's in your heart and on your mind and ignore the trolls that give you a hard time.

I personally thought your comment was very interesting because if Audrey Tang used to be a man then he would would not have faced the barriers that women face when entering the field. It might also mean that he has a better grasp of the group dynamics and group norms that are present in all-male, or male-dominated, groups. That knowledge would make it easier for him to fit in. Women may not have that insight into the group dynamics and might find it hard to fit in with the established "boy's club."

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 1:25 UTC (Sat) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link] (11 responses)

Men and women are different. People are doing what they want. What is the point? Furthermore, what makes someone think there is no place for women in the communities, given that they actually want to take that place?

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 6:50 UTC (Sat) by tetromino (guest, #33846) [Link] (5 responses)

>Men and women are different. People are doing what they want.
Sure, most boys like guns and most girls like barbies. But that's not the point. The point is, a good number of women *do* want to join the free software community, and it would be helpful if we don't insult them and push them away. We need all the hands we can get, so being unnecessarily hostile to potential recruits is simply idiotic.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 16:22 UTC (Sat) by tuxchick (guest, #42009) [Link] (4 responses)

Thank you, this is the core of the issue- at the very least, don't drive away people who would like to contribute. It doesn't matter if it's a paid job or unpaid volunteer; there comes a point where it's just not worth dealing with chronic idiocy and hostile jerks. Tolerating toxic behavior is a big weakness in a lot of FOSS projects, and it's not like excluding the jerks is a loss anyway, because they rarely contribute anything useful.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 23:56 UTC (Sat) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

Wow, let's just stereotype the men. Oops, I forgot that it is OK to bash white males.

Sorry

</Sarcasm>

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 30, 2007 0:12 UTC (Sun) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, I never saw that hostile behavior myself -- quite the contrary, a girl trying to be involved was always welcomed with applause, and a girl actually involved in the community was typically regarded as a queen of that community. This was a Russian-only experience, anyway, so maybe this thing everyone is talking here about is US-specific or whatever. I never understood the elitism problem, as in all the situations I saw all the "leet" guys were rightly treated like jerks -- no one liked that attitude, really.

Different approach, different result

Posted Sep 30, 2007 12:37 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It's easy to explain.

In Russia woman does not expect that anyone will change the whole system "to make it more user-friendly for women". She comes as foreigner who just want to "fit it". And everyone knows that it's not easy, it requires courage and bravery to do so. That is something to be admired. And while woman can complain when she's confronted with sexism and porn ("guys, this is too much - can you remove this picture?") she knows it's "male world" and she can only ask for so much. She's an immigrant in a foreign country and she knows that she can ask for help but she can not ask for a change of laws. Of course this means people will try to help: their positions are not threatened and women usually don't ask for too much.

In US woman expect the "equal footing" from the start. She demands to remove all discriminating elements as prerequisite ("this is just a list of the things that make women feel unwelcome" => there will be more demands in the future). Because it's "just wrong". The idea that it may be wrong but it's "law of the land" is not even considered. In short: she acts as an invader. She's not even "in the community" yet she already demands to change the laws of the community. Of course it leads to vitriol and hate. What's to admire in an occupant ?

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 30, 2007 12:52 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

>Thank you, this is the core of the issue- at the very least, don't drive away people who would like to contribute. It doesn't matter if it's a paid job or unpaid volunteer; there comes a point where it's just not worth dealing with chronic idiocy and hostile jerks. Tolerating toxic behavior is a big weakness in a lot of FOSS projects, and it's not like excluding the jerks is a loss anyway, because they rarely contribute anything useful.

The thing is, this issue really has little to do with women specifically. Being/tolerating toxic jerks will drive away otherwise willing contributors, period.

I guess this is one of my pet peeves -- people making something out to be a "women's issue" when, like most serious problems, it transcends gender entirely.

(feel free to substitute "women" with "religion X" or "country Y" or "arbitrary identifier Z" at your discretion..)

One interesting statistic

Posted Sep 29, 2007 10:03 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (4 responses)

I think the reason this is worth talking about is that, in proprietary software development, the percentage of women is higher than it is in free software development.

This might indicate that we're doing something wrong, in terms of fostering an inclusive (read as: large) contributor base.

For the free software movement, it'd be great if that huge section of society participated more.

Maybe there is a natural reason for the numbers being so low, but maybe there's not. For that much benefit, it's worth looking into the topic.

One interesting statistic

Posted Oct 1, 2007 12:07 UTC (Mon) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link] (3 responses)

Rather than indicating that we're doing something wrong it may be simply because women may choose more secure orthodox roles over non-conformist roles. In the sense that the Free Software movement is unorthodox/unknown territory/financially unrewarding/somewhat revolutionary then if the personality traits that cut across gender come into play here then we might see a natural gender imbalance. Also, if what you say is true (is there data?) and the percentage of women is higher in proprietary software than free software then why does it have to be a reflection on the men in free software? Why can it not be a reflection on the choices that women make?

Let's remove the plank from our own eye first.

Posted Oct 2, 2007 17:37 UTC (Tue) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] (2 responses)

Suppose we write a program that makes some calculation error. Could this be a bug in the compiler or some external library? Yes, but we should suspect our own code first. Only after we're certain that it's correct is it reasonable to consider blaming some other component.

We can't control the choices women make but we can take steps to make our community more welcoming to them. Let's find out what happens if we try.

Let's remove the plank from our own eye first.

Posted Oct 14, 2007 14:28 UTC (Sun) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry... 12 days later...

Sure, regards taking steps - we should reprogram misogynists and deplore advertising that uses curves to sell wares. But shouldn't we be doing that anyway? (By being empathic sheeple I mean.) Are we suggesting that FOSS nerds/geeks are less mindful of women than the average Joe Bloggs. The thing is, we don't know if this _is_ a bug or calculation error in our code. Having said that I am all for following the "get your own house in order before you go trying to spring-clean others" dictum :)

Let's remove the plank from our own eye first.

Posted Oct 14, 2007 20:06 UTC (Sun) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Are we suggesting that FOSS nerds/geeks are less mindful of women than the average Joe Bloggs.

Maybe. Unfortunately, we can be pretty sure something is going on with FOSS in particular, because female participation in FOSS is lower than in practically anything else. There are a higher proportion of female *construction workers* -- by reputation, at least, one of the most male-dominated and misogynistic fields out there -- than there are female FOSS contributors (see).

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 3:50 UTC (Sat) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (89 responses)

So when are we going to start trying to force little girls to throw away their dolls and start playing with race cars like little boys?

I'm sorry, but _forced_ gender equality is bullshit. I don't buy for a minute that guys are smarter than gals, but research has indicated that men and women have different strengths when it comes to the mind, just like we have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the body. IT takes a drastically different mental approach than a career in medicine, or art, or language, or law, and so on. Maybe women aren't biologically weaker at what IT requires (maybe they are - I don't know), or maybe women are just biologically less interested in the sorts of problems and tasks that IT requires of them.

Female electricians are rare. Female plumbers are rare. Female drywallers are rare. Female miners are rare. Female IT workers are rare. Female taxi drivers are rare. Women are rare in a wide range of professions. Likewise, men are rare in a wide range of professions as well. The gender split has no basis on intelligence that I can find - most of the girls I know are in medicine, science, law, or business professions, where-as most of the guys I know are in engineering, computer, or business professions. That doesn't give any evidence that girls are dumber than guys, but it does indicate that something about engineering and computing appeals to men more than to women.

Maybe men are doing something wrong and driving women away from IT. I have a suspicision that, more likely, most women just don't give a shit about the same stuff most men care about. How many little girls do you know that want to be a firewoman when they grow up, and how many little boys do you know that want to be a veterinarian when they grow up? (Sure, a few people might be able to pull up a few examples, but you know what I'm getting at here statistically.) A lot of my male friends express interest in learning about programming while not a single female friend has even the slightest amount of interest in the field.

It's horrendously stupid that so many people have this idea that we for some reason have to force any industry to have a 50/50 gender split as a goal in and of itself. If we were actually driving women away from the field, I'd buy it as a problem. From what I can tell, we're not driving anyone away; most women just don't give a damn about being an IT professional. Spending time and effort trying to think up ways to force women into the field, or as I'd put it, conning women into a profession they won't really enjoy, is a gigantic waste.

Might as well say that we as a society have to start forcing women to be more interested in football or race cars because of the uneven gender distribution there. Clearly women are uninterested in football because men are doing something to drive them away, and not because women just aren't interested.

Heck, let's try to find a way to force more men to become fashion designers, which the women are clearly driving us out of with their discrimination, or to make guys buy more shoes, because it's just not "right" that every girl I know owns at least six pairs of shoes and I only own one. Obviously we have to fight to make it socially hip for guys to buy mores shoes so that women and men are equal.

What's up with the way that many women love wearing dresses, skirts, bikinis, and stuff like that when men love jeans, button-up shirts, and flannel? There's something wrong with society! Crap, most women have long hair and most guys have short hair. Humankind is crumbling under the discrimination!! OMFG!!!!

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 4:10 UTC (Sat) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (5 responses)

So when are we going to start trying to force little girls to throw away their dolls and start playing with race cars like little boys?

From having observed little children, I think it's pretty obvious that this particular difference in preferred toys is a socialized behavior. Parents, other adults, and older children react differently -- even if they're trying very hard to be egalitarian -- to a little girl playing with dolls or to a little boy playing with cars. Sure, you might be very encouraging and open when it's the other way around, but it's hard to suppress the "oh, that's so cute!" that seems to "naturally" arise for the socially correct play. I was surprised to find myself doing it. Kids are sensitive to this sort of reaction and learn quickly. Add in all the input from people not actually trying to be conscious about such actions, and there you go -- socialization for play preferences.

Whether this is a problem or not is another issue.

And oh my god I've let you trolls draw me into this. This whole whiny misogynist thing needs to die. We already have slashdot.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 4:49 UTC (Sat) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (1 responses)

Eh, classic nature-vs-nurture arguments. The world may never know. ;)

[I very strongly believe both are huge factors. Experiences may differ, I suppose.]

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 17:11 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It's not really meaningful to divide them. The nature/nurture divide would
make sense if all we had was `heterogenous genetic factors without
environmental influence' and `homogenous genetic factors encoding systems
influenced by the environment', but there are a *lot* more options than
that, and for most of them `versus' isn't even the right word to use.

(Pinker had an excellent analogy in _How The Mind Works_, describing this
as being akin to someone pointing at a high-end computer and saying `that
hardware is really powerful, so the software must be correspondibly
inflexible'.)

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 15:41 UTC (Sat) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

it's hard to suppress the "oh, that's so cute!" that seems to "naturally" arise for the socially correct play.

And exactly how should the free/open source software world solve this problem?

Bye,NAR

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 30, 2007 0:42 UTC (Sun) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (1 responses)

And exactly how should the free/open source software world solve this problem?

Simple. Be aware of your actions and words and how they impact other people.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 30, 2007 12:54 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

>Simple. Be aware of your actions and words and how they impact other people.

More importantly, realize that the other person is not the same as you.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 5:31 UTC (Sat) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (7 responses)

If we were actually driving women away from the field, I'd buy it as a problem. From what I can tell, we're not driving anyone away; most women just don't give a damn about being an IT professional.

Except that women who are in the IT profession apparently do perceive problems with they way they and other women entering the profession are treated and with the general workplace culture. There are plenty of men who remain blissfully unaware that there is a problem, but that doesn't invalidate the concerns of women who do experience a problem.

It's social, too.

Posted Sep 29, 2007 7:57 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (6 responses)

My coworker (in the same cubicle even) is woman. And she's subscribed to the list dedicated to "attracting more women as software engineers" (she was subscribed against her will, BTW - she stayed for laughs). And she does not "get it". I'm not sure I can cite her words 100% correctly but she said something like this once: "Ok, I always liked math, had screwdriver and combination pliers along with lipstick and powder in my purse - since I was a teenager. So it was natural for me to become a software engineer. But why the hell these lunatics are trying to coerce normal women to become software engineers ? What's the goal ?"

And no, my coworker is not transsexual - she was born a woman... So I think this phenomenon "we need to bring more women to IT" is social phenomenon: when woman are subscribed to said list and they hear constant complains that women are oppressed - of course they start to believe it it!

It's social, too.

Posted Sep 29, 2007 8:45 UTC (Sat) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link]

The goal is to avoid missing out on people who could contribute a lot to the community. If people are being socialised not to pursue an interest in science, engineering, technology, IT etc. because it's too hard / not feminine / not masculine, the number and quality of people entering those disciplines decreases to the detriment of society.

It's social, too.

Posted Sep 29, 2007 16:51 UTC (Sat) by tuxchick (guest, #42009) [Link] (4 responses)

Coerce? What coercion? Nice bogus argument there. And citing the cliche fictional female who feels just the same way you do. Those tactics are so old they're moldy. I am curious- what stake do you have in denying that there are problems specific to women in FOSS? Why is it so important to you to be dismissive of these issues?

Bogus ? Think again.

Posted Sep 29, 2007 18:20 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Coercion ? Few ideas were t-shirts, bags and some other strange ideas. I'm not sure how well they worked - I'm not a subscriber. As far as I can tell - not very well: we only got one female intern in our office so far and I do not think it was result of these campaigns.

As for "fictional female"... If you don't believe there are non-brainwashed women - it's your choice. Unfortunately LWN does not have any private messaging system so I can not direct you to her - and I'm pretty sure she'll not appreciate storm of e-mails from zombies that will try to tell her for 1000th time that it's just wrong that she does not support this "bring women to IT" campaign, so I can not publish contact information here.

Bogus ? Think again.

Posted Sep 30, 2007 0:34 UTC (Sun) by tuxchick (guest, #42009) [Link] (1 responses)

Khim, I misread your comment- you were referring to some specific
incidents. Sorry I ranted at you! You are right that trying to make
someone fit into a role they're not interested is doomed to failure.

As far as FOSS goes, I'll settle for getting rid of the barriers that
already exist for women who are interested in contributing. I don't care
if it's 50/50 or 90/10 or whatever. I don't want roses and ponies. I just
want to do my thing and not get hassled by jerks and trolls, and not get
hassled by folks who think that being part of FOSS means tolerating jerks
and trolls.

Bogus ? Think again.

Posted Oct 1, 2007 16:30 UTC (Mon) by N0NB (guest, #3407) [Link]

Having been involved with F/OSS for the better part of a decade, I think that having to deal with jerks and trolls is not a gender specific issue. The sucessful person in this field forges ahead regardless of their antics.

Perhaps we need to examine why many women find this so off-putting as to allow the trolls and jerks to dictate what they do while many men seem to be able to shrug the jerks and trolls off and continue their work on a project. This, I suspect, is a fundamental difference between the genders.

Is it that jerks and trolls don't exist in other fields of endeavor that women gravitate to? I doubt it. Most likely it is because the F/OSS community is so open and public that the jerks and trolls voices are amplified and women in general have no interest in these kinds of public confrontations.

That's one aspect of the "problem". Another could be that many men are interested in what goes on inside the "box", while many women are interested in how they can use and benefit from the "box" ("box" being a device or software, etc.). So, it may well be that men and women approach a technology with a different sort of curiosity and the "problem" is no more complicated than that.

It's social, too.

Posted Sep 29, 2007 21:40 UTC (Sat) by mitr (subscriber, #31599) [Link]

We all have a stake in knowing the _truth_. Attempting to change the situation is much harder, if not impossible, if we don't understand it - the attempts might even be counterproductive.

I can see no reason to assume malicious intent in khim's comment and to call it bogus it merely because it "denies that there are problems specific to women in FOSS". The existence of problems is not an axiom, and the burden on proof is necessarily on people that claim these problems exist.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 9:26 UTC (Sat) by lynoure (guest, #45484) [Link] (1 responses)

"Heck, let's try to find a way to force more men to become fashion
designers, which the women are clearly driving us out of with their
discrimination"

Actually, many, if not most, haute couture fashion designers are men. See
http://www.newfaces.com/magazine/designers.php for example. If you would
have mentioned nurses instead, yes, I bet there is some discrimination
there. At least the public seems to view male nurses as somehow weird
people, unfortunately.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 17:08 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

This is one reason why high fashion is so bloody bizarre, so utterly
unlike anything a sane woman would actually wear, and apparently designed
for stick insects or rather thin men rather than actual women.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 14:49 UTC (Sat) by wyrmfire (guest, #47886) [Link] (2 responses)

After reading most of this thread, I think there's a deeper issue behind
all of this.

The way I see the overall article, this seems to be more about men and
their egos and also about overall segregration and not about what women
want.

The fact is that most women don't tend to want to be computer
programmers, whether the soggy sheeted technogeek a.k.a. male computer
programmer want them to be or not.

Sure, I encourage women to start programming and honestly the first
programmers were women in fact with the ENIAC during WWII so yes, they're
quite capable of doing it.

Just like MOST men not wanting to be nurses, most women these days don't
seem to want to be computer programmers or in I.T..

I can think of a few good reasons as well.

Firstly, having been in I.T. for over 25 years (13 years as a
profession), it seems to me that there is a lot of segregation and double
standards within I.T. and it isn't just limited to women.

The way I see it, "normal people" in general aren't welcomed at all and
generally tend to be alienated by the "technical elite" as are women when
they want to and are willing to learn.

This is especially so in the Open Source and Linux movements.

With all the brain power that you guys have, have you realized or
wondered why there are so few women and "normal people" in the I.T.
industry and also business decision makers that are ready to take up the
banner of opensource?

I have an answer for those that can't answer it themselves: Most of them
can only handle being treated like idiots for so long before they've had
enough and begin to hate technology.

They want solutions, not whingers.

Its funny that these are the people you're trying to get to adopt your
open source software.

This attitude tends to surround Open Source and Linux as a whole.

It just seems funny to me that such intelligent people as yourselves tend
to alienate the people you want to adopt your software by using the
typical "dominant, egotistical, elitist stance".

Seems to me that the "revenge of the nerds" seems to be suffering from
the same malady as the jocks who originally bullied the nerds to begin
with; bullying, yet on a different front.

I know the technogeek can sit there on their throne of "3lit3dom" and
spout about how brilliant he/she is and that the mere mortal is only
capable of poultry feats, yet you may find that Obiwan's chef friend was
right about the difference between "knowledge and wisdom".

Kind of seems superfluous to want to make software and then not want to
promote it or teach about it.

I know, I know, who cares, right?

Next question: Why do women want to join the I.T. profession again?

Lets ask someone from the audience here.

"Anyone here ever asked an innocently stupid question in an IRC channel
or on the newsgroups and been flamed to hell?"

Sorry, we had to sensor out their response.

Anyway, overall, I'm sure you get the idea.

They'll be the first to encourage the "girl next door" to go and line up
for that job interview tommorrow.

Realistically, and to summarize my conclusion for you, the reason there
are few women and "normal" people in the I.T. industry is they won't put
up with being made to feel like idiots, even though they're willing to
learn and usually geeks don't tend to have too much tact most of the time
when trying to explain something in a few minutes that they've been doing
their entire lives.

Just throw the baby into the ocean after their first bath, I'm sure
they'll be able to swim after that, won't they??? :)

And yes, there ARE a few women that are very interested in computers and
a few that work in the profession for some very large companies so
although there may not be 50/50 in numbers, they do exist!!

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 15:54 UTC (Sat) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Kind of seems superfluous to want to make software and then not want to promote it or teach about it.

I know, I know, who cares, right?

I think you're not right. Makig software is fun. Promoting or teaching something is definitely not fun. At least in my opinion - it's not about caring or don't caring, it's about having fun.

Lets ask someone from the audience here.

"Anyone here ever asked an innocently stupid question in an IRC channel or on the newsgroups and been flamed to hell?"

It's maybe my "problem" that I only visit civilizated places, but I don't remember ever being flamed for an innocent question. Actually I can't even think about a scenario like this: the linux newbies list I read has a strict no-RTFM policy, but even the "non-newbies" list carries very little RTFM answer, only occasionally a "please go to the newbies list with this question". Anyone who breaks these rules could end up in the spamdb.

Maybe a developer list could be different, because a leading developer can't be put into the spamdb, but I'd presume if someone subscribes to a developer list, can't ask a so stupid question.

Bye,NAR

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 20:08 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I know the technogeek can sit there on their throne of "3lit3dom" and spout about how brilliant he/she is and that the mere mortal is only capable of poultry feats

Even the most flamy and brusque variety of free software developer doesn't do *that*. I've never seen, never even heard of any free software developers doing that. We're hardly a humble bunch, and definitely take pride in our work, but there is a reason why the l33t rubbish emerged from the cracker community: free software developers don't do it.

One major reason why a lot of 'normal people' and particularly 'business decision makers' get on badly with techies is probably because the normal people want 'solutions dammit', and the techies have other priorities as well: maintainability, technical elegance, the 'neat hack'; a scary number of 'normal people' find it totally incomprehensible that anything could be considered more important than getting whateveritis done on time and under budget.

(Personally I think these people are incredibly shallow. I mean, what is making money anyway? Incrementing one value: useful for other things but still just one value. If I wanted to spend my time obsessed by a single incrementing value then I'd spend my time on arcade games. Instead, I spend it, uh, commenting on LWN...)

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 15:25 UTC (Sat) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] (69 responses)

Maybe men are doing something wrong and driving women away from IT.

Not maybe. Yes, obviously. If you don't see it, you have issues.

The same damn thing comes up in Physics all the time. There, too, there is a bad gender inequality, although it's not nearly as bad as it is in computer science generally and in free software development specifically.

Look, despite the fact that it gets me flamed, I agree that there's no need to force a 50/50 split, and I agree that it may well be that there are gender differences that would lead to a "natural" balance that is different. However, given the serious sociological issues we have, I don't believe that we know that it should be (say) 60/40 or 70/30 men/women, or any other ratio; for that matter, perhaps "naturally" it should be 20/80 men/women! The society of computer science (and free software development specifically), just like physics, is so amazingly sexist that it washes out any potential signal there may be that would measure natural aptitude and/or interest.

If there weren't blatantly obvious misogyny in our society— and one need only read this thread to see it— then, yeah, I'd say, we shouldn't worry about the disparity. But the fact is that the disparity is a result at least partially because of the misogyny. The misogyny is embarrassing, unworthy of a society that likes to congratulate itself for being a meritocracy, and immoral in general, and is something we really need to address rather than becoming defensive about every time somebody reminds us that it is there.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 16:46 UTC (Sat) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (68 responses)

"Not maybe. Yes, obviously. If you don't see it, you have issues."

Way to toss a pointless insult in there.

I can count a grand total of five women I've ever met in the IT field. On that note, all five of them were in lead development or other high-up positions. (Two school IT directors, two project lead developers, and one professor.) There is nothing stopping women from working in the field or achieving as well as any man, other than that women largely just aren't interested, so far as I can observe around here (Ann Arbor, MI area).

Which is fine, because forcing people to be interested just because you have some sociologically invalid need to force an equilibrium between men and women in some field is selfish, short-sighted, and ultimately pointless. If a woman wants into the IT field, good for her. If she doesn't, that's fine. Trying to find ways to con people into professions they aren't interested in just to make some statistics look more politically correct is retarded.

Hell, why is IT so focused on getting more women when we have an even smaller number of african-descended people in the field? I've met asians, indians, arabs, australians, north and south americans, and white africans in IT... I've met a grand total of zero black people. That's five times more women I've met in IT than I have black people. Looking at the Open Source conference photo shoots over the years, I can recall only two black people I've ever seen, both in the GNOME community.

I don't see anyone making a big ruckus about that, though. How come you're not getting worked up over that? Are you going to tell me that it's because IT professionals are racist and are driving people away for that reason? I've never seen that happen, not once - mostly because I've not once ever seen a black person in a single one of my classes or jobs over the last 10 years. I've met tons in science, language, math, engineering, and art courses and professions. Just not anything relating to computers. If racism is the problem, I'd love to hear an explanation of why the prejudice drives people away from even TRYING to get into IT, but doesn't keep people out of numerous other fields.

I'd also like to know why it's more important for people to get women into IT than it is to get racial minorities into IT. I don't think that's prejudice at work, either, but it seems that something sociologically is up here.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 17:00 UTC (Sat) by tuxchick (guest, #42009) [Link] (63 responses)

Here we go with bogus argument #3- "why aren't you concerned with all of these OTHER Very Important Issues? Since you're not, that invalidates your position! yay I win!" The issue under discussion is problems faced by women in FOSS. I don't disagree there are other important issues, but that's not your point at all; you're just using a weak and worn-out tactic to try to dismiss the issues under discussion.

And bogus argument #1- "Since I (willfully) don't see a problem, there aren't any!" Come on, at least try to be original.

At the very least, stay out of the way. You don't have to help- not obstructing is good enough for me.

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 19:08 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (60 responses)

To me it looks more like discussed issue was "we have not enough women in the IT - how to bring them en masse?". And to me this looks like a totally bogus issue. If the real question is about "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where the hell is the list of said problems ?

My reaction to this discussion is akin to Linus and Co reaction to responsibility issue. We should measure problems somehow before we'll try to find the solutions - any other way is idiotic. Yet when "women in FOSS" problem is raised this step is invariably omitted. People look on statistic, note that there are very few women and start creating schemes to change situation. What for ? To improve cuteness factor among FOSS developers ?

Yes, if there are some real problems which affect women but somehow don't affect men (ditto for other groups of people) - it's important to discuss them. But I'm yet to see any such coherent list - just accusations that if I don't accept existence such of problems on faith without proof I'm misogynist and must be punished.

I do believe that all real barriers which only affect women must be discussed (end eventually fixed). Inequality of starting positions are bad - no matter if we talk about african-descended peoples or women. But to treat "low number of women" as a problem in itself - it's just stupid.

One such problem (related to conferences where noone want to talk with women because they know "women in booths are there for eye candy reasons") was discussed and solution looks like acceptable short-term solution: male coworker can send half of incomers to female who's not getting enough attentions since people are seeking information and not eye candy. Good. Problem obviously exist, there are no questions about it - and while solution is not good long-term solution it's acceptable as short-term solution. Can we have list of such problems instead of trying to lure women by questionable means ?

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 23:20 UTC (Sat) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] (59 responses)

Since you asked for a list: threats of sexual assault via e-mail; disparagement of women's abilities, in these very comments no less; objectification of women as sexual objects -- post a comment as a female to Slashdot and you'll see what I mean; sexist advertising in major Linux journals; soft porn images in illustrations in major Linux journals.

That is just a list of the things that make women feel unwelcome. Imagine how different the FOSS community attitudes would need to be to make women feel welcome. Counter-example 1 in that list would be ESR's recent comment on LWN.

Statistically, we can be pretty sure that FOSS discriminates against women because there is no evidence of the reverse case. If FOSS were discrimination-free then we would see a rise in women's participation in IT employment as FOSS became more widely used. Of course, this has not occurred -- the participation of women in the IT workforce keeps worsening.

What I find most disheartening about the whole thing is that simple lack of willingness to admit we have a problem. Look at the number of comments in this thread, most denying the obvious. FOSS has long argued that people should have a willingness to change. But faced with such change itself FOSS engages in the same myopia it accuses in supporters of proprietary software.

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 1:41 UTC (Sun) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (53 responses)

> threats of sexual assault via e-mail

Again these email threats... As has been noted by others, very much like McBride's. If you consider these real, contact police. Otherwise - ignore as the rest of your spam. In fact, I wonder how these emails didn't end up in your spam folder automatically.

> disparagement of women's abilities, in these very comments no less;

There were statements that men and women are different, including IQ distributions. So what? Either these are false - prove it, otherwise what's point of arguing against a fact of our current nature? More to the point, though, nobody said that women should be _pre_judged based on the sole fact they are not males; if a given woman has the desire/abilities/etc to fill a job - fine (more than fine, I'd personally say).

> objectification of women as sexual objects -- post a comment as a female to Slashdot and you'll see what I mean

I never post on /. and read it only sporadically (mostly when linked from a more respectable site). Now may I ask you - what kind of post it was that caused such a response - was it a techie one or you tried to promote something feminist? In the latter case, it's not a surprise you got a correspondingly polarized reply (not that I approve it...). Please provide a demo link.

> sexist advertising in major Linux journals;

I disagree to call these "sexist". Anyway, I understand what you mean. You know, the purpose of ads is to drive potential clients in. Ads cost money. These ads, apparently, pay for the money spent. By the time (and <extralarge>IF</extralarge>) there is a 50/50 gender balance in the field, either a) the ads will feature both genders equally as well or b) will disappear if a majority find them offensive (so they actually drive potential buyers off).

> Statistically, we can be pretty sure that FOSS discriminates against women because there is no evidence of the reverse case.

I wonder where you studied logics...

> If FOSS were discrimination-free then we would see a rise in women's participation in IT employment as FOSS became more widely used.

??? Don't see a logics here either. Why a movement, by the sole virtue of becoming more popular, should become more attractive to women than to men?

> What I find most disheartening about the whole thing is that simple lack of willingness to admit we have a problem.

Let's not call something "a problem" before it's proven as such. There is a statistical fact - there are significantly more men than women among the FLOSS community. It's only a problem ONLY IF caused by a direct discrimination. So let's talk about cases of discrimination - and we all must do our best to fix these. Anything else - I beg your pardon...

> Look at the number of comments in this thread, most denying the obvious.

You also have problems with math. Please count which comments you consider as cons. From what I can tell, an absolute majority are sympathetic.

> FOSS has long argued that people should have a willingness to change.

Right. Change it! Why the hell you're considering the status-quo as a result of a gift from the $DEITY that was seized by those rude males? Wasn't the overwhelming majority of the FOSS projects started by single developers in their free time - and most of them were males? Who is preventing a motivated group of women from forming a female-only mailing list/forum/what not and come up after a while with a rival OS or killer app? Don't talk about inequalities, show the equality! (And before someone happily starts providing examples - yes I know there ARE such projects/significant contributions/etc; I'm talking about statistics - use lines of code or any other metrics you wish).

> But faced with such change itself FOSS engages in the same myopia it accuses in supporters of proprietary software.

And, please stop accusing all and everyone by calling all of us "FOSS". BTW, do you consider yourself a member of FOSS? Then you've got that myopia disease, too. Oh, that male chauvinist logics again...

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 4:02 UTC (Sun) by tuxchick (guest, #42009) [Link] (35 responses)

You just don't want to admit there is a problem, and would rather rail on
and on dismissing everything we say. Proof? There is no proof that will
satisfy you. The proof is already all around you- in the statements of
women who are reporting their experiences, in the daily activities in
forums, mail lists, and IRC. You seem to think we are inventing all these
stories for fun. Or perhaps are hysterical. Why are you so keen to shoot
down what we are saying- does it threaten you in some way?

What we are advocating for is to be treated with courtesy and respect.
Just as any human deserves. Perhaps you think this is unreasonable? It
will not inconvenience in the slightest the many fine FOSS people who
already do this.

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 7:18 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (3 responses)

Strangely enough, the article we all comment to points to several conflicting "solutions".

The comment you posted to tries to sort things out. But asking hard questions is not Politically Correct. So you just dismiss his arguments. Or personal motives. Anybody who doesn't agree with you is an enemy who must be shot down?

This has been very unpleasant discussion, and personally led me to think that there's a big bunch of raving feminists I shouldn't even spend my time reading.

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 9:37 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, I've found a good few unpleasant misogynists by reading the same
threads.

The phrase `raving feminist' itself is pretty revealing. There *are* some
people who could be described as `raving feminists' --- reverse sexism,
basically, `men are worthless' and such tripe --- but I've seen none on
this thread, and they're so rare they can generally be discounted.

All the posters to this thread have been saying is that it would be nice
if we didn't drive women away, and let's find out what we're doing to do
that, and by the way being vicious and sexist is unpleasant and let's
stop. In response to this a bunch of people have acted like we're coming
in and spraying them with scary girl cooties OH NOES --- the `dolls and
ponies' comment was particularly disgustingly stereotyped.

If I was female, this thread would probably drive me away on its own.

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 15:23 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

There were some interesting comments. But they were generally lost in the noise.

The problem is that some people are so afraid of hurting any women and thus (oh no!) scaring them away, that they will not let us discuss the facts.

You cannot even mention that a certain prominent female developer started its development life as a man (the name, mind you, was chosen, probably mistakefully, as example in the article) without a bunch of people with good intentions coming to hush you.

There's also a matter of tradeoff that nobody seems to mention: what is the price of those steps?

Suppose that the current "community" has 5% women and 95% men (just making up those number, just like 53.74% of the statistics thrown in in this discussion). Now suppose that your steps manage to double the number of women in the field. But because of the changes they bring, tenth of the men no longer like to contribute.

Do the math: you got a decrese of 5% of the population. Not very successful.

Now of course those are numbers I have made up. And I know that no one wants to chace off men from the field. But you have to be careful with that. Are you?

And I'm not impressed with the "50%" figure: there are two important causes that greatly decrease the proportion of women in free software projects, and will not be addressed simply by being nicer to women:

1. The percepcion of this subject. A matter of education. Face it: there are very few girls in math. Thus even if this is to change, it is a matter of decades.

2. The role of women in the family. This is gradually changing, but slowly. And certainly has an effect on something that requires much devotion of time.

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 18:00 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Just one point here (I'm too tired to handle the lot but this jumped out
at me): the role of women in the family is surely not relevant in most
Western societies. Across most of Europe the average age of childbirth is
nearing thirty (perhaps even above it) and there are a goodly number of
good free software hackers still in their teens. A large proportion are in
their twenties, far more than the *total* number of female free software
hackers.

So, no, whatever the explanation is, that's not it.

Hmm... Good question.

Posted Sep 30, 2007 10:57 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (6 responses)

What we are advocating for is to be treated with courtesy and respect. Just as any human deserves. Perhaps you think this is unreasonable?

In one word - yes. You propose serious change in a huge system for unknown benefit. Similar changes in other FOSS projects were strongly opposed. For example Linux kernel discriminates against 95% of Earth population (including, ironically enough, Linus himself) - by using non-translatable English messages. Yet all patches designed to fix this problem were rejected so far. The Linux developers feel that "courtesy and respect" to other language natives just "don't worth it".

Here we come to the crunch of the problem: a lot of guys in FOSS don't feel that huge change in the system (rehabilitation and in extreme cases removal of all technically brilliant jerks and misogynists) worth it, but women involved just skip over this very important step. This is not just "women in FOSS" problem, BTW - read about drobbins fate, for example.

That's why I've said "it's important to discuss them", not "it's important to solve them". Because it's not obvious that all requests are "worth it": if the price of making women developers happy is to make 90% of male developers unhappy - then my reaction will be "forget about it". I'm not sure if there are such extreme demands on table, but how can we know if we don't have a discussion ? Certainly "trivial" need "to be treated with courtesy and respect" is not so trivial. Right now "nice are polite" Linus can say anybody who thinks others don't have the "right to choice", and then tries to talk about "freedoms" is a damn hypocritical moron - and it'll not lead to temper tantrum from the person in question.

Guys in FOSS like this atmosphere so all suggestions that they should change it and treat everyone "with courtesy and respect", "avoid sexist jokes" and "objectification of women" in discussion and so on are viewed as direct attack - and rightfully so. I'm not saying such changes are not worth it - far from it, often discussions among FOSS folks are too corrosive and hurt progress even you don't think about women involved, but to say that "it's a no brainer" (like women like to assume) - is oversimplification...

Here we go

Posted Sep 30, 2007 11:22 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (5 responses)

Thanks for admitting it frankly. IMHO all those jerks and misogynists need to either learn courtesy and respect (in other words, grow up) or be left out in the cold. It is an extremely unprofessional conduct, so even if it makes them uncomfortable at first, those people will probably be better off with their newfound skills.

As a side effect, we have learned in these threads that this kind of attitude is also driving lots of people away (women included) who don't feel like dealing with it, or have better things to do with their time.

Here we go

Posted Sep 30, 2007 11:53 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (4 responses)

Quite so. Nobody's suggesting the instition of a Free Software Courtesy
Authority with the power to ban people from mailiing lists. It's simply a
fact of life that social oil (i.e. `not being nasty to people') is
*beneficial*, especially over email where tempers can run high due to
undetected positive feedback loops and misinterpretations.

Would it really be disadvantageous to say `free software development lists
should try not to turn themselves into alt.flame', especially given the
sheer number of projects that implode (often at an early stage) because
the technically brilliant guys who start them simply can't interact with
other human beings without being nasty to them?

(and, again, this social oil is hardly difficult to learn: if I can do it
with autism holding me back, so can you. The Golden Rule is the most
important part: `treat others as you would wish to be treated'. I don't
know anyone who actually likes to be attacked. Maybe you do, I don't
know.)

Here we go

Posted Sep 30, 2007 12:38 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

>(and, again, this social oil is hardly difficult to learn: if I can do it
with autism holding me back, so can you. The Golden Rule is the most
important part: `treat others as you would wish to be treated'. I don't
know anyone who actually likes to be attacked. Maybe you do, I don't
know.)

But what if the "guys" are perfectly okay as far as the golden rule is concerned? They're not the ones objecting; it's that new outsider that doesn't understand that this is the way things already work here.

The "golden rule" is a good foundation for social interaction when dealing with individual interactions within an existing group, but like any other generality, it breaks down and indeed even causes problems when you're taking about mixing *groups* of people that may hold different values dear.

Here we go

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:02 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Perhaps so in the general case, but the specific case of `don't attack
newbies' is, I thought, one that most corners of geekdom held too. Some
poeple in the free software community seem to treat it as `don't attack
newbies unless they've made a tiny error, in which case a charred hide
will be good for them' and judging from some other posts in this
interminable thread some people are treating it as `don't attack newbies
unless they are female'.

Golden rule CREATED this problem

Posted Sep 30, 2007 12:57 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Nobody likes to be attacked, but FOSS people can (and often prefer) open attack to behind-the-scenes intrigue or polite allegories.

Yes, it's true that some projects were destroyed by lack of tact, but a lot more were created by the people with lack of tact. Brilliant coders who are good in interpersonal communication as well organize startups and sell them for millions of dollars, not create free software, you know...

Golden rule CREATED this problem

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:39 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

A project which prefers open attack to anything else will tend to drive
away all those developers who don't prefer open attack, sure. That doesn't
mean that open attack is a good thing, especialy not openly attacking
newbies (which is what really drives them away). Behind-the-scenes
intrigue is wrong, as well. `Not being nasty to people' does not imply
`stab people quietly in the back'. The Golden Rule implies that you
shouldn't do that either, unless you personally like being quietly stabbed
in the back, that is. (Few people do!)

I don't understand why you're arguing so hard against fundamental
principles of human discourse here. They're not rocket science. They're so
much not rocket science that they're cliched (`do as you would be done by'
for instance).

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 11:03 UTC (Sun) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (22 responses)

> Proof? There is no proof that will satisfy you.

You mean there is no proof that is based on solid facts? OK, got it. Not something unexpected, though.

> The proof is already all around you

Again blah-blah instead of answering the specific questions...

> What we are advocating for is to be treated with courtesy and respect.

How about showing courtesy and respect to the group you're so badly daring to be part of? You know, men like logics and factual information. This is a result of millions years of natural selection. One thing is, sitting near fire in a cave, to think "I can touch this star! I did it!" (never mind it was a lighting beetle) - this kind or perceiving the reality couldn't hurt the carrier of the gene (or even, at much later historical times, did help to successfully mate); on the other hand, thinking "I can run faster than that saber tooth tiger" immediately resulted in purifying the genotype.

Do follow the rules of the game: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html. Just read aloud the section names one by one and think carefully: did you follow them? Just a few examples:

* Be precise and informative about your problem
* Volume is not precision
* Don't claim that you have found a bug
* Describe the problem's symptoms, not your guesses

etc

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 11:57 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (21 responses)

How about showing courtesy and respect to the group you're so badly daring to be part of? You know, men like logics and factual information.

Non sequitur much? So do women (your just-so story regarding natural selection being as fallacious as most such).

Human beings, of whichever gender, prefer not to be attacked without cause.

I find it notable that basically all the people arguing against common courtesy here are kernel hackers. This reminds me yet again of why I prefer to hack on userspace code (although some userspace development lists are as bad: I avoid them, too).

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 12:14 UTC (Sun) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (20 responses)

> Non sequitur much? So do women (your just-so story regarding natural selection being as fallacious as most such).

Perhaps. You couldn't deny though that in the very specific post none of my rather specific questions were answered, could you?

> I find it notable that basically all the people arguing against common courtesy here are kernel hackers.

Honestly, I don't see anyone (let alone majority) is against it per se. What some people find inflaming/amusing/absurd is to focus on this issue from the pure gender perspective. (I'm not a kernel hacker so perhaps see it wrongly ;-)) When in addition any attempt to get pointers to _real_ facts are being answered like "just look around" _this_ begins to sound _really_ impolite.

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 12:31 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (19 responses)

The only facts I can see in this thread consists of requests from you that
other people should prove a negative. This is of course impossible.

And as for `just look around': can you find *any* other field of human
endeavour with a percentage of female participants as low as free software
development? It's damned rare (perhaps pure maths?), and software
development is not something which appears to be intrinsically male-only:
even if you go in for the `extremes of ability are male' hypothesis, free
software development does not *require* extremes of ability. It's not
*that* hard, and with a global talent pool to draw from we'd expect more
than the well under a hundred female free software developers total that
we see.

Women don't 'choose not to participate' in most fields. It behooves us to
determine why they choose not to participate in this one, and if possible
fix it: not by forcing anyone to participate, not by massive and enforced
changes, but simply because doing things that cause half the human race to
choose to avoid us is a bad way to ensure that we have many eyes to make
bugs shallow and come up with neat ideas. It's obviously a good idea, just
as trying to make small changes that avoid us driving away Indian or
Japanese participants is a good idea.

(And they *do* participate in proprietary software development in larger
numbers. 1/5th of the *programmers* on the thing I work on in my working
hours are female: still not a high percentage but way higher than in free
software.)

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:08 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

I can't find any decent statistics right now, but I suspect that you'll find striking similarities to the rate of males/females which have graduated computer sciense with honors.

I also suspect that this applies to some minorities as well.

(At least this was rather true when I graduated almost 10 years ago).

And this is before one extra factor comes into play: "devoting extra time to the family". Like it or not, women are more likely than men to reduce the work load in order to raise the kids. Unless you claim that much of the free software is developed by "students" and thus this factor is not as strong.

(You can like it or not. You can think of ways for changing that. But those are outside the scope of the current discussion)

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Oct 2, 2007 2:45 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

>I can't find any decent statistics right now, but I suspect that you'll find striking similarities to the rate of males/females which have graduated computer sciense with honors.

I don't have statistics on graduation with honors, in particular, either. It's not a well-defined term between institutions, even. So here are some other statistics for the US, from the same report that we discussed a few days ago in the other thread: http://lwn.net/Articles/251569/

Bachelor's awarded, CS: between 28% and 37% female over the last two decades.
Enrolled graduate students, CS: between 20% and 30% female over the last few decades
Master's awarded, CS: between 25% and 34% female over the last few decades
PhD's awarded, CS: between 15% and 19% female over the last few decades.

All of these numbers are wildly larger than the percentage of females in FOSS coding, which is in the 1-2% range.

>And this is before one extra factor comes into play: "devoting extra time to the family".

This is like the 5th "extra factor" you've made up as previous ones have been shot down, but anyway. This one, for a change, is almost certainly real, but I still dispute its significance.

Suppose that the "natural rate" for women in FOSS would be 15%, because that's the smallest of the numbers mentioned above, i.e. we can be pretty sure it's a low estimate. (In fact, having children is a reasonably common reason for women to drop out of PhD programs, so it already includes some of the effect that you are claiming accounts for the difference.)

Suppose that the "actual rate" for women in FOSS is 2%, because that's on the high side of the statistics I've seen. With those assumptions and if I didn't screw up the arithmetic somewhere, that then means that your "extra factor" needs to explain the loss of *87%* of potential female contributors -- probably more in reality.

Here I also don't have statistics (anyone want to chime in?), but I'm pretty sure that far fewer than 87% of techie women even have kids, never mind having a sufficiently disproportionate share of raising them to keep them from being hobby programmers. I base this intuition on my intuition that way fewer than 87% of the male FOSS contributors have kids, and presumably kid-having is equally distributed between the male and female portions of the population.

...so, uh, do you have a 6th try at explaining why it is like totally not the men's fault not even the ones who like to harass women for fun?

Now we are back to square one

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:17 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

Even if we'll manage to find as many female FOSS developers as there are male ones - it'll only increase "talents pool" two times. Not a big deal.

Lack of female developers is not a problem worth fixing. It's can very well be symptom of something sinister in the FOSS community - that's for sure, but disease worth fixing by itself it's not.

And, BTW, what the big fuss is about: it's free software. You can fork any project you want - and if you'll be successful and your project will have >50% female participants you'll have the power to punish "male jerks" with impurity... Hell - even if just lead developer will be female it'll be enough to establish firm rules...

Why you are concentrating on changing existing, "broken" system ? Free software was not created when RMS convinced proprietary software developers that "software is like sex: it's better when it's free" - it was created when he left MIT and started coding. Why can not "women-friendly" FOSS communities be created this way ???

Starting a women-focused group

Posted Sep 30, 2007 23:19 UTC (Sun) by SelenaDeckelmann (guest, #47907) [Link] (3 responses)

At the risk of opening up a thread that was winding down...

I am the author of the Women in Technology article quoted at the top of the page.

Free software was not created when RMS convinced proprietary software developers that "software is like sex: it's better when it's free" - it was created when he left MIT and started coding. Why can not "women-friendly" FOSS communities be created this way ???

While much of this discussion has ranged outside of what I set out to talk about, I wanted to mention that I am part of a group of people (men and women) who started a software users group whose goal is to get more women involved in F/LOSS. This is a group specifically about programming. We meet in-person, in Portland, OR.

We are in our infancy, but are fortunate enough to have experienced programmers, and enthusiastic volunteers driving the effort. Over the next few months, I hope to have more to report.

Those of you here who have not read my article, I am very interested in what you think about the specific points I made in it. (here it is)

My perspective, in a nutshell, is that I have had an exceptionally positive experience both as a user and a developer of open source software. My goal in writing the article was simply to encourage more women to join us and share in that fantastic experience and community. I see F/LOSS as an important social movement, not just about the code.

It is self-evident that we cannot have F/LOSS without code. But we also cannot have code without people. I think that we all benefit from actively inviting into our communities people who are different from us - different genders, different ethnicities, different cultures or political beliefs. The discussion that occurred here is remarkable because of the willingness of people of polar-opposite opinion to (mostly) rationally discuss a very difficult problem. If there is one advantage the open source community has relative to the rest of the world, it is an abundance of people willing to listen to other points of view and be persuaded.

And with that, thanks for listening. Feel free to contact me directly. I am fairly easily found through google at this point.

Starting a women-focused group

Posted Oct 1, 2007 0:39 UTC (Mon) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (1 responses)

> While much of this discussion has ranged outside of what I set out to talk about

Indeed.

> I am part of a group of people (men and women) who started a software users group whose goal is to get more women involved in F/LOSS. This is a group specifically about programming.

I wish you good luck (though somewhat skeptical about groups formed to follow more than one agenda, and mostly orthogonal ones at that).

> Those of you here who have not read my article, I am very interested in what you think about the specific points I made in it.

OK, I did re-read it, and I guess the only point which I disagree with is ...

> I think that we all benefit from actively inviting into our communities

... that word "actively". Perhaps we mean it differently, but to me, it associates with "forcibly". I hate it when _I_ am "actively" being involved into something, so expect others might find it rather unpleasant, too. I believe the internal barriers (== discrimination, doesn't matter against women or any other subset of the mankind), in cases when they exist, should, if possible, be dealt with instead.

PS. Oh, and the title. Perhaps you believed that "To Sir, with Love" would ring the bell and make the connotation obvious. It didn't for me - not until I googled for it (and that happened only after I had read the article, confused by an apparent lack of connection between the title and the body).

What I mean by active

Posted Oct 1, 2007 1:21 UTC (Mon) by SelenaDeckelmann (guest, #47907) [Link]

Thanks for having another look.

... that word "actively". Perhaps we mean it differently, but to me, it associates with "forcibly". I hate it when _I_ am "actively" being involved into something, so expect others might find it rather unpleasant, too. I believe the internal barriers (== discrimination, doesn't matter against women or any other subset of the mankind), in cases when they exist, should, if possible, be dealt with instead.

Fair enough. I meant active as the opposite of passive. Speaking for myself, I did not think anyone would want to hear my opinions on technical subjects in a user group - until a friend asked me to speak up. My point in the article was that asking someone directly for their opinion, or letting them know that their participation is wanted, can encourage a person to participate. That's very different from forcing people.

Honestly, I don't think that it would be possible to force women into IT. It is certainly possible to invite them. I've "recruited" a few women from other disciplines to get CS degrees myself.

PS. Oh, and the title. Perhaps you believed that "To Sir, with Love" would ring the bell and make the connotation obvious. It didn't for me - not until I googled for it (and that happened only after I had read the article, confused by an apparent lack of connection between the title and the body).

I'll try to pick a better title next time :)

Good luck

Posted Oct 1, 2007 5:16 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Wish you success - if you'll succeed it'll be sample which can be pointed out as "you don't need to tolerate jerks and misogynists to achieve success". Just don't forget that for most men "creation of place where both women and men can participate equally and where women do not feel ostracized" is not a success by itself (you successfully created yet another way to waste time? congratulations! we sooo don't need this). Something used by all major distributions or something touted as "major new feature" in one of them - this will be a success...

P.S. May be "just" 200% increase in number of Linux desktops in area can be considered success (but here I'm not sure: since it does not have global impact it's easy to say that such increase was a reason why your group survived, not a consequence of it's existence).

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:30 UTC (Sun) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (4 responses)

> The only facts I can see in this thread consists of requests from you that other people should prove a negative. This is of course impossible.

What is impossible? E.g. LKML archives are there for everyone to look & search. Show me examples of female participants being treated rude based solely on the gender issue. Have problem, eh? On the other hand, the flame level against males there is very high ;-)

> It behooves us to determine why they choose not to participate in this one, and if possible fix it:

Good. And what does one get trying to pinpoint the possible causes? An extremely helpful anything between "look around yourself" and "you are the problem". If anything, this could only worsen the deal.

> And they *do* participate in proprietary software development in larger numbers.

And certainly you couldn't imagine there are other factors beyond the sucked-out-of-the-thin-air *isms... Like "participation in proprietary software development" provides immediate revenue in the form of cash - which perhaps helps tolerating assumed abuses. Just one of the zillion of possible explanations.

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 14:12 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

The problem I see is newbies being treated unnecessarily nastily. This
drives all sorts of people away: it is plausible that it preferentially
drives away women (also Japanese and others from cultures where formality
is prized).

I don't see much sign of women being treated nastily *because* they are
women, but that may in part be because there are so few around, so you
rarely see them treated in any way at all: but then we've already had some
pop up on this very thread saying that they were treated nastily (although
as far as I know not on free software mailing lists).

I've seen several projects nearly die because their maintainers drove
everyone away. In some cases the project failed: in some it limps on with
one or two maintainers: in some the project forked. In a sense this is
Darwinian and self-correcting, but notice that the criterion here wasn't
anything technical: it was social... and some of those projects *did* die
(I'd have to dig a bit to fish out their names, though).

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Oct 1, 2007 12:59 UTC (Mon) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (2 responses)

Where are Women/Japanese/newbies being treated harshly? On LKML? that is a technical mailing list, so newbies should indeed do their homework before posting there. And if they don't , they will be flamed for wasting the time of everybody.

If they don't know how to post, they should go to #kernelnewbies instead. That's why it's there.

I try to be nice to beginners. But as you are probably well aware, some of them simply don't read basic documentation or do basic search (Even after being told to. Nicely). Sometimes being harsh is the only way to get the message through. Sometimes even this won't help, and you have to ignore requests for help, or (im)politly answer that you won't answer. And it is not always easy to tell if someone who is asking a question has made an honest effort first.

If I would spend 30 minutes double- and triple-checking before answering to newbies, newbies simply won't get answers and will get frustrated. And answering their questions won't be fun enough for me, so I won't do that.

It's not matter of doing the homework

Posted Oct 1, 2007 14:47 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

It's clash of cultures. Japanese (and to the lesser degree a women) expect to get all criticism in private - never in public. That's just how they were raised. But you can do tons of homework yet still get flames on LKML (it's kind of hard to do everything perfectly from the first try no matter how much homework you've did). Often it's enough to "close the story": they'll go away and will try to invent closed source API to avoid this public embarrassment (among other factors). Of course hackers culture (very much alive on LKML) says the direct opposite: everything should be discussed and all mistakes should pointed out with brutal honest in public.

You can say that it's Ok to ignore quirks of women and Japanese (and thus drive them away) - it's your right, but don't try to say that they are wrong, not you. Actually the sad truth is that there are noone who's clearly wrong - it's clash of cultures and representatives of both honestly believe they are in the right...

It's not matter of doing the homework

Posted Oct 2, 2007 20:42 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Excellently put. (It goes to show, even if someone *is* intrinsically evil
because they disagree with me, they can still be right. ;} )

Proprietary developers are in different position

Posted Sep 30, 2007 14:33 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

Don't know about your employer but in my case I was forced to study "code of conduct" rules and signed paper which signifies that I've read and accepted them - and I can be fired if I'll violate them. There was sizable chunk about "how not to offend female co-workers". I've not seen anything too restrictive from my viewpoint (I do not use soft porno pictures in my presentations, for example), but I can easily imagine guys who'll hate these rules, but will accept them: employer is employer, who pays sets the rules. But now these same rules are pushed in FOSS world - and I see why it does not fly: "LinuxChix is not my employer and not my mom, why should it set the rules for me ?"

When you can give better answer to this question than "we deserve to be treated with courtesy and respect just as any human being" - you'll be ready to set the rules. Because right now most "jerks" are offering you the same amount of "courtesy and respect" they offer "just as any human being": none. Their peers are accepting it, why can not you ?

P.S. It all looks like a story with topless bar: when feminist organizations started to complain male waiters were also deprived of the top... Here we have something similar: the same principles applied to male and female work differently so it's hard to achieve discrimination-less position...

Proprietary developers are in different position

Posted Sep 30, 2007 15:12 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Your employer is a lot more... excessive about it than I am. (Perhaps one
advantage of working in the UK is that employers assume common courtesy
rather than slamming down what is by the sounds of it a ridiculously
overdone spiked iron fist and mandating it?)

I find it interesting that you consider that treating other human beings
with courtesy and respect is *optional*. I suppose it is, if you don't
mind driving most people away and having them call you nasty things when
you're not there. It's a `should do' on the same level as `remember to
shower regularly': if you don't do it, most people will dislike you. (But
perhaps you don't care about having everyone else dislike you and stay
away from you.)

Your comparison of software development to working in topless bars doesn't
even deserve a response. If you seriously think that the two occupations
are comparable, you're beyond help.

(It's amusing to me that I, a diagnosed autistic who had to *learn* this
stuff over several decades and am still very bad at it, am now having to
explain it to other people. I'm normally the one who makes social faux pas
and has to apologise for them: but perhaps the difference is that I care
if I'm doing so, and try to avoid it. Your words strongly imply that you
think that if you piss off other people through being unnecessarily nasty
to them, it is in some way *their* fault. I hope that attitude doesn't
land you in court or jail someday, is all...)

Anyway, I've had it with this thread.

Finally! Breaktrough...

Posted Sep 30, 2007 17:31 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

My employer is US company. They need this paper for accidents. The "no discrimination" hysteria in US is such that company can be sued if it can not prove that it did everything it could to avoid "unjust discrimination". So if they got the paper and someone called female worker "bitch" and than said "bitch" sued the company - it can show that it's employer's fault: he signed papers so was warned.

As for courtesy and respect - yes, that's the problem. Respect is not a right. It must be earned. And optionality of needless courtesy is often considered a feature among FOSS developers.

And the topless bar story just shows that the same rules when applied in the exact same way to male and female can be acceptable for male and offensive for female. If the situation in FOSS is not like that then my comparison is wrong, of course, but then the question arises: what's the hoopla is all about if rules happily accepted by males are driving females away ?

Proprietary developers are in different position

Posted Sep 30, 2007 22:32 UTC (Sun) by mepr (guest, #4819) [Link] (2 responses)

The person who said something along the lines of "I can't think of examples of females being treated badly for being females, but maybe it's just because they are so few" is on to something.
The people who said that women are socialized out of programming were also largely correct, I think.
There is a woman who became a member of the LUG in my town. Her story is interesting. She never learned to play chess because nobody ever suggested to her that it was a good idea. She never learned to program for the same reason. At the same time, her brother was encouraged in these same things, and went on to be a programmer.
In her early twenties, she tries chess and finds out that she's good at it. Then she tried programming and found out that she's good at that. Within a couple of years she was a Debian developer, and currently maintains a fairly well known Debian package.
Unfortunately, she quit going to lug meetings, because despite repeated, direct comments on the subject by her and others, there were a few of the males in the group that insisted on making highly unwelcome, highly sexualized and demeaning remarks.
What is so difficult to understand that there are very few people willing to put up with such things for very long? I have long held the theory that women avoid working in IT because they would rather work in one of the many fields where they will be treated with a modicum of respect and not live through incessant pissing contests at work.

And that is small model of the story of "women in FOSS", right ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 23:11 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

She quit going to lug meetings, because despite repeated, direct comments on the subject by her and others, there were a few of the males in the group that insisted on making highly unwelcome, highly sexualized and demeaning remarks.

Yup. And when time come to choose between "one intelligent woman" and "few male jerks" majority choose "few male jerks", right ? If behavior of people does not change and it's not acceptable - they must be removed from the group. That is the question which should be discussed first: are members of community (LUG, LKML, gentoo-dev, etc) ready to kick out few male members to make women fell comfortable and who exactly can be kicked and who will not be kicked - no matter what. Then you can decide if you want to try to "make women feel welcome". It's tough question - but without answering it you'll only get flames and steam...

And that is small model of the story of "women in FOSS", right ?

Posted Oct 1, 2007 21:09 UTC (Mon) by mepr (guest, #4819) [Link]

Yup. And when time come to choose between "one intelligent woman" and "few male jerks" majority choose "few male jerks", right ? If behavior of people does not change and it's not acceptable - they must be removed from the group. You're right, that's essentially what happened.

Given the dynamics of the group, it would be quite difficult to kick out a person for such a thing. The local LUG is largely run as a very informal, loose association. It was difficult in the particular (non-isolated) incident I am thinking of, because one of the people involved was well liked by most of the group, even though most people there were not happy about it.

However, I am glad to say that the kind of behavior we are talking about is not tolerated on the LUG's mailing list. The rare unacceptable comment generally receives a very strong response and we have never had to kick someone off of the list.

BTW, I hope that my comments (and the summation of this thread) don't make it seem that people who care about F/OSS software are bad people. In fact, a great deal of the reason why I have been involved has been the idealistic community spirit shared by many of us, and the unusually high density of principled people and deep thinkers.

In fact, I usually find that people who love F/OSS software are usually wonderful people that have wonderful significant others. Also, I think the majority of us recognized that we are diminished by having too few women around.

However, I wonder if a culture that is perennially stocked with immature males will take a long time to grow up.

Also BTW, WRT groups that promote the involvement of females in F/OSS, they are performing a needed service. It is just the way of things that people need role models and mentorship, and it is also the usual way of things that people need a mentor that is like them. Isn't the wizard/apprentice one of the oldest stories in hackerdom? If it is more likely for that bond to form between people of the same gender, then such groups provide a place to go for women that look in their immediate environment and don't find a same-gender role model.

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Oct 2, 2007 3:50 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

And as for `just look around': can you find *any* other field of human endeavour with a percentage of female participants as low as free software development? It's damned rare (perhaps pure maths?)

Pure maths -- no way. In the US as of 2001, women get >27% of math PhD's, hold >17% of math postdocs, and >16% of tenured faculty positions in "mathematical sciences". None of these are quite pure pure maths, but. (Source: nsf04317).

In the US there are a higher percentage of female *construction workers* than FOSS contributors -- 2.5%, which is slightly higher than the *highest* count I've ever seen for FOSS. (Source: figure 19c on this page of "eLCOSH"; note that unlike 19a and 19b, 19c is specifically excluding managers, secretaries, etc. -- these are the people actually out doing the work.)

Apparently we are at least doing better than, umm... welders. If we look only at welders, than we're doing great. Makes you feel better, don't it? :-/

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:15 UTC (Sun) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link]

Anecdotal evidence really isn't proof, and not necessarily a strong argument. I'm sure that the things you describe have happened, but things like death threats are simply not common behaviours, and do not show that we have a general problem any more than the occurrence of murders in society as a whole shows that we're living in an anarchic warzone.

Indeed, even more mild forms of apparent sexist behaviour aren't necessarily real sexism - there are trolls everywhere and they will use any line of attack they think will annoy people; in your case that would be sexist remarks, in my case it would be something else. You would think you were being discriminated against unfairly, when you may actually be being trolled in an entirely equal opportunities manner.

Lastly, there /is/ an implied threat in what you're saying. This is a functioning community, and one in which many people who find themselves excluded from wider society find a comfortable home. You are suggesting that this community should be made more like that wider society, that it should behave 'professionally' etc. People fear (not unreasonably) that if the changes you desire are made they will lose their comfortable community, and attacking people as being liars, delusional, and using 'bogus arguments' does nothing to assuage those fears.

My attempt

Posted Sep 30, 2007 15:00 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (16 responses)

OK, since you insist on getting answers, here is my take, all of it IMHO. Just spelling the obvious for evgeny; sorry if it is boring for the rest.

Again these email threats... As has been noted by others, very much like McBride's.

We had a legitimate reason to believe that McBride's threats were just a publicity stunt. We don't have a similar motivation for sexual harassment, do we? If you think that e.g. Val Henson has anything to win, the burden of proof is on you.

There were statements that men and women are different, including IQ distributions. So what? Either these are false - prove it

They are patently false, since IQ tests are designed so that both genders average at 100. Yes, they have to be revised from time to time, as education in the general population grows.

Now may I ask you - what kind of post it was that caused such a response - was it a techie one or you tried to promote something feminist?

Let me speculate: both techie posts and feminist posts. Add 1 for "techie feminist" posts (as in "women in IT"). If LWN elicits this kind of responses, I don't want to imagine what Slashdot can do with it.

By the time (and IF) there is a 50/50 gender balance in the field, either a) the ads will feature both genders equally as well or b) will disappear if a majority find them offensive (so they actually drive potential buyers off).

I get it. So, in the meantime women have to bow to their male overlords and accept our sexist ads.

Why a movement, by the sole virtue of becoming more popular, should become more attractive to women than to men?

It doesn't have to, but a tendency towards equality is generally regarded as "healthy". After all, women in IT are quite common today, and they even do their jobs. While women in Free software are still very scarce.

Let's not call something "a problem" before it's proven as such.

You should ask any female in the field then.

It's only a problem ONLY IF caused by a direct discrimination. So let's talk about cases of discrimination - and we all must do our best to fix these.

I have seen plenty of cases of discrimination in this thread alone. The will to overcome it has been null so far.

Why the hell you're considering the status-quo as a result of a gift from the $DEITY that was seized by those rude males?

AFAICT, many people here are simply questioning the status quo. Others are just defending it with bogus arguments.

Who is preventing a motivated group of women from forming a female-only mailing list/forum/what not and come up after a while with a rival OS or killer app?

The "problem" that you discounted above.

Don't talk about inequalities, show the equality!

We can't since there is a so called "problem". Sorry if it is getting circular at this point.

BTW, do you consider yourself a member of FOSS? Then you've got that myopia disease, too.

Gotcha, that one really hurt! So mature!

Seriously, though. The problem is that a subset of males feel it is their right to be impolite and don't feel the need to be respectful to their less experienced peers, especially when they make mistakes or belong to "the female persuasion".

This immature and unprofessional attitude is luckily not as widespread as our little conversation here on LWN would suggest; on certain dev lists (e.g. Cinelerra's CinCVS) women are welcome and make valuable contributions. The situation can therefore improve with some effort.

My attempt

Posted Sep 30, 2007 16:20 UTC (Sun) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (4 responses)

> We had a legitimate reason to believe that McBride's threats were just a publicity stunt.

No, why? I honestly believe he got a few (perhaps more than a few). I mentioned these as something that should simply be ignored (or treated properly if believed real).

> We don't have a similar motivation for sexual harassment, do we?

?? Who are these "we"?

> If you think that e.g. Val Henson has anything to win, the burden of proof is on you.

And what is exactly about Val? Her articles here at LWN are very well welcomed. Mind to provide a pointer to an offensive post?

> They are patently false, since IQ tests are designed so that both genders average at 100.

So to make at least the average look politically correct? But how can a translation operation alter the _scale_? What about other genetic and hormone differences?

> Let me speculate

No, enough.

> So, in the meantime women have to bow to their male overlords and accept our sexist ads.

Don't look at the ads; ignore them; write to the editor; cancel subscription. I personally choose to ignore - most are tasteless anyway, being they what you call "sexist" or not. BTW, how these ads are specific to our community? They are neither created by us nor, AFAIKT, are different than ads of e.g. coffee or washing machines - and these are basically used/bought by men and women alike.

> a tendency towards equality is generally regarded as "healthy"

Nope. "Healthy" is when any kind of discrimination is absent. Whether it results in equality or not (what is "equality"? 50/50?) is completely irrelevant.

> You should ask any female in the field then.

Like http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/x106.ht... ?

"2.9. Reasons women avoid Linux specifically:

Linux development is more competitive and fierce than most areas of programming. Often, the only reward (or the major reward) for writing code is status and the approval of your peers. Far more often, the "reward" is a scathing flame, or worse yet, no response at all. Since women are socialized to not be competitive and avoid conflict, and since they have low self-confidence to begin with, Linux and open source in general are even more difficult than most areas of computing for women to get and stay involved in."

Which is basically what has been said in this thread earlier (by those labeled by all kinds of *ists). Please notice especially the sentence that starts with "Since women...". The rest of the list doesn't look any specific to FLOSS.

My last attempt

Posted Sep 30, 2007 21:08 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (3 responses)

And what is exactly about Val?

Quoting from her homepage:

Just think, if I ever get to be the first female keynote speaker at a top Linux conference, then I get to look forward to death and rape threats! Awesome! Why do I bother, again?

She is actually reporting from a blog post which is lost, unfortunately. You have plenty other testimonies to make up for it, some of them on this same page.

So to make at least the average look politically correct?

No, by definition. IQ tests are done this way. Men and women are assumed to be equally intelligent. It's an axiom. If you don't agree, you can create your own test and publish it.

But how can a translation operation alter the _scale_?

Easy. An IQ test is composed of many individual tests, and many of them are gender-biased. Let's say there are only two tests: S (spatial, where men fare better) and V (verbal, where women are more proficient, always on average). The final score is

IQ = a*score(S)+b*score(V)

so manipulating the coefficients 'a' and 'b' you can make both genders perform about the same, on average.

An even more difficult problem is to make it look like a normal distribution, and yet they do it. Yes, the Bell curve is there by design.

What about other genetic and hormone differences?

As many people have repeatedly pointed out: irrelevant. All the IQ factors are chosen to equate men and women (or, as psychologists say it, to "remove the gender bias", go figure).

BTW, how these ads are specific to our community?

The word "blatant" comes to mind.

"Healthy" is when any kind of discrimination is absent. Whether it results in equality or not (what is "equality"? 50/50?) is completely irrelevant.

Fine. As you don't agree that there is any discrimination, you can rest now: Free software is "healthy". Never mind that half the population are either absent or actually complaining about inequalities.

[quote from the HOWTO] Which is basically what has been said in this thread earlier (by those labeled by all kinds of *ists).

Not at all: those people have said that women may be less intelligent in account of their smaller brains (MisterIO), that jerks and misogynists can rule Free software as long as they are technically brillian (khim), that open attack is better than polite allegories (khim again), that maybe women are biologically less interested in the sorts of problems and tasks that IT requires of them (elanthis), that acrobatic intelligence would be very rare for a woman (alankila), that you shouldn't expect feminists to use any formal studies to prove their vague points (evgeny), and the like. Never once did you admit that there may be something wrong with the social structures we have built, since they are so hostile to huge sectors of the population (like half of it to begin with). And that is what the HOWTO literally says.

To me it reads between the lines rather like: "most women have to put up with enough crap already in their daily jobs, so they have better things to do in their spare time than stand a bunch of macho jerks". Quite sensible IMHO. Unluckily we are competitive men and tend to persevere in these inane threads. Enough for me already.

My last attempt

Posted Sep 30, 2007 22:13 UTC (Sun) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

> Men and women are assumed to be equally intelligent. It's an axiom.

How divinely simple...

Small correction

Posted Oct 1, 2007 0:09 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

I can not understand if you see the difference, so I'll clarify. I never said "jerks and misogynists" should "rule Free software as long as they are technically brilliant". I just pointed out that it's currently the case: a lot of core developers in a lot of projects are jerks - and proud of it. Not sure about number of misogynists - but there are probably sizable number as well. And they designed the system which suits them. Said system is hostile to probably 90% of population (not just women). This is by design. Is it fair system ? Surprisingly enough the answer is "yes": it's not designed to be pleasing for everyone, but it is designed in such a way as to give everyone chance "to fit". If they want to. The catch is that some rules are hard to swallow for some men and most of women. They are even written - were written for years: Some people assert that many hackers have a mild form of autism or Asperger's Syndrome, and are actually missing some of the brain circuitry that lubricates normal human social interaction. This may or may not be true. If you are not a hacker yourself, it may help you cope with our eccentricities if you think of us as being brain-damaged. Go right ahead. We won't care; we like being whatever it is we are, and generally have a healthy skepticism about clinical labels.

Now the questions is: should this system be changed or not ? If the system will be changed some of participants will become unhappy but it'll probably bring some new developers (some of them female). Before such major change is contemplated the current members must decide that they want such a change (where there are clear leaders they can decide that it's worthwhile goal). Even if it'll drive few valuable contributors away. Change should be driven by insiders, not imposed by unsatisfied outsiders (female or not). "Valuable suggestions" by analytics firms are met with hostility - and linuxchix is version of such an analytics firm from the insiders POV. As long as existing members are happy with the outcome "jerks and misogynists can rule the projects", if most members will decide that it's time to change "jerks and misogynists" will be left in dust. The fork option is always open - and if most developers agree that "time of jerks and misogynists" is gone original project will go the way or XFree86 or Sodipodi...

Basically my point is: "small cosmetic changes" women are asking for are not "small" and are not "cosmetic" at all. This is request for MAJOR REVOLUTION - and should be regarded as such. May be we need this revolution, may be not - I do not know, it's complex question, but to try to say that it's just a question of "few jerks and misogynists" is to oversimplify the problem.

Small correction

Posted Oct 1, 2007 21:43 UTC (Mon) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

Although the quoted paragraph was Eric's rather than mine, I just wanted to put in a small, gentle word as co-author of the essay "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way" that you cited.

Our essay actually did not address misogyny. (Alas, it appears that various forms of that problem are rather more common than I'd hoped.) The passage you quoted is part of where Eric and I attempted to account for a tendency towards extreme bluntness on technical forums that comes across as tactlessness at best, that is part of a pattern of ruthless S/N filtering that people on technical forums who wish to remain productive typically feel obliged to implement.

But that should not equate to misogyny, and I feel pretty confident in saying that neither Eric nor I wished to excuse in any way the hostile and abusive reception that I often see extended to women in technical contexts, especially, to my dismay, those dealing with Linux and open source.

And I might or might not agree with the need to implement particular practical corrective suggestions made by members of Linuxchix (and others), but I'd certainly strongly recommend listening to them very carefully, and in a fair, patient, and receptive frame of mind, because I think you'll (plural "you will") find that they have a strong general tendency to make sense.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmaifa.com

My attempt

Posted Oct 1, 2007 10:09 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (9 responses)

I have to quibble this part here:

>> There were statements that men and women are different, including IQ
>> distributions. So what? Either these are false - prove it

> They are patently false, since IQ tests are designed so that both genders
> average at 100. Yes, they have to be revised

Note that even if the average is the same by design, the shape of the curve may still be quite different. There is some literature showing that this is the case and it's even been used to support the notion that this is why men are more likely to be high achievers: the percentage of population above a certain IQ point is significantly larger. For the average to work out to the same, it's then balanced by greater number of low-IQ men.

Trying to quit

Posted Oct 1, 2007 18:36 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (8 responses)

I don't want to engage in full-scale warfare again, just a small skirmish: you still don't get it. The shape of the curve is there by design too, including the dispersion, just as much as the average.

IQ tries to measure the unknown quantity g, which represents "intelligence" and is hard to even define. It does so by creating an absolutely artificial measure, which includes gender equality in the definition. (Which some people here don't seem to like.) If the dispersion is different for men and for women, that is an artifact of the measure, not a fundamental truth about the unknown g. It is as insightful as saying that it is twice as hot when the temperature in Celsius degrees doubles, from 20°C to 40°C (or 50°F to 100°F, if you prefer).

In short, IQ is utterly useless for, among other things, finding differences between men and women, apart from the obvious: spatial vs verbal aptitudes. forthy makes an interesting comparison below to CPU profiles. (Note the irony: if it was the opposite and women were better at spatial reasoning, a few posters would probably have jumped at the fact to suggest that women are worse at programming since they lack the verbal skills to use our very masculine programming languages. As it is, they are left wondering what on Earth does better spatial reasoning have to do with IT skills.)

Trying to quit

Posted Oct 1, 2007 20:27 UTC (Mon) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (5 responses)

Perhaps we refer to different definitions of IQ. What I mean is: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence>. E.g., see the second figure and the explanation for it.

Wikipedia at its worst

Posted Oct 1, 2007 20:44 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (4 responses)

You mean Normal_distribution_pdf.png, about which the article says: "The diagram shows only general concepts of how curves might compare. It does not represent specific experimental data". Come on, you are bordering the obtuse.

Please read this very informative article by the American Psychological Association, linked from there. It may clarify the situation for you. Then again, it may not.

Wikipedia at its worst

Posted Oct 1, 2007 21:46 UTC (Mon) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (3 responses)

> You mean Normal_distribution_pdf.png

I mean there are scientists who are perfectly happy NOT to use gender-averaged definition of IQ as your previous post explicitly said. This figure TOGETHER with the text RIGHT to it confirms it.

> It does not represent specific experimental data". Come on, you are bordering the obtuse.

If you're interested in the specific experimental data, follow the links to refs below. E.g., let me quote the abstract of Ref. [15]:

"Sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability: more facts"
CP Benbow and JC Stanley, Science 222 (1983): 1029-1031.

Almost 40,000 selected seventh-grade students from the Middle Atlantic region of the United States took the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test as part of the Johns Hopkins regional talent search in 1980, 1981, and 1982. A separate nationwide talent search was conducted in which any student under age 13 who was willing to take the test was eligible. The results obtained by both procedures establish that by age 13 a large sex difference in mathematical reasoning ability exists and that it is especially pronounced at the high end of the distribution: among students who scored greater than or equal to 700, boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1. Some hypothesized explanations of such differences were not supported by the data.

-----

Now you can go to the library and read the full article. Alternatively, call this sexism and be PC-happy.

Careful with your terminology

Posted Oct 2, 2007 6:20 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

You will notice that the referenced article is not about "IQ", but about mathematical reasoning. When using these culturally loaded terms in a scientific frame so that we can distinguish between prejudices and legitimate differences, rigor is crucial.

Careful with your terminology

Posted Oct 2, 2007 11:56 UTC (Tue) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (1 responses)

> When using these culturally loaded terms in a scientific frame so that we can distinguish between prejudices and legitimate differences, rigor is crucial.

I did suggest we might use different definitions - to which you extremely politely replied "you are bordering the obtuse."

With linguistic issues aside, do you accept that (i) certain intellectual abilities (in this specific case, abstract math) might differ significantly between the representatives of the two genders and (ii) these abilities might be crucial for a success in certain FLOSS projects? You know, at least as _hypotheses_ that may merit civilized discussion instead of shouting "liars" and all kinds of "*ists".

These 13-year boys and girls are now around 37 - more or less the average age of e.g. LKML, if multiple photos from all kinds of kernel summits are indicative.

Now, one can go to great length discussing whether these differences are at the genetic level or somehow socialized (those dolls... I wonder why no parent sued the manufacturers of these toys resulting in dumbing down their daughters - and that in the US, known for successful multi-million absurd cases!). There are _scientific_ works on these subjects as well. But these are extremely off-topic. Not to mention that an absolute majority, if not 100% of us are not specialists in the field.

Whatever the actual causes of the disproportions are, any attempt to "actively" bring in an abstract "equality" are doomed. The best we can do (and I believe most of us are doing it anyway) is to fight against any sign of _direct_ discrimination and try hard to avoid prejudicing.

Let us operate with _facts_, clearly label _assumptions_ and _personal_ experiences as such, and be tolerant to opinions which break taboos (even when you honestly believe this is an axiom and not a taboo).

Careful with your terminology

Posted Oct 2, 2007 17:21 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I did suggest we might use different definitions - to which you extremely politely replied "you are bordering the obtuse."

You did suggest your own alternate definition for the same term, "IQ", which has a perfectly defined meaning already. I only replied the quoted sentence when you tried to use as explanation of your alternate definitions a wikipedia graph about normals which you can find in the corresponding article. Sorry if I'm being pedantic, but as I explained it is especially important to use the right terms in this area.

I accept your suggestions (males are more profficient at some abilities than females, and those may be crucial for certain FOSS projects), but I don't think they are very likely -- or relevant. As to the rest, all you say is perfectly reasonable and I think we mostly agree.

Trying to quit

Posted Oct 2, 2007 17:50 UTC (Tue) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

> ... an absolutely artificial measure, which includes gender equality in
> the definition. If the dispersion is different for men and for women,
> that is an artifact of the measure, not a fundamental truth about the
> unknown g.

This looks like a contradiction to me. If measurements are corrected to produce identical result ("gender equality in the definition"), then how could the dispersion end up being different? And why wouldn't some approximation of the "fundamental truth" about g not be found in the gender bias function used to correct the results for equality?

No contradiction

Posted Oct 2, 2007 21:18 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

IQ tests must be corrected from time to time, or the results tend to drift. For starters, among civilized populations IQ grows about 3 IQ points per decade. Since the average for a large population must be 100, by definition, the test results must be adjusted.

I'm no expert, but I can imagine that variations in dispersion between genders are possible too. Giving more weight to tests with bigger variance on one side and smaller in the other, and recalibrating to keep the same average, would eliminate the gender bias. Or maybe it is a statistical artifact from an imperfect fit to a normal. Remember, the normal distribution in IQ scores is there by design; nobody really knows if intelligence itself (whatever it is) follows a normal distribution or not.

And why wouldn't some approximation of the "fundamental truth" about g not be found in the gender bias function used to correct the results for equality?

Because g is not an intelligence profile; it is a scalar factor. Again from APA:

Some theorists (e.g., Spearman, 1927) have emphasized the importance of a general factor, g, which represents what all the tests have in common

This factor, in other words, represents "intelligence" itself, not ability at specific tasks. It is the thing that makes people solve problems better than chimpanzees or gorillas. It is what makes disabled children unable to learn beyond a certain point (as opposed to those with behavioral issues). Even its existence and utility is also a contended issue; read the article for a good introduction.

My attempt

Posted Oct 1, 2007 16:57 UTC (Mon) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

They are patently false, since IQ tests are designed so that both genders average at 100.

That's only the bottom line. These tests don't try hard to make women score good on 3D recognition, and they don't try hard to make men score good on wording stuff. They actually use a mix of all these different skills to drive the overall score to 100 for an average person (gender independent). So while the test makers acknowledge that there are different "performance profiles" between males and females, they also produce a gender-neutral result. If you like to, you could probably also go on spec.org and create a CPU-neutral benchmark (e.g. neutral between Athlon and Core 2), by deliberately changing the weight of the particular benchmarks (there are enough of those that you can probably solve the equation for quite a number of CPUs to be "equal"). It now no longer tells you which CPU is "faster", but it still will tell you which is faster on 189.lucas (or whatever particular benchmark you choose). Still note that a different "performance profile" of the average male/female doesn't mean that a particular woman is bad at math or a particular man has problems with words. It's just statistics, it just tells you "how many".

And remember, it doesn't have to be an actual "hard" skill. FOSS development is not just about being able to do it, but also about being motivated to do it. You don't get money, it doesn't boost your career, at least not instantly. A lot of capable male software developers will refuse to do FOSS just for this reason. And since FOSS development is not "cubicle based", it also means that you won't meet you peers in person very often. You discuss with them on mailing lists, with a lot of heat on them. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. That's the attitude. It can drive away quite a number of people, not just women. A number of high-profile people are famous for being difficult to work with (RMS, Theo de Raadt, recently I've the impression, Linus Torvalds wants to join the list). Maybe being a jerk is a particular required skill for some kind of work in FOSS. Especially when you want to pave a road that's full of thorn bushes (like RMS did). If it's so, we can't get rid of it and we know why so few females participate: There are just so few female jerks (just kidding. Being a jerk is unfortunately not limited to one particular gender ;-).

All this together can make a huge difference in numbers. Some of them can be changed, some of them can't. E.g. if we found out that capable women rarely seek endeavors for themselves (that's how most of the men ended up in FOSS), we might need to build up a mentoring system to get women to participate. If women can't stand the heat of a mailing list discussion or IRC, we need some other communication mean. Maybe women developers prefer talking to each other on the phone? I don't know, many male developers prefer telephone conferences as well, but few of them end up in FOSS development. So some of these changes could expand the community in other directions as well.

What is probably a wrong approach is an accusing tone. If some outsider comes in and without having any other merits, tells me "you scare me off because of <insult>," would I follow that advice? Probably not. There might be some truth behind the insult, but being open about other's faults doesn't work out that well. You don't report outright bugs. You report problems. The problem might be you yourself; the problem in software is often located 50cm in front of the screen. In social interactions, it's even more often. This procedure is well known here, we can deal with it. Follow it, we can find solutions.

Good. Now we have a list and can discuss it.

Posted Sep 30, 2007 10:04 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

1. Threats of sexual assault via e-mail.

Hmm... Guys usually get death threats exclusively, gals are often sexually harassed too. Do you advocate switch to death threats in both cases ? Hard to do and I'm not sure what it'll change...

2. Disparagement of women's abilities, in these very comments no less.

Fact of "real life" translated to FOSS. Note that this "diparagement" is often encouraged by these same "victims" when it's convenient for them in real life.

3. Objectification of women as sexual objects -- post a comment as a female to Slashdot and you'll see what I mean.

Hmm... If you do say that you are female in the post - you started the process of objectification (why should it matter if you are female or not?), the same - when you use nick like "tuxchick": first you point out that the most important fact about you is the gender and then you complain that people are concentrating on that. This is illogical. If don't concentrate on gender in your post - you'll get few derogatory comments anyway, but that's just how Slashdot is: there are always a lot of jerks around and they are always ready to attack gender, religion, nationality, etc.

4. Sexist advertising in major Linux journals.

Fact of life. If this page has 14 females on it (half of them pictured as sexual objects) and only 5 males - why do you expect "Linux journals" should do better ?

5. Soft porn images in illustrations in major Linux journals.

Hmm... Never seen such a problem, but Ok - this item probably real: I just don't real "major Linux journals".

The rest of post explains how we should fight sexism by treating women differently than men and mixes conclusions with premises so I'll not discuss it.

Good. Now we have a list and can discuss it.

Posted Sep 30, 2007 11:46 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

Ah, right. So women are acceptable if and only if they hide the fact that
they're female, and if they don't hide it then they deserve to be attacked
on the basis of gender?

It's odd that this only seems to apply to *women*. I don't notice anyone
criticising `AnswerGuy', for instance, for daring to use a similarly
gender-indicative term as part of his nick: and nor should they. Using
`AnswerGuy' as a nick is not the same as yelling `all that matters is that
I am male; I am a hunky beefcake and all I'm good for is male-only
tasks'[1]; equally, using the nick `tuxchick' is not saying `all that
matters is that I am female; I am asking to be attacked on the basis of my
gender'.

We've seen this before: it's the `she was asking for it' `explanation' for
all kinds of attacks on women based on things like how they dress. This
time it's only being used to `explain' a nasty attitude, but it's still
logic as faulty as when it's used to `explain' assaults.

[1] among my relatives this is pretty much restricted to 'doing the
cooking' :)

(this really is a consciousness-raising thread. It's damn valuable for
that alone.)

Good. Now we have a list and can discuss it.

Posted Sep 30, 2007 12:47 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

"Guy" doesn't really have strong sexist conotations. Chick, on the other hand, does (as opposed to "girl", "gal", etc.). A better example thus would be someone calling himeself "AsnwerStud" or a similar nick name.

Good. Now we have a list and can discuss it.

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:03 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

This is an English-language dialect difference, I think.

Good. Now we have a list and can discuss it.

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:07 UTC (Sun) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

> I don't notice anyone criticising `AnswerGuy', for instance,

Has he ever been after any gender-related issue? I don't remember. Similarly, I don't remember "tuxchick" being in any slightest manner being offended in any technical thread here at LWN. Can you provide a link showing otherwise?

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 30, 2007 4:50 UTC (Sun) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (1 responses)

When did I obstruct anything?

"why aren't you concerned with all of these OTHER Very Important Issues? Since you're not, that invalidates your position! yay I win!"

I din't say that, nor imply it, though I can see how you might read my sarcasm incorrectly. Note that I never said that there was an "important issue" at all. I wasn't implying that getting black people into IT was more important than getting women into IT - was implying that it's stupid to take one tiny little part of the "different groups of people in broad generality have different interests and goals" reality and rabidly attack it.

You realize that in order for a woman to be driven away from IT by discrimination, she'd have to ENTER the IT field in the first place, right? Or even take some classes, or _something_. I don't see that happening. A professor can't discriminate against a student not in his class. An employer can't discriminate against an applicant who doesn't apply for the job. A computer professional can't discriminate against an employee who doesn't work at his company.

I'm all different sorts of minority myself, based on my hobbies, likes and dislikes, and so on. I'm into a lot of stereotypically "feminine" things - but you don't see me trying to convert all my male friends over to it because I think it's totally politically incorrect for them not to be. Instead of trying to make my male friends learn an ounce of interior decoration or fashion sense, I ask the people I know who absolutely adore those things (hint: they're all women) when I need advice or want to go shopping.

I'm sure some dipshits are going to call that sexist, instead of recognizing a simple truth - for whatever reason, guys aren't generally into it, girls generally are, and I'm one of the oddballs who breaks the stereotype. It's not politically incorrect, it's just a part of life. There is far more that differentiates men and women besides their reproductive organs, and people who want to either eliminate those differences or try to ignore them are jackasses.

"Since I (willfully) don't see a problem, there aren't any!"

Way to add in something completely unfounded to make me seem like a bad guy. I "willfully" don't see anything, hmm? I am actively turning a blind eye to stuff that you for a fact know is happening all around me. By my inaction, I am an accomplice of evil, for sure.

It's wonderful how you feel a need to forcefully imply bullshit accusations about my motives in order to make your point seem more profound. Go ahead and call me misogynistic, prejudiced, and discriminating while you're at it. That will totally make you seem like the holy warrior and me the villain, and you'll totally win the argument.

I don't care what gender, race, or religion you are - the one type of person I will gladly discriminate against is stupid people. And now you can proudly claim that I am discriminating against you, dumbass.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Oct 2, 2007 4:01 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

>You realize that in order for a woman to be driven away from IT by discrimination, she'd have to ENTER the IT field in the first place, right? Or even take some classes, or _something_.

See http://lwn.net/Articles/251569/ and followups, and http://lwn.net/Articles/252602/ . And http://lwn.net/Articles/252605/ , for that matter. In sum, women are doing the things your quote mentions. It's just FOSS that they're staying away from, and there's reason to think that it's not just because they're "not that into it".

It's true that there probably aren't that many black people in FOSS, though I don't know if it's significantly lower than for IT in general. I am pretty sure that black people who do participate don't have to hide their real name when they show up on an IRC channel just to avoid getting sexual advances while they're trying to configure their firewall. If someone wants to make the argument that we are being inhumane to black people, I'll listen and consider it too, but in the mean time the evidence for women is pretty clear, at least to me... and to the point where yeah, I'm willing to call your statements "willful ignorance". Cheers.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 20:31 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

I think the `black people' thing may be a US thing rather than a FOSS
thing (given the country's sad history of racism this is less than
surprising). I can say that in the UK I've worked with, hm... this is of
that subset where I know the nationality, they're recent immigrants, and
there were more than five of them over my career: Pakistanis,
Bangladeshis, Indians, black South Africans, black Zimbabweans, Egyptians,
Iraqis, two poor sods who left Sierra Leone when it went to hell... I
can't really see any shortage here. (Most of them were way above the
average competence level, probably *because* they were first-generation
immigrants.)

And I haven't been working anywhere particularly radical. I suppose the
City of London is the UK's largest melting pot, though...

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 30, 2007 23:52 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Someone has to say it somewhere in this gigantic thread mess: thanks for your words. For an autistic/aspergic you are definitely my hero. A couple of cousins of mine work in the field just as your sister, and I never supposed you people could be so reasonable. There goes another stereotype; again, thanks.

women, get into IT... or else

Posted Sep 29, 2007 23:01 UTC (Sat) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

> Way to toss a pointless insult in there.

Didn't you know about rknop the hero, who can post-factum spend megabytes of virtual tears moaning and whining about a stupid joke [1]? Of course, when fighting the opponents, he himself is allowed to use any language he finds fit. Let feminists talk about double standards...

[1] http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/~rknop/blog/?p=116

Mysogynist by ambient

Posted Sep 30, 2007 11:10 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I can count a grand total of five women I've ever met in the IT field.

Wow, I didn't know that things were that bad in Ann Arbor, MI. No wonder you want to defend the status quo.

In my current job I work directly with 13 people; 4 of them are women. This is not a stellar proportion, but it is something like 30%. In former jobs sometimes there were more, sometimes less women, but a third seems just about right. This would mean I have met about... thousands of women in the IT field. And this is in male-chauvinist Spain, no less.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 6:44 UTC (Sat) by Sertorius (guest, #47862) [Link] (1 responses)

This whole discussion is very "western-centric" (US/Europe/Australia
etc.), but it comes down to a fundamental problem: there aren't very many
women in Engineering and IT in the western world.

You will find the situation quite different in other contries, such as
China, Russia or (gasp) Iran. I am an electrical Engineer, and in
Australia this is one of the most male-dominated professions (much more so
than IT). However, having worked in China, I can say from first-hand
experience that at least 25% of the EE workforce is female (the company I
worked at had closer to 40%). In Iran, more than half of Engineering
graduates are women (my wife is Iranian and is an electrical engineer!).
Russia also has a culture of women in Engineering as so many young men
were killed in World War II that women were recruited en masse
to make up the shortfall - a legacy which remains to this day.

Want to see more women in Engineering? Go overseas! :-)

Funny you should say this.

Posted Sep 29, 2007 8:09 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I've seen a lot of "women in Engineering" in Russia. Testers, designers, writers. And one software engineer - among hundred or so.

I've also seen few women who have title "software engineer" but actually are creating Excel spreadsheets and test plans - and know nothing about complexities, scalability, etc. When they needed some serious redesign of system - invariable they shuffled it to the male colleague or subcontractor... Why they were there and had title "software engineer" ? Yup: they were legacy of "after World War II" era...

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 9:20 UTC (Sat) by Clytie (guest, #47882) [Link] (18 responses)

It's not "just" the constant sexual demands and put-downs, once you're known to be a woman
online. We get death threats.

There are several Women in Computing groups, trying to encourage more female participation
in FOSS. I am a member of some of these, and over the past few years, I have received multiple
death threats, sent both to the list and to me personally. Some of the personal emails have also
threatened to kill my young daughter.

The people sending these emails do not know me personally: they have only seen my
occasional posts to lists like Debian-Women and Linuxchix (my daughter was mentioned,
thankfully not by name, in a post on encouraging more girls to study IT). I am not politically
important in any way: my posts generally deal with voluntary efforts in different free-software
groups. I am a free-software voluntary translator. Most of my contributions to the free-software
world aren't even in a language these people can read.

I am only one of many women in FOSS who have received death threats in the past few years.
It's sick, it's frightening, and I can't say I'm surprised that most women don't want to take these
risks.

Clytie

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 10:31 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

There are men who will attack any prominent women that takes an active role.

I imagine it is because such a woman is seen as a threat (by a process I do not quite understand). These are small men: they will not carry out their threats. The only purpose of the threat is to get you to shut up again.

As a check-in with the real world, when was a last time you heard of a software engineer being beaten (or killed) for being a woman or something like that? It is unthinkable and it just doesn't happen.

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 12:41 UTC (Sat) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] (12 responses)

> We get death threats.

I do hope that you have reported this to the police.

Honestly: if people are getting death threats, that's a serious criminal offence. It needs to be dealt with using the full power of the law, not by running campaigns on mailing lists.

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 16:35 UTC (Sat) by tuxchick (guest, #42009) [Link] (11 responses)

I'm familiar with some of the incidents Clytie is referring to, and yes, the people involved are taking it seriously. They're getting law enforcement involved and making abuse reports to ISPs and so forth. For whatever good it does, but it beats just taking it.

The bigger point, I think, that Clytie is making is that women receive special evil attention simply for being women, and all the people who claim there are no problems are lying or delusional. And that the FOSS world is much too tolerant of evil and hostile behaviors. Me, I don't expect men to come riding in on white chargers to rescue us- I would like more people to admit that there are problems, instead of denying it or expecting us to tolerate them as the price of participating in FOSS. No one should have to tolerate hostile or rude treatment as the price of participating in FOSS. That's so obvious I feel silly having to say it, but obviously it's a debatable issue to a sizable number of people.

As always, the LWN readers are the best, and post the most thoughtful, rational comments. Thank you. This particular discussion is happening all over, and the noise ratio is always a lot higher elsewhere.

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 16:46 UTC (Sat) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] (2 responses)

the noise ratio is always a lot higher elsewhere.

This I find alarming, because in this thread the percentage of commenters who are Lubos Motl (an openly misogynistic physicist who sometimes posts on this topic in physics) is much higher than it is when the topic comes up in physics.

This reminds me of something I read that came out of the discussion of RPG geekdom. Insofar as there are community overlaps and similarities between FOSS geekdom and RPG geekdom, it might be relevant: Give Geek Social Fallacies.

It's not directly applicable, but the "Friends Accept Me As I Am" fallacy sounds related here. FOSS accepts evil behavior because of the social fallacy that we're supposed to accept evil behavior from somebody who's got the chops to be a programmer. It's very ironic, of course, because it's very hypocritical; women find themselves very much not accepted as they are, whereas the misogynists too often are.

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 17:04 UTC (Sat) by tuxchick (guest, #42009) [Link] (1 responses)

Heh, maybe the noise ratio is higher than I realized at first. I still appreciate the intelligent, thoughtful comments.

I think that the "Friends Accept Me As I Am" fallacy is definitely a factor. Five Geek Social Fallacies discusses this, and I think it's right on.

Five GSFs

Posted Oct 2, 2007 12:55 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

I haven't observed these fallacies. Trolls are regularly kill-filed and people reply to their baits with "don't feed the trolls". If they behave too awful, they are kicked out of BBs, where that's possible. It's difficult on usenet and mailing lists where everybody can subscribe and it's technically difficult to kick somebody out. The same thing is true for friends. This GSFs seem to come from a parallel universe. There are a lot of things to debate with geek friends, and maybe you put the priority differently. You may criticize your geek friend for using Ubuntu instead of Gentoo (or the other way round), but his pony tail+goatee hairdress is definitely not important. This sort of discussion - if at all - comes up in political discussion, like "Have you ever been harassed by the police for looking like a long-haired bearded bomb planter?" and you get actual fact based answers on that ("No, I haven't, but the guy next to me with a much better shaved beard has been twice").

We might have different standards, though, but we have standards. If you think in usual academic standards, Linus would have kicked out of usenet and OS development when it came to the famous flamewar with Tanenbaum. Linus just didn't follow the conventions, and insisted (in a rather childish manner) that he (beginner) was right, and Prof. Dr. Tanenbaum was wrong. So we can't remove this sort of "jerks". Today it's probably the other way round, Prof. Dr. Linus (ok, he hasn't got the title, but the reputation) calls some thread "idiotic", like the "large block" discussion, and a few other guys simply continue, because they don't care about reputation. That's how it ought to work, that's our standard. Reputation is nothing, show us the code.

Some people have already complained here about how we treat people who don't follow the conducts, like clueless newbies or "normal people" who just want their computer to be fixed, and no discussion. Hey, it's hard if there are rules and you chose not to follow them or not even to know them!

Do women actually receive special evil attention simply for being women ?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 20:05 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It looks mightily strange to me. How many women who never participated in "let's bring women in ...." campaigns (but are involved in FOSS) got such "evil attention" ? To me it looks like the campaign and participants got evil attention, not just women in FOSS. And I certainly can understand why: to declare "sexism in FOSS" big problem and then to organize sexually segregated group to solve said problem looks just hypocrisy to me, but to misogynists in FOSS it certainly looks like conspiracy a-la SCO. So actual surprise is not that some women got death threats but that they expected they will avoid them!

And yes, that's actual problem with FOSS: since there are so few women misogynists can thrive here. It's kind of catch 22 problem: while women treatment does not affect FOSS misogynists will be tolerated - and women treatment will not affect FOSS till women will not become active participants! Tough problem to solve.

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 21:16 UTC (Sat) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (3 responses)

I would like more people to admit that there are problems, instead of denying it or expecting us to tolerate them as the price of participating in FOSS.

I admit that there are problems like sick people who send death threats to Darl McBride or to females as general, and I think these people should be dealt by the police or mental institues (so I don´t tolerate them) - but what does it have to do with the community in general? Is there anyone in the FOSS community who tolerates these people?

Bye,NAR

Unfortunatelly yes...

Posted Sep 29, 2007 21:26 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

How can you know if someone from LKML or even LWN threatened Darl or someone from Debian-Women group ? You'll probably never know. And since there are so few women in "normal" mailing lists it's hard to catch such guys...

So yes, they are tolerated - not because anyone likes them but because
1. People don't know.
2. People don't care - sometimes actively don't care (we care here only about technical superiority - don't ring any bells?).
If someone if antisocial in general and hates linuxchix in particular but does good technical work - will he be tolerated ? Sadly quite often the answer is "yes" - and it affects not just women.

Unfortunatelly yes...

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:05 UTC (Sun) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

1. How on earth can one tolerate someone, if one doesn't even know him or what he does? Without an object this action cannot be carried out, so a statement like "they are tolerated because people don't know" ha no meaning at all.

2. That someone is antisocial in general or hates linuxchix in particular does not mean that one has to shut him out and ignore his technical contributions. That's his personal views and he is entitled to that, even if I'd personally think he's a dork. Now if he actively offends someone else (e.g. a woman), not even to mention death threats, that's a whole different issue. That's exactly where toleration has to end.

Unfortunatelly yes...

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:41 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I think khim meant that the specific people who made the death threats or
whatever are tolerated in the community because nobody knows that those
specific people made the threats, and that if it was widely known, those
people would (one hopes) be ostracised or in some other way receive
negative social reinforcement. (Being nasty to people who send death
threats seems fine to me. Such people have shown themselves to not be
shrinking violets already.)

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 0:03 UTC (Sun) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] (1 responses)

> the FOSS world is much too tolerant of evil and hostile behaviors

"the FOSS world" is composed of many smallish enclaves. There are plenty of them where people are much too rude for my sensitivities. But there are enough others where I get along fine, so I ignore the rude places.

> women receive special evil attention simply for being women, and
> all the people who claim there are no problems are lying or delusional.

That's a bit strong; please also consider the possibility of ignorance. I have never seen any of the abuse that you're describing; I'm not lying and I don't think I'm deluded.

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Oct 1, 2007 11:40 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

People like you do wonders to get me off my edge with this whole "women in OSS" issue. It is because you seem to oppose what I interprete to be much more radical forms of feminism.

For instance, to cast this "women receive special evil attention just for being woman" in such black-and-white terms as tuxchick is doing doesn't really leave any room for discussion. You either agree with her instantly, or are cast as delusional?

(Well, sure, some women at least sometimes receive some "evil attention" which wouldn't come their way if they weren't women. I can agree to that much, but I feel it's already watered down version of the problem and thus I'm "delusional", no doubt.)

Just how is looking at issues this way supposed to promote any kind of understanding or lead to positive actions to fix the problem. It's obvious that only a few people can be doing this. And they may be nothing more than internet trolls. The rule one of dealing with internet trolls is that you don't talk back to the internet trolls.

It seems to me that we are yet to agree on what the problem specifically is and what should be done to repair it. (And that means getting to level of practical actions, not handwaving about how women are entitled not to feel oppressed, we can agree to that.)

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Oct 1, 2007 13:52 UTC (Mon) by peace (guest, #10016) [Link]

Could you please explain how you know that the threats originated from a contributer to FLOSS? You painting the community with a very large brush given that the Internet is open to anyone and nothing is preventing crazy people from latching on anywhere they choose.

Let me suggest this: There really is nothing wrong with the FLOSS community. The problems that women are finding are do to the larger acceptance of FLOSS in the world and the flocking of all sorts of disturbed individuals to areas where they can easily get attention or strike out in pitiful attempts at having any power at all in the world.

I really have no idea how an actual FLOSS _contributor_ could find the time or inclination to send out death threats to anyone. What would be the point? Don't you think it is more likely we are dealing with your run of the mill jackass here and that it is not likely to be a central problem with all the blood thirsty sociopathic FLOSS developers so prevalent in society?

Kind Regards

Not unique to women at all...

Posted Sep 29, 2007 19:41 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Our friends Darl McBride and Rob Enderle got a lot of death threats as well. The big question is why. I certainly find this hoopla around "women in FOSS" annoying but to send death threats ? Gosh. That's overkill if I've ever seen one... Of course I've not ever sent death threats to Darl or Rob too, so may be I just have wrong mindset...

Not unique to women at all...

Posted Sep 29, 2007 21:25 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

There is no cause so good that fools will not follow it. Subsitute `raving
misogynist maniacs' for `fools' and it's still true.

(well, mostly. I don't think I'll find many raving misogynist maniacs
running women's lib organizations, for instance. But still.)

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Oct 1, 2007 13:13 UTC (Mon) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link] (1 responses)

Okay - this is shocking. This is a potentially criminal matter. One for the authorities. It shows my naivety that I had never imagined that events like this can occur. Can you document this for the community in general? You would be doing a great service if you exposed this kind of behaviour in an explicit and non-anecdotal manner. Can you provide links? You can mask the identities of your assailants if you fear recrimination.

It must be very troubling for you to have your family attacked. I am not faulting you for it but it is perhaps better not to put them in harms way? I would like to offer my support and sympathies. My only consolation to you is that these people (this person?) is all bark and no bite, you can be reasonably sure of that.

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Oct 3, 2007 9:24 UTC (Wed) by Clytie (guest, #47882) [Link]

Sorry it's taken me so long to reply: I can only sometimes be online.

Thankyou for your concern and support. It is indeed a frightening situation, and the police are
involved. They, unfortunately, do not consider the people sending these messages to be "all
bark and no bite". Perhaps some "death threat" messages are sent by blusterers, but the texts I
have received were classified as coming from people who will, in the police's experience, very
likely cause physical harm. :(

I posted in this thread to point out that women contributing to the FOSS world are not "just"
confronted with men viewing them as second-class citizens or as freebies from the Blow-Up
Doll factory. Hostility covers a wide range.

I agree with you that this hostility doesn't reflect the behaviour of all men, or in some places,
even of men in general. I work in over 20 free-software projects, and I invariably encounter
only polite and helpful behaviour. I can't speak for the projects at large, since I specialize in
i18n, but within my area of expertise, I enjoy very positive relationships with all my colleagues.
This applies not only to the large projects, like Debian, GNOME and KDE, but also to the
individual projects, like Mailman and Inkscape.

My male colleagues in these projects have been just as shocked as you by the death threats I
have received, mostly because they have never personally encountered anything of the sort, but
also because they suddenly realize we have no mechanism for reporting such behaviour and
dealing with it.

I believe it will be useful to emphasize the positive behaviour that does exist, and to follow
Ubuntu's example by creating Rules of Conduct for participation. Then we _do_ have a
mechanism within each project, and we have models to follow.

Dealing with hostile behaviour _within_ projects is the key step forward, even if things like
these death threats may attract more attention. Make projects a positive and welcoming place
for people of all backgrounds, and you will increase your membership and QA'd contributions.
This is a win-win.

Outside the projects, it's still frightening to be targetted, but there are some laws in place, and
the people causing the suffering will hopefully be caught and face the consequences. Outside
FOSS projects, it's more of a wider community issue.

Which brings me to something you may have wondered, or asked. Why do I continue to
participate, while receiving death threats against myself and my family? Am I crazy? (Well, just a
tad eccentric, I prefer to think. ;) )

I continue for the reason I've mentioned above. Within the projects to which I contribute, I am
welcomed and valued. I believe it is worth the risk, to experience that kind of community, while
being useful (which is very important to me).

If I had experienced hostility within any of my projects, I would not have felt it worth
continuing in those. Volunteer time in order to get hassled? No, thanks.

So, if you want volunteers and participation, treat your participants the way my i18n colleagues
treat me. Since I have been unable to code for some years now, due to illness, I do not know if
the rest of each project is as welcoming. But you can do your own part in making it so.

Today's XKCD seems to sum it up quite well

Posted Sep 30, 2007 18:05 UTC (Sun) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link] (1 responses)

Entirely by coincidence, today's XKCD comic covers this very issue:
http://xkcd.com/322/

Today's XKCD seems to sum it up quite well

Posted Sep 30, 2007 21:50 UTC (Sun) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

Heh. Thanks for that link.

Something that seems to be missed is how rare people are of any sex who
would enjoy figuring out the differences between Kittler and Otsu
threshold calculations.

I know how rare I am in my interests. I have talked personally to maybe
2-3 people who I can actually learn something from in this field, and I
know how little I know. And there are even fewer women who show the same
interests. I can easily find people on the net who are more knowledgable,
a situation which has allowed free software to exist at all.

Maybe the current atmosphere in free software communities is what has
produced free software. It takes a certain type to spend the time and
energy over years to build a dream. I suspect most software development
shops are production environments, cranking out similar things. Which
attracts a different skill and personality set.

Oddly enough, in an environment where people do what they want, we tend
to see trends that contradict what we think should be. After all the
hundreds of messages in this thread, it comes down to that. Reality has
an odd way.

Derek

Thanks!

Posted Oct 1, 2007 12:03 UTC (Mon) by frodonl (guest, #16826) [Link] (7 responses)

After reading through the comments on this post and on an earlier post, I can only conclude that these articles are clearly needed. Thanks, Rebecca, for posting them!

Frank

Thanks!

Posted Oct 1, 2007 17:42 UTC (Mon) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link] (4 responses)

Seconded.

A couple general points, which nobody will read at the end of the thread...
- many of the posters who are instinctively on edge when these issues are discussed seem to argue "from resentment". I suggest they take some of that brutal honesty and debug their own thought processes. Just answer the question why they get so hot emotionally when asked to respect the fact that people come in different packages. They may be linking to obsolete libraries.
- respect is not a one-dimensional variable. Separate respect for each person as him/herself (this is a right) from respect for technical prowess (this is earned).

Thanks!

Posted Oct 1, 2007 19:44 UTC (Mon) by tuxchick (guest, #42009) [Link] (2 responses)

Thank you, I was intending to make one more post, and you already
expressed what I wanted to say.

"respect is not a one-dimensional variable. Separate respect for each
person as him/herself (this is a right) from respect for technical prowess
(this is earned)."

Well said.

This is a hot-button topic, and it shouldn't be. What's so controversial
about advocating for politeness, courtesy, and respect? What's so
controversial about recognizing that rude, hostile behavior drives people
away from FOSS, to its detriment?

I dare say a lot of this is plain old misogynism, because of course women
are just whiny crybabies who should shut up and take it, and it seems to
be mainly women who are raising this issue publicly. "If you don't like it
here, leave" is not a solution, but a last resort. It happens way too
often in FOSS projects, to their detriment. Maintaining a reasonable level
of civility is hardly something that requires radical re-tooling; just a
bit of self-control and consideration for others.

Thanks!

Posted Oct 1, 2007 22:25 UTC (Mon) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (1 responses)

There are several reasons that this is a hot button topic, including:

- Whatever you think you're advocating, you're calling for a change in
the status quo, that's inevitably going to be looked upon sceptically by
people happy with the status quo.
- Some of us have experiences of the FOSS community that are largely
characterised by politeness, courtesy, and respect; you called
us 'delusional' and 'liars'.
- There are undoubtedly misogynists in the community, that does not mean
that the community is generally misogynistic.

In short, you're trying to change something that many people enjoy, based
on a weakly demonstrated case, and you seem unwilling to engage
meaningfully in debate. Of course you're going to feel resistance.

Thanks!

Posted Oct 2, 2007 14:06 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

One thing about courtesy is when you ask something like "you fucking misogynic jerks, be more polite", you won't get what you want, not even as woman. Think before insulting!

The typical pattern I've seen in this discussion (from the rare woman who starts it) is a list of annoying things, where the fault is always on someone else, usually a group as large as possible ("society" or at least the whole "FOSS community"). Claims to support this alleged fault usually paint only half of the truth - e.g. one of those article mentioned that children visiting a hospital selected themselves for boys as doctors and girls as nurses, when the nurse in the hospital was actually a man, and the doctor was a woman. This ignores that more women study medicine than men, so the prejudices of children don't affect this profession at all. It's a good example that children believe far more in role models than when they are grown up.

Another pattern is that whenever someone brings up some statistics about mathematic skills (which they usually do when the question is "why are so few women in xxx"), the technically skilled women claim it's personally insulting her. No, we are not insulting, we are trying to find a reason. Another reason than "we are all misogynic jerks". And this math problem is not out of thin air - most of the girls I've met during my CS studies complained that the math they were forced to learn was too hard. A significant portion of the men complained, as well. But those people who still were in the computer pool at 8pm and hacked on stuff nobody ever told them to do (e.g. free software) didn't. Or they complained when a particular interesting math topic was removed from the lecture list. This is the part of the population who will do free software; we can forget about the others. They might do commercial software, where someone tells them what to do.

Thanks!

Posted Oct 1, 2007 22:10 UTC (Mon) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

sjj wrote:

respect is not a one-dimensional variable. Separate respect for each person as him/herself (this is a right) from respect for technical prowess (this is earned).

FWIW, I mildly and respectfully ;-) dissent from the popular notion that people (as people in themselves) deserve respect as a claim of right -- at least, as best I understand what you mean by that phrase. People as people merit civility (in the general case[1]), if only because the resulting discourse is more pleasant to read, and less likely to digress into time-wasting, irrelevant psychodrama. Civility is worth speaking out for.

It's possible you actually meant that people (in the general case[1]) deserve civility, in which case I think you'll get very wide agreement. If you think, in contrast, that they have an inherent right to receive a reception that will boost their senses of self-worth, then I suspect you're receive only expressions of concurrence that are insincere and/or tactical.

[1] There are exceptions: Not all people behave in a manner that merits civility, though many will grant it anyway for decorum's sake.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Thanks!

Posted Oct 3, 2007 5:06 UTC (Wed) by zasxcdfvbg (guest, #48002) [Link] (1 responses)

A recent news article relevant to this discussion: Women wary when outnumbered.

Quote: Women feel threatened when outnumbered by the opposite sex, such as in math, science and engineering classrooms

Thanks!

Posted Oct 3, 2007 7:09 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Hey, *I* feel wary when a lot of men are around (like, one), and I *am* a
man.

This cross-gender variation, like all the others, has more variation
within genders than between them. :)

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 4, 2007 14:38 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

Wow, this is the first time that *reading the comments* on an LWN article has caused me to reconsider my subscription.