To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

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)
In reply to: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet) by graydon
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

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.

to post comments

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.