What puts women off FOSS? [LWN.net]

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 16:46 UTC (Sat) by rknop (guest, #66)
In reply to: What puts women off FOSS? by tuxchick
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

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.

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.

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.

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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!