What puts women off FOSS? [LWN.net]

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 0:03 UTC (Sun) by endecotp (guest, #36428)
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 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.

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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.)