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

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)
In reply to: Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ? by evgeny
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

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).

to post comments

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. ;} )