Proprietary developers are in different position [LWN.net]

Proprietary developers are in different position

Posted Sep 30, 2007 22:32 UTC (Sun) by mepr (guest, #4819)
In reply to: Proprietary developers are in different position by khim
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

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.

to post comments

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.