OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 27, 2009 21:51 UTC (Mon) by jordanb (guest, #45668)
Parent article: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

How is the discrepancy even relevant? It seems like a tautology.

If you were to do a survey of how many blacks notice racism versus whites, would it be surprising that far more of the former do than the later? How about discrimination against the handicapped? Would it be surprising that more handicapped people notice it than non-handicapped?

Why would you *expect* men to notice sexism? Would you expect the discrepancy to be different in *any* other context? Do you expect men and women to notice the same amount of sexism in any other profession, or for that matter, when walking down the street?

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OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 27, 2009 22:29 UTC (Mon) by puzzlement (guest, #51999) [Link] (2 responses)

Roberts' text about that slide is pretty short (she only had 15 minutes), so I can't infer exactly what she intended, but a couple of things.

One possible relevance is that some men will trust their own observations unless they have this pointed out. If a man has some other reason to believe women may have different experiences in the world and that sexism is part of this, he might then distrust his own observations of how frequent it is and be interested in what women and other men have to say about it. But not all men do so, they trust to their own observations, sometimes just because it's what they have, but sometimes to the point of being prepared to deny women's accounts of things regularly (just as many able-bodied people don't realise they should ask disabled people how they're treated, or white people ask people of colour, and then some of them fight different accounts of the world).

So it might seem obvious: there's a systematic pattern of troublesome behaviour towards women, and women have seen it more. But part of the point is validating the first clause of that sentence.

Another possible reading of those figures is that "noticing sexism" could perhaps include having heard and believed an account of it (although not everyone would interpret 'notice' that way). If a lot of men haven't heard the accounts of sexism that many women can give, which means they aren't talking to women in Free Software at all, they aren't talking to women about sexism or they are but they don't believe them.

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 27, 2009 22:53 UTC (Mon) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (1 responses)

There is another alternative; a lot of the communication in Free software circles takes place in public, and on the record, so it's perfectly possible to notice directly something that's not aimed at you - men don't have to only 'notice' sexism by listening to accounts from affected women. A possible source for the discrepancy is that both men and women notice the same things, but differ in whether they believe particular behaviours to be sexist or not.

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 29, 2009 1:47 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

You mean TFA doesn't say that?

Of course that's got to be a large part of it. A large part is also probably Minority Syndrome, from both sides; while women are probably 51% of the population now (which isn't helping *me* get any dates :-), I'd be surprised if they were as much as 20% of the technical population, and 5% of the hacking population.

(Go ahead: someone tell me the 'not getting dates' crack is sexist. If you do, I'll tell you to pull the stick out of what our UK pals would call your arse, and get a sense of humor. Being a grownup *is* a requirement.)

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 5:36 UTC (Tue) by PaulWay (subscriber, #45600) [Link] (2 responses)

"Why would you *expect* men to notice sexism?"

Because if those same men are saying "we don't need to change things, we're not being sexist" then they're deluding themselves. If they then wonder why they don't get any women developers wanting to work with them, then they're blinding themselves to the obvious reasons. Because we expect men that claim to be highly intelligent, rational individuals that spend their lives problem solving to be able to spot problems not just in their code but in their own behaviour.

Just because male developers don't notice this sexism doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that it isn't hurting our community.

Have fun,

Paul

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 7:08 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (1 responses)

My point is, that may be a good reason why you would *want* men to notice sexism, but not that you would *expect* men to notice sexism.

I think one reason that these conversations always end really horribly is that both groups talk past one another.

On the one hand, there is some really offensive stuff that happens in the geek community (like the RubyCon porn presentation, and RMS's bizarre "emacs virgins" thing).

On the other, whenever there's a sexism talk like this, it always seems to expect geek men to quit acting like men. And when I say that, I don't mean to paper over chauvinist bullshit with "boys will be boys." I mean things like pretending it's surprising and wrong that men don't notice sexism.

Looking through that post, I think it's unfortunate that the noticing sexism bit is what LWN chose to highlight. There's some really cool stuff in there about woman-dominated open source projects. I think that's really cool that there are people putting that kind of thing together. I think it *would* be nice to get more women into computing in general, and more specifically to get women to see participating in free software as an acceptable activity.

At the same time, I think the above statistic was counterproductive. I also thought the Linux Kernel Summit picture was counterproductive. Once again, the argument style seems to be to observe that there are very few women choosing to spend their time working on the Linux kernel, and then just assume that it's the fault and the problem of the men involved.

Now, to be honest, it's pretty hard to defend the Linux kernel community specifically. The LKML is so full of douchebaggery and dick size comparison that I think most *men* don't want to have anything to do with it. Calling the LKML out for their bullshit isn't a bad idea.

Once again, the problem is how it's done. Simply *pointing out* that there doesn't seem to be many women in the kernel community doesn't prove anything. You can find many, many non-assholish communities that are still completely male-dominated. Take gcc, for instance. Is it their fault that there don't seem to be many women who want to manipulate ASTs or or tweak register allocation in their free time? Notice that the projects with a lot of female participation are the ones very close to those aspects of computing that tend to interest women more, like blogging and fan fiction. Whenever female participation statistics get trotted out as proof of male pigheadedness, they need to be controlled for other sources of bias, otherwise all you're doing is lying with statistics.

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 29, 2009 17:55 UTC (Wed) by yatima (guest, #59881) [Link]

"...men don't notice sexism."

On the contrary, according to Skud's statistics, 20% of them _do_. What's wrong with inviting more men to join that enlightened subcategory?