OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 27, 2009 22:17 UTC (Mon) by CyberDog (guest, #29668)
Parent article: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

So 80% of the 1.5% of the community noticed something, plus 20% of the other 98.5% noticed something. That sounds like it falls between a fifth and a quarter of the community overall. Not trying to trivialize the problem, but those numbers don't exactly sound earth shattering or unusual.

(I recall my computer science classes looking a lot like that kernel summit photo.)

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OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 6:03 UTC (Tue) by PaulWay (subscriber, #45600) [Link] (3 responses)

"That sounds like it falls between a fifth and a quarter of the community overall."

Yes, a fifth to a quarter of the community *notice* that there's a problem. But 80% of women are *having* the problem. I haven't seen a survey that determines how many people in the technical community are *causing* the problem, but for 80% of women to have had this problem I'd say there's probably about 80% of the technical community that are causing the problem.

You say you're not trying to trivialise the problem, but you then go and do that anyway. You're making excuses; you're trying to make the numbers sound less important by doing specious maths with them. Your implication is that if it's not earth shattering we can allow it. If you're going to say you're "not trying to trivialise the problem", then don't.

Let's look at it this way. At what percentage would it *be* 'earth shattering'? When would you say the collective open source developer community should act on this? As Kirrily points out, the aim is not to convert the existing developer population to an even gender balance, the aim is to *expand* the developer population to *include* all the people that want to participate but who are currently being excluded. If we can stop some people in our community being sexist and antisocial then we attract a huge extra group of people who want to be involved.

Have fun,

Paul

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 8:27 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

In other contexts, what you see is a minority of people causing the problem (maybe 10% to 20% of the total involved), but spreading their offensiveness round such that it hits 75% to 100% of women in the group. The remaining people, who aren't actively offensive or offended, often simply don't notice what's going on, because this is fairly standard in any group - it's just that in groups with significant numbers of women involved, those people (mostly men, but not all) who are actively sexist are sidelined until they learn how to behave.

So, I could well believe that only 20% of FOSS participants are actively sexist, affecting all women in FOSS, but not being noticed by other men in the group, as the public face of it is just "jock" behaviour that we tolerate in the Real World. Combine that with the people being sexist not necessarily realising that they're actually offensive, and you've got a bad situation, where women are pushed out of participating, yet no-one can tell you why.

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 29, 2009 19:48 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

I'd argue that it's worse than that. Perhaps only 10-20% of the community engage in outright sexism. But, looking at the comments to most discussions of this nature, significantly more than that appear to expend time and effort arguing that it's not a real problem and that women should just get a thicker skin if they're going to get involved. If we define "the problem" as "involvement in the Linux community is unattractive to women", then those people are part of the problem just as much as the ones who engage in sexual harassment and threats. And it's those people who have to have their minds changed, because dealing with the poisonous minority is almost impossible unless you have the majority clearly on your side.

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 29, 2009 7:31 UTC (Wed) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

>but for 80% of women to have had this problem I'd say there's probably about 80% of the technical community that are causing the problem.

Uh? Pulling numbers out of nowhere isn't helpful.

A small percentage of the population being sexist and the majority of the other being just indifferent (ie this guy made inapropriate comments? Bah, grow a skin) is enough to have a big proportion of women feeling that there's sexism.