OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

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.