OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

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.