OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd [LWN.net]

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 8:27 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd by PaulWay
Parent article: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

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.

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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.