Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed? [LWN.net]

Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed?

Posted Jul 28, 2009 12:26 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed? by njs
Parent article: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Even closely related fields, like academic computer science and professional software development, now have *vastly* higher female participation than FOSS.

I have no idea about female participation on FOSS, but at the university and during professional software development I haven't seen more than 10% female participation. On the other hand I'm yet to meet a male assistant, that's a 100% female occupation.

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Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed?

Posted Jul 28, 2009 23:32 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (16 responses)

I'm not sure where you are, or how carefully you gathered statistics, but 10% is consistent with the studies I've seen (though at the low end; 20-30% is more commonly quoted). There's some discussion of this in the parent article.

Female participation in FOSS, on the other hand, is generally estimated at ~1-3% (again, this is in the parent article), and that's wholly consistent with my experience. So we're talking a 3x difference in the best case, 30x in the worst. I think that's consistent with my original statement.

...I can't tell if you're trying to disagree or what, though. Did you have a particular point to make?

Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed?

Posted Jul 28, 2009 23:50 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

how much of the difference is different values and choices in what to do with their free time?

I suspect that you would see similar drops in hobby versions of male dominated careers (construction vs woodworking, auto-industry vs hotrods, etc)

just because there is a differing percentage doesn't mean that there's some grand conspiracy

in the case of opensource software there is less of a difference between day jobs and the hobby (to the point where for some people the day job _is_ the hobby), but it still boils down to what do people choose to do with their free time prior to getting involved with 'the community'

Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed?

Posted Jul 29, 2009 1:59 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, sure, that may be a factor. But it's hard to tell, isn't it, while we *know* that there's blatant sexism at play too? And this kind of explanation can itself be harmful: it's not testable; it doesn't suggest any useful course of action; and anyone who's looking for some way to ignore the real, demonstrable problems can (and does) take it as an excuse to throw up their hands and stop thinking. So, yeah, maybe in a perfect world the gender ratio in FOSS ends up being 40/60 or 50/50 or even 30/70, who knows -- but I don't think that should affect what we do here and now.

(And do you really want to point to hotrodding culture as a model for appropriate attitudes toward women?)

Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed?

Posted Jul 29, 2009 14:44 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

while we *know* that there's blatant sexism at play too?

Do we really know? I accept that there's blatant sexism, but how can know it doesn't drive away males as well in the same ration as females?

Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed?

Posted Jul 29, 2009 19:52 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Can you propose a plausible model for why sexism against women would drive away men in the same proportions?

Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed?

Posted Jul 29, 2009 22:13 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If it drove away 90% of men the mailing lists and user groups would be
exploding. The very suggestion is utterly ludicrous.

Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed?

Posted Jul 29, 2009 1:57 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (10 responses)

I would assert that given the small percentage that what we view as the FOSS community comprises of the total CompSci/programming/engineering communities, that the issue is statistical noise.

Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed?

Posted Jul 29, 2009 2:40 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (9 responses)

I'm not sure what you mean by "statistical noise". In the social sciences, that would mean the uncertainty about a figure like "1.5% female participation" caused by only surveying a small number of people. You seem to think it has to do with the size of the community itself, though, so you must be talking about something else?

In any case, the FLOSSPOLS survey had 1541 participants, which is huge. With that many respondents, the uncertainty in an estimate of 1.5% is only about 0.7%. We're talking about an order of magnitude difference in large studies. Statistical noise is just irrelevant.

Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed?

Posted Jul 30, 2009 1:38 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (8 responses)

What I meant was that 1 death threat in 5000-10,000 developers in a (relatively) small social space such as FOSS development stands out quite a bit more brightly than 1 death threat in 400,000 people in a metro area, or 5M in a state, or 307M in the US.

That doesn't belittle the threat; it merely points out that the difference between 0 and 1 is much larger than the difference between 1 and 100.

Statistical significance

Posted Jul 30, 2009 20:23 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (6 responses)

Your previous statement (FOSS communities are statistical noise compared to the larger scientific and engineering community) made little sense. Now what you say has no meaning at all.

Catastrophic events are not usually measured statistically: comparing them to the whole population is meaningless. Otherwise we would dismiss earthquakes as "statistical noise", since they happen very rarely at any point on the Earth crust. Or, say, nobody would have cared about the Tiananmen killings or the WTC attacks since the probability to die in any such events is "statistically insignificant" across the whole population. Nevertheless it may be interesting to put the whole thing in perspective, such as comparing it to the much worse death toll of traffic accidents, but a comparison cannot hide the horror of a massacre.

One death threat is one too much and should be repelled by any human being, be it in the whole US or in a small town, but especially from within Debian developers given what Debian stands for. What is the use of pointing out its "statistical insignificance"? I can only think that you are trying to hide the fact that they are horrific events, and that is sad.

Statistical significance

Posted Jul 30, 2009 20:33 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (5 responses)

Sure, cause that's a perfectly reasonable derivation to draw from everything I've said here.

You're makin stuff up now; quit it.

The point remains, though, that however you characterize a death threat, and howver you characterize "everyday" sexism, they have little to nothing to do with one another, and things which might mitigate the latter will have pretty much no impact on the former at all -- it's not a discomfiting behavior pattern based on a difference in perception, it's a *crime*.

Even the threat, in case people have missed that, is a crime -- a felony in some jurisdictions, depending on how it's phrased and delivered.

Here, though, it's just a red herring. Trying to tie it to other behaviors you consider sexist merely makes you look like you have no other rhetorical points left to make.

Statistical significance

Posted Jul 30, 2009 21:17 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (4 responses)

I am sorry if I misunderstood you but I honestly don't see how.

Anyway, you are right that I don't have many rhetorical points to make. The fundamental issue is this: there are very few women in free software projects and that is a problem. You may disagree about the reasons or about the remedies but if you don't see the problem then we don't have a common ground.

After this acceptance, we may start discussing whether death threats specifically made to women participating in Debian (according to the DPL: "harassing women for supposedly destroying the free software movement") are sexist or not. Once we determine that they are, we may try to link them to other sexist behaviors because, well, all of them are sexist -- that is the common link. But until you see the problem there is certainly no point in all of this.

Statistical significance

Posted Aug 2, 2009 22:33 UTC (Sun) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (3 responses)

> there are very few women in free software projects and that is a problem

For the projects?

Or for the women?

If the former, show your work; I'll stipulate the latter as a problem (to the amazement of some of my detractors here, probably).

Statistical significance

Posted Aug 3, 2009 20:22 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Excluding half the human race from any endeavour is a problem.

If you only listen to purely economic arguments, look at the leap in GDP
of most nations when it became common for women to have jobs.

It appears that we are, intentionally or not, excluding women from our
endeavour. Thus...

Statistical significance

Posted Aug 12, 2009 23:09 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not half the human race. It's "the women who would participate in OSS development but aren't going to now because we do things they don't like". That is a fairly small number and, given current CS enrollment statistics, amounts to /maybe/ 10% of the current OSS developer base.

So, if we spent some enormous time and effort eradicating whatever these women consider "sexism" from all OSS projects everywhere, we'd get a 10% boost in developer numbers. We'd have to subtract from this all the men we lost because we either kicked them out for being "sexist", or they left because OSS development wasn't fun for them anymore.

I put "sexist" in quotes because it doesn't really matter whether the behavior is sexist or not based on any legal or reasonable definition of the term; all that matters is what these women consider sexist, which, importantly is likely to be a much more expansive definition. It might be impossible to reject a patch from a few female contributors -- for any reason -- without being called "sexist" by them. Since some patches need to be rejected, regardless of the gender of the contributor, we'd need to create some official definition of sexism and then have ways to try accusations. This administrative overhead would be an additional cost to be deducted from that 10% figure.

I don't doubt that there's some actual sexism in OSS. There are assholes everywhere. But, from a practical standpoint, sexism in OSS is, always has been, and always will be a complete non-issue. We're talking about volunteer groups, not companies with a legal obligation to pretend to care about this particular type of assholery, and these groups of volunteers have all naturally created behavioral standards that by and large work well for them. They'll expel the worst assholes without prodding, but most people learn when they are children that it is usually fairly easy to ignore assholes, so they'll let "productive assholes" stay on and just mentally killfile them. This is exactly the right response. Outside of groups like Debian that /enjoy/ doing everything with a tour-de-force, no one will ever care if a few whiners claim they're being discriminated against even though they're being invited to contribute with open arms -- just like everyone else -- and no one ever should.

Statistical significance

Posted Aug 12, 2009 23:27 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

We have repeated evidence of death threats being received. Thinking that
this is problematic is not 'whining'.

Active discrimination, or feeling oppressed?

Posted Jul 30, 2009 23:38 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

I just checked, and no-one in this particular sub-thread has mentioned death threats besides you. There've been several *other* examples of horrid behavior endured by female FOSS developers, and a discussion of the exact percentages of women in FOSS vs related fields. You clicked reply on that comment and typed "the issue is statistical noise".

Now you say that "the issue" you meant was not, you know, the statistics in the comment you were replying to, but actually the number of death threats specifically?

Point 1: Either you're wildly inarticulate and expect your readers to have magic psychic powers, or you saw the responses you were getting, changed your mind, and are lying about what you originally meant. I realize neither of these is very charitable, but I don't see any other explanation -- feel free to offer one.

Point 2: Assuming you were talking about the statistics of death threats -- why? That's not what we were talking about. If you want to talk about the astonishing rarity of females in FOSS, or harassment in general[1], then that's responsive. Focusing in on death threats and how they're really not a problem just makes it look like you want to quash substantive discussion by changing the subject to something you think you can argue with more effectively.

Point 3: Your comment text here is arguing that 1 death threat in FOSS is a really big deal (you point out that it's a relatively large number given the size of the community, say it "stands out brightly", it's a "much larger ... difference"). But you seem to conclude from this that 1 death threat is not really important. Even assuming you were trying to address the point at hand, your argument makes no sense. (Nor is a death threat a minor occurrence, regardless of statistics, especially when it occurs as part of a broad spectrum of harassment.)

Point 4: Even if your argument made sense, it assumes that death threats are rare and isolated. A quick google reveals that debian-women and LinuxChix (and others) have been receiving regular death threats over a multiple year span. And, of course, even the original article here says "death threats", plural. So where did you get the idea that there was only 1 death threat anyway? It makes you look like you value your preconceptions over facts.

Conclusion: You come across as a sexist troll thrashing about wildly in an attempt to derail the discussion. Stop it.

[1] For example: "The O'Reilly thread about this has discussion of comments like "who'd you sleep with to get that patch accepted?" and how much more bearable things are if [they] adopt a non-female pseudonym."