There's one final comment I want to make here. [LWN.net]

There's one final comment I want to make here.

Posted Jul 29, 2009 20:13 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: There's one final comment I want to make here. by Baylink
Parent article: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

The problem with saying that we should apply exactly the same technical standards to men and women is that it's a wonderful example of setting up a straw man and then knocking it down. People aren't unhappy about being judged on their technical ability. They're unhappy about the crap that goes along with it.

Let's go back to your firefighter example. We'll keep the physical tests - if you pass them, you're in. But anyone born on a Tuesday has to either pay $5000 or be viciously beaten with an iron bar before getting to take them. What do you think that's going to do to the proportion of people born on Tuesday in the firefighting community?

The objective is to remove the additional barriers that make it harder for women to get to the point where they can prove themselves technically in the first place. Not to give women a free pass.

to post comments

There's one final comment I want to make here.

Posted Jul 29, 2009 20:28 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (19 responses)

> But anyone born on a Tuesday has to either pay $5000 or be viciously beaten with an iron bar before getting to take them. What do you think that's going to do to the proportion of people born on Tuesday in the firefighting community?

And you suggest that... *what* barrier to entry into FOSS development constitutes that?

Cause unless you can make a case for that analogy in fairly fine detail, I'm going to call *it* a strawman argument, right back. :-)

There's one final comment I want to make here.

Posted Jul 29, 2009 20:31 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (18 responses)

I'd have thought that harassment, occasional threats of violence, continuing belittling of contributions, prevelance of sexualised environments and so on could be reasonably construed as factors that may discourage people from being engaged in the community for long enough that their technical abilities can be fairly measured.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

Posted Jul 29, 2009 21:16 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (9 responses)

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Are there any actual numbers on "number of total developers/number of female developers/number of incidents"?

There's one final comment I want to make here.

Posted Jul 29, 2009 21:34 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (8 responses)

81% of women surveyed in the FLOSSPOLS study felt that it was easier for men to gain recognition than women. 75% of them had observed discriminatory behaviour (55% of them within projects they were directly involved in). While arguably not statistically rigorous, there's been at least two cases of "I hope you die" type attacks on the debian-women project - given the proportion of women in the project as a whole, we'd expect there to be somewhere like 200 against men. I haven't been able to find any.

Do you have any numbers at all to indicate that these issues don't disproportionately affect women?

There's one final comment I want to make here.

Posted Jul 29, 2009 21:48 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (7 responses)

I do not.

But the undertext is "most male FOSS developers are assholes".

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I'm not the one making that claim.

Clearly, men and women perceive social interactions differently. I haven't heard any reports for trained social scientists who are accustomed to avoiding gender based perception bias; are there any? I'm not saying that lots of male developers are not understating the case... but everyone seems to be assuming that all the females are being perfectly objective, and not *overstating* the case in their own anecdotal reports, and that doesn't seem reasonable either.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

Posted Jul 29, 2009 21:54 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (6 responses)

That's not the undertext at all. The undertext is "some male FOSS developers are assholes, and this creates a community that is disproportionately hostile to potential female contributors".

As for whether women are being perfectly objective - does it matter? Given the 80% figure, you'd need a huge proportion of women to be overstating their case to get to male-equivalent figures. The question is "Is there a problem", not "How big is this problem to several significant figures". And given that basically all the evidence points at there being a problem, I think the burden of extraordinary proof is on your side of the discussion.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

Posted Jul 29, 2009 22:10 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (5 responses)

The point I was trying to make was this:

The percentage of problem perception is clearly gender skewed, markedly.

So that casts into some question the justification, as I see it, for the "disproportionately" in

> The undertext is "some male FOSS developers are assholes, and this creates a community that is disproportionately hostile to potential female contributors".

Some contributors to *all* projects are assholes; I'm male and middle aged (shudder), and I've given up on projects because a major developer was a massive jerk, in environments where there were no females in sight.

So while fixing that problem will probably lift all boats, *that* issue has nothing to do with sexism. My assertion, though, is that many people involevd in this issue are *conflating* developer assholiness with developer sexism, and trying to use the former as evidence of the latter.

Socially, there's evidence that women and men interact differently, and while I think this issue points directly to that, I don't think that's "men behaving badly", I just think it's "men behaving like men".

I'm not here to be an apologist for the death threat or vagina slide crowd; there are *certainly* sexist assholes in (and probably running) FOSS projects. But not all assholes are sexists. And yes, it might turn out to be the case, even if only historically, that a given project is going to have to decide explicitly "we want to be female-friendly", and go out of their way to do it.

And that may, in the final evaluation, impact on how that project does things, and how much it gets done. Could go one way, could go the other. Anyone who makes the blanket assertion that *merely* because that decision is taken and enforced, everything will be mercy and goodness and sweetness and light *for the project* is blowing blue smoke out their ass.

It'll probably be better for *female developers who want to work on that project*, but that is a separately measured quantity.

There's a reason perception is skewed.

Posted Jul 30, 2009 1:10 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] (4 responses)

> The percentage of problem perception is clearly gender skewed, markedly.

That might just be because the worst-offending death threats, sexual propositions and the like are sent as private messages to the woman in question, not to a public list. I mean, even most arseholes don't want everyone to *know* they're arseholes.

In contrast, the milder comments which do get posted in public are much more likely to register and attract the attention of the people they're directed towards, and from other women who are alert from a lifetime's experience of sexism directed against them, than from the average bloke.

There's a reason perception is skewed.

Posted Jul 30, 2009 2:04 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (3 responses)

But you know something? Maybe some *guys* got death threats in private emails too. And, for whatever their reasons might be (I'm big enough to take care of my self; he's 3000 miles away; he's blowing off steam; yeah whatever), they just ignored them.

Both reactions would strike me as characteristic (though it's been established in this thread that there are *lots* of people who don't consider me a Reasonable Man :-), but you can see how those reactions would skew the public perception of the issue at hand.

And there's just no real way to tell, is there?

Again: is there *data*?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data

There's a reason perception is skewed.

Posted Jul 30, 2009 2:27 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

What data do you want beyond the previously mentioned FLOSSPOLS study?

There's a reason perception is skewed.

Posted Jul 31, 2009 0:07 UTC (Fri) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

Again: is there *data*?

I'm glad to see you're getting good use out of that link I gave you.

Seriously, you're arguing: There are a large quantity of anecdotes all pointing the same way, but no formal data (well, there is, but it's not exactly the sort of data I demand). Therefore, ~~nothing can be concluded~~ we can conclude that there is no problem.

Also, you're arguing that women are fragile flowers who of course will whine about little things like death threats, unlike Strong and Reasonable Men who will shrug them off. Rather ignoring the bit where the most recent debian death threat thing only came out when project leadership solicited members for information on their experiences, and the bit where women are both more used to being the target of such behavior and have less reason to believe that publicizing it will help, and the bit where they got these death threats specifically *because they were women*, not because they got into some heated argument and someone needed to blow off steam or whatever. You can't say that those threats are okay because some other guy got threatened for some other reason and so the women deserved it to keep things balanced.

There's a reason perception is skewed.

Posted Aug 2, 2009 22:56 UTC (Sun) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

<sigh>

I've said it a couple of times already, in other places, but I guess I can say it again.

You're drawing statistical inferences from a "survey", about which you cannot speak to the selection bias of... and selection bias -- which I can for myself infer from the report in question -- would make this "survey" worthless for the purpose for which you're depending on it to make your argument.

So, if you agree that anecdotes are not sufficient, then let's nail down how they got their answers, shall we?

And if you don't agree, and think that a self-selecting online survey is enough to make this argument, well, then ...

Anecdata

Posted Jul 30, 2009 4:41 UTC (Thu) by sumanah (guest, #59891) [Link] (7 responses)

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents

Anecdata

Posted Jul 30, 2009 4:59 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (3 responses)

I like Hooters, too; they have a decent hamburger.

Again, anecdotes, the clever portmanteau title aside, are not data. I see an amazing number of what the Wikipedians would call weasel words in those summaries.

First, again: let's let out anything that involves a crime, ok? Murder is not sexist, no matter whom you kill.

Debian is a boys club. Yeah, so's NFL football. I got news for you: I ain't breaking into that club, no matter how much I try.

But that's not sexism.

I won't be hosting the View any time soon either. *That* *is* sexism.

The Warty Theme: both sexes include in the images; how is *that* sexist? Or are you implying that women don't enjoy looking at nekkid men; that's just a boys thing?

As for Lawrence Summers, he appears to be an equal opportunity offender; you know: a shithead.

Why should Launchpad not be permitted to require real names? Facebook, a much more intentional community always has; hell, even MySpace is now encouraging people to use their real names; the majority of the females I know on there do.

I guess my current crystallization of my point is that -- especially given that list -- I think there's some confirmation bias going on there in the definition of what constitutes "proof of sexism in the FOSS development community"... our original topic.

Anecdata

Posted Jul 30, 2009 5:22 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] (2 responses)

> let's let out anything that involves a crime, ok?
> Murder is not sexist, no matter whom you kill.

You have some data to back that up, Baylink? It's an appallingly ignorant falsehood. Much crime targets the weak (and weakens the targeted). An awful lot of violent crime is highly sexual.

Anecdata

Posted Jul 30, 2009 5:31 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

A matter of your definitions of words.

But being sexual in its nature is does not make it sexist. Gay men kill one another for reasons of passion as well, and they're the same sex, and both minorities -- the same minority. That's a question of preference, not one of gender, per se. IMO.

Assuming that man on woman crime is the product of sexism is therefore in itself sexist behavior, precisely the point I (and one or two other commenters) have been making.

But here's a case in point:

Why am I worrying this bone? Because the process of argument, of getting all the various pros and cons out on the table is *fun*, the same reason hackers write code. But the intensity of the process has almost certainly scared off some other people with something useful to say, and I'd bet a lot of them are male...

We weren't doing that to drive them away... but that doesn't mean it might not happen.

It *also*, though, doesn't mean that that is *our* problem.

And as for someone's innuendo as to my posting count -- it's a conversation; I work a desk job, stay up nights, and get my comment notices on a Blackberry; it's not like I'm sitting here hitting Refresh every 30 seconds waiting for the next round...

Anecdata

Posted Jul 30, 2009 5:32 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Oh, and if you're sure it's a falsehood, why would you want data?

Naw, my real problem

Posted Jul 30, 2009 5:01 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (2 responses)

is that I feel like any response that I make to anything from the "you're all sexists" side of the table, no matter how rational and well thought out or justified, is merely going to be construed as further evidence that I'm one of those nassssty sexists.

Ask yourself how I might have come to feel that way tonight...

Naw, my real problem

Posted Jul 30, 2009 10:25 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Because, uh, you are? As far as anyone can tell from your comments,
anyway.

Either you're an old-style unreconstructed sexist or you're aggressively
defending sexism for some other reason. I have no idea what that other
reason might be.

Naw, my real problem

Posted Aug 2, 2009 22:57 UTC (Sun) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Nope. I'm defending clear thought, and not using self-selected surveys to make your arguments, and y'know, things like that.

Or worse: not *caring* about the quality of the data you're arguing on.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

Posted Jul 29, 2009 22:37 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

People would of course be popping up saying that this is perfectly normal
and that it doesn't constitute privileging people not born on a Tuesday
and being beaten with an iron bar wouldn't hurt if they just grew a
thicker skin.

And, look, at the LinuxFund booth we have several people born on a
Tuesday! It sells more merchandise and is in no way creepy!

There's one final comment I want to make here.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

There's one final comment I want to make here.

There's a reason perception is skewed.

There's a reason perception is skewed.

There's a reason perception is skewed.

There's a reason perception is skewed.

There's a reason perception is skewed.

Anecdata

Anecdata

Anecdata

Anecdata

Anecdata

Naw, my *real* problem

Naw, my *real* problem

Naw, my *real* problem

There's one final comment I want to make here.

Naw, my real problem

Naw, my real problem

Naw, my real problem