As I see it

Posted Aug 2, 2009 22:20 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: As I see it by Baylink
Parent article: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

In computing in the UK there was a long period when it was considered
the 'default employment choice' for young males with no particular
interests, because it paid well. The universities gorged on this and by
2000 some had single yearly intakes so large that they had to split
lectures into several groups to fit them into the lectures theatres.

Then the dotcom crash hit. That supply was choked off, and has not
recovered.

I suspect that anyone who's worked in the field across the dotcom crunch
is either doing it out of desperation because they have no other
experience, or is doing it because they're hooked. (Some people who joined
later may have done so for the pay, but it's been pretty stagnant since
then in my corner of the field in any case.)

(And in any case, are women more or less likely to do things because of
money than men? Again you're derailing, changing the subject from 'why is
the gender gap so large' to 'women are Just Naturally Different', when no
differences in ability or inclinations of more than a few percent have
ever been documented in any properly controlled study I've ever heard of.
Again, we are not a very sexually dimorphic species as mammals go: any
argument for the absence of female free software developers that is based
around assumptions of radically differing abilities or inclinations
between the sexes is probably incorrect and should be considered only as
the last option.)

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As I see it

Posted Aug 2, 2009 22:29 UTC (Sun) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (2 responses)

Wow.

Again, no I'm not.

The fundamental issue here, as you are playing it, is "the majority of men in FOSS development behave in sexist ways, and much change their behavior".

(If that's *not* the argument you're making, please tell me now.)

That is an extraordinary assertion (that 80% of 20,000 someodd people need to change the way they behave), and requres, as I have noted before, extraordinary proof.

At the least, it requires you to show your work as you go, and you continue not to. I've kept my mouth shut on this for a couple of days, since as a couple of people noted, it could be construed that I was sucking up all the oxygen in the room... and lo and behold, several other poeple (appear to me to) agree with my fundamental position.

My argument was precisely that I see no gender difference in "doing things solely for the money", even though you try to paint what I said the opposite way. In this case, the person "derailing" is you: the argument is yours: that all developers are doing it for love, not money, and I don't believe that a whit.

As I see it

Posted Aug 2, 2009 23:45 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

The fundamental issue here, as you are playing it, is "the majority of men in FOSS development behave in sexist ways, and much change their behavior".

That's not the case. There's no reason to believe that the majority of people in the open source community are sexist. The concern is that there's a minority who engage in sexist behaviour and a larger body (perhaps a majority) who either don't recognise this behaviour or who aren't concerned about it. To deny that this behaviour exists is unrealistic. Anecdotes don't provide statistics, but when they're describing verifiable events they do prove whether or not something has occured. So really, what you're disagreeing with is the scale of the problem. And that's fine. I don't have hard statistical data to back my belief that it's fairly significant. You don't have hard statistical data to back up your belief that it isn't.

That's disappointing to some extent, but it makes little difference. The changes in behaviour that would help here are simple things like not using sexually loaded language, not making off-colour jokes in a technical environment, not turning a conference into a sexualised environment by hiring women in short skirts purely to hand out flyers. These things cost approximately nothing, but doing them removes a great deal of the perceived sexist environment and means that anyone engaging in more flagrantly sexist behaviour is more obvious.

Will that magically get the number of women involved in free software up to 20%? No, of course not. But if there is a barrier to reaching that figure, then the onus should be on the people who want to maintain that barrier to justify it.

But let's get back to where this thread started. "Women and men don't enjoy the same things" would explain these ratios only if *almost no* women enjoyed software development, followed by a discussion of whether people do things for love or money. That's not the point. Let's say that 10% of men involved in the software industry enjoy it enough to get involved in free software in their spare time. If the same figure were true of women then we'd have the same 20%/80% split (approx) that we see in the commercial world. Given that the actual figure is more like 2%/98%, if differing levels of innate interest are the reason then the figure for women has to be around 0.8%. Or, to put it another way, women have to be over ten times less interested in engaging in free software development than men. This seems an awfully large figure to assign to nature. Of course, if 10% is an overestimate (which it is) then the 0.8% figure drops in the same way. At which point it becomes pretty obvious that "Women and men don't enjoy the same things" would explain these ratios only if *almost no* women enjoyed software development is true.

So "Men and women are just interested in different things" doesn't seem to hold. You're being accused of derailing because you've managed to turn a discussion of sexism in free software into an argument about whether or not people write software because they're paid to do it or not. That might well be an interesting discussion to have, but there's no realistic way that it's relevant to this issue. And by changing the topic you imply that the original topic isn't the important thing here. Which isn't a great way to reassure people that their concerns are being taken seriously, which in turn isn't a great way to convince them that they'll be able to fit in. Which is where we came in.

As I see it

Posted Aug 3, 2009 20:18 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

An accurate description. I cannot imagine what misreading of what I had
said could lead to anyone interpreting it as '80% of men are sexist'. That
is plainly ludicrous and nobody has proposed it. (It is also tangential
and thus yet *another* bloody derailing.)