OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering [LWN.net]

OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering

Posted Aug 25, 2009 13:11 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (21 responses)

So, uh... I'm trying to imagine this. A world where the Emacs user base isn't male-dominated, okay, I got that part, but then in that world you can see RMS saying "In the church of emacs we believe that taking his emacs virginity away is a blessed act."?

Because... I mean... really? I can't imagine it. Admittedly, the reason I can't imagine it has a lot to do with the cultural rules for how men cannot say anything vaguely homosexual public, but... there it is. Jokes that allude to the metaphorical rape of women are just more publicly acceptable than jokes that allude to the possibility that the speaker might be gay. (Of course, that version also alludes to homosexual rape, but sadly, I don't think that has much to do with its unacceptability.)

(Oh, just to ++ your count: my wife uses emacs. So do the, like, 40% of the entering CS class at Berkeley who are female, etc., it's actually not that big a deal, but hey, since you're counting.)

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Posted Aug 25, 2009 14:54 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (8 responses)

First, calling someone else sexist because *you* can't imagine replacing "her" with "his" in a joke is just baffling.

Second, nobody mentioned rape or even hinted at it, until you did.

Folks, if you want to help gender inclusion, then dissecting a joke and making up stuff to feel offended about is not the way forward. How about organising a summit on the topic? Oh.

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Posted Aug 25, 2009 15:38 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (4 responses)

Telling people that they're wrong to be offended is not the best way to engage in a constructive dialog about why they (in general) feel excluded from the community. People *were* offended. You may feel that they're misinterpreting what was said, but the helpful response to that is to try to understand why that misinterpretation occured and either help to avoid it in future or (perhaps) decide that they're not worth it and just ignore the issue entirely.

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Posted Aug 25, 2009 16:41 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (3 responses)

In your first sentence, grammatically, "people" refers to the "they" in "they (in general) feel excluded", which in the context is women.

If you read my comments in this thread, you'll see that I haven't said that any woman is/was wrong to feel offended.

In my comment, I pointed out some unfair accusations by njs. You've replied by launching unfair accusations at me :-) I'm sure you're well intentioned, but I think this topic is being approached in an unproductively hot headed manner. I expect the ladies will do a better job on Sept 19th, and then we can listen instead of discussing how offended we feel for them.

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Posted Aug 25, 2009 17:02 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

You said "Folks, if you want to help gender inclusion, then dissecting a joke and making up stuff to feel offended about is not the way forward". The obvious reading of that is that anyone offended by the virginity thing is making it up. If that's not the case then it'd be helpful to clarify what you did mean, because right now it sounds like you're claiming that it's fine for women to make these arguments but not for men. Which doesn't make a lot of sense, but still.

In any case, this isn't a situation that will magically get rectified by the existence of a summit. If there's a problem here then it doesn't get solved unless men (as well as women) are willing to do something about it. That includes calling people out on perceived poor or unhelpful behaviour, and it includes accepting that people might be offended for themselves rather than being offended on other people's behalf. RMS's behaviour offended me not because I think women are unable to stand up for themselves but because he managed to undo some quantity of the work many people have been doing to try to make the Linux community a welcoming and friendly place that doesn't marginalise anyone on the basis of biological differences they have no control over. I'm offended because he made us look bad. I'm offended because it was entirely unnecessary and could have been avoided with a straightforward apology, and the refusal to do so encourages the perception that our community leaders are all unwilling to accept that they may have made mistakes but we love them anyway.

By saying that people are merely being offended on behalf of women you imply that there's no rother reason for a man to have been offended by the case in question. You're writing off their concerns as an irrelevance. It'd be very easy for you to just put this down as another unfair accusation on my part, but at some level I'd hope that you'll put some time into considering why people feel this way about what you're writing instead of deflecting it without any obvious thought.

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Posted Aug 25, 2009 23:55 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

I was replying to someone who blatantly made stuff up. I thought I made the target of my "making stuff up" comment pretty clear, but you're putting it in a different context (it does apply to a wider context, but not as wide as where you put it).

Then you criticised me for "telling [women] that they're wrong to be offended", which I didn't say at all. Now, when I say the summit could be helpful, you complain that the issue won't "magically get rectified by the existence of a summit" - I never said it would!

Do you think misrepresenting people and making careless accusations is a way to make a gender inclusive forum? I don't think a vague joke by rms is the only problem here. Not by a long shot.

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Posted Aug 26, 2009 0:00 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

It's pretty straightforward. You're accusing someone of making stuff up. Do you believe that other people who say exactly the same thing are making stuff up? Do you believe that the women who said they were offended by RMS's statement were justified in being offended?

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Posted Aug 25, 2009 23:25 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (2 responses)

> First, calling someone else sexist because *you* can't imagine replacing "her" with "his" in a joke is just baffling.

Uh. Then I suppose you're glad I didn't call anyone sexist...?

Bruce claimed that the reason RMS talked about women was a simple reflection of user statistics -- that it had nothing to do with the sexual/gendered overtones of "virginity", and indeed, that those overtones didn't even exist in context of the joke.

I'm skeptical. Note that this is not "I think Bruce is sexist", or even "I think RMS is sexist". It's "I'm skeptical of Bruce's claim that I was replying to". I think that's a pretty unremarkable sort of stance to take in LWN comments.

One way I tried to express that was by appealing to people's intuition for cultural rules about sex -- AFAICT, around here (here being America, more or less) it's much more okay for a guy to joke about taking a women's virginity than to joke about participating in homosexual sex. If you then try to imagine RMS taking guy's emacs virginity and your brain goes "whoa whoa what?", then that suggests that yeah, "emacs virginity" *is* pulling up all those sexual/gendered stereotypes. Sorry Bruce.

But maybe you don't share that intuition, and that's fine. Cultural rules are messy, variable, and hard to articulate; maybe you're coming from somewhere else, maybe I just got it wrong, it happens. But that doesn't mean they don't exist, or don't matter, or that "*I*" cannot talk about them on the basis of my own knowledge. I'd rather try and get it wrong occasionally that pretend they don't exist.

And as for hinting at rape... well. Here's the quote again: "we believe that taking her emacs virginity away is a blessed act." Does that call on men to go out and rape women? Absolutely not. But when I take my lunch out of the fridge, the lunch doesn't have any say in the matter. I decide to take it, it doesn't make a decision. It's just some apples and lasagna and stuff, decision-making isn't what it does. I certainly wouldn't ask it if it minded being taken. That's the metaphor he chose to use; women are like my lunch. Whether women lose their virginity/learn emacs is something for a man to decide and implement, with no place for her to have an opinion on the matter.

One more time, before people rise up with pitchforks: I'm not saying that anyone who uses that sort of language is an evil misogynist who hates women and wants to rape them. This stuff is subconscious and out there in the culture; it's easy to miss. (Esp. for men, who don't spend their lives with the spectre of real rape hanging over them.) But you know, one could just as easily talk about helping women relieve their own virginity, or just offer to answer their questions about emacs. When we choose not to, then yeah, that has something to do with our nasty cultural models about power and sex and agency.

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Posted Aug 26, 2009 1:25 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

> Then I suppose you're glad I didn't call anyone sexist...?

Heh. I guess I'm also not immune to reading people's comments with tunnel vision. Sorry 'bout that.

(As for "taking someone's virginity", I think that's a pretty normal turn of phrase for two consensual partners where one or both is a virgin.)

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Posted Aug 26, 2009 2:08 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

> Heh. I guess I'm also not immune to reading people's comments with tunnel vision. Sorry 'bout that.

np. Thanks for being willing to listen.

> (As for "taking someone's virginity", I think that's a pretty normal turn of phrase for two consensual partners where one or both is a virgin.)

Oh, it's definitely common. It's still just a bit icky. And of course context matters: when you're not talking about two consensual partners, but publicly exhorting a crowd of men to go out, find some women somewhere, and take away their virginity... yeah, it's a joke, but within that joke it's asking listeners to laugh at a really disturbing scenario.

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Posted Aug 25, 2009 15:00 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] (11 responses)

Where in the world is "take virginity away" equal to an act of rape? In countries where all people (except the geeks ;-) have sex first time before being of age?

My take at what our problem is: Women hate us geeks. That's why there are so few women in geek-like activities. They hate us because we are boring, we don't dress properly (we look deliberately poor), we don't smalltalk easily on parties - if we go to parties at all (other than of course geek parties). It's not our social deficits - if someone who beats his spouse loses her finally, he's got a new one the next day. Yes, we have that kind of people in the OSS szene (think of Hans Reiser). He was married, and had children. Come on, this sort of social deficit is only a serious handicap if the spouse is six feet under, and you have to deal with a court.

What matters a lot to women is if you are wealthy or at least care about wealth. Free software and wealth? Doesn't seem to fit. This was Hans' real problem, this is our real problem. Women who do software already have a gender-specific handicap. But doing it for free, just for fun, and not out of monetary interest, that's a much larger handicap for female way of thinking. Remember: Men are driven by recognition, by rank they achieve through fights. Women aren't. Their rank comes of age, not of achievement (we are apes, after all). The ranking system we in the FOSS szene have is not recognised by women - it has no obvous benefits outside, you can't pay the rent with Linux kernel patches (well, you can, but the reward system is extremely indirect).

This will change all on its own. IMHO it is basically a recognition problem: Do ordinary people recognise how important software is? More and more, they do. Computers for young people are everyday's tools. They aren't strange things stuffed in geeky cellars any more. Women often lag behind in adapting new technologies, but when the technologies are old and boring, they are usually only operated by women. Again: Remember that rank in the female ranking system comes primarily of age, not of achievement! What has been around long enough obviously is important.

And always remember: The question is "why are there so few"? All those points that prevent people from joining are not the points that annoy people who already are in there. You have to ask the people who are not in there, why they won't join. They may have completely different reasons. I think what we need to fix first to appeal more to women is the reward system. We can't go on with a reward system where the joy of having a working program is the only reward, and that is spoiled by the bug reports. I know of no woman personally who is rewarded by the result of her work. They all need compliments in addition. "Bug reports" usually don't work. Even when women complain about problems, it is no good to help them by telling them how they should do (especially when completely counter-intuitive things are involved). They want that you listen and agree to their laments. Women apparently can improve. But an open discussion how to improve things - no way.

Of course this is a very stereotypical view. But like the long-haired geek with goatee, stereotypes are not generally wrong. They are only wrong in special cases, in the other cases, they are mere exaggerations. Statistically, special cases are not that relevant.

So to sum that up: The most urgent thing to establish is a positive reward and compliment system. Put a "send flower picture to developer" button on Sourceforge pages, next to the donate (developer can choose secretly what kind of picture it actually will be, and the option "porn" is only shown after the developer has proven he's male ;-). Add a "thanks for fixing that bug" button to bugzilla. Make sure that the social page of your project shows how long each developer has been with the project, how many flowers and how many thanks for bugfixes they got (and build a social page first, idiots! If women care about anything, it is about brownie point competition with their peers). Add a pink flower and butterflies theme to Sourceforge (also for gay developers; if you need inspiration, look at a random web page from Asia ;-). Wait for asian people to become significant part of the community - the girls there have less problems with technology and being geeks than ours. And that despite they are usually much more stereotypical girls than ours. They haven't been that much through emancipation, so they just accept the gender differences. Some things go away by themselves, our young girls have less problems with them being girls than the generation before - this gender-mainstreaming is already failing.

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Posted Aug 25, 2009 16:36 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

Some people here are trying to seriously discuss the tricky problem of how to deal with the human (in)ability to express interpretations and interpret expressions. Not a huge mental exercition, but practically challenging.

But not this challenging.

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Posted Aug 25, 2009 20:15 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

What matters a lot to women is if you are wealthy or at least care about wealth.

Well, free software developers are not badly paid, certainly not worse than your average non-free-software developer, so if this was the controlling factor, it would be falsifed thereby.

But in fact it isn't. Do you actually know any women? Hint: female motivations are every bit as complex and multifaceted as male ones (hell, more so) and it is erroneous to say 'all women X' for almost any value of X.

(In any case, this bit of pop evo-psych applies to mating strategies. We're interested here in why so few women become free software developers, not in few male free software developers get dates, if indeed this is true, which it probably isn't unless you have some other major deficit. TBH this latter effect is of interest to nobody but male free software developers.)

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Posted Aug 26, 2009 19:28 UTC (Wed) by maco (guest, #53641) [Link] (2 responses)

> Women hate us geeks.

Oh! You're right, I *do* hate myself!

Here's the problem I have with what RMS said: he made the wrong-headed assumption that all EMACS users, all geeks...are men. And you just did too. Can we stop with the marginalization?

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Posted Sep 8, 2009 12:02 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] (1 responses)

Why is it so difficult for you to parse expressions? I'm not marginalizing anybody, I'm just making a generalized statement (would you like it better if I write "70% women hate 70% of the geeks" or whatever figures there actually are?). Most women are non-geek, just as most men are non-geek. Most women "hate" female geeks as much as male geeks (or even more, because they directly compete with this "knows-all-better" but badly dressed, w/o makeup girl). We geeks all are marginalized! The society is pretty anti-geek and pro mediocracy as such! And of course most women approach men (and professions) with "mate selection mode" applied. If you don't - I'm fine with that. But to explain "why are there so few xxx" (e.g. xxx=properly shaved, without ponytail) geeks, then generalization works. Those few who are there are the exceptions. If you fail to understand that you are an exception, please learn more about yourself. And if you don't accept your own exception-state, you are marginalizing yourself.

I just came out of a conference full of geeks. The only woman was the wife of one participant, and she was only there for the social activities (the geek parties). There was an obvious separation between groups, which became visible when we started discussing about foreign language interfaces (to C and other languages). The left side of the U-shaped table was the side of Windows users who didn't see the problem with their approach, because it works for them - basically one OS, two processor architectures, of which they mostly support only one (32 bit x86). It didn't work for the other side of the table, where the weird, bearded, pony-tailed Unix guys where sitting (in fact, only one of us was actually bearded and pony-tailed, but it is completely sufficient if you have one of those in your group ;-), who have lots of different architectures and OSes, and know of problems the other side never has heard of - and therefore propose to use the C compiler (which is not available to Windows users... typically).

And even though discussions like this bring up personal things, we can get along with each others well. Technical discussions have to be hard, it's about not giving in when you know that the other side is wrong. There's a time where you are nice to your peers and there's a time where you are rude. And sometimes, discussions like this bring up your beard+ponytail state. Or your gender, if it differs. So what? If the results are worth the hard discussions, it's apropriate. The occasional women in this sort of meetings often is said to "have hairs on her teeth", i.e. she masters this sort of discussion style perfectly.

And after all, as geeks, we won't compromise on a process that's working just for having more girls in that field. Or other complaints, like occasional sexual harassments: Come on, girls who go to a club are more than occasionally harassed, yet the places are packed full with girls. This is just a crazy argument. Unless, of course, you really hate the male geeks, and therefore their sexuall harassment is much worse than the ones of the guys in the club.

clubbing

Posted Sep 9, 2009 3:00 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

Aww, c'mon. Clubs are all about sex.

One goes clubbing for the purposes of overt public exercise of one's sexual animal nature (well 99% of patrons do, some just like dancing or drugs or deafening music). People are there to show off their bodies and those of their partners if they have them. Plenty of people are there in order to advertise their availability, and it's a good bet quite a few intend to 'score'. The rules in a nightclub are, for this reason, very different from those on the street (your local red-light district partially excepted) or in a daytime workplace. Harrassment is still unacceptable, but the very definition of harrassment is different. Sex-related signals abound and they must be read and understood, and ambiguities tactfully resolved, before it is clear what behaviour is acceptable.

Technical mailing lists and websites are not sexually charged environments. Well, they *shouldn't* be.

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Posted Aug 27, 2009 19:58 UTC (Thu) by lizhenry (guest, #60479) [Link]

So in your mind "us geeks" doesn't include women? We're here and we're not invisible.

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Posted Aug 27, 2009 22:32 UTC (Thu) by artibasos (guest, #60487) [Link] (4 responses)

"Women hate us geeks."

I am so glad to know that "geek" and "women" are mutually exclusive
categories.
[eyeroll]

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Posted Aug 28, 2009 0:29 UTC (Fri) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (3 responses)

Hmm. Three comments that all say the same thing. Maybe my joke detectors are off, or perhaps you all missed what he was trying to say. Or perhaps this is some kind of meta-sarcasm meant to trip up someone like me, stepping right into trap...

I think the guy was trying to say, poorly, that he thought women would be most attracted to sort of (male) social climbers who try to get status, not the sort of people who dress poorly and don't care if they work for free for idealistic reasons. Starting from the next paragraph he's quite clearly implying a mate-selection context with "What matters a lot to women is if you are wealthy or at least care about wealth."

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Posted Aug 28, 2009 21:51 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah. That's also implying that all readers are male. And people wonder why women feel out of place in this community...

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Posted Aug 28, 2009 22:33 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

I just took his comment on what he thinks women like as irrelevant to the discussion.

If anyone wants to discuss why some women go for abusive dirtbags instead of you, with all of your shining geeky qualities :-), there are appropriate net venues. LWN isn't one.

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Posted Aug 29, 2009 21:54 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

Well where does it say that it's suddenly unfair to address your words to male audience, either implicitly or explicitly. I just noticed that apparently not one of the women seemed to read further than that sentence until firing a comment, because that's the only thing they commented upon and I think it wasn't even what frosty meant. Maybe he could show up to clarify, though.

We're concerned with editor choice among female open source developers? Really??

Posted Aug 25, 2009 17:29 UTC (Tue) by PO8 (guest, #41661) [Link]

I teach open source (among other things) at Portland State University. 20-30% of the students I've worked closely on open source projects with over the last five years are women---around 2-3 of about 10-15 per year. Of those, as near as I can remember about a third prefer emacs and about two-thirds vi. The ratio among my male students seems the same.

If you want to meet female open source developers who use emacs, I guess you're welcome to drop by and say "hi" to some. But it would be kinda weird---I guess you could give a talk in one of my classes or something and chat with them afterward. You can also meet married open source developers with kids who use emacs, and 40-something open source developers who use vi, and an up-and-coming young open source developer who prefers nano, and any number of other combinations of demographic and editor choice with varying likelihoods...

Here's a blog from one of my students, a woman who develops open tech and (IIRC) uses emacs: http://dotfiveone.com . Her current entry is about a bunch of women, one of them another of my students, who spoke at our recent open source conference in Portland. It's pretty likely some of them use emacs too.

Whatever.

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Posted Aug 26, 2009 19:23 UTC (Wed) by maco (guest, #53641) [Link]

Yeah...we've enough sense to use a standard editor that exists on all UNIX variants...like vi ;)

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Posted Aug 27, 2009 20:13 UTC (Thu) by hypatiadotca (guest, #60478) [Link]

Wow, you use Emacs and have never run into Sacha Chua? As well as being an awesome all-around Open Source contributor, she's currently writing "Wicked Cool Emacs" for No Starch Press.

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Posted Aug 27, 2009 22:29 UTC (Thu) by artibasos (guest, #60487) [Link]

Really? My female friends frequently try to convince
me into switching over to emacs. Off the top of my head, I can think of five
or six women who would happily lecture me for hours about How I Should Use
Emacs.

(I am female; I use vi.)

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Posted Sep 22, 2009 15:29 UTC (Tue) by Lefty (guest, #51528) [Link]

Because women who use EMACS are especially rare. I have found out about only one in the past 30 years, and she was trained on it for a job and doesn't use it any longer.

I'd suggest that you need to get out a little more, Bruce. I've certainly met many more than a single female EMACS user in my past thirty years in the industry... In any case, putting the supposed situation in terms where the male component of the audience (outnumbering the women at a ratio of, at a minimum, twenty to one) are encouraged to unilaterally take it upon themselves to "relieve" those women of their "virginity" seems a pretty peculiar way of making a point.