FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial 1255
Last Friday Bryce Byfield gave us a little insight into the fallout surrounding his article on sexism in the FOSS world. Unfortunately it seems that FOSS junkies did little better than the rest of the world with respect to sexism, displaying similar levels of denial, abuse, and ignorance. "But the real flood of emotion comes from the anti-feminists and the average men who would like to deny the importance of feminist issues in FOSS. Raise the subject of sexism, and you are met with illogic that I can only compare to that of the tobacco companies trying to deny the link between their products and cancer. Because I took a feminist stance in public, I have been abused in every way possible — being called irrelevant, a saboteur, coward, homosexual, and even a betrayer of the community. I know that many women in the community have been attacked much more savagely than I have, so I'm not complaining. Nor am I a stranger to readers who disagree with me, but the depth of reaction has taken me back more than once. I think the reaction is an expression of denial more than anything else."
re (Score:5, Interesting)
I stopped reading after "I'm not complaining"
For some, simply being a guy is sexism (Score:5, Interesting)
And I suspect a vast majority of FOSS people are dudes with a heartbeat and would react like the same overblown charges of racism that get directed towards non-progressives with heartbeats.
I think the male-female dynamic has much to argue over. In many areas there are cultural differences that keep women down and other areas where the natural differences of our mad ape ancestors merely express themselves in reality.
Many charges of sexism are valid, but some are so ridiculous they deserve the ire they generate.
I'll second the call for examples. (Score:5, Interesting)
No one is denying that there are idiots out there. Just browse at -1 here. You'll see every kind of comment for every kind of 'ism that you're looking for.
But let's look are real EXAMPLES of real COMMENTS. Okay?
And since we're talking about FOSS, we can look at the kernel mailing list. Hmmmmm, not a lot of sexist comments there. Particularly when taken as a percentage of total comments.
So if only 1.5% of developers are women ... but fewer than 0.1% of comments on development mailing lists are sexist ... what is the real "problem" that exists?
Re:Words stuffed into our mouths (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that the near-complete elimination of sexism and racism (which has been accomplished) is prompting many people to become even louder in their accusations of sexism and racism. If fighting discrimination is your raison d'etre, you may not WANT it to end; even if only on a subconscious level, you will seek out ever more and more slight examples of it, and make ever more and more shrill noise about it.
Or maybe you're wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the reaction is an expression of denial more than anything else.
OK, how are we supposed to disagree without being "in denial"?
I put this in the same box as the obvious elitism (Score:1, Interesting)
Nothing is so prevalent among FOSS developers as that chunk of people with the elitist attitude. Anyone who's ever asked for help in, let's say, #whatever-foss-project on Freenode, knows exactly what kind of people, what kind of "tough crowd", they are; a stereotype so "nailed" you could hang a coat on it; the know-it-all complete-opposite-of-a-people's-person.
Instead of being friendly and helpful, spending 30 seconds giving a kind answer to help another, these people instead gladly spend 5 minutes elaborating to another how stupid they are, how wrong they are, how inefficient their idea is, how bad their way of thinking is, how wrong they are for trying to learn things the way they do, how wrong they try to solve problems and solve their task, and, in the end, that they should just "rtfm/google" or similar.
People who have a hard time getting along with others in real life situations often try to assert power, as a means of compensation, where they can: in "their field".
How is asking a woman out for a date sexist? (Score:5, Interesting)
He mentions geeks asking peer women out for a date as an example for being sexistic. WTF?
A single woman amoung dozens of men actually is likely to be asked out for a date more often than each man. How is that sexistic?
That aside I presume this is a vocal few distorting perception of the majority. With feminists and 'manly' programmers alike.
Re:Don't be so damn sensitive (Score:4, Interesting)
Either it's a community or it isn't. Getting rude anonymous comments is one thing; getting them in a mailing list going back and forth between a small group of developers, that's something different.
As for this idea that only the quality of the code matters in how you're treated, I don't think that's not true. There is an immaturity and a narcissism prevalent among coders, and I think a lot of them would be enraged to find themselves outcoded by a woman, but wouldn't mind it so much being outdone by a man.
Sexism is like racism in the OSS community; there but nobody wants to talk about it (though the racism has been a lot more overt in some situations).
Standard FOSS: Don't blame, Debug! (Score:5, Interesting)
As much as the F/L/OSS community likes to pretend that it is distinct from the "real world" communities, it isn't. But whereas the "real world" is mostly comprised of idiots who lack the mental capacity to understand anything new, let alone seek it, F/L/OSS developers often represent some of the most curious, information-seeking individuals and some of the highest-calibre intellects out there.
So if we have trouble excusing such behaviour for the "normals", we must be far, far harder on ourselves for those same flaws.
There is a flip-side, though, that the original poster may have neglected to consider. F/L/OSS developers ARE amongst the brightest and the best, but they also have extraordinarily high levels of autistic behaviours, anti-social disorders, emotional instability and alienation.
(The first two are collectively known as "Geek Syndrome". The latter two are the inevitable consequence of Geek Syndrome in a society that tolerates no differences, no matter what it says.)
It is not just likely, but a near-certainty that people with that kind of internal and external pressure WILL fragment into groups that conceal differences by being essentially uniform.
I'm not sure if it can be called sexism when such behaviour is, at least in part, a mask to conceal what's going on. The mask can be sexist without the person underneath being.
However, true misogyny does exist, independent of the mask. THAT particular aspect of sexism should be rooted out and burned, as it is warped, buggy thinking. Bugs SHOULD be erased, and a buggy brain SHOULD be patched.
The problem is how to tell the mask from the person underneath. These are distinct issues. The mask doesn't need fixing, rather the person needs an extended API to handle errors, and the Real World needs replacing with Real World 2.0 to debug the flawed mental processes that produce the garbage in the first place.
Once either the person has better exception-handling or error trapping, and/or there's less noise generating errors, the mask can be erased. It's a filter that exists to hide bad wet-coding and so the sooner we get rid of the bad code, the sooner we can get rid of the filter.
My guess would be that if the mask died, a good 75% of the perceived sexism in F/L/OSS would die with it, without a single F/L/OSS coder needing to change their view of gender.
Re:Actually, you're a good example of that. (Score:4, Interesting)
okay, how about 54 incidents? [wikia.com] And that's with about 25 seconds of searching.
And before you respond, tell me if you'll need a tractor to help you with all the goalpost moving you're doing.
65.6 male/1 female (Score:2, Interesting)
Given: Human Gender Ratio in the physical world ~= 1 male/1 female
Given: Human Gender Ratio in FOSS ~= 65.6 male/1 female
Therefore: FOSS is not Gender neutral
Delima:
1_FOSS inherently favors males.
or
2_Sexism has been built into FOSS
_a) intentionaly
_b) unintentionally
Given: studies in under representation in Sciences, Math and Engineering, have found NO inherit factors that can contribute to such ludicrous ratios as 65.6/1
Therefore: Sexism has been built into FOSS, either intentionally or unintentionally.
so what is it gonna be ppl Murder or Manslaughter?
Re:I'll second the call for examples. (Score:5, Interesting)
I absolutely hate when women wave the flag of feminism when they're just being sexist asshats trying to get ahead of men. As a girl working in software development, it makes it all the harder to get accepted when male work colleagues are suspicious of my motives and being careful not to offend just in case I'm one of those idiots. I can't say I blame them either, it could ruin a mans career.
As for those women, please don't give them any credit by calling them feminists. They're sexists and should be called out as such. Maybe then the rest of us can get on and get some proper work done. /rant
Then try a simple test. (Score:5, Interesting)
Create yourself TWO new accounts. One with a name that a teen boy would choose and the other with a name that suggests that you are a girl. Go on. Do it. Right now!
Then the NEXT time this subject comes up, post similar comments (not trolls) from BOTH accounts.
Then compare the scores and the follow up comments from the two accounts.
I will bet that the comment from the girl-account will be ranked higher and have more "me too" comments than the boy-account.
Sexism in FOSS does exist. But it isn't the type described by the author.
Just look at this discussion. How many different accounts reference the SAME handful of incidents as "proof" that there is sexism and that anyone who disagrees is somehow "bad".
THAT alone should be enough to tell you where the real problem is.
I can take that challenge. (Score:4, Interesting)
I can take that challenge because I'm not blinded by ideology as you are.
Read the LKML. There are thousands upon thousands of FOSS development comments there.
So far, the people crying "sexism" have only been able to produce one page with 54 examples of sexist comments.
So, with a single mailing list (out of many) I have demonstrated that fewer than 0.1% of the FOSS development comments are sexist.
Unless you, for some reason, do not believe that the LKML is really about FOSS development. But then, that's your problem.
Re:Missing reference (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah - it makes me think like there might be something different obout corporate employment and volunteerism.
Perhaps some kind of laws that requires the former to hire a certain indeterminate number of women or be sued.
And perhaps run by some government entity. A commission, perhaps. And it could be called "Equal Employment" or some-such.
Re:Asking someone out is sexist? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sexist answer: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/clips/sexual-harassment/258532/ [nbc.com]
More Balanced Answer: I think it's an example of setting rules for the few bad cases. Most girls would find it flattering if a guy asked her out, took no for an answer, and went back to work. They find it less flattering when no one can talk about circuits because they're staring at her chest, or constantly try to impress her in annoying ways, or just refuse to leave her alone. In a field where most of the employees are male, you're assured a fair number of assholes, even if the overall percentage of them is low. So we set rules to keep everyone in line.
Re:Statistics IS evidence -- "flamebait" (Score:2, Interesting)
Or, perhaps, one needs to have been nerdy and suffer from bullying — something girls rarely have to go through...
WTF, Are you kidding me? Seriously? You obviously haven't been -- repeatedly -- the only "girl" in years of math and science classes, surrounded by immature leering little boys who repeatedly make crude sexual jokes and suggestions in your general direction, tolerated by a male teacher whose attitude is "boys will be boys" and "stop being so sensitive." Then, when such behaviours are publicly denounced as uncivil, watch in amazement as otherwise intelligent male humans will leap up to *defend* such behaviour as normative. Do any of these people truly believe that this *should* be the price of admission that women *must* pay in order to join the fraternal order?
Re:Well if that's true... (Score:5, Interesting)
Guys rarely go into female only fields like nursing or pre-school teaching for the same reasons girls don't do tech
Except that 10% of nurses are now male, rising every year. On top of that 20% of current nursing students are male, again, rising every year.
Is it really so hard to believe that more men find electrical engineering interesting and more women find psychology interesting? Do we really have to be the same to be equal? I hope not, that would be pretty boring.
Re:Mod parent up... (Score:4, Interesting)
If I haven't seen it, and no around me has seen it, isn't the onus on you to give some more proof other than, "Really, guys! Sexism in OSS is real!" I mean, to say you have to show some causal relationship between OSS "culture" (however you measure it) and sexism. Simply saying that the number of women who work on open source projects is less than the number of women working on proprietary projects isn't enough, for that is correlation, not causation.
You hear the same sort of rhetoric about other group/profession combinations. The other day, I was hearing a person rant about how men were underrepresented in nursing. When did it become mandatory for every profession to have perfect gender balance?
Perhaps women just don't like spending hours and hours of their free time on a project for little monetary gain. In other words, perhaps they aren't as likely to be chumps compared to men. :)
Re:Oh brother. (Score:3, Interesting)
Slashdot is one of the least female-friendly places on the Internet,
Really?? The vast majority of posters and posts here are gender-neutral. The vast majority of topics here are gender-neutral. This topic is a rare exception, it has a lot of sexist comments, and it is widely recognized as a troll (it is tagged so). You are contributing to trolling as well. Slashdot, at large, is very neutral towards any particular minority in IT, especially after you build your friend list and adjust viewing options. I hope to god you are not reading it raw.
Re:Refreshment of memory (Score:2, Interesting)
Except that that's not the way the world works. People are in fact judged by gender, orientation, race, etcetera, in our society; and those who are (mis)judged by those criteria naturally will band together for support.
It may not be as bad inside our little enclave of coders (or, actually, it might: I've certainly seen asinine sexist behavior), but when you live in a muddy environment you're going to track mud through the house occasionally. We live in a nation where a political writer can get away with suggesting that women's suffrage might be a mistake [thinkprogress.org], so let's not even pretend that sexism isn't an issue in our broader culture.
After a couple of decades, it might be possible for "Debian Women" to work themselves out of a job. This recently happened in the martial arts system I belong to, when it was decided that there were enough women in both total enrollment and in the senior ranks that it was no longer necessary to have a special "women's seminar" every year. But the reason that things reached the point that sexism was so reduced in significance was because there was this extra support system in place.
Re:Well if that's true... (Score:4, Interesting)
Realize that women have a very different social dynamic than men do. Hell, just read this [pbs.org]. Choice quote:
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the women are feeling victimized, and reading a hell of a lot more into it than was actually intended, and that is at least partially their problem to deal with if they're going to work with a lot of men?
What you're asking is for all men in a given field to change the way they think and behave because some women feel uncomfortable. Excuse me, but fuck you. I, and every man I know, try by and large to be decent people. Unfortunately, there is culture clash. The only way through that is to have BOTH SIDES compromise a bit. Getting pissy about every perceived slight is NOT a good way to win friends. Being a frat-boy isn't, either. But I see a hell of a lot more victims feeling entitled to be "treated with respect" due to someone not living up to their expectations than I do 'Bluto' Blutarsky's just being misogynist assholes.
Don't make a mountain out of molehill. (Score:1, Interesting)
Mark didn't say the equivalent of Nigger. He didn't say, "When I want to talk to B*tches" or "When I want to talk to C*nts".
He said, "When I want to talk to girls". Why is girls offensive? Women call women girls all the time. "You go girl", "girl's night out", "my girlfriends". Similarly men are called boys all the time. "boys will be boys", "let's hear it for the boy", "boy's night out", "her boyfriend". It's a term of endearment. Of course, he could have just fully qualified every word and said "When I wish to speak to women whom I'm attracted and wish to know better, most of these women of whom I'm attracted because I'm heterosexual -- not that there is anything wrong with being gay -- are not in technology and thus could not be expected to know anything about compiling kernels, coding in Python, and all the billions of details in packaging an operating system. So I have a hard time explaining the intricate detail of my work."
He'd have to increase the length of his talk by an order of magnitude, however and the audience would be asleep through a death by qualification. People don't talk this way for a reason. Colloquialisms exist. Deal with it.
Re:Mod parent up... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mod parent up... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't like to guess at the motivations and drives in play here, BUT-
I work in a team that is roughly one third female. Of the guys I know well enough to know what they do after hours, most of them go home and play with computers, whether it's gaming, tinkering with linux, web design, FOSS components, private projects, whatever. Of the women I know to the same extent none of them do that.
The team is made up of very competent Software Engineers.
I really think that the skew in FOSS contributors is not that surprising. Yes, I know, anecdotes and data, but it's my experience. If women genuinely feel that they are suffering from sexist attitudes or behaviour then sure, it needs to be looked at and stamped out. But taking the raw gender imbalance as evidence is just crap.
It's like the studies that the UK government put out on the gender pay gap. Look a little closer and you'll find they compare female part-time workers to male full-time workers and don't take into account the difference in hours worked. Bullshit.
Re:Refreshment of memory (Score:3, Interesting)
Often, we don't fully get these things even when someone mentions it. We're just like "Huh." and move on to the things that actually affect us directly. It takes a pretty high-profile and involved community discourse to a) get enough attention drawn to the problem and b) work out as a community how we should respond to it.
Re:No Denial Here But What Are the Reasons? (Score:3, Interesting)
Gosh, you've got a whole anecdote of data! How could I possibly argue against that?
Maybe some people say Lynn is a traitor, or that you're lying. I won't. I'll trust that you've recounted the story reasonably accurately, and that Lynn was honest both with you and herself. People leave majors all the time because they find them boring.
The point isn't that every woman who leaves or never enters engineering or computer science is driven by sexism. Anyone arguing that is arguing nonsense; many men leave or never enter the fields. The argument is that there is a pervasive sexism that is influencing them. Some may be overt, but much is background. You're essentially arguing that women don't like engineering because they're women. Perhaps that is some portion of it, but for it to be such a radical change seems implausible. There is a strong boy-club culture. I've seen it to varying levels at every technical job I've had. It's ranged from as wildly inappropriate as jokes about hiring women to do "under the desk" work to the pervasive and easy to overlook like telling someone to "man up," "have some balls," or "don't get your panties in a bunch." It can as minor as entering an office for an interview and meeting the entirely male staff. (Mind you, that's not sexism, but that doesn't mean it won't be daunting.) Surely some women will be perfectly skilled technically, but not quite able to put up with the culture and find themselves driven out. Surely some women, when exposed to this early on will decide to not enter the field in the first place. Some will pass this message on to their daughters, perhaps in subtle ways like also being a bit strained when discussing the possibility of being an engineer.
To argue that women are massively underrepresented in engineering fields solely because women are uninterested on some biological level is to simultaneously argue that women are somehow perfectly rational beings, completely influenced by others.
As it is, I'll see your anecdote and raise you another. I know an M. She's armed with a BS in Computer Science, and works in the field. She likes the work, but she's now pursuing a degree in Law. Why? Because she's tired of the constant background level of sexism she faces working in CS. Nothing overt; no sex jokes, no offensive language. It's subtle but pervasive things. I regrettably cannot remember most of the list of things she mentioned, but the one she called out was repeatedly finding herself at the center point of a semicircle of men when at a technical conference. She found herself not wanting to attend technical conferences because she always found herself subtly being treated not as a peer, but as a potential date.