Tackling Open Source's Gender Issues 589
angry tapir writes "Women's participation in open source development is at a far lower level than women's participation in proprietary software development. One of the groups that aims to change this is the Ada Initiative: A non-profit organization formed last year. I recently caught up with its two founders, Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora and comp sci PhD student Mary Gardiner, to discuss the project."
Re:This again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing turns me on... (Score:2, Insightful)
....like a woman with geek creds. [Looking at you, Jeri Ellsworth.]
Re:Community resistance (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why networking and making friends is important. People turn into shut-ins or otherwise forget how important friends are, and wind up with this mentality of "he/she's being nice to me? omg he/she wants my body or is otherwise such a creeper"... That's extremely off-putting to the person who's just trying to be decent. I only took a few computer science classes, but when I was there, I could forget about social interaction. Nobody wanted to be the guy who got straight As, or be the guy who answered questions in class, but everyone wanted to be the one girl's personal at-home tutor bow chicka wow wow. Really? That's called doing it wrong on so many levels. If you have healthy friendships with both men and women, you won't need to single out that one person at work or school or wherever else. Don't treat everyone like a potential mate or threat, and life is a lot better.
Re:Community resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that you called two of them gold diggers that's sexist. It's that you said that there's no such thing as a woman who *isn't* a gold digger.
Can you spot the difference?
Some are harassed and attacked into leaving. (Score:5, Insightful)
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area and working in software, I know many developers both male and female. I have a few personal female acquaintances that were (past-tense) previously active in the open source community, but left.
They were aggressively harassed by a very vocal online minority. This vocal minority would trash the ladies name on a large swath of online forums while using different names and accounts. Two received multiple anonymous threats of violence. This went on for years, and the ladies in question finally left the open source community.
This went above and beyond 'normal' flaming in online forums. This involved many forums, each cross referencing each other to lend validity to their (entirely fabricated) claims. And it went on for years, including insinuation that the female developer would come to harm at conferences.
It's very unlikely this happens in every case, but it takes more than a single nutjob attacking someone, or even many nutjobs attacking, to make someone leave the community. It takes good people like you and me to ignore the nutjobs, to not step in and say, "That's enough."
Re:Community resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
RMS also believes in legalizing pedophilia and possession of child pornography
This is as accurate as quoting Ahmadinejad as wanting to wipe Israel off the Earth... And actually both dudes make more sense than their insecure indignant "critics".
Re:Community resistance (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I'm not going to say "turnabout is fair play", but before you heap too much criticism on socially inept nerds, consider that one reason they are that way is that women universally reject them. Tell a woman you're a computer programmer, and her eyes glaze over. Tell her you like playing computer games, and she leaves. Tell her you like her, and she'll say "ugh". And now other women want to come to communities dominated by these kinds of men, who have been despised by women since the day they were old enough to be, and then wonder why they are not made as welcome as they'd like to be? Who is really the problem here, the nerds, or the culture that inculcates contempt for them?
A possibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Okay this may get me modded down to infinity, b (Score:4, Insightful)
Saying something is a stereotype is not the same as saying it's never true. People often forget that.
Re:Community resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much this. Males seem to excel at making an environment hostile towards women, which ok in the locker room, gentleman's clubs, and other places where men have every right to be alone.
Unfortunately, this often ends up happening where men don't have a right to be alone, but just are alone for any of the myriad of reasons that it happens. Suddenly, programming is a boy's club, or any other particular profession or hobby. Now, women have to overcome not only "crossing gender roles" in order to participate, but they find themselves in a hostile environment where men seem to expect that no women are allowed.
And then, heaven forbid any woman comment that such an attitude is sexist, lest they be roundly shouted out with anti-PC arguments, when asking for people to be PC is different from asking people to not be sexist.
Is it any wonder that the only women who make it into the highest levels of programming have learned to cope by pretending to be a guy, or acting the bitch just to get their way? :(
Re:This again? (Score:5, Insightful)
You expect to see proportional involvement across all activities because that's the way statistics suggests they should. If you selected people at random from the general population to fill 10,000 programming jobs, you would expect that the gender & ethnic composition of that 10,000 would largely be reflective of the population the random sampling was drawn from. When your composition varies - in this case widely - from the expected results, there is an interesting question of, "why?"
Is it because girls are bad at programming? I see no reason to think there's a gender-related basis for programming... do you? How do you explain it, if "being a woman" doesn't automatically mean someone's probably bad at programming? "Differences in interest" sounds like a nice way of saying "girls like dolls, boys like guns." There is no particular biological basis for this, so again, there'd be no reason to expect this to be the case, unless there is a cultural reason for it.
Now, you can certainly argue whether or not culturally-reinforced 'gender roles' are desirable or undesirable, but you've got a long way to go to establish any sort of *biological* reason for the disparity.
Re:Okay this may get me modded down to infinity, b (Score:1, Insightful)
I think this misses what the parent's point actually was. He wasn't saying that all women are gold diggers and want your money, he said that women generally are motivated to work for money as opposed to working for free (love of the project) on an open source project. Your first girlfriend being motivated by money and wanting to work for her own would actually play right into that. Still a stereotype, but not quite the one you may think it is.
Re:Some are harassed and attacked into leaving. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is always room for men to be allies to women without degrading, patronizing, or creating dependence. Doing it skillfully can take some consideration and actively consulting with women about how they'd prefer to work with male allies. It also means backing off when women say your help isn't needed or wanted. But there's nothing sexist about standing with someone who's being attacked. The same goes for straight people and gay people or any other majority/minority situation: having members of the majority who really "get it" absolutely matters.
Re:Community resistance (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd like to nominate this comment for "Understatement of the Year." Here's what you just wrote, more or less:
"Girls need to have babies, and this overwhelming urge drives them to seek out a mate so that he may plant his fertile man seed in her receptive girly parts. Who can blame them for not being interested in contributing to open source?! Also, those bitches need to raise mah babbies, not pretend like they can write software!"
Sexism is not biological, it's cultural - as you've just illustrated in amazing detail.
Re:Community resistance (Score:2, Insightful)
> is because nerds and geeks are often awful to women
Compared non non-nerd men, who are... good to women?
Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Society has to get over the preoccupation of having a 50/50 gender split on everything.
As a married father of a girl and two boys it is very clear that every child at a very early age (6 months) starts displaying very different interests and abilities. My two boys both took to boy things instantly but one loved swords (guns, sports etc) and the other took to mechanical stuff (cars, thomas the train etc.)
A rule is just a general principle, but, as a rule girls move into IT for reasons other than the love of coding. Claim that they are too smart to work for free, that they figured out that IT staff are abused, that nerds scare them away or whatever you want... but the truth is they just have other interests, get over it.
I think... (Score:3, Insightful)
...that says more about *you* than the female sex.
Re:Okay this may get me modded down to infinity, b (Score:4, Insightful)
The conceit that all stereotypes have a grain of truth at their core is one that is mostly championed by the people who are both unaffected by stereotypes and also enjoy being prejudiced against others. Not to mention it's incorrect.
Re:Community resistance (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny, I've never seen that response from a woman simply from telling her "I'm a software engineer."
Though I *have* seen that response when a "So what do you do?" turns into a 60-minute-long exegesis on the history of computer science and the critical role of the computer programmer in modern society, replete with references to Star Wars, Firefly, Lord of the Rings, Babylon 5, and Star Trek in the hands of some friends and colleagues.
Here's the thing: they're turned off by you because you're an aspie bore who fixates on topics of interest to you with no understanding or awareness of how uninterested in that topic they really are. It's not because you work with computers, it's because you don't know when the fuck to shut up about computers.
Re:This again? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's usually somewhere between difficult and impossible to determine before the effort has been made to integrate people of characteristic X into the community of people doing Y. I'll certainly say after reading replies on Slashdot to various stories regarding women, I can see where I might find the climate here and on similar sites hostile if I were a woman. Just look at the replies so far here. They're split about 3 even ways between: reasonable people who think that women avoid OSS because of reasons that are the fault of the community (Deliberate or inadvertent hostility, sexism, etc), reasonable people like you who question that assumption for fairly good reasons, and blatant woman hating or sexism. Granted there's always trolls in a Slashdot discussion, but the level of sheer vindictiveness always seems to go up when females in "geek" activities are the topic.
When the topic is an actual female geek, who has actively done something cool (Like that girl who did a "howto" on building your own iPod charger a couple of years ago), the comments jump from the creepily fawning to completely dismissive like a bipolar Chihuahua on a cup of espresso. I'm not saying that this is the only reason women don't participate much in OSS software. There might also be issues of interest or that sort of thing. The general attitude certainly can't be helpful though.
Re:Some are harassed and attacked into leaving. (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the reasons women do not sometimes speak up when harassed or threatened, etc is because sometimes it is felt that the community supports the harasser. It is often simply easier to leave a community that does not want rather than attempt to change it. Why do I need the headache of putting up with bigots so that I can participate in a optional community that doesn't want me? If you do not value me, I can go elsewhere. The open source development community is not something that is essential. It is purely optional.
Another reason is that often when you do speak up people respond by complaining that you are an overly sensitive whiner and how typical of a woman to not have the balls to take it. So again, why bother? I don't need you so if you obviously don't need me, fuck off. I have better things to do. Like my real job that pays me.
It's not that women need the help of MEN, but that when people are being asses it is the job of other PEOPLE to step up and say "No! We do not treat people that way!" The same call for decency applies to all kinds of harassment, not just gender. It is your job as a member of the community to represent the community and make sure the people you want to be there feel welcome and the people who step out of line get put in their place. This has nothing to do with men protecting women, but for decent people standing up for what is right. All that is required for evil to flourish is for good to do nothing.
The attitude that you need do nothing because a woman should stand up for herself all on her own only supports the asshats and serves to isolate the woman. This proves to her that the community does not want her and she is better off going someplace else.
Re:Some are harassed and attacked into leaving. (Score:5, Insightful)
Way to set the bar pointlessly high. So women, in order to participate normally in the community, have to demonstrate super-fitness to participate by beating the shit out of those who threaten them? Why doesn't the community simply agree that this behaviour is unacceptable?
It's not that men need to protect women. It's that, in a room of 100, if five or so are working diligently to prevent another two from participating, those two can't really be expected to be successful at participating if the other 95 just keep their mouths shut and shuffle their feet when the two complain about how they're treated.
That's why men should speak up against sexism.
Re:Okay this may get me modded down to infinity, b (Score:4, Insightful)
Saying something is a stereotype is not the same as saying it's never true. People often forget that.
People tend to conveniently "forget" anything that gives them an excuse to be offended.
For a certain kind of person who has little or no power elsewhere, being "offended" is extremely gratifying. It gives them an excuse to demand that someone else change their behavior. Your post practically served it to this type on a silver platter. It usually takes less temptation than you gave for their control motive to manifest.
Personally I thought your post was humorous but then I'm not looking to tell other people how they should live, what they should think, what they should say, how they should feel, etc. If I really had a problem with something you said, I would ignore you and move on to someone I prefer. Life is not politically correct, the world is not fair, and other people have this habit of not often doing what you wish they would do. I made my peace with that a long time ago.
If I want to provide a contrast, I do it by setting a better example. Otherwise I live and let live. So for me it's easy to see the bullshit behind "I'm offended" and its variants. The only time "I'm offended" is valid is when someone is forcing you to listen, and in that case, the problem is that they are forcing you to listen.
Re:Some are harassed and attacked into leaving. (Score:4, Insightful)
I apologize if my post made me sound condescending or unconcerned, but I've spent a lifetime receiving mixed signals on this topic. The worst, which actually makes me feel like dirt when it happens, is getting shouted at for holding the door. I hold the door for people, not women. The look of loathing I have on occasion received, simply for trying to help another person out, is enough to make me want to dig a hole and drop into it.
Re:Community resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Positive discrimination is still discrimination, and no truly equal system can ever come of it.
Re:Community resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Set theory looks good on paper. In practice I'd imagine it's pretty hard to ignore the 10 or 12 guys trying to get into your pants by living out a tech support related porn movie fantasy, in favor of the normal reasonable guys who probably aren't going out of their way to proclaim their normal reasonableness. It's probably made even worse by the realization that most of the ones trying to get into your pants are likely not actually bad guys, they just don't know how to act around polite society. Imagine going into a theater where 15% of your fellow patrons are screaming at the screen, talking on cell phones, or using laser pointers. Could you still enjoy the show since the other 85% of the audience are behaving well?
Re:Good luck with that (Score:2, Insightful)
On the contrary: in college the few women in CS were there because they actually liked the material (and as such they were invariably in the top 10% of the class). There were about an equal number of men who actually liked coding, and the remainder of the class were mediocre-to-terrible programmers (all male) who "figured this would pay better than an English major".
Any woman willing to deal with the rampant sexism in the computer geekery community (for reference, see half the comments on this page) has to really love computers.
Re:Community resistance (Score:2, Insightful)
I raised 4 daughters while I was a programmer. One is a network engineer, the others don't want anything to do with tech professionally. While the behavior of some idiots do drive women away, the guys should just get over themselves. Most of the women I know who left the IT trenches did it more because of the tendency to do system upgrades on holidays or be on call 24/7 or be stuck in a career ghetto.
Re:Community resistance (Score:2, Insightful)
And you would call this vapid generalization about women... NOT sexist? The problem isn't you, it's the dumb broads?
Here's where you disconnect: These are topics that MOST people - men and women both - don't give a shit about. Yes, you'll need to develop some interests outside of code optimization if you want to socialize with people. I'm a software engineer. I also play music. I also do a lot of reading. I also enjoy rock climbing, mountain biking, playing hockey, traveling, cooking, and studying languages. In other words, I have a basis for connections with people outside the small number of people I can talk about programming with. If I spent all social time droning on about the piece of code I'm writing, I will - rightly - be viewed as a one-dimensional bore.
If you want to be a one-dimensional bore, the problem lies with YOU, not with other people who find you boring.
Re:Community resistance (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Community resistance (Score:4, Insightful)
You touch on something, but I think there are deeper issues at work here.
(FWIW, I welcome their involvement in OSS. There is quite a bit of historical social machinery that stands in the way and someone needs to do something about it.)
Every few months (YMMV), it seems that there is a story on /. about a lack of women in science and engineering. Some posters on this particular topic have also suggested that very few women pursue "geeky" endeavors in their free time. From a very arm-chair/anecdotal position, I think these both have some of the main root cause: from a young age women are not encouraged to pursue technology or science in the same way boys are.
There are many factors for this, it's not as simple as saying that "the parents are doing a bad job" or "it's the schools". Like most things, it's not that black and white. As a boy, for a variety of reasons, I spent many hours reading books, tinkering, and generally "being by myself" that led to how I solve problems and spurred me on my way in my interests. My sisters, under the auspices of a very liberal, slightly disconnected intellectual, were given the same sort of options, but followed their peers more: socializing, etc. But I cannot rightly claim that this is what happens to everyone. What I can say is that it does seem like even children are encouraged in different paths by the whole of society and that this is hard to fight, but should start somewhere. Did my teachers encourage males to "be nerdy" and females to be social? Are there different pressures exerted on young girls, not just by their families, but by media?
If we take that disparity between male and female at an academic level (that is, the difference in enrollment/matriculation under science and technology by the sexes) and then envision those graduates as working professionals, the numbers make more sense. If (these are purely made up numbers to illustrate a point) 75% of graduates in, say, Computer Science are males and only 20% of graduates go on to contribute to OSS, there is a good chance that the make up of the OSS contributing graduates will be predominately male (there is no guarantee, of course... it could well be that that 20% is part of the 25% of female graduates in my made up scenario, but ceteris paribus you'd not expect that).
I don't think this has as much to do with salary as it does these other social rules and the existing social frameworks that exist. That is why groups like the Ada Initiative may seem backwards to some, but are needed. Someone needs to encourage the young (and old) women on the fence that they can contribute to OSS, that it's okay to be geeky. Someone needs to set these examples for girls so that they don't fall into the age old traps of misogyny.
Additional food for thought: I do many technical interviews and I see very few females who contribute to OSS in them, but a sad majority of the men are often quite bigoted and not as liberal as they would like to believe. That is to say, anecdotally, there is sometimes a correlation with OSS work and poor empathy skills which result in these types of problems (groping, etc). Sometimes this social outsider "dive into books" sort of thing that may contribute to the division to begin with, also makes some men who's social skills are undeveloped (to put it nicely) and pathetic (to put it bluntly).
Re:This again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes, because the sex that we're being told is biologically predisposed towards nurturing, consensus-building, sharing, caring behavior... ALL they care about is getting paid for everything they do. And the men, who are biologically predisposed towards aggression, competition, and dominance... all they care about is sharing their code and delighting other people with the free software they've helped create.
It's ironclad, I guess I have to concede defeat.
At what point does this stop mattering? (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything is a gender or race issue. Why is this so important? No one is forcing women out of open source. Pretty much anyone can participate that WANTS to be there.
First, most participation comes without any idea of what the other person even looks like so the notion of gender or race probably is irrelevant. Am I man or a woman or an orange gorilla who escaped from his cage? You don't know.
Second, most of these heavily male communities are not lacking for females because they're intentionally driving them away. To the contrary, most of them want women if only to feel less like they're in an isolated research station on the moon. Psychologically men just prefer that. It doesn't even need a sexual component.
I guess I wonder if people are going to be playing the race and gender card 100 years from now? Does this thing expire ever? What effort needs to be made and then we can say "enough."... ever? Because if it's never enough then just out of simply pique I suggest we reverse that situation and start demanding male participation in female activities ESPECIALLY if men don't want to participate. See, some group is complaining because women have INTENTIONALLY chosen to not participate in certain activities. And this is somehow a male problem. Well, what about all the female groups that men don't have any interest in at all? Demand equal representation. Now you might only be able to get one man for every ten women that want to join such groups. But if you enforce equality it means that nine women have to be rejected for every one that is accepted into such groups and all men are accepted indifferent to any other qualification.
Sound like fun? Well, the men aren't enjoying this nonsense either. Just stop it. If you're actively being driven away because of your vagina then cite some evidence and we'll deal with it. But if all you've got is correlative gender statistics then please don't waste our time.
Re:Community resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Slowly this is improving (I got lucky, my parents were very liberal) and other die-hard programmers of both sexes whom I've known all attribute it to a childhood environment that promoted a love of computers and science. There's a large drag coefficient on Rosie the Riveter (and her descendants) simply because of cultural inertia.
Re:Some are harassed and attacked into leaving. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's very unlikely this happens in every case, but it takes more than a single nutjob attacking someone, or even many nutjobs attacking, to make someone leave the community. It takes good people like you and me to ignore the nutjobs, to not step in and say, "That's enough."
Excuse my incredulity, but is this attitude really helping? You are continuing to promulgate the idea that women need the help of men to survive -- like it's YOUR job to step in and say "enough."
If I received a threat implying I'd come to harm at a conference, I'd show up to the conference with some brass knuckles, and anybody trying to make good on that threat would be leaving the conference minus a set of front teeth, and perhaps minus their complete set of cognitive abilities.
Women cannot gain independence via dependence.
If you put the strongest black man in the world in a room with 100 white supremicists bent on his destruction, the fact that the black man now needs help doesn't make him weak.
And in the OP's case, it is YOUR job to step in and at the very least say "this nutjob does not represent me".
Re:Community resistance (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure I'd agree. Turn on Discovery channel or Animal Planet and look at animal behavior. Many wild animals have a level of male dominance that is pretty extreme - PARTICULARLY among our fellow primates.
And many animals have female dominance, including some primates [umich.edu]. There have also been female dominant human societies.
I'd argue that not only is sexism not wholly cultural, but the fight against sexism is mostly cultural.
Providing pissoir's for men only is not sexist because there are real biological differences which make women less keen on their version. Providing maternity wards for women only is not sexist. Sexism is, almost by definition, exactly the bit that's left over after you take out the biological element. That means sexism is cultural 100%.
Re:This again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Gender performance in mathetmatics (certainly relevant to computer science and programming, no?) shows fairly little gender variance until secondary schooling, and in recent years, that gap has closed as women are encouraged to participate in greater numbers in the more advanced math classes on offer. Some studies find boys test better on SATs... other studies find girls do better in classroom studies. There's very little to suggest that girls are "biologically" disinclined to participate in math and science as a career.
I'd agree that the notion shouldn't be rejected out of hand, but there's also a pretty strong body of evidence that indicates that, as far as math and science learning is concerned, there's not a lot of difference inherent to the genders - it's not really a "boys only" or "girls only" thing. There are huge swaths of evidence suggesting that sexism, cultural norms, and social pressures contribute to these disparities. This certainly suggests a parallel to the situation here, where programming, and especially Open Source programming, is a "boys club," where social pressures, rather than biological, keep female participation low.
What a gross generalization (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I'm not going to say "turnabout is fair play", but before you heap too much criticism on socially inept nerds, consider that one reason they are that way is that women universally reject them. Tell a woman you're a computer programmer, and her eyes glaze over. Tell her you like playing computer games, and she leaves. Tell her you like her, and she'll say "ugh". And now other women want to come to communities dominated by these kinds of men, who have been despised by women since the day they were old enough to be, and then wonder why they are not made as welcome as they'd like to be? Who is really the problem here, the nerds, or the culture that inculcates contempt for them?
I've never had that problem (and I know many quote-n-quote geeks would say the same.) Seriously, the generalizations presented herein are such an overused cliche. It's all about communication skills with members of the opposite sex, presentation, etc. If you have experienced these problems, that's on you, not them.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
More women have "real" lives (Score:5, Insightful)
An intelligent, educated woman is very unlikely to remain single for long. I suspect the root cause of the disparity between open source and proprietary participation of women on projects is due to the simple fact that once they go home from work, they have real lives to live, while many of "the guys" in the industry are techno-freaks with little or no social life and plenty of spare time to devote to OSS or Free projects.
Like myself. 47 and counting. *sigh*
Stereotypes are social heuristics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Okay this may get me modded down to infinity, b (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Preachy is your better example? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe try another.
It's hard not to sound a little preachy when you're dealing with such emotionally-driven unreasonable people who think they're so justified. Try it yourself sometime; I'd be interested in whether you remain as calm and centered. While I understand your complaint, it goes with that territory. You may as well complain about the strong breeze every time you go skydiving.
... my better example is that I don't pretend to be "hurt" by the words of another person so I can guilt-trip or shame them into modifying their behavior to suit my personal tastes. Not even when I really, really don't like what they said and why they said it. That's mine to get over because their freedom of expression trumps my personal likes and dislikes.
To answer the question you posed
Unless someone tries to use force or fraud to cause me material harm, I have absolutely no reason to look for ways to make them do anything. "I'm offended!" is how cowards aspire to be bullies.
Re:Okay this may get me modded down to infinity, b (Score:4, Insightful)
I never understood why people refuse to believe something could ever be the case because its labeled as a stereotype, lets take the goldigger example. Women have a biological imperative to find a mate capable of supporting her offspring, we see this behavior in just about every species out there, so why do we think the human female would be ANY different in this regard?
I remember once an AC answered a post like yours. It was an AC or else I'd give a proper attribution.
The response was "you're using reason to counter an emotional argument. Sadly, this will not work, because those who will be swayed by emotional arguments are not mature enough to be reasoned with in an adult manner."
I don't see anything sexist in simply acknowledging we are different.
Academic careers have been ruined simply for suggesting that the female brain is "wired" differently from the male brain. I wish I were making this up. No amount of incontrovertible physical evidence will stop this kind of hyper-emotional over-reaction. What you're dealing with is like a religion and anyone who does not adhere to it is a heretic. I know many would like to believe we abandoned this type of approach after the Dark Ages but the reality is that it simply changed form.
Narrow-minded types always tend to believe things like "equality implies same-ness", causing them to feel threatened by any valid claim of differences (which incidentally is why weak-minded people worship conformity). As far as they're concerned, any difference you point out is the same as saying one is inferior to the other. That's the doctrine of this religion.
Re:Community resistance (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, the whole reason this keeps coming up on slashdot seems to be to kick the (male) geeks in the shorts for being sexist pigs. And of course like Pavlov's dogs a few sexists and a few trolls (and probably some sexist trolls) show up to prove the point. The problem with the "sexist pig" theory is it requires computer programmers to not only be sexist, but to be the most sexist of all professions excluding sports. More sexist than men in the military. More sexist that salespeople. More sexist than advertising people. This is a bit hard to believe.
No, he's really smelly. I only have that information secondhand, but it's from a female programmer, so it's reliable :-)
Re:Community resistance (Score:4, Insightful)
1.Women have a lot duties at home.
2.Duties, that are supposed to be shared by both parents, male and female (in our case), but the male part of the family does not do such a trivial things as being parent, being husband, and lets face it, having a full time job.
3.Because women sacrifice their time to do all the home work, they actually don't have time to do any geek things.
4.Because women don't do geek things, they stupid, useless, and...deserve it, right?
Here my sarcasm is dead, but not my logic. And for some strange reason, most of the males don't see the CATCH-22....but it is okey, i suppose most of them are stupid and ignorant...what, nerds?
Re:Community resistance (Score:2, Insightful)