The Empathy Gap and Why Women Are Treated So Badly In Open Source Projects (perens.com) 786
Bruce Perens writes: There's no shortage of stories of horrible treatment of women in Open Source projects. But how did we get here? How did we ever get a community where a vocal minority of males behave in the most boorish, misogynistic, objectifying manner toward women? I have a theory: "It’s unfortunately the case that software development in general and Open Source communities are frequented by males who have social development issues. I once complained online about how offended I was by a news story that said many software developers were on the autism spectrum. To my embarrassment, there were many replies to my complaint by people who wrote 'no, I really am on the spectrum and I’m not alone here.'
It’s still an open issue whether males and females have built-in biases that, for example, lead fewer women to be programmers, or if such biases only develop as a response to social signals. There is more science to be done. But it’s difficult to do that sort of science because we can’t separate the individuals from the social signals they’ve grown up with. Certainly we can improve the situation for the women who would be programmers except for the social signals."
It’s still an open issue whether males and females have built-in biases that, for example, lead fewer women to be programmers, or if such biases only develop as a response to social signals. There is more science to be done. But it’s difficult to do that sort of science because we can’t separate the individuals from the social signals they’ve grown up with. Certainly we can improve the situation for the women who would be programmers except for the social signals."
Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:3, Informative)
The summarry makes it look like I'm blaming folks with Asperger's, which is not the case. It's a social development issue but not attributed to the people with pathology.
Click through the link to get the whole story.
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Insightful)
"It’s unfortunately the case that software development in general and Open Source communities are frequented by males who have social development issues"
What about the women who have "social development issues" that draw them to the field, or do they get off with a wink and a nod?
I love ya, Bruce, but this is bullshit.
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Bruce's argument is that the so men with social development issues can't empathize with women, and that the men can empathize with other men enough to get along. Presumably, the women with social development issues can empathize with the women, and aren't part of the issue of integrating non-issue women into software development. So I would say that for the time being, the women with issues probably get a wink and a nod, as they aren't as big a part of the
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does this have to be a "male" problem versus an "asshole" problem?
If you say there are unpleasant women to work with, doesn't that kind of transcend gender?
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There are no ads on my blog. This issue is sufficiently far from my business that it does me no good. It's just something I care about.
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Insightful)
Asshollery has a strong positive correlation to the Y chromosome and testosterone.
Sorry, as someone who knows/has known literally thousands of women in my lifetime, I call "bullshit".
You're actually claiming that the presence of a Y chromosome is a predictor for "assholishness"?
I doubt you could even define "assholishness" (or "asshollery" or whatever) to any degree of accuracy. One person's "assholishness" is another person's perfectly acceptable behavior, so that's a fail. It's like defining pornography, which ends up coming down to some subjective value judgement.
So, in short, you're wrong, and you should stop spreading this nonsense- it just makes you out to be an asshole.
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Insightful)
Asshollery has a strong positive correlation to the Y chromosome and testosterone.
Sorry, as someone who knows/has known literally thousands of women in my lifetime, I call "bullshit".
Beat me to it.
A male tends to be more aggressive by virtue of the extra testosterone we carry around, but that in no way is a marker for being a jerk. Women do just as well in the jerk department as do males.
This matter ain't a-goin nowhere until we realize this is a people issue.
Having friends and co-workers who are successful people who happen to be female, I've gotten few of the now pervasive "Men are fucking assholes" from any of them.
In fact, while they have met men who are assholes, to a woman they declare the man an asshole - not men .
What is universal among their experience is that a lot of the resistance and discouragement they get is from other women. Which sadly enough has caused several of them to associate almost totally with male cohorts, in large part because they got tired of the "Who did she lay to get that job?" comments from other women.
And heaven help the poor woman if she is also attractive!. Two of these women (disclaimer - one is my wife) are pretty attractive, and there are plenty of women who simply hate you for that. My wife, who is also tall and slender, has had women come up to her in the street tellng her they hate her for her looks, and the other woman, a fine engineer, is also a fitness buff and remarkably beautiful as well - has taken so much guff from the other women at work that she's one of the ones I noted, avoid other women now. And why not? The men at work treated her as an equal even if they appreciated her beauty at the same time. And woe onto anyone who disrespects her.
All of which led me to conclude that there are men who are jerks. All of this led me to conclude that there are women who are jerks as well.
But here we are, in this dysfunctional state where there is no fault but men's fault, where whatever any woman says is the unaasailble truth.
But here's the thing. There is a definite gender ratio difference in male/female in IT. Does this mean that all men or all men in IT are jerks? If so, in the field of veterinary medicine, which is almost exclusivley female now, does it then follow that all women or all women in veterinary field are jerks? Does it mean that there is some aspect of gender that attracts mostly males to IT? Some aspect of gender that attracts overwhemingly females to veterinary medicine?
Thes questions make some folks very uncomfortable. And anyone who tries to tapdance some bullshit that female veternarians are saints and men all dropped out of the field because they are assholes is displaying grade A assholeism themselves.
Do we want to actually solve the problem if there is one? Blaming all problems on men is like a person looking for their lost keys under a streetlamp where the light is good, rather than in an unlit area, where they knew they actually lost them.
If we want to fix this problem - if it is a problem based on discrimination or maltreatment, it must be acknowledged that it is not simply a male problem.
Because to ignore that simply won't fix the issue - it just won't.
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Informative)
Asshollery has a strong positive correlation to the Y chromosome and testosterone.
It's statements like this that make me wish there were a much stronger word in the English language than "bullshit."
tough guys don't HIDE adversarial behavior (Score:3)
It's good that you were very clear you're not saying ALL men are this way or ALL women are that way. Certainly that wouldn't be true.
I understand there ARE studies which suggest that when men and women are "assholes", men are MORE LIKELY to be an asshole to your face, while women are MORE LIKELY to do it behind your back. It might be that some men feel more comfortable being a "tough guy", while many women prefer to maintain the illusion of being "nice", that women's social cues tend to value getting along
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I know they are there. I have had some startlingly unpleasant interactions with a handful of them. I don't know enough about them yet. Probably someone else should handle that side of the problem.
Well I'll tell you what, Bruce. Just as soon as "someone else" gets to work on fixing women's attitude problems and female dominated professions, I'll get right to work on fixing men's attitude problems and male dominated professions. Or is it that your version of "equality" is that only men have problems, only male-dominated fields need fixing, and that only men should bear the responsibility of fixing them?
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're still blaming men with unspecified "social development issues", which is politically correct for now.
In five years time, when "social development issues" become a protected class, I'm going to remind Slashdot and your employer that you posted this.
Cheers,
Anonymous SJW
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm genuinely curious why women's standards of behavior and empathy are the norm to which we ascribe? Why do they get to set the standard definition?
Perhaps male behaviors with a lack of empathy, etc are the norms to which women need to conform?
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Insightful)
The supposition is that there is a problem 'we women' suffer at the hands of males. The reality is that there are trolls and bullies who just pick on the weak. What I have also found is that said trolls and bullies are generally rapidly expunged from tech & gaming circles as they are unpleasant to deal with.
I have always found both the video gaming and open source/tech communities to be the most pleasant and welcoming of all. Am I doing something wrong here? Am I internalising misogyny, or some such nonsense?
Please, stop making up non-existing problems. We got enough real problems as-is already, including radicalised feminists and the media harassing us female gamers and geeks for not adhering to outdated and/or ridiculous stereotypes. Now there's a target to focus on for some real research on an actual problem. I won't stop you.
"Mobbing" (Score:3, Interesting)
I"ve sometimes wondered if this behavior is similar to the mobbing behavior you see in certain species such as Monk Seals:
http://www.pinnipeds.org/seal-... [pinnipeds.org]
"Mobbing" refers to a pathological behavior that occurs when the gender ratio becomes skewed, with an excess of males versus females. The adult males become increasingly aggressive towards females (and immature pups), and will injure and even kill them, as multiple males gang up to play out a violent parody of their normal mating behavior. This problem
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand your intention, but I would urge you to change your mindset to focus less on stereotypes and more on behavior.
I often find this kind of study/summary to be of the greatest irony.
Person complains men are insensitive or make assumptions about women, which is a great irony because that just making an insensitive assumptions about men.
Let me try another example.
You are trying to point out problems within a group. Yet, you have chosen the word 'male' to represent this group.
Suppose we wish to talk about problems in urban Detroit (gangs, single motherhood...)
Would you state the problem in any way as:
Black people are prone to violence and broken families?
No, because that would be so insensitive. You'd probably call that person a bigot.
You'd have to make it more specific. People in poverty, certain urban centers, certain historical background...
I was born in Apartheid South Africa. I know a little more about racial grouping. I also see the reverse now where the groupings and power plays have shifted. It's always tempting, but if you want to be better than a bigot, you have to check yourself and not fall into 'my tribe' thinking.
Now this is always a tricky area as how do you talk about systemic problems without 'grouping' people.
Well as I say, take two minutes and make sure you've tried your best to narrow your group as much as possible. You might not get it perfect, but at least you made the effort and can offend fewer people AND be more accurate.
It's almost pointless to talk about 'black' people as that is such a large group. Neil Degrass Tyson is black. Condoleeza Rice is black. One of the best IOS programmers I know is black. These people bare no resemblance to the image people have when they talk about 'black problems' perpetuated by both bigots and SJW. There are upscale blacks. There are ghetto blacks and every other subgrouping in between.
It's just as pointless to talk about 'white' people. There are rich white folk and downright poor ghetto white folks. You can for example talk about 'white privilege' but you better be careful about it. Tell some poor white kid from a broken home that he has 'white privilege'. Do you have any idea how harmful that is to that person?
Now ponder your choice of groups. You chose to group humans into two of the biggest groups possible. Male and Female.
And you make grand stereotypes about both, lumping in everyone. You insult anyone who identifies with either being male or female. You insult the female who prefers direct talk or believes she should fight the fight. You insult the male who prefers social grace.
Did it ever occur to you that many men get turned off by poor social behavior?
Perhaps the issue is less that of men vs women, but of people who lack social grace.
I would also imagine with all the tools available in the open source world, it might be interesting to find out why other open source cultures haven't developed. Or maybe they have? I haven't studied it. I'm generally just a deep user, as opposed to an active contributor, but I generally find people quite helpful. There are some assholes, but I've also had some very good conversations and help from a lot of people. Every open source project is started by someone.
Basically, take two minutes.
Check your groupings.
Even if you go in depth with nuance in the research, check your summary. Just do the black test. Change the 'bad' group to 'black' and see how it reads.
How does this read to you Bruce:
How did we ever get a community where a vocal minority of males behave in the most boorish, misogynistic, objectifying manner toward women?
How did we ever get a community where a vocal minority of blacks behave in the most boorish, misogynistic, objectifying manner toward women?
Even masked with the words minority, it still stings doesn't it? No matter how your phrase it, it stings a little doesn't it.
So for someone complaining about insensitive men ... you might want to check yourself.
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A few things.
1. Bruce is complaining about men not being sensitive in their open source groups. We're not talking apartheid or segregation here. Bruce's complaint is political correctness, so it is incumbent that such a person be politically correct to all.
2. We must insist on political correctness for all. Not just as a matter of speech, but as a mindset. When people buy into a narrative, they don't see any other voices. You can see that completely in Bruce's summary and post. He just buys the narrative th
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of this was sent to me by a 3rd party with a sharper gaze than I....if I didn't know better, I'd think Bruce's account had been hacked and is now being used by a clever troll. Sadly, that does not seem to be the case.
Here are a few things Bruce has said that people might find interesting:
Bruce Perens: I'll tell you another secret then. Open Source was a mistake. I am not a Freetard any longer.
I know that there's a good chance that some folks will not believe this was a quote from him, but it was. Others might suggest that it is taken out of context, but it isn't, and I'll cite it here:
This is the relevant link [slashdot.org]. (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8501517&cid=51150923)
And then there's this:
Bruce Perens: Yes, I would take your gun. I hope to do so someday.
And, again, a citation [slashdot.org] for those who would insist on evidence. (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8501517&cid=51147449)
Note: None of that is edited, taken out of context, or reworded. It's all easily verified by simply clicking the provided links and looking at what he's written. There are multiple comments that may be of interest.
Bruce, basically, has used the FOSS community as a springboard and now has decided to abandon them, claim he doesn't believe in them, and now uses the term as a derogatory phrase - "freetard" a pejorative.
In other words, he's basically pulled a great troll and is now in the process of abusing the people that he used to get the small measure of fame that he does have.
I've admired Bruce's commentary in the past, but it's hard for me to reconcile any of this recent stuff with the person I thought I knew.
Re: Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh come on. I would like to understand how we have brought up some folks like, to take the worst example, weev. Obviously I don't know a thing about his upbringing, but I know about the general situation, and I suggest a solution, although it would take a generation to implement.
Just what are you doing? Denying there's a problem?
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Just what are you doing? Denying there's a problem?
Isn't that what us humans, as a whole race, tend to do?
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Postmoderrn man is Homo Sapiens Abnego, eh?
No, you are just exasperated with political debate. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, but we make progress slowly.
Re: Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:4, Insightful)
So how's your day going? XD XD XD
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Informative)
A couple of points...
How about, to start, that all sexual abuse and harassment will be considered strictly unacceptable?
Newsflash: it's considered unacceptable by most people. However, *considering* something unacceptable, and it actually *being* unacceptable are two very different things. It's not like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the end of a cliff, looks down, and the law of gravity "considers it unacceptable that he's standing in the middle of the air", and takes action to prohibit it. Social conventions are not the same things as the laws of physics.
For example, the kinds of things that Linus Torvalds has said on mailing lists is stuff that would get any employee of a company instantly fired. Yet in his arrogance he thinks that because he's some super-duper-important OSS guru guy that the same code of conduct doesn't apply to him, which is a pretty disgusting way to think.
Except... it demonstrably does not, in fact, apply to him. When he is making pronouncements from the throne, he isn't an employee, he's a king, and short of armed insurrection, it's almost impossible to involuntarily remove a king from power.
So yeah, for the foundation, how about stopping harassment and abuse?
"Patches welcome".
You can engineer social systems, and you can even engineer emergent properties into social systems, if you have a deep understanding of what you are doing. But the problem with feedback mechanisms in social constructs is that the feedback designed to correct the aberrant behaviour from the normative baseline within any design, is that the feedback has to be non-ignorable. It has to take away something that the person or persons receiving the feedback value, as a punitive measure, and (as studies on gambling addition and slot machine design have shown), it has to have intermittent positive reinforcement that is valued by the recipient as well.
So at this point, you might as well be saying "how about stopping terrorism?", since we've been just as ineffective at that.
As for Autisim Spectrum stuff, I believe that it is very common among all people in this world, male, female, black, white, yellow, green.
This is, at best, a speculative statement, since study after study has shown autism to be more prevalent in males than females:
http://www.autism.org.uk/about... [autism.org.uk]
I don't think that necessarily has any bearing upon whether a person would treat others badly.
No, but it certainly increases the perception by non-autistic persons that they are being treated badly by autistic persons. It doesn't matter whether or not they are actually being treated badly, if it's their perception that they are. Objective facts will not change subjective perceptions.
I notice a lot of Japanese dramas have characters who often are in the autistic spectrum and those characters actually make the dramas more interesting and are almost always depicted as being exceptional in more than one way, often with incredible gifts and ability to influence people positively.
Autistic savants comprise only about 10% of those with autism. They tend to make for interesting stories for those without autism, since savants occur in the non-autist population a less than 10 times that rate -- less than 1%. Thus, it's no surprise that they appear more in fiction than they do in reality.
While they may be interesting, realize that 9 out of 10 people with autism will therefore not be savants, and if that's not your expectation, the expectation needs to be adjusted, since the myth "all people with autism have savant abilities in some area" is harmful, and is based primarily in an expectation that the universe has a built-in inherent fairness.
https://www.autism.com/underst... [autism.com]
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
I have an idea for starters. How about, to start, that all sexual abuse and harassment will be considered strictly unacceptable?
How about for starters, we define clearly what does (and doesn't) constitute "sexual abuse and harassment?" Because in the United States, both are already considered not only social unacceptable, but also illegal.
The problem isn't in getting people to agree to the premise that "all sexual abuse and harassment will be considered strictly unacceptable." The problem is that SJW's would redefine both of those terms so broadly as to include almost all social interactions between men and women.
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you still in school? If so you are in for a bit of a shock when you enter the workforce.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Interesting)
I have an idea for starters. How about, to start, that all sexual abuse and harassment will be considered strictly unacceptable?
Define that. In my first sexual harassment class back in the late 80's, a fellow asked the counselor what sexual harassment was defined as.
Her answer? "Anything any woman thinks is sexual harassment - is sexual harassment.
As you might imagine, a hush fell over the room. How does one have any interaction with a woman if she can interpret "hello" as sexual harassment?
I did ask a coworker what she considered as harassment - she said "It depends". Keep in mind this was a woman who used to find it funny to goose me when I was using a glove box and couldn't move or get hy hands loose.
But back to our counselor we were told that remarks on how the woman looked, saying we liked her jewelry, or her dress, or her hairstyle, or any mention of anything physical or anything that could be interpreted as sexual in nature would very likely result in us getting fired.
Know what effect that had on most every man there? We avoided women like the plague. We made certain that nothing other than business was discussed when we absolutely had to deal with them, and we very often made certain to have a witness along with us.
Know what effect that had on the assholes? None.
Want to know what effect that had on 99 percent of the women there? Pissed them off royally. Our staff assistant had the dirtiest mind I've ever known. Silly small talk. She was devastated when the guys started avoiding her. Because despite what a few folks think, women actually think about sex, talk about sex, and make jokes about it.
Some years later, after seeing the unproductive chill this had put on campus inter-gender relations, not to mention actual real cases remained unchanged in number, these draconian guidelines were relaxed a good bit.
I'm not certain if the incident had anything to do with the change of heart, but not too long before this happened, one of the machinists was taken to task because someone saw in his toolbox, a photograph of a cheerleader. Since photographs of women in cute little outfits were considered harassment of other women, he was turned into HR.
The offensive photograph that was so demeaning to women and considered sexual harassment? It was a photo of his daughter, who had made the high school cheerleading team. He did note that if he was disciplined, he was going to take it to the legal system, as denying hime to post a school photo of his daughter, not unlike the ones the HR people had on their desks, surely looked like discrimination.
So be careful what you ask for. In your ideal world where women cannot hear anything regarding sex, you could end up with...http://feminist.org/education/SexSegregation.asp
or http://www.tolerance.org/magaz... [tolerance.org]
https://62e528761d0685343e1c-f... [rackcdn.com]
http://cdn.inquisitr.com/wp-co... [inquisitr.com]
or even.....http://www.relativityonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/12653311_img9939.jpg
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Which is always going to be true if a word is made up and then used as a definition for a extreme strawman that among other things lies.
Can we please get back on topic instead of from a book by political hack that stacked the Hugos to push some weird male supremicist shit just for the sake of it?
The topic as I see it is just an example of straight out bullying - pretty hard to excuse that even if you consider yourself superior by birth.
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Doesn't it depend on the project? I've hung around the neovim project and from just the gitter/irc forum and the commits I don't get the impression folk there would either know nor care what gender (or race, or if you are disabled etc) you are. Is it hard to find projects like this? What percentage of OS projects do have this problem? Can they be identified easily?
Knowing how/why some people have been brought up a certain way might be interesting to some people but I don't think that that group intersect
Re: Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bruce, please do what you can to get the word out that every instance of assholery needs to stop. It doesn't matter what the gender of the victim is - males should be no more "expected" to take abuse than females. If we stop the abuse, we stop the abuse. I agree, it starts with good parenting, but we can also apply social pressures to adults. Our movement is about means as much as, if not more so than, than ends, and this is a black eye on it. Maybe women as a group tend to be smarter about not abiding such behavior.
Most people don't like to hear that every instance of assholery needs to be countered because it requires *them* to act at every opportunity to counter injustice. This can't be delegated to a committee and if learning to behave is as required as learning to code in our community then it doesn't matter what personality types are at a disadvantage, except that they may need extra help. Other community members need to be as willing to help a newbie behave as they are to help him submit good patches. Is that comfortable in our society? No, but we're doing the evolution thing here - nobody said it was going to be easy.
And one good patch from an asshole isn't worth the loss of several more community members. If we had to make that trade, I'd take one fewer patch, on principle, but we don't have to - a vibrant community is non-zero sum.
My favorite open source communities are joyous playgrounds and rich in female contributors. I'm hesitant to post them here because /. has its share of miscreants, but get in touch if you want some follow-up. Thanks for keeping this problem at the fore.
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Stating that a person is incompetent and backing it with evidence is not a personal attack.
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But this should really be the last straw. If you've been polite and respectful in your previous rejections, and ultimately asked the person to stop contributing in a firm but kind way, then it's on their head if they refuse to accept the rejection and get a much tougher response.
Yes, I agree it's not a personal attack, but being too aggressive too soon will make it look like it is.
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Just what are you doing? Denying there's a problem?
Yes. I deny there is a problem. People often treat each other badly, but I have seen NO evidence that this is a specific problem in FOSS projects, or in tech in general. My personal experience has been the exact opposite. Over the years, I have managed many techs, and I have also managed many non-techs. If you think that engineers are misogynists, you should meet some salesmen. I have dealt with sexual harassment complaints about the sales dept, the shipping crew, but never once about an engineer. My
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Weev's a dick, if I may use that term. But he's not the general case, any more than his ex-girlfriend Shanley is representative of women in tech. There's a group of people, or several, intent on pushing a narrative of "those horrible misogynistic nerds are driving women out of Open Source" (or substitute for Open Source: "tech" or "gaming" or "comics" or a bunch of other things).
Sometimes we're supposedly horrible in the classic hit-on-anything-with-a-skirt way. Sometimes it's "women wouldn't pay attenti
Re: Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your suggested solution involves changing education. This is a favorite tuning knob of many would-be social engineers: diagnose a problem without a study (or with a study made to find exactly that problem, run by people with a vested interest in finding that thing). Specifically, you imply that there's something that schools can do with groups of friends, trying to define the self organizing social groups. This will require a level of policing that is absolutely ludicrous and impractical, and likely very harmful if schoolchildren are denied the ability to choose their friends. School is a tyrannical experience for many, and this plan of yours will just create even more loners, and make them more alone.
It's also amazing to see how thoroughly socially awkward people are chased down and vilified. Finding one of the few places that socially awkward or autism spectrum people are able to spend their time helping society (in some cases for free, and in most cases for less compensation than they WOULD get, outside of it) and trying to find the correct combinations of matches to set their house on fire, all sacrifices for whatever Diversity-God is currently venerated in social engineering circles.
As the pressure increases, they'll eventually figure out what's going on. Within 10 years, I fear you'll be seeing forks of projects along political lines.
That will be the end result of diagnosing a problem where none exists, prescribing solutions where the term is meaningless, and ultimately vilifying and excluding contributors who don't toe the politically correct line. More divisiveness for no gain.
Re: Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:4, Interesting)
It didn't take too long after he passed on a (perhaps paranoid, but perhaps not) warning about some people trying to entrap high-profile Open Source people into sexual harassment complaints at conferences before a few women posted some vague accusations of Raymond "creeping" on them at conferences. Including some he wasn't at.
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You're right about him not being part of our community. I was just referring to him as the archetype of the misogynistic troll. So many people know of him simply because he has made himself so grotesque.
Also, I don't want to refer to specific names in our community and convert this into a personal attack. You might know a few and I've met them.
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Did you not read all the way to the end of the article? I point out a problem similarity to the reason we integrated schools in the '60's, and suggest a potential solution. The only problem is that this solution takes a generation to work.
No doubt the problem is not unique to Free Software projects. That's just the community that I have to work with.
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Yes, women are intelligent, powerful, and capable, but here's a point that I've tried to make before.
While it's true that when some men treat women badly, women are capable of standing up for themselves and don't need men to do it for them, men still need to object, because the bad actions of other men unfortunately reflect poorly on all men.
No, it shouldn't be that way--- lumping men together--- but still, many people do that (and they in turn need to stop).
Women don't need men to defend them. But men need
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Consider weev to be a stand-in for the folks in our community who I don't want to name because this would turn into a personal attack if I did. You probably know of them although certainly none are friends.
It might even be that the folks who drove Telsa out weren't really community members. I didn't investigate. But I have had no trouble finding misogynistic stuff written on the web about women who were or are participating in Open Source projects. Someone got close enough to our community to do that.
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A stand in? Sort of like a variable? Shouldn't that be $weev, then?
Message to Bruce Perens (Score:3)
Bruce,
I read your article, The Empathy Gap, and Why Women are Treated Badly in Open Source Communities [perens.com]. (I saw it on Slashdot. [slashdot.org])
It seems to me that I have some useful comments:
You said, "How did we ever get to the point that a vocal minority of males in Open Source communities behave in the most boorish, misogynistic, objectifying manner toward women?"
A vocal minority of males on Slashdot, for example, behave in the most boorish, objectifying manner toward each other.
An example of a programmer b
Re: (Score:3)
Really? I'm paying Cloudflare real money for that. Is it still gone?
Regarding the rest of your argument, I think we all end up in a socially unhealthy environment if women have to start segregated women's projects as you suggest or if we don't get them into our communities. It's bad for men too if that continues to happen. Nor is the problem minor, I would post a link to some of the more repulsive stuff but I don't want to promote it. You don't have to be at all precious t
Re: (Score:2)
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Server: cloudflare-nginx
Date: Fri, 01 Jan 2016 18:45:46 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 168
Connection: keep-alive
Set-Cookie: __cfduid=d96c6aff4602b1e0616027bf8aa8160271451673945; expires=Sat, 31-Dec-16 18:45:45 GMT; path=/; domain=.perens.com; HttpOnly
CF-RAY: 25e062127b7d40a0-HAM
I still don't see it as a big problem - if a project starts driving away people with repulsive behaviour of its members, it will die out. Mayb
Re: Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Social justice at it's finest.
Social Justice is now cloudflare not delivering services they're being paid for?
What the fuck? Are you on drugs or do you define "SJW" as simply everything you don't like today?
Re: (Score:3)
That insult has pretty well always been that as used on this site. It often makes a fine idiot detector or anger detector.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF is "We should try to be nice to people" such a controversial position?
Because when you state it in a way that implies all men in open source projects are not being to nice to women, it's grossly offensive.
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody says all. I write, at the link, a "vocal minority". But I would like to know how we got folks like the ones who abused the late Telsa Gwynne. A person I met long ago and really liked, and wife to Alan Cox. Not anyone unreasonable. Still driven out of the community.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I deny your premise. When it's read by people with unbel
Re:Summary insufficient, click through the link. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly because of the generally non-nice, aggressive, "it's all your fault" way that it was put. The social issue on display here is the article's author generalising a large group of people, and collectively calling them socially underdeveloped. It's unsurprising that that gets a negative response, in much the same way as generalising all women, and calling them crap at technology gets an unsurprisingly negative response.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Why don't you investigate Ian Murdock's death? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ian was a really bright and capable guy with a dark side. Unfortunately, at times he had difficulty dealing with anger, debilitating depression, and blame projection. He was arrested for battery and illegal confinement in 2009, this event with SFPD wasn't the first time.
I was his friend once, although that was more than a decade ago. I absolutely hate that he died without a friend left in the world to help him and in such an undignified, unfair, senseless way. But that's what happened. The police were not to blame.
Ye gods (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ye gods (Score:5, Insightful)
Repeat it often enough and people will start to remember it as fact.
Re: (Score:3)
how did we get where? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gender has no role in online interactions unless you make it.
We're all pixels. we have no race. no nationality. no gender. no sexuality.
I'm not sure what online community you're taking part in, that this is happening in but i suggest you leave it =)
"There's no shortage of stories .... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"There's no shortage of stories .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"There's no shortage of stories .... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because you don't feel sorry for guys getting their feelings hurt but you get almost teary eyed when women cry. Its sort of the essence of being a man.
It is? (Score:3)
It’s still an open issue whether males and females have built-in biases that, for example, lead fewer women to be programmers,
I disagree that it's still open. We all know that the built in biases are there. Where do you think the "social stigma" would have come from?
Re: (Score:2)
We had a whole lot of social pressure for women to stay at home with the kids which went by the wayside during World War II, where Rosie went to be a welder (not a riveter) in the Kaiser shipyard. Then the war ended and we sent the women back to the home for a generation. But it's not really the same today, nobody blinks at women in the workplace. So, is that socialized because of a need to protect childbearing women centuries past, or is it inbuilt?
Re: (Score:3)
This graph [imgur.com] seems to indicate that the problem of lack of women in computer science correlated pretty directly with the rise of the home computer and video games in the mid 80's.
Stop Hazing Us (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop Editors. Stop Slashdot. Stop Dice. Stop Bruce Perens. Stop This.
Stop hazing the tech sector. Stop making us out to be hostile to women, or racists, or all white male misogynerds. We're just regular people, regular geeks. Yes we like to play D&D, and pretend we're dwarves, or warlocks, or elf-maids, but that does not make us supporters of rape culture. Yes we like to write computer programs and make geeky websites about science stuff or cat videos. But that does not makes us anti-immigrant bigots. Yes we disagree with you and politely explain our reasons why, but that does not make us harassing MRA online stalkers.
The lies and hazing have to stop. The tech sector does not have a problem with women. The media has a problem with the tech sector.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Learn. To. Read.
He said "a vocal minority", never implying it was all men or you in particular.
Stop being an SJW and taking offence at everything, and then trying to shut down the debate for those interested in having it.
Re: (Score:3)
I could barely get tech interviews and my qualifications and experience were oft questioned (I had a good internship and grades and projects and such).This didn't happen to the guys I graduated with. It's something I've heard MANY times from MANY women. It's a slow pushing out of women in technology by men in technology because it's frankly just not worth the bullshit.
May I ask how many of those interviewing managers questioning your qualifications were non-technical? From what I've seen, that's the source of the problem. Non-technical managers who hate hiring developers of any kind because they're a "cost center" have no ability at all to judge the worth of any developer, because they don't understand what a developer does, or how a developer does what a developer does, so they latch on to the one visible thing they can understand: you're a girl. And monkey boy doing
Careful with distinctions here... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are some people who really are awful to women, and they're often (but not always) really awful to work with in other ways too. Finding ways to get them to either improve or get out is tricky because they exist in the same career ladders as people who want a decent place to work.
Then there's a subset of people opposing them who insist on overly narrow notions of how people should be allowed to act, talk, and think. They take it on themselves to police speech and behaviour far more than is reasonable or necessary. In their effort to deal with a legitimate problem, they become another kind of problem.
Making all this less clear is that the boundaries between these are unclear and they tend (but don't always) to line up with political views, and political witchhunts in the workplace (or broader society) are dangerous and ill-advised.
It's messy enough that it'd be tempting to just step back from the whole thing, but the stakes are too high for that. We neither should want to waste the potential of half our population (or other subsets of the population) nor should we create a work environment or society where most kinds of differing views on gender or jokes are curtailed. So navigating this is damned tough.
Re: (Score:2)
You took the words right from my head.
Re: (Score:3)
Interesting. You call it a troll post, I find little in there to challenge.
In my experience, sexist people just don't know how to communicate with women, and feel threatened. Grow up, and be a man!
You sexist piece of shit, stop telling men how to be a man.
I don't know how to communicate with women. That's because I have Aspergers; I can't communicate with fucking anybody. Women complain about sexual objectification; I objectify everybody and everything and there's nothing sexual about it.
Threatened? I'm feeling very threatened by people telling me that all of my success is because I'm sexist, misogynistic, benefiting from some
Re: (Score:3)
Curious. You seem to think I'm trying to be rude.
I'm merely failing to observe the local etiquette, often because I just don't have a fucking clue what it is. I'm failing to respond to body language, because it's a total mystery to me. I'm being honest, because that's respectful.
Tell me, where in all of that am I being sexist? Where am I being an arsehole? Where exactly am I intentionally upsetting people?
How the fuck am I meant to be in the wrong here, when other people are judging me by their rules, inclu
Waaah, I'm offended (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what." -- Stephen Fry
General problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. I don't think the open source community, or rather nerds in general have a special problem with sexism or racism or homophobia for that matter.
Society has a problem. There is a vocal minority of assholes everywhere. Including in technology.
Also there is generally a healthy dose of racism and sexism in all of us. Is it natural? I dunno. But I do believe it can really hurt people and it does cloud our judgement. We deal with it in different ways. Some recognize it, try to be educated about it and try to avoid expressing it and keep it from clouding their judgement. Some others don't even see it. Some even celebrate it.
But no matter if you see something or not. Or if you ignore it. It doesn't go away. And it doesn't help victims, if you tell them that it doesn't exist. Every time there is a story on sexism on Slashdot, most comments are either outright sexist or they deny the existence of sexism. That is the problem, IMHO.
Case in point:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is blaming a bunch of powerless computer nerds. But, since they're nerds, they're easy to bully and it's fun, too. Who doesn't enjoy shoving a nerd's face into the mud, be it literal or figurative (online)?
This is just the "confess! confess!" kind of Spanish inquisition that goes on today in the SJW crowd. They could address real problems, but those are hard. It's much more entertaining to bash people who don't fight back.
Why are you such a sexist, Bruce? (Score:4, Insightful)
Women are about 50% of the population and the majority of college graduates. Women could easily create women-dominated computer science programs, companies, and open source projects, run according to whatever preferences they have, if they wanted to. When it comes to open source development, none of the usual barriers feminists postulate to explain underrepresentation of women in certain fields apply: if pimply maladjusted male teenagers living in their mom's basement can create open source projects, surely intelligent, educated, empathetic women can do so as well. And if women's empathetic and communication styles result in superior project performance, they'd quickly take over the open source world.
Instead, Perens seems to view women as so weak and inferior that the only way they can create open source software is under male guidance and tutelage, within male-dominated projects. Perens and people like him are the real misogynists and sexists, because he obviously deep down still believes that women are the weaker sex and need protection and help from males like him.
And the real irony behind arguments like Perens's is that on the one hand, he acknowledges deep biological differences between men and women, but then thinks that society should somehow shoe-horn and reeducate people in such a way that despite those differences, outcomes are still statistically equal in a few select areas that he happens to care about.
There's no shortage of stories (Score:5, Insightful)
where the man is an evil thing and the woman is the pristine victim of the bestial male. This doesn't make man a beast or a women virginal purity.
There's no "Empathy Gap". There's a story being written and the geek is the least protected class, male, weak, strange and acts mostly alone, and this is a valuable target.
Chauvinism is alive and well in 2016 (Score:5, Insightful)
No, really it is. You don't need to look far for piles and piles of peer validated, long running, empirical studies showing how women get the short end of the stick in lots of social, economic, and employment situations.
I knew all of the above but the clue bat really didn't knock my personal set of teeth out until early in 2015.
I work for a small-ish nonprofit providing all kinds of IT services, but in a small outfit you end up wearing all kinds of hats. I was asked to move my office to one adjoining a large floor that's essentially free public access computers for job search.
Why? The reason that was literally told to me was "We need a male presence out there"
Nonprofit public service tends to attract a lot of female employees, so my workplace is about 95% female. (And working there almost 15 years gives you some real insights in to the dynamics of women in the workplace) Having the above told to me verbatim by the female director of our organization was eye-opening to say the least.
But not as eye opening as what I experienced in the first week in my new office.
As you might imagine from what I've said above, the staff helping job seekers on the floor are women. They're all wonderfully qualified and extremely patient. They deal with everyone off the street - From the homeless to the people shunted over from the practically un-staffed unemployment office to the old men who lost their lifetime jobs at the lumber mill that just closed and found that their pension has been raided. (They're unhappy is the point I'm trying to make)
Some people, a surprisingly large number of people, simply do not respect women. At all. Even other women.
Sometimes my job is to simply pick up my cup off coffee, walk out on to the floor, and just stand there. When things are getting out of hand, everybody calms down. Sometimes my job is to repeat exactly what my co worker said to an upset job seeker - And suddenly they believe it. Sometimes a troubled soul will come into my office (The door is always open), sit down in a chair, and vent his or her troubles. I listen and nod politely and then direct them back to the people that were helping them 10 minutes ago. (And this works!)
It's creepy. I'm just the IT guy. When I'm done doing my new job as Y chromosome holder I go back to my desk and resume testing backups and managing EC2 instances and updating the website.
Women do get treated poorly, even in 2016. Just .. Be aware.
Re: (Score:3)
Boy, does this ring a bell. I remember one job where we had a good number of extremely competent women programmers, albeit non-nerds. I was there as a contractor for another project, but I'm an obvious geek.
It was really horrifying how often in meetings one of the women would say something pertinent which would generally get ignored. But when I repeated it, suddenly the management would start to discuss it. Part of it was cultural ("he's a geek, so listen to him on technical issues") and part of it was
Manners (Score:5, Insightful)
Being autistic (or on the spectrum somewhere) is no excuse for deliberately being a cock towards women.
I'm almost certainly autistic, I have all the possible traits of it. But I'll be fucked if I judge a woman coder over any other. Hell, if anything, the social aspects of such conditions mean that you wouldn't conform to such obvious social stereotypes and prejudices.
Nobody can stop you being a cock, overall. But being a cock towards women rather than men is just a deliberate, targeted prejudice no matter what you claim to be suffering from.
Stop conflating "autism" with certain social disorders or with racist / sexist / ageist dickheads. If anything, people like myself treat all people equally - with complete apathy.
Re:Manners (Score:5, Insightful)
This.
Autism may lead to a certain level of social 'clumsiness'. And the subsequent behavior might be misread by some women. But by and large, autism is being used as an excuse for being an asshole. And some guys just figure they can get their way on the job by being assholes. These guys do it to other men as well as women, but men know how to deal with it as a part of their upbringing.
Whence the embarrassment? (Score:2)
Why was he embarrassed? Was he embarrassed because he was wrong or because he believed that those who claimed to be on the autism spectrum were wrong? I've read the paragraph a number of times and I'm just can't tell what the source of his embarrassment was.
Women aren't victimised (Score:3, Informative)
There are certainly plenty of odd developers, and although we might seem rude or argumentative to outsiders, on the whole I'd actually say that women tend to get better treatment from technical people. Some people just get offended by everything these days. People who have been stuck talking to computers for ten or fifteen years are going to become slightly literal, pedantic, or concise in their method of communication. This may not aways appeal to very sociable young women, but women when they are interested, can be excellent developers too. Just don't read hostility into communication where it wasn't intended. Software is an area where we do sacrifice time on social graces for quick and productive decision making - although that doesn't mean that anyone should be individually victimised, which is definitely unacceptable, and sackable, or that there should be deliberate nastyness.
All the haters are just proving his point (Score:4, Insightful)
What's with all the Bruce hate? What is wrong with discussing a "gender empathy gap", why it might exist and what we might do about it? If you disagree with his point then offer sensible counterpoints of your own, but when you insult him or his ideas you're just reinforcing his point that the tech world is full of socially challenged asshats.
I would also think that Bruce's contributions to open software would merit some reflective humility, to maybe sit back and think a bit about what he's saying. Haven't you seen misogynistic behavior online? Why do you think that exists? Are you okay with it? If not, what can be done about it?
Thank you Bruce for openly speaking your concerns and ideas. I hope we can find a way to foster a more humane and empathetic open source community.
Re: (Score:3)
What's with all the Bruce hate? What is wrong with discussing a "gender empathy gap", why it might exist and what we might do about it? If you disagree with his point then offer sensible counterpoints of your own, but when you insult him or his ideas you're just reinforcing his point that the tech world is full of socially challenged asshats.
While I agree that hating on him isn't the right call, I can see why people would do that. We're hearing about "Waaah tech is hostile to women!" and "Nerds are mean to women!" and so on every week. People are quite frankly exasperated with the constant berating that's largely baseless or restricted to a tiny minority that everybody would rather see disappear, women treatment or not, but who're extremely difficult to dispose of. It's not because suddenly women are involved that excising those rotten apples b
Time is finite, what are your priorities? (Score:4, Interesting)
Being an expert in a particular area means that you have neglected learning in other areas. You only have so much time to learn things. To many technically oriented people all of the vagueness of social interactions is not logical, it cannot be derived from first principles. If is culture and it is that way because that is the way it is. This isn't interesting to many technical people so we spend our time on more interesting things. So while you may bitch that technical people don't have social skills what you really mean is that instead of learning social skills they spent that time becoming an expert in a technical field. You have spent your time learning social skills and then complain the reason you don't have technical skills is because those with them are mean. That's like me after spending my life learning English moving to a Spanish speaking country and bitching that I could learn Spanish much easier if all of these people would just learn English to help me. Sorry but that's not how it works.
I am an excellent mechanical design engineer that has spend over 20 years learning and honing my skills. This includes studying in my spare time and even my hobbies contribute in some way. Even entertainment I like watching "How it's made" so I can see examples of automation equipment for ideas. Some bosses have asked me to put together a 30 minute talk to help people learn to become a good design engineer. I laugh (maybe my lack of social skills) and say I only need a minute. I'd tell the people to dedicate their lives and spend 20 years learning this stuff and you can be just like me! Most people don't want to do that and spend their time with other things. That's fine, but don't come complaining that I lack budgeting or scheduling skills. No kidding, I have no interest in management. That's your job.
Take the red pill Bruce. (Score:4, Interesting)
Safe spaces are a symptom yes, but you're wrong about the disease.
The disease: Raising kids to believe that women are always right and men are always wrong, giving every kid a trophy just for showing up, and helicopter parents holding kids' hands their entire lives. We know have a generation of legal adults that require "trigger warnings" before they hear anything the least bit upsetting during university lectures.
So why are you carrying water for a group that prefer to whinge, complain, and force others to act the way they want, instead of getting off their ass and downloading source to start their own projects?
Cover your ears (trigger warning): You're too old to buy into this bullshit, and I believe this is a troll to get back in the headlines.
reptile brain vs mammalian brain (Score:2)
Lack of empathy isn't just the fault of autism, it's also due to the nature of the business.
When I'm coding I'm in a creative, but heavily logical space. My brain is just crunching paths, 1s and 0s and firmly sat on the reptile side of the fence. If I want to go out and socialise with people and relax the mammalian, emotional, side will need some warming up, especially after 9 hours of heavy logical, reptile thinking.
This is the nature of normal people's brains, male or female.
To have someone firmly using t
The gender discussion is boring (Score:2)
Enough with this... If people want to get ultra sensitive about gender then we can point out that women are often insensitive to male behavior patterns. Do we want to go over that or is this only a problem when men don't automatically take their coats off and let the ladies walk over puddles?
And tere are men being really shitty to other men (Score:3, Funny)
But as men we have to deal with it. If this is a feminist issue, then a logical consequence might be that women need protecting from men because they are too weak to protect themselves, i.e. men and women aren't equal... but this exactly the opposite of most lines of feminist thinking. Smells like a proof by contradiction.
One Woman's Experience (Score:5, Interesting)
As a woman who's been in the electronics/computer field for more than 55 years, now, I read with much disgust the attempts by some in this thread to discount women, and then claim that, somehow, "It ain't true."
Believe me, I've been there. After three books, hundreds of published papers and articles, and decades of consulting to Fortune 500 firms, I have been on the receiving end of the misogynistic "swinging dicks" who couldn't write a competent subroutine or draw a working circuit if their lives depended on it. I can (and, in the past, have) named names and identified organizations where women dare not go. What's interesting is having the CEO of a Fortune 500 company hire me (at $2,500/day) and then have twerps three years out of school decide they know more than I and refuse my counsel because my anatomy is different from theirs. Usually, there's a competent male around who steps in and shuts the abuse down. When there's not, I have developed a strong skill in suckering such blithering idiots into cul de sacs of their own ignorant reasoning, until they are reduced to mumbling to themselves. But, why should I ever have had to DEVELOP that skill?
We are all born the same way, and discover our gender as we grow up...but, due to family influences (e.g., drunken men abusing their wives, "men of the house" who want their women "barefoot and pregnant"), some males grow up with a tacit belief that women are, somehow, inferior to men. There's a name for these people: They are BIGOTS (and it often extends to other differences, like cultural heritage, skin color, education, that are patently irrelevant to judging whether the person is "human" or not).
Fortunately, not all men are chained to this philosphers' wall, drawing conclusions from shadows and accepting them as fact. There are many men who exhibit humanity and treat ALL others with respect and dignity...and they are a delight to work alongside. Unfortunately, they are outnumbered by the dolts, in my experience.
Re: (Score:3)
Amazing. A post about actual experience, and an instant chorus appears of "you think *you* have it bad, try being male!"
Pathetic.
Let's try simple logic:
"Programmers who are jerks towards everybody" + "Programmers who are jerks only towards women" > "Programmers who are jerks towards everybody"
And the set of "Programmers who are jerks only towards women" is not particularly small. I'm not particularly perceptive, but even I couldn't help but notice a pretty pervasive bias against women in my programming
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Believe me, I've been there. After three books, hundreds of published papers and articles, and decades of consulting to Fortune 500 firms, I have been on the receiving end of the misogynistic "swinging dicks" who couldn't write a competent subroutine or draw a working circuit if their lives depended on it. I can (and, in the past, have) named names and identified organizations where women dare not go. What's interesting is having the CEO of a Fortune 500 company hire me (at $2,500/day) and then have twerps three years out of school decide they know more than I and refuse my counsel because my anatomy is different from theirs. Usually, there's a competent male around who steps in and shuts the abuse down. When there's not, I have developed a strong skill in suckering such blithering idiots into cul de sacs of their own ignorant reasoning, until they are reduced to mumbling to themselves. But, why should I ever have had to DEVELOP that skill?
You think that has anything to do with you being female? If you do, you really aren't that smart. A large portion of 23-28 year old * will behave that way towards *.
Its not your vagina, its that they are immature young adults fresh out of a university and even without the university they think they know everything, certainly far more than you would (so they think).
I'm male and go through the same shit regularly since I work at a company that pride itself on hiring people fresh out of school (we're on camp
Credentials. (Score:5, Informative)
Who is Bruce Perens?
Bruce Perens.... created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond.
The original announcement of The Open Source Definition was made on February 9, 1998 on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Perens is an amateur radio operator, with call sign K6BP [who] promotes open radio communications standards.
Perens founded No-Code International in 1998 with the goal of ending the Morse Code test then required for an Amateur Radio license. His rationale was that Amateur Radio should be a tool for young people to learn advanced technology and networking, rather than something that preserved antiquity and required new hams to master outmoded technology before they were allowed on the air.
Perens worked for seven years at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab. After that, he worked at Pixar for 12 years, from 1987 to 1999. He is credited as a studio tools engineer on the Pixar films A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999).
From 2002 to 2006, Prentice Hall PTR published the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series, a set of 24 books covering various open source software tools, for which Perens served as the series editor. It was the first book series to be published under an open license.
Bruce Perens [wikipedia.org]
Put up or shut up (Score:3)
First of all, don't postulate something without proof. In other words, first you show THAT women are treated badly in OSS projects. Then I read the rest of that diatribe.
oh, the FEELS (Score:3)
not this again :/
Recent talk by Sheldon Cooper sums this topic pretty nicely (around 35.30 minutes in) https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
We DONT CARE about feelings, we care about absolutes. I wont cater to some alien (to me) social norms just because you are a precious snowflake, I will tell you outright what is wrong ('this code is garbage' etc).
This is also pretty good and on topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Overload == operator, moderate, optimize for +, &a (Score:3, Insightful)
Even before Bruce wrote this timely article, I wondered whether more women in open source might be a cause or an effect of better moderation. My brief time working with the late Telsa Gwynn [gnome.org] at GUADEC 2003 suggested that moderation was one of her under-appreciated roles. But she was attacked by the misogynistic mob (AKA the open source community.) Were it not for Telsa's thick skin and an overdeveloped sense of forgiveness, none of us would have benefited from her work. Many other women and others outside of a particularly narrow age/race/religion/gender profile have experienced similar when attempting to contribute and most gave up. We tolerate Linus's rantings and ignore that only timing and humility separated Linus from countless other early *nix hackers. We tolerate Gangolf Jobb's [sciencemag.org] racist license and Trumpish rantings because he is a good coder. My family and remote team members met at GUADEC Istanbul where a very well-known opensource developer spewed misogynistic rantings that embarrassed and offended me, projected a terrible impression of Christians and Euro/American society to my global team who were experiencing western society for the first time. He came very near to inspiring at least one person to push him into the Bosporus. Why does this happen? Part of it is the same reason Whitney Houston and other rock , movie and sports superstars are bat shit insane. Society should be a counterbalance to the Id, but when we worship people as superstars, there is no counterbalance and Id rules. The defence mechanism takes over when the inner demons unleashed by bad decisions are externalized, possibly as police brutality. [slashdot.org] Similar forces were at play when Hans Reiser [slashdot.org] became our OJ Simpson.
In the past that role of moderation was performed by a central government (e.g. the FCC), a tight group of highly educated individuals, a class/caste system. Twitter and Facebook use something close to a democracy but the S/N ratio can quickly fall to the level of CB radio, AOL and usenet. The more sophisticated merit-based moderation system used by Slashdot, some opensource projects and creative sites such as worth1000 works well, at least above a certain threshold. But these systems must be designed to prevent individuals or small groups from becoming immune to criticism. Within government legal frameworks the censor or impeachment is a mechanism for moderation. We could do something within opensource communities where an individual's ethics could taint their contributions. Each of us would be able to choose whether we want to contribute or use ethically-tainted patches.
Back in the 1980s when I may have been the last male to wirewrap a PDP-11 core memory board, a friend commented, "Did you ever notice that men in the comp-sci program are (80s equivalent of "Meh") but the women are brilliant?" Yes, I did notice that. But whatever happened to Karen Norwood, Maureen T, Kathy Christiansen, Norah K, and the sole woman in our Physics program?
This is where overloading the == operator comes in. Equality is an overloaded word. Here in Ireland, the word was a slogan for LBGT marriage rights which passed referendum with an overwhelming majority. But the word "equality" doesn't apply to gender, race, religion or immigration issues here. But do we really want women to become equal to 20-something males who live in their parent's basement who have the moral and emotional depth of comic book and video game heros? I don't. Let's take the best woman have to offer and not try to force them into our broken mold.
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Who is Bruce Perens? Why should I care what he says? And why should we trust a man to discuss women's issues?
Haven't you heard? - "Bruce" recently began her transition to become "Caitlyn."
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That's a pretty comprehensive list of the worst people on the Internet.