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Designers, Women, and Hostility in Open Source

61 points by abraham 16y ago

RickHull 16y ago
> Feminism is fundamentally about equality for everyone, not just women What on earth does this even mean? If I am to take the first part at face value, then they sure picked a bad label for this idea. As for the second part, what would equality just for women even mean? If feminism means that, all other things being equal, women should have the same rights and privileges as men, then gosh darn it, I'm a feminist! I just wish my feminist counterparts didn't get so wrapped up in these divisive side issues like choosing a particular gender to promote.
locopati 16y ago
Don't let the title fool you - these are some valuable thoughts on growing inclusive projects.
- Stuk 16y ago
  This is a genuine question: what do you mean by "Don't let the title fool you"?
  - locopati 16y ago
    Some readers might be put off by 'designers', 'women', or 'open source', thinking that the article would not be of interest to them. In reality, the essence of the article is how one makes any project inclusive to outsiders. This could apply to in-house corporate stuff just as easily as foss stuff and to any dichotomy you want to look at (tech v biz, coders v non-coders, men v women, etc etc etc).
neutronicus 16y ago
I thought the quote from Vitorio Miliano in the article was too kind to feminism (equality for everyone? It's a women's interests lobby, let's call a spade a spade), and underestimates how eager Open Source communities are to "discipline unruly users" and provide mentoring. Every time I can't figure out how to do something in Clozure Common Lisp, I go on IRC, ask for help, get it, and then write about it on the Wiki, at which point the CCL devs thank me for my contribution. Otherwise, though, I agreed with the article's points.
- britta 16y ago
  Feminism as a "women's interests lobby" is vaguely like calling the free software movement a "geeks' interests lobby" - it's both condescending and inaccurate about the nature of movements, among other things. Anyway, sounds like the article agrees about the usefulness of helping more people get on IRC and contribute to wikis, and I agree too. They're fundamental tools for community projects.
- JonnieCache 16y ago
  >equality for everyone? It's a women's interests lobby It's both and more. The world is a complicated place.
- vitovito 16y ago
  As the "Vitorio" who was being quoted, thanks for your thoughts. However, I think you're too kind to open source, and as Anil Dash commented after my original article, "i find everyone who hates the word 'feminism' defines it differently from those of us who identify as feminists." Please feel free to read my original article and see if that explains the stance any better.
quanticle 16y ago
On the modern web, where far-flung strangers collaborate on things like authoring an encyclopedia and overthrowing abusive governments, it's still too hard for most people to contribute to open source projects. First, its actually not that easy to contribute to Wikipedia. Unless you've got a lot of patience to fight with the people who don't like your changes and are more willing to revert them rather than improve them, getting your contribution into Wikipedia is far more difficult than it first appears. Even if you are willing to undertake that battle, you have to navigate a slew of semi-official organizations and obscure three-letter-abbreviations in order to make your case. For example, I've seen the following on the Wikipedia IRC channel: "The submitter didn't like their article being AfD'd, so he took it to AN/I and argued that it wasn't a violation of WP:N." I wish OSS commentary would stop holding Wikipedia up as some paragon of openness, when in fact it is just as closed and insular as every other online community. Second, the impact of a bad submission into Wikipedia is much less than the impact of a bad submission to a software project. A buggy patch causes the program to fail. A single bad fact on a Wikipedia article doesn't cause Wikipedia as a whole to be a failure. For that reason, free software projects are justified in being more selective than Wikipedia in accepting patches.
- sethg 16y ago
  I always got the impression that getting stuff on Wikipedia was a political minefield because you can never make a clear-cut argument like “after this patch was submitted, the code didn’t compile; therefore, the patch should be backed out”.
- _delirium 16y ago
  Unless you've got a lot of patience to fight with the people who don't like your changes and are more willing to revert them rather than improve them, getting your contribution into Wikipedia is far more difficult than it first appears. This is often asserted, but it has never been my experience. Have you attempted to contribute to Wikipedia and had that experience? In which areas? My observations have been, on the contrary, that there are very few areas where reverts are common, mostly areas with political controversy or recent events. And deletion is only an issue in a small minority of article classes as well, mostly things like software projects, music groups, and professors, where there's a grey area between "obvious keep" and "obviously this guy just wrote an article about himself". Some more solid data would be nice to tell either way, but I'm confident that if you ran the numbers, the percentage of edits that get reverted or deleted is tiny; probably under 0.1%. Most articles I create have the opposite problem: they languish unimproved for years, with no edits besides the occasional maintenance bot modifying a category.
Tichy 16y ago
"Still, uptake is slow, the on-ramp steep" So at ThinkUp she does all these things, and still hardly any women contributors. Maybe something is wrong with her theory? It also doesn't explain why women need special treatment - isn't it in fact rather demeaning to claim they do?
- earl 16y ago
  Only if, in your opinion, special treatment is equivalent to the community not acting like misogynistic assholes, or at least tolerating such behavior. Similarly, gay people will tend not to feel welcome at homophobic places, black people will tend not to feel welcome at racist places, etc.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    So all Open Source developers are misogynistic assholes? Seems very unlikely to me.
- sp332 16y ago
  It also doesn't explain why women need special treatment - isn't it in fact rather demeaning to claim they do? Actually she says the opposite: The tech industry is by and large a boys' club, and that's a shame, because homogenous teams turn out one-dimensional products. That may or may not be a fair assessment of the "tech industry", but her point is that the industry is treating men specially. She wants the same treatment for women as for men, which means either treating women better or not catering so hard to men. Of course, she brings up one other thing: most people in tech may be men, but there just are not very many people in tech. The environment is hostile in more ways then simple sexism. edited for correctness
  - Tichy 16y ago
    She doesn't actually present any examples of special treatment that is denied to women, though. Or did I miss that? Being a man in the industry, I don't feel treated very special at all. For example it seems normal that every coder thinks other people's code is crap.
OasisG 16y ago
Somewhat off-topic: I had my first experience with IRC at 15. I'd recently discovered fansubbing and wanted to find subbed copies of the yet-un-aired in America episodes of Sailormoon. Some of the guys in my C++ class were avid IRC users and suggested I get on to see if they were available. Unfortunately, one of the first things I noticed was the rampant use of the N-word. Not especially inviting to a young black girl. I asked the guys what that was about and they suggested I just ignore it. I had enough to deal with at 15. I never went back.
- deleted 16y ago
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  - araneae 16y ago
    She never went back to IRC. There are other ways to find knowledge.
  - OasisG 16y ago
    No, because IRC wasn't the only place to seek knowledge. I continued to peruse other parts of the internet that didn't allow such blatant racism to slide. Beyond my C++ classes, I was also on a FIRST Robotics team. I was seen as a person there, and even if some people thought I shouldn't be there, it's harder to call someone the n-word to their face.
- TrevorBramble 16y ago
  Your experience is not atypical, and it's been a struggle to win over ThinkUp contributers who've been around for awhile to the idea of spending time in IRC because of it. But just like the larger Internet, it all depends on where you go. There's been sort of an IRC revival in development communities and I've found them largely jerk-free.
  - OasisG 16y ago
    I would love to give it another chance then. My biggest regret about how things went down is that I missed a lot of the cool, web-based stuff that was going on all these years (I was 15 back in 2000/2001). I was interested in the web, but I was learning more generalized C++, Java, and working with computer animation tools.
warrenwilkinson 16y ago
How can one disagree with this article without being branded sexist and intolerant? She asserts there are few designers and women in open source software because men alienate them. And that we should try to make it so technical competence isn't required to contribute. There are some good ideas here. But they only apply to a small subset of OSS projects. There is no cause for calling programmers anti-women or anti-designer.
- archgoon 16y ago
  Hi, I think you misunderstand the argument being here, and are needlessly interpreting this as a 'men vs women' argument. The author is not saying that OSS communities are explicitly anti-women. This does not appear anywhere in the article. What she does argue is that OSS projects can be unwelcoming to newbies in general. There are no gender arguments being made here. In fact, she seems to feel that she herself has been guilty to an extent here. She cites a UX designer who argues: "There’s no perceived value in open source for mentoring, facilitation, disciplining of unruly users, training of newcomers or non-technical users, etc., which are needed to support both designers of any gender and women in any role." Again, I think a very poor summary of her argument is "She asserts there are few designers and women in open source software because men alienate them", as this suggests that the only issue is too few women being present. If you simply introduce more women, this argument would go, the problem would disappear. This is emphatically _not_ what she is arguing. Men and women are equally well suited to implementing the solutions presented in the article, and the mistakes are equally easy to be made by engineers of either gender.
cousin_it 16y ago
Why oh why do women who complain about being alienated by men so often write articles that make me feel alienated? I refuse to believe that my revulsion at being called a "sexist boy" is somehow an illegitimate feeling.
- rauljara 16y ago
  I do not believe that anywhere in the article she calls you a "sexist boy"? She calls the tech industry "by and large a boy's club". And I'm not just being pedantic when I say that's not the same thing at all. Complaining about the state of an industry doesn't imply that every member of that industry is to blame, just as saying that there exists racism in the American South doesn't imply that every Southerner is a racist. Legitimate question: What leads you take the statement about the industry as a personal attack?
  - Tichy 16y ago
    "There exists racism in the American South" is a different statement to "the American South is by and large racist", though. Maybe those IT-Feminists should just write about their good experiences once in a while, to make it clear that they don't blame everybody.
  - deleted 16y ago
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  - vitovito 16y ago
    I'll be happy to call cousin_it a sexist boy. Statistically, he probably is. And worse, he probably thinks he's too smart to be sexist, and hangs out with mostly males who also feel that way, so their sexism goes uncorrected. To be clear, in my original post that Trapani was responding to, I called most open source projects "sexist boy's clubs with no facility for mentoring, no respect for design, and mailing lists that are 50% dick-measuring contests." I also call programmers abnormal, by definition of their being programmers. Thanks to cousin_it for his defensiveness, which happens all the time, and is an excellent illustration of the problem.
jlees 16y ago
The switch from the general design-by-committee approach to "look folks, we're hiring a designer, and they'll sell their ideas to us" is a really interesting one, and mirrors a lot of the part-OSS part-corporate projects I've recently become more familiar with. Is design ultimately something that can't be done in patches and edits? I suspect so...
- cschwarm 16y ago
  Ever tried to sell something to a committee? I don't mean this to be disrespectful but it's not as simple as it sounds. Especially, if the committee is clueless (or in disagreement) about the usual questions: What do you want? What do you need? What goals should be accomplished? It even gets more tricky if membership for the committee is not well defined.
zby 16y ago
Probably the main reason for this is that online is such a new environment that it nullifies many assumptions that support our off-line culture. This way, on-line we regress to the primitive ways of organisation - and these are very power-centered masculine ways - because individual power is what used to be the basis for organisation. On-line the individual strength is swapped for intellectual mastery - but I would be surprised if this shallow change would be enough to make that culture optimal in the area of knowledge production.
sp332 16y ago
In the old days, which was really not very long ago, geeks had to push hard against the "mainstream" to create a little bubble where they could exist. They catered hard to people like themselves, because it was hard to find anybody like them. It was good to have some space that catered to geeks. But now that pressure against geeks isn't so high, some of them are still pushing against the mainstream just as hard as ever. The hard part is over, guys! Geeks can now find people like themselves without too much trouble. There are now lots of places we can go that cater to geeks. It's time to stop pushing against the mainstream so hard. We don't have to be so defensive anymore.
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burrows 16y ago
This article falls flat for a couple of reasons. 1) In Open Source projects people don't care about your gender, orientation, race, etc. in large part because this information isn't even available. I'd like you to give me some examples where people's code is treated like the plague for a prejudice such as those. 2) Of course developers are going to be valued more highly in a community _centered_ around development. Whose valued more highly at an art showing, the painter or a curator? 3) Treating disrespect and generalizations with more disrespect and generalizations has proven time and again to be an ineffective technique that's wielded by sensationalists. I don't see how you can expect anyone to take such melodrama seriously. 4) Your value to an open source project is directly correlated to the quality and quantity of knowledge and code you provide to the project. It should be obvious that more experienced people will be valued much higher than a noob who wants to join. Everyone initially takes a beating or two for submitting poor patches, but those who aren't deterred by petty bullshit stick around and actually learn a thing or two while becoming developers. Honestly I couldn't care less if people put off by blunt commentary on their contributions don't want to participate. They aren't cut out for it.
HedgeMage 16y ago
headdesk I started out in open source as a 12yo girl back in the mid-90's. I loved the OSS community because no one cared in the least that I was a farm girl from nowhere. You know what? I came in at the tail-end of a time when we had a lot more women doing open-source tech than we do now (some estimates have it around a 1:2 F:M ratio if you go back to the 70s and 80s). Anybody wonder what the differences between then and now are? * There were no "girl groups", i.e. Debian Women and the like. Women weren't a special case in need of protection, we were as mainstream as the men. * There was no pressure to be politically correct. Everyone was indoctrinated into hacker culture, we weren't supposed to treat one another like foreign specimens in need of kid gloves. * The stereotype that women are more suited to design and support tasks, and men more suited to development, wasn't hanging over our heads (ironically, like the author of this article, the people pushing that stereotype are usually so-called feminists). * No one cared about the demographics. The current obsession with gender ratios in open source has been wholly counter-productive. It's taught people they must act differently around women, that women need special help, and generally worked against the hacker ethos of "best idea first" (no matter from where or whom that idea comes). In short, the actions of those who are obsessed with parity between the sexes are causing half the problem: increased stress between the sexes in open source communities. The other half of the coin is what happens long before most young people come into contact with open source: My 8yo son recently showed off his new netbook to some neighbors, who commented, "It's a good thing you had a boy, Susan, what would you have done with a daughter?" The boys my son knows have tech toys: netbooks, robots, Snap Circuits, and so on. The girls don't. Most of them never get more intimate with a piece of technology than typing and printing an essay or answering email until college, at which point it's too late. Every great hacker I know was introduced to hacking in some form at a very young age. I'm not on par with men because some patronizing feminists made me feel welcome, because the community was sensitive, or because I was gently sequestered into girl-friendly areas: it's because I wrote my first code when I was six. Feminists, stop whining and let the real women do what we do, without the burden of your self-destructive attempts at shaming the men.
- zebular 16y ago
  I understand your point about letting women "do what we do," because although it's not common, intelligent, strong women like yourself will rise to the level of their male counterparts despite cultural pressure. But I think you still have to admit that the pressure exists, and keeps some women who otherwise would succeed out of the business and out of Open Source. Myself, and most of the girls I know, were raised to be "ladies." That means that skills like cooking, drawing, and playing classical instruments had a higher value placed on them than computer hacking or coding skills. Just as you say, many of use don't learn to use a computer until we reach college and have to start writing essays (for our acceptable "girly" majors: I chose to major in French because I didn't even feel like computer science was an option for me at the time I entered college.) It's girls like this who need the support of a female community before they can feel comfortable enough to dive into programming. No matter how talented, not all girls are going to be able to write their first code at age six because parents often actively discourage their daughters from spending time in front of the computer - just look at the comments your neighbors made! My own parents frequently booted me off the computer so that I would go practice violin, etc. My brothers on the other hand, were allowed to use the computer and often received tech-related items as presents. For whatever reason, computers are still perceived as a boy's plaything rather than a girl's plaything. While I don't think shaming men is going to solve this problem, I do think there needs to be a supportive community that welcomes women into the tech world, which is exactly the point of Gina Trappani's article.
Stormbringer 16y ago
I had a thought the other day because one of the women I'm working with was showing rather a large amount of cleavage. The thought was that it must be great to be a woman in IT because all you need to do is dress a little tarty and you get the red carpet rolled out for you. Then I thought about why that was the case. And I realised that basically the only reason that dressing slutty gets you favours is because the industry is so thoroughly male dominated, or, in the words of the article, a boy's club. So now, I don't begrudge them the advantages they accrue from dressing that way, I just enjoy it instead :D
- Mz 16y ago
  I had a thought the other day because one of the women I'm working with was showing rather a large amount of cleavage. I think women basically have two role models for how to "dress for success": One is basically as a "boy toy" and the other is to dress like a man, neither of which cuts it. I think a lot of women who dress "sexy" really aren't specifically intending to come across as "sexy". I think they are trying to come across as "successful, as a woman" and we really don't have much for them to draw from. We have female entertainers who make big bucks, in part because they are sexy (Demi Moore, Madonna, etc). And then we have male role models for business and such. Dressing like a man risks coming across as one or both of the following: 1) Sexy, because it only serves to emphasize that she is really a girl, not a guy or 2) Second class citizen because it only serves to emphasize that she is not a man. In the US at least, we don't have a history of female presidents and such, so we have clothing that signals "successful for a woman" (which almost always means either someone's wife or you got your money because you are sexy) and we have "successful for a man" (which doesn't work well as a clothing style for a woman). As a woman working in corporate America, I am painfully aware that most stuff you see in magazines is something I would be sent home over as "not appropriate" if I showed up at work in it. Most women who have devoted themselves to becoming competent enough at core skills for their career to get anywhere aren't fashionistas and won't have spent gobs of time studying this topic. I think about it a lot and I think the lack of good clothing options for signaling "successful business woman" significantly contributes to the rampant amount of office-slut-wear out there (which makes me basically cringe on a daily basis).

61 points by abraham 16y ago

> Feminism is fundamentally about equality for everyone, not just women What on earth does this even mean? If I am to take the first part at face value, then they sure picked a bad label for this idea. As for the second part, what would equality just for women even mean? If feminism means that, all other things being equal, women should have the same rights and privileges as men, then gosh darn it, I'm a feminist! I just wish my feminist counterparts didn't get so wrapped up in these divisive side issues like choosing a particular gender to promote.

locopati 16y ago

Don't let the title fool you - these are some valuable thoughts on growing inclusive projects.

Stuk 16y ago
This is a genuine question: what do you mean by "Don't let the title fool you"?
- locopati 16y ago
  Some readers might be put off by 'designers', 'women', or 'open source', thinking that the article would not be of interest to them. In reality, the essence of the article is how one makes any project inclusive to outsiders. This could apply to in-house corporate stuff just as easily as foss stuff and to any dichotomy you want to look at (tech v biz, coders v non-coders, men v women, etc etc etc).

neutronicus 16y ago

I thought the quote from Vitorio Miliano in the article was too kind to feminism (equality for everyone? It's a women's interests lobby, let's call a spade a spade), and underestimates how eager Open Source communities are to "discipline unruly users" and provide mentoring. Every time I can't figure out how to do something in Clozure Common Lisp, I go on IRC, ask for help, get it, and then write about it on the Wiki, at which point the CCL devs thank me for my contribution. Otherwise, though, I agreed with the article's points.

britta 16y ago
Feminism as a "women's interests lobby" is vaguely like calling the free software movement a "geeks' interests lobby" - it's both condescending and inaccurate about the nature of movements, among other things. Anyway, sounds like the article agrees about the usefulness of helping more people get on IRC and contribute to wikis, and I agree too. They're fundamental tools for community projects.
JonnieCache 16y ago
>equality for everyone? It's a women's interests lobby It's both and more. The world is a complicated place.
vitovito 16y ago
As the "Vitorio" who was being quoted, thanks for your thoughts. However, I think you're too kind to open source, and as Anil Dash commented after my original article, "i find everyone who hates the word 'feminism' defines it differently from those of us who identify as feminists." Please feel free to read my original article and see if that explains the stance any better.

quanticle 16y ago

On the modern web, where far-flung strangers collaborate on things like authoring an encyclopedia and overthrowing abusive governments, it's still too hard for most people to contribute to open source projects. First, its actually not that easy to contribute to Wikipedia. Unless you've got a lot of patience to fight with the people who don't like your changes and are more willing to revert them rather than improve them, getting your contribution into Wikipedia is far more difficult than it first appears. Even if you are willing to undertake that battle, you have to navigate a slew of semi-official organizations and obscure three-letter-abbreviations in order to make your case. For example, I've seen the following on the Wikipedia IRC channel: "The submitter didn't like their article being AfD'd, so he took it to AN/I and argued that it wasn't a violation of WP:N." I wish OSS commentary would stop holding Wikipedia up as some paragon of openness, when in fact it is just as closed and insular as every other online community. Second, the impact of a bad submission into Wikipedia is much less than the impact of a bad submission to a software project. A buggy patch causes the program to fail. A single bad fact on a Wikipedia article doesn't cause Wikipedia as a whole to be a failure. For that reason, free software projects are justified in being more selective than Wikipedia in accepting patches.

sethg 16y ago
I always got the impression that getting stuff on Wikipedia was a political minefield because you can never make a clear-cut argument like “after this patch was submitted, the code didn’t compile; therefore, the patch should be backed out”.
_delirium 16y ago
Unless you've got a lot of patience to fight with the people who don't like your changes and are more willing to revert them rather than improve them, getting your contribution into Wikipedia is far more difficult than it first appears. This is often asserted, but it has never been my experience. Have you attempted to contribute to Wikipedia and had that experience? In which areas? My observations have been, on the contrary, that there are very few areas where reverts are common, mostly areas with political controversy or recent events. And deletion is only an issue in a small minority of article classes as well, mostly things like software projects, music groups, and professors, where there's a grey area between "obvious keep" and "obviously this guy just wrote an article about himself". Some more solid data would be nice to tell either way, but I'm confident that if you ran the numbers, the percentage of edits that get reverted or deleted is tiny; probably under 0.1%. Most articles I create have the opposite problem: they languish unimproved for years, with no edits besides the occasional maintenance bot modifying a category.

Tichy 16y ago

"Still, uptake is slow, the on-ramp steep" So at ThinkUp she does all these things, and still hardly any women contributors. Maybe something is wrong with her theory? It also doesn't explain why women need special treatment - isn't it in fact rather demeaning to claim they do?

earl 16y ago
Only if, in your opinion, special treatment is equivalent to the community not acting like misogynistic assholes, or at least tolerating such behavior. Similarly, gay people will tend not to feel welcome at homophobic places, black people will tend not to feel welcome at racist places, etc.
- Tichy 16y ago
  So all Open Source developers are misogynistic assholes? Seems very unlikely to me.
sp332 16y ago
It also doesn't explain why women need special treatment - isn't it in fact rather demeaning to claim they do? Actually she says the opposite: The tech industry is by and large a boys' club, and that's a shame, because homogenous teams turn out one-dimensional products. That may or may not be a fair assessment of the "tech industry", but her point is that the industry is treating men specially. She wants the same treatment for women as for men, which means either treating women better or not catering so hard to men. Of course, she brings up one other thing: most people in tech may be men, but there just are not very many people in tech. The environment is hostile in more ways then simple sexism. edited for correctness
- Tichy 16y ago
  She doesn't actually present any examples of special treatment that is denied to women, though. Or did I miss that? Being a man in the industry, I don't feel treated very special at all. For example it seems normal that every coder thinks other people's code is crap.

OasisG 16y ago

Somewhat off-topic: I had my first experience with IRC at 15. I'd recently discovered fansubbing and wanted to find subbed copies of the yet-un-aired in America episodes of Sailormoon. Some of the guys in my C++ class were avid IRC users and suggested I get on to see if they were available. Unfortunately, one of the first things I noticed was the rampant use of the N-word. Not especially inviting to a young black girl. I asked the guys what that was about and they suggested I just ignore it. I had enough to deal with at 15. I never went back.

deleted 16y ago
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- araneae 16y ago
  She never went back to IRC. There are other ways to find knowledge.
- OasisG 16y ago
  No, because IRC wasn't the only place to seek knowledge. I continued to peruse other parts of the internet that didn't allow such blatant racism to slide. Beyond my C++ classes, I was also on a FIRST Robotics team. I was seen as a person there, and even if some people thought I shouldn't be there, it's harder to call someone the n-word to their face.
TrevorBramble 16y ago
Your experience is not atypical, and it's been a struggle to win over ThinkUp contributers who've been around for awhile to the idea of spending time in IRC because of it. But just like the larger Internet, it all depends on where you go. There's been sort of an IRC revival in development communities and I've found them largely jerk-free.
- OasisG 16y ago
  I would love to give it another chance then. My biggest regret about how things went down is that I missed a lot of the cool, web-based stuff that was going on all these years (I was 15 back in 2000/2001). I was interested in the web, but I was learning more generalized C++, Java, and working with computer animation tools.

warrenwilkinson 16y ago

How can one disagree with this article without being branded sexist and intolerant? She asserts there are few designers and women in open source software because men alienate them. And that we should try to make it so technical competence isn't required to contribute. There are some good ideas here. But they only apply to a small subset of OSS projects. There is no cause for calling programmers anti-women or anti-designer.

archgoon 16y ago
Hi, I think you misunderstand the argument being here, and are needlessly interpreting this as a 'men vs women' argument. The author is not saying that OSS communities are explicitly anti-women. This does not appear anywhere in the article. What she does argue is that OSS projects can be unwelcoming to newbies in general. There are no gender arguments being made here. In fact, she seems to feel that she herself has been guilty to an extent here. She cites a UX designer who argues: "There’s no perceived value in open source for mentoring, facilitation, disciplining of unruly users, training of newcomers or non-technical users, etc., which are needed to support both designers of any gender and women in any role." Again, I think a very poor summary of her argument is "She asserts there are few designers and women in open source software because men alienate them", as this suggests that the only issue is too few women being present. If you simply introduce more women, this argument would go, the problem would disappear. This is emphatically _not_ what she is arguing. Men and women are equally well suited to implementing the solutions presented in the article, and the mistakes are equally easy to be made by engineers of either gender.

cousin_it 16y ago

Why oh why do women who complain about being alienated by men so often write articles that make me feel alienated? I refuse to believe that my revulsion at being called a "sexist boy" is somehow an illegitimate feeling.

rauljara 16y ago
I do not believe that anywhere in the article she calls you a "sexist boy"? She calls the tech industry "by and large a boy's club". And I'm not just being pedantic when I say that's not the same thing at all. Complaining about the state of an industry doesn't imply that every member of that industry is to blame, just as saying that there exists racism in the American South doesn't imply that every Southerner is a racist. Legitimate question: What leads you take the statement about the industry as a personal attack?
- Tichy 16y ago
  "There exists racism in the American South" is a different statement to "the American South is by and large racist", though. Maybe those IT-Feminists should just write about their good experiences once in a while, to make it clear that they don't blame everybody.
- deleted 16y ago
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- vitovito 16y ago
  I'll be happy to call cousin_it a sexist boy. Statistically, he probably is. And worse, he probably thinks he's too smart to be sexist, and hangs out with mostly males who also feel that way, so their sexism goes uncorrected. To be clear, in my original post that Trapani was responding to, I called most open source projects "sexist boy's clubs with no facility for mentoring, no respect for design, and mailing lists that are 50% dick-measuring contests." I also call programmers abnormal, by definition of their being programmers. Thanks to cousin_it for his defensiveness, which happens all the time, and is an excellent illustration of the problem.

jlees 16y ago

The switch from the general design-by-committee approach to "look folks, we're hiring a designer, and they'll sell their ideas to us" is a really interesting one, and mirrors a lot of the part-OSS part-corporate projects I've recently become more familiar with. Is design ultimately something that can't be done in patches and edits? I suspect so...

cschwarm 16y ago
Ever tried to sell something to a committee? I don't mean this to be disrespectful but it's not as simple as it sounds. Especially, if the committee is clueless (or in disagreement) about the usual questions: What do you want? What do you need? What goals should be accomplished? It even gets more tricky if membership for the committee is not well defined.

zby 16y ago

Probably the main reason for this is that online is such a new environment that it nullifies many assumptions that support our off-line culture. This way, on-line we regress to the primitive ways of organisation - and these are very power-centered masculine ways - because individual power is what used to be the basis for organisation. On-line the individual strength is swapped for intellectual mastery - but I would be surprised if this shallow change would be enough to make that culture optimal in the area of knowledge production.

sp332 16y ago

In the old days, which was really not very long ago, geeks had to push hard against the "mainstream" to create a little bubble where they could exist. They catered hard to people like themselves, because it was hard to find anybody like them. It was good to have some space that catered to geeks. But now that pressure against geeks isn't so high, some of them are still pushing against the mainstream just as hard as ever. The hard part is over, guys! Geeks can now find people like themselves without too much trouble. There are now lots of places we can go that cater to geeks. It's time to stop pushing against the mainstream so hard. We don't have to be so defensive anymore.

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burrows 16y ago

This article falls flat for a couple of reasons. 1) In Open Source projects people don't care about your gender, orientation, race, etc. in large part because this information isn't even available. I'd like you to give me some examples where people's code is treated like the plague for a prejudice such as those. 2) Of course developers are going to be valued more highly in a community _centered_ around development. Whose valued more highly at an art showing, the painter or a curator? 3) Treating disrespect and generalizations with more disrespect and generalizations has proven time and again to be an ineffective technique that's wielded by sensationalists. I don't see how you can expect anyone to take such melodrama seriously. 4) Your value to an open source project is directly correlated to the quality and quantity of knowledge and code you provide to the project. It should be obvious that more experienced people will be valued much higher than a noob who wants to join. Everyone initially takes a beating or two for submitting poor patches, but those who aren't deterred by petty bullshit stick around and actually learn a thing or two while becoming developers. Honestly I couldn't care less if people put off by blunt commentary on their contributions don't want to participate. They aren't cut out for it.

HedgeMage 16y ago

headdesk I started out in open source as a 12yo girl back in the mid-90's. I loved the OSS community because no one cared in the least that I was a farm girl from nowhere. You know what? I came in at the tail-end of a time when we had a lot more women doing open-source tech than we do now (some estimates have it around a 1:2 F:M ratio if you go back to the 70s and 80s). Anybody wonder what the differences between then and now are? * There were no "girl groups", i.e. Debian Women and the like. Women weren't a special case in need of protection, we were as mainstream as the men. * There was no pressure to be politically correct. Everyone was indoctrinated into hacker culture, we weren't supposed to treat one another like foreign specimens in need of kid gloves. * The stereotype that women are more suited to design and support tasks, and men more suited to development, wasn't hanging over our heads (ironically, like the author of this article, the people pushing that stereotype are usually so-called feminists). * No one cared about the demographics. The current obsession with gender ratios in open source has been wholly counter-productive. It's taught people they must act differently around women, that women need special help, and generally worked against the hacker ethos of "best idea first" (no matter from where or whom that idea comes). In short, the actions of those who are obsessed with parity between the sexes are causing half the problem: increased stress between the sexes in open source communities. The other half of the coin is what happens long before most young people come into contact with open source: My 8yo son recently showed off his new netbook to some neighbors, who commented, "It's a good thing you had a boy, Susan, what would you have done with a daughter?" The boys my son knows have tech toys: netbooks, robots, Snap Circuits, and so on. The girls don't. Most of them never get more intimate with a piece of technology than typing and printing an essay or answering email until college, at which point it's too late. Every great hacker I know was introduced to hacking in some form at a very young age. I'm not on par with men because some patronizing feminists made me feel welcome, because the community was sensitive, or because I was gently sequestered into girl-friendly areas: it's because I wrote my first code when I was six. Feminists, stop whining and let the real women do what we do, without the burden of your self-destructive attempts at shaming the men.

zebular 16y ago
I understand your point about letting women "do what we do," because although it's not common, intelligent, strong women like yourself will rise to the level of their male counterparts despite cultural pressure. But I think you still have to admit that the pressure exists, and keeps some women who otherwise would succeed out of the business and out of Open Source. Myself, and most of the girls I know, were raised to be "ladies." That means that skills like cooking, drawing, and playing classical instruments had a higher value placed on them than computer hacking or coding skills. Just as you say, many of use don't learn to use a computer until we reach college and have to start writing essays (for our acceptable "girly" majors: I chose to major in French because I didn't even feel like computer science was an option for me at the time I entered college.) It's girls like this who need the support of a female community before they can feel comfortable enough to dive into programming. No matter how talented, not all girls are going to be able to write their first code at age six because parents often actively discourage their daughters from spending time in front of the computer - just look at the comments your neighbors made! My own parents frequently booted me off the computer so that I would go practice violin, etc. My brothers on the other hand, were allowed to use the computer and often received tech-related items as presents. For whatever reason, computers are still perceived as a boy's plaything rather than a girl's plaything. While I don't think shaming men is going to solve this problem, I do think there needs to be a supportive community that welcomes women into the tech world, which is exactly the point of Gina Trappani's article.

Stormbringer 16y ago

I had a thought the other day because one of the women I'm working with was showing rather a large amount of cleavage. The thought was that it must be great to be a woman in IT because all you need to do is dress a little tarty and you get the red carpet rolled out for you. Then I thought about why that was the case. And I realised that basically the only reason that dressing slutty gets you favours is because the industry is so thoroughly male dominated, or, in the words of the article, a boy's club. So now, I don't begrudge them the advantages they accrue from dressing that way, I just enjoy it instead :D

Mz 16y ago
I had a thought the other day because one of the women I'm working with was showing rather a large amount of cleavage. I think women basically have two role models for how to "dress for success": One is basically as a "boy toy" and the other is to dress like a man, neither of which cuts it. I think a lot of women who dress "sexy" really aren't specifically intending to come across as "sexy". I think they are trying to come across as "successful, as a woman" and we really don't have much for them to draw from. We have female entertainers who make big bucks, in part because they are sexy (Demi Moore, Madonna, etc). And then we have male role models for business and such. Dressing like a man risks coming across as one or both of the following: 1) Sexy, because it only serves to emphasize that she is really a girl, not a guy or 2) Second class citizen because it only serves to emphasize that she is not a man. In the US at least, we don't have a history of female presidents and such, so we have clothing that signals "successful for a woman" (which almost always means either someone's wife or you got your money because you are sexy) and we have "successful for a man" (which doesn't work well as a clothing style for a woman). As a woman working in corporate America, I am painfully aware that most stuff you see in magazines is something I would be sent home over as "not appropriate" if I showed up at work in it. Most women who have devoted themselves to becoming competent enough at core skills for their career to get anywhere aren't fashionistas and won't have spent gobs of time studying this topic. I think about it a lot and I think the lack of good clothing options for signaling "successful business woman" significantly contributes to the rampant amount of office-slut-wear out there (which makes me basically cringe on a daily basis).