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I don't find too much to disagree with in the observations made in the post, but I'm not sure what useful conclusions emerge. It's clear that women are under-r

I don't find too much to disagree with in the observations made in the post, but I'm not sure what useful conclusions emerge. It's clear that women are under-represented and this needs to be addressed. The OP doesn't really suggest how this might be done and appears to be more interested in assigning blame (which is not actually particularly Marxist thing to do; after all, it was Marx who said that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways - the point is to change it"). Beyond that, I'm not totally convinced by the argument that women are incapable of leveraging unpaid work to gain future economic advantages. The last 50 years has seen a massive increase in the number of women doing this - work done towards a degree in a university is not only unpaid, but you actually have to pay for the right to do it (in many countries). Despite this, the proportion of degrees awarded to women has consistently increased and in many countries there are now more female graduates than male on an annual basis[1]. The argument that women are capable of passing 3-4 year degree courses but incapable of maintaining a Github account needs some further explanation. As a cis/hetero/white/male human, my opinion has always been that, yeah, life is pretty awesome. Open source software is great and I'm hugely empowered by it. However, I genuinely would wish to see those benefits extended as widely as possible, and open source software has the potential to be a good tool for this purpose. FOSS does lack formal barriers to participation and the culture is still young and malleable. One of the things that the OP does is attack the rhetoric of open source, on the basis that claims to "openness" or "meritocracy" (not mentioned in the OP but often raised in these discussions) are misleading. I would accept that but I think it would be best to see this as a failure to live up to our ideals rather than as a deliberate obfuscation that masks the hidden agenda of oppression. If we want to challenge hackers on their behaviour, point out that behaving misogynistically is un-hackerish, that our commitment to openness needs to be backed by actions, that our values are best served by giving everyone the best possible chances to thrive in our community. The OP takes the view that the straight white men of the tech industry are perfectly happy with excluding those who are unlike them, to which my initial response is unprintable on a family website and my more measured response is that this is a blanket assertion that does not match my experience. It is certainly true of some people, but I think it would be better to isolate and exclude them, rather than start from the assumption that they represent the mainstream view of the community and that hacker culture is inherently sexist. [1]: http://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/how-many-men-and-women-are-studying-at-my-university http://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/ho...

vezzy-fnord 13y ago
It's clear that women are under-represented and this needs to be addressed. I'm genuinely curious as to why. I'm quite befuddled by the social justice rhetoric that is so popular today. It's not that there aren't legitimate equality issues in need of solving, but a lot of people do not focus on these anymore. Rather, they're willing to point out supposed misogyny everywhere they go. Even when there isn't any. The concept of "privilege", while doubtlessly real, is barely ever noted by the ones it actually affects. Instead it's typically used as a tool of demagoguery by the same privileged people to instill guilt into others, or just to demonstrate their perceived moral superiority. But for the love of me, I cannot comprehend why one would have such a vendetta against something as benevolent as FOSS. Something that is meant to strengthen community, to encourage freedom of information and empowerment. To everyone. Not just white males. Ah, but since most people working on FOSS are "privileged white males", then we must demonize the entire effort. Most programmers are "privileged white males", so this is only a natural consequence. I don't see what the problem is. All that is stopping you from contributing is your programming skills. Software does not discriminate on basis of race, class or anything like that. All that matters is: "Can you program?" Then you have other positions like raising awareness and activism, which do not necessarily require programming aptitude. But most people will counter that the culture of programming is fundamentally male-centric and misogynistic. Male-centric it is, given that most programmers are male. The same way nursing is female-centric. Misogynistic? No. But, whenever something even mildly offensive is said or done by a programmer, it is swallowed, regurgitated, swallowed again ad nauseum by news and media. Sometimes for no good reason, as in the Adria Richards case. It's fallacious to assume that just because arbitrary quota X is not met, we need to alleviate the "issue" immediately. Yet this is how most people see it: an "issue" that can be fixed through affirmative action and ideological changes. What ideology? There is no single programmer ideology. You know what I think is misogynistic? Assuming that women are weak, fragile and whenever someone makes joke in poor taste (such as Titstare), that we should immediately go up in arms and do something about all the poor oppressed women that were offended by this. This is what happens when people use their primal emotions to guide their thinking. There is nothing wrong with being emotional, but this is ridiculous. I absolutely think that most women are perfectly capable of handing whatever sexism they may encounter on their way in a rational manner. But it's not an institutional problem in software, it's something that certain individuals may display, sometimes not even deliberately. Asinine social justice rhetoric only serves to fuel unwarranted anger against microaggressions. It weakens us all. It makes people actively look for oppression and offensive material in places where there aren't any. Aye. Back in the day, if someone tried to flirt with a woman on the subway, she would brush it off and move on with her life. Today, she would go back to her home, open up her $1,200 MacBook Pro and write a blog article about how all of womankind is being systematically oppressed by privileged white men daily. Please.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

It's clear that women are under-represented and this needs to be addressed. I'm genuinely curious as to why. I'm quite befuddled by the social justice rhetoric that is so popular today. It's not that there aren't legitimate equality issues in need of solving, but a lot of people do not focus on these anymore. Rather, they're willing to point out supposed misogyny everywhere they go. Even when there isn't any. The concept of "privilege", while doubtlessly real, is barely ever noted by the ones it actually affects. Instead it's typically used as a tool of demagoguery by the same privileged people to instill guilt into others, or just to demonstrate their perceived moral superiority. But for the love of me, I cannot comprehend why one would have such a vendetta against something as benevolent as FOSS. Something that is meant to strengthen community, to encourage freedom of information and empowerment. To everyone. Not just white males. Ah, but since most people working on FOSS are "privileged white males", then we must demonize the entire effort. Most programmers are "privileged white males", so this is only a natural consequence. I don't see what the problem is. All that is stopping you from contributing is your programming skills. Software does not discriminate on basis of race, class or anything like that. All that matters is: "Can you program?" Then you have other positions like raising awareness and activism, which do not necessarily require programming aptitude. But most people will counter that the culture of programming is fundamentally male-centric and misogynistic. Male-centric it is, given that most programmers are male. The same way nursing is female-centric. Misogynistic? No. But, whenever something even mildly offensive is said or done by a programmer, it is swallowed, regurgitated, swallowed again ad nauseum by news and media. Sometimes for no good reason, as in the Adria Richards case. It's fallacious to assume that just because arbitrary quota X is not met, we need to alleviate the "issue" immediately. Yet this is how most people see it: an "issue" that can be fixed through affirmative action and ideological changes. What ideology? There is no single programmer ideology. You know what I think is misogynistic? Assuming that women are weak, fragile and whenever someone makes joke in poor taste (such as Titstare), that we should immediately go up in arms and do something about all the poor oppressed women that were offended by this. This is what happens when people use their primal emotions to guide their thinking. There is nothing wrong with being emotional, but this is ridiculous. I absolutely think that most women are perfectly capable of handing whatever sexism they may encounter on their way in a rational manner. But it's not an institutional problem in software, it's something that certain individuals may display, sometimes not even deliberately. Asinine social justice rhetoric only serves to fuel unwarranted anger against microaggressions. It weakens us all. It makes people actively look for oppression and offensive material in places where there aren't any. Aye. Back in the day, if someone tried to flirt with a woman on the subway, she would brush it off and move on with her life. Today, she would go back to her home, open up her $1,200 MacBook Pro and write a blog article about how all of womankind is being systematically oppressed by privileged white men daily. Please.