[clug] Open Source Software's Dirty Little Secret

[Daniel Pittman]

Eyal Lebedinsky <eyal at eyal.emu.id.au> writes:
> Adam Thomas wrote:
>> 2009/9/10 Eyal Lebedinsky <eyal at eyal.emu.id.au>:

[...]

>> I don't want to encourage women participating in FOSS more than I want
>> encourage men participating in FOSS. I just want more people
>> participating in FOSS. I will promote FOSS to whom ever will listen,
>> regardless of their physicality or background.
>
> Yes, me too.

...and yet you engage in activities that are widely understood to discourage
the participation of some of those people, such as gender stereotyping.

Personally, I don't just want to advocate FOSS, I want to do it *effectively*.


>> There is still a large number of existing FOSS community members who
>> discourage women from joining or continuing to participate in the
>> community.
>
> I failed to see these 'large numbers', but then I probably do not go
> out enough to see what is going on.

Thankfully, other people have already done the hard work of tracking,
recording, and providing references to these incidents for you.  How lucky are
you that people spend their time doing that instead of, say, writing code:

    http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents

You will also find it useful to look at the responses to these things: try and
identify the number of people who dismiss these incidents as acceptable for
some reason, such as "an edgy community" or "thin skinned victim", even if you
do believe they are accurate.

Don't forget to count the people who do call them out, too.  That way you can
come to understand not just the incidents, but the people who feel compelled
to talk about them and/or defend or attack them.

[...]

> I want to mention another aspect of the FOSS community that is known but
> maybe not highlighted. Some the those male-geek groups are actually
> intentionally for men (boys, whatever).

That is almost certainly true, just like there are some women-only groups.

> This is the equivalent of other kinds of male bonding activities, and in
> this context women are excluded, and rightly so (not all teen-geek groups
> are like this though).

No.  It is interesting to do a count, though: how many of these are male-only
or male-favouring, and how many are women-only or female-favouring?

How many of these stay in those categories if you accept the theory that, for
example, sexualized imagery, or gender-biased language, make them unwelcoming
to women?

(...or, y'know, University-educated language makes them unwelcoming to people
 who learned "the hard way", or White-Western language makes them unwelcoming
 to people who are not from the privileged class?)

[...]

> One should not confuse this with the general FOSS community which is gender
> neutral (even if not equally represented).

That is a heck of a sweeping statement to make without support.  Can you
provide any evidence to back up your claim that the general FOSS community —
which, for reference, you are presently representing part of, and in a way
that is absolutely *NOT* gender neutral — um, is?

> At times I hear people refer to such geek/hacker/whatever culture in the
> same breath as the FOSS culture; this is wrong.

Why?  Your use of the terms certainly doesn't match well with common use, in
which geek/hacker culture is tightly and intimately associated with the FOSS
culture.  Not *exclusively*, but it is hardly disconnected.

Regards,
        Daniel
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