[clug] Open Source Software's Dirty Little Secret

Brendan Jurd direvus at gmail.com
Fri Sep 11 01:31:59 MDT 2009


2009/9/11 Jacinta Richardson <jarich at perltraining.com.au>:
> If you were in an online Warhammer 40k community that had say 2% women
> participation and over time you got to know many of those awesome women and
> appreciated playing against them, and then you found that many of them were
> leaving without being replaced; some noisily pointing at pervasive sexism others
> just disappearing... would you not want to discuss why?  Perhaps re-evaluate
> behaviour you thought was normal and reasonable?

It's an interesting thought.  If I was in an online gaming community
with 2% female participation, chances are good that I could play for
years without ever encountering any of the females.  Chances are also
good that if I did manage to encounter a female, I wouldn't even know,
because in such an environment they might not own up to being female
due to the inevitable "OMG BEWBS" reaction.

But, to answer your direct question: Yes.  I would want to know why,
and I would ask those women what it was exactly they found
objectionable, and whether I'd personally done anything wrong.

I suppose the very VERY few females friends I've had who were into
geeky hobbies, didn't leave.  They appeared to have long since figured
out how to deal with puerile behaviour.  They either ignored it or
they made a joke out of it.

Please don't take the above as me suggesting the puerile behaviour is
okay.  That's not my intention.

> From primary school and up, women are discouraged from being geeky.  Boys tend
> to get their first computer quite young, girls might not get one until they're
> 10 or so.  The "larval phase" (which thankfully seems to be going out of
> fashion) might be tolerated by parents of a teenage boy but certainly isn't
> societally acceptable of a teenage girl or young woman.  Career advisers tend to
> push girls into picking "female-friendly" career paths such as chemical
> engineering rather than mechanical, software or computer engineering.
>
> Young women who do get into computer-focused university courses, not only see
> their female course mates drop out over the years from about 30% down to 5% in
> four years, but often have lecturers or tutors who actively propose changing to
> "more appropriate" fields of study.  (Not all lecturers or tutors, but it only
> takes one or two).  Once a woman gets a job as a programmer, system
> administrator etc, she's often likely to be one of a very few women in her
> workplace doing such technical things (1:3 after all).  Where she's the only
> such woman she may also find herself in a very club-house atmosphere because
> previously all the guys used work as a place of bonding rather than professional
> work behaviour.  Although she's unlikely to experience overt discrimination as a
> result of her rarity; statistics show that she's likely to be paid less, get
> less promotions and lower bonuses than her male counterparts.  She's less likely
> to job-hop at a salary raise of 20-30% per job change.
>

Right, I've seen this effect at work too.  And it seems to me to be
the real meat of the issue.  We're all standing around wringing our
hands about how to encourage women into FOSS when this is precipitated
by something that begins AT BIRTH and continues right up through
schooling?

I feel that by the time a generation of girls have made it through
that filtering process, there are going to be so few real geeks left
among them that even if FOSS was the very model of asexual behaviour,
it wouldn't be enough to generate a critical mass of female
participation.

Cheers,
BJ


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