Infrequently Noted

Thank you very much for this.

WC: "Is there a barrier to entry for women in OSS? Yeah, I’ll admit that it’s a higher barrier than for men. But it’s not high enough that it would keep out anyone that was actually interested."

So you admit that there is a higher barrier to entry for women than for men, and you imply that this is acceptable. Three questions for you:

1. What do you consider to be the barrier?

2. Can you explain why it is acceptable for a primarily online community whose very existence is predicated on the ideas of freedom and "openness" to exclude a group of people based on their physical characteristics?

(Think carefully about this one. Would you find it similarly acceptable if the higher barrier applied to, say, fat people, or people with ginger hair?)

3. Why are you commenting anonymously?

Fantastic stuff, Alex. There's a great line in Snow Crash (quoted in the comments to that Charlie Stross piece) that sums it up for me:

"It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists."

Engineers tend to idealise the conversations and communities that gather around intellectual/abstract projects (as software projects are often seen) as purely intellectual themselves, and above the ego/insecurity-driven failings that plague other social situations. This is, of course, bollocks. By embracing codes of conduct such as yours, we may have a hope of getting near egalitarian communities of the kind that some poor fools think can be achieved with no dedicated effort.

Update: I have "down modded" ponvoula's comment, but not deleted it there. It seems essential to the conversation, such as it is, but I won't hesitate to down-mod or delete comments in the same vein in the future.

Makes me wonder what sort of world this would be if the entire human race were blind, and only the important things, like what people think and feel, mattered.

"Go find some other community to destroy with your hatred and ignorance."

Ooh, pot meet kettle!

I can't read ponvoula's post (it's not there, despite not having been 'deleted') but your reply to it was just as damaging to the community as his post was. People could have read his post and said 'oh man, is HE misguided!' and continued on, but then you reply and act as spokesman for the community... And you're just as nasty.

I agree with Sho, btw. If women were interested in open source projects, they'd join them. Some are, and do. Heck, the majority of most males techies aren't interested in them, either.

Is there a barrier to entry for women in OSS? Yeah, I'll admit that it's a higher barrier than for men. But it's not high enough that it would keep out anyone that was actually interested. The entire 'tech community' on the internet is male-biased... Just head to Digg or Slashdot and you'll see many comments about how 'there are no women on the internet' and constant jokes claiming anyone obviously female is actually male.

As for starting their own projects, he's right about that, too. Just like you can delete any comment from your blog you don't like, the leader of an OSS project can remove any member they like as well.

No, the playing field is not level... But it's not so tilted that it would force people out, either.

I could say, "I made the mistake of reading ponvoula's comment", but on reflection I think I am better off having read it, because it is so utterly shocking. It's a perfect example of the kind of _poison_ that can be casually dropped into a conversation under the veil of anonymity, and clear evidence (if any was needed) that codes of conduct and community standards are not just welcome, but _vital_ components for healthy online discourse.

WC:

The post hasn't been deleted. A link should appear (if the script is working right) to give you the chance to open it up (works for me on FF, Safari, and Opera). Furthermore, there's nothing even slightly hypocritical here: I'm suggesting that moderation and setting the tone is a good thing in the face of "comments" which do nothing but drive away some very large percentage of our potential contributors. ponvoula doesn't qualify as a "very large percentage of our potential contributors". He's a small minority which is doing great harm. Societies which can't find ways to police small minorities which abuse their power and position don't deserve success and power.

But don't misunderstand me: I'm not making a purely moral argument. There is a practical consequence to letting folks assume that the Open Source world will gladly tolerate blatantly sexist behavior in order to serve some jaundiced idea of "fairness". The OSS world is losing out on much of its potential community, a community which is essential to our long-term, wide-spread success. I don't want OSS just to succeed in the lives of the men of the planet. On a practical basis, I'd rather the OSS world have the participation of the many women (and others) who feel disenfranchised than feel hostage to the hateful tirades of the ponvoula's of the world.

More to the point, to take your suggestion to it's logical conclusion, why don't the sexists in the OSS world go form their own projects? I'm not saying I'm in favor of that (it would be far better if everyone behaved as adults), but it does seem a better and more just solution than the one you propose.

Regards

ponvoula:

I must say that I had a very hard time not agreeing with Akismet's first classification of your post: it's barely better than most of the other junk that it handily dispenses with. Pulling it out of the dustbin of the "spam" section may have been a mistake.

I may yet delete it, but I'll let others weigh in on what I should do here.

Clearly, I'm Yog on my own blog and I can do what I like with your comment, but as an object lesson in how badly the OSS community is b0rken, it might serve some purpose – particularly for those who don't think we (collectively) have a problem or don't need policies to keep attitudes like yours from being given an undisputed forum.

Your view of the contributions of others (particularly WRT gender) is so wrong-headed and destructive that I pray for the sake of whatever projects you interact with that they all have the sense to kick you out should you act that way in their fora. Your behavior certainly won't find a home in Dojo Foundation projects.

Trying to counter your "comment" point-by-point would likely be as futile as it would be depressing, so I won't. Clearly you don't even know enough about Debian and the process of building Linux distros to even understand what is a valuable contribution in a project like that. Hint: Linux distros package things. That's what the whole point of distros, so those who package things form upstream form the backbone of a distro project. You, clearly, are not worth our time. I will just say once, clearly: until you can learn to value all types of contributions to OSS, not just code written by those who by an accident of genetics have outdoor plumbing, go away.

You are destructive to everything we are trying to accomplish with Open Source. Go find some other community to destroy with your hatred and ignorance.

Great post, Alex. Also, that was a far calmer and more reasoned response to Sho's comment than it deserved.

(Peripherally related, Charlie Stross just wrote about "Bechdel's Law", which highlights the matter of level playing fields (or lack thereof) in a different context: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/07/bechdels_law.html)

Bravo--thanks so much for this post, Alex!

if there's anything that I, or wise-women.org can do to help out, just ask.

This needs to be said more often!

Bravo for this, Alex.

sho:

It's not "build it and they will come", it's "create a level playing field", which is something that OSS projects ostensibly pride themselves on in every other aspect of their development processes. From that perspective, offensive, misogynistic behavior is a bug in the way projects and run and should be ruthlessly managed out in exactly the same way that bugs are hunted down in our code.

You're making a deterministic argument about how, because the computer science world is currently dominated by men today, that it should always be so and that we should accept that norm. What I'm saying is that even if it will be that way for some time to come, there's zero reason to accept or expect that to be true in the future. We're not going to solve this overnight, but the first step is to enable existing projects which believe in these norms to effectively mediate on behalf of all of their contributors, and that means setting standards.

Your suggestion that we should have, or should want all-female "counter projects" totally misses the point and is in no way a proof for your argument. In fact, you're propagating another fallacy of OSS – that forks are healthy, normal, and somehow serve the broader community interest. The passive-aggressive M.O. of OSS community conflict resolution is a different but related problem that I'll blog about soon, but suffice to say that a lack of forking for non-technical reasons surely can't be your proof point. Of course, it doesn't help that you're also wrong about "counter-projects" not existing: LinuxChix, Anita Borg, etc. are all set up as reactions to the often jarring world of FOSS for female participants. Just look at the list on the LinuxChix website:

http://www.linuxchix.org/other-groups-women-computing.html http://www.linuxchix.org/other-groups-women-free-software.html

You likely aren't seeing these counter-projects because you aren't looking for them.

More to the point, though, you're suggesting that it's the fault of those who would rather not put up with belligerent behavior for leaving, and in that suggestion you are showing that you don't understand the subtle power of dcsiriminationatory behavior. It's the rational thing to do for any individual to not participate in an endeavor where they're clearly not welcome, but it it's not an instantaneous choice by the entire group. If it were an instantaneous gender-wide, gender-based decision, your thesis would work. But it doesn't.

Your mental model of behavior regarding how women should act in response to lewd, sexually charged behavior in a forum which is ostensibly dedicated to purely technical or product-related discussions shows that you don't understand that the point of meritocracy isn't to be a pissing contest for who can withstand the most abuse. If that were the bar, OSS projects should be content to just be glorified frat houses. If it doesn't strike you as a problem that the allegory of frats to the OSS communities you contribute to is deeply apt, then you probably need to think very hard about what it means for OSS to be meritocratic.

Regards

That was a very long way of saying "Build it and they will come". My reply is, "no they won't".

The problem of women participating in open source is not a result of hostile all-male environments. That is more an outcome of the fact that in current society men are far, far more interested in programming then women. The reasons for that are, as you say, complex societal issues, not the occasional misogynistic comment on IRC. So I think you're looking at it from the wrong direction, and furthermore I think these "codes of conduct" you are proposing are needless overhead on a community that works pretty well as is and for whom overhead is death.

Also, you've missed one critical point, which is that there is absolutely nothing stopping any open-source-minded woman from simply starting her own project and enforcing her rules there. If the projects have merit they will be used and gain momentum no matter the gender of the founder. There is absolutely nothing stopping women from creating their own communities. In that regard OSS is as level a playing field, and as pure a meritocracy, as you'll find anywhere.

The fact that this tsunami of woman-owned "counterprojects" does not, to my knowledge, exist, is a pretty powerful argument against your core thesis, which that it's only the negative tone of some communities keeping the women away.

Well said.

Thanks for writing this. There's a couple of choice quotes in there that I need to remember.

Thanks,

James

I find the conversation interesting, but while im not the guy upstairs, let me make a point on what he was saying

1. What do you consider to be the barrier?

I consider the higher barrier basic distrust. I for one can answer for myself I distrust everyone new - no matter who they are. I will also "test" them, by poking fun a bit at them for a week or two. Note I do this to everyone. The point is "why is it worse for women?" Take this as a generalisation - partially correct, partially incorrect - they tend to take offense more personally. If you dig into me once, I hardly notice - and so do my male friends. I noticed that women, and girls, tend to take offense easier. Why? I dont know. So they feel offended by jokes - specially sexist ones - worse than we do. I've been made fun of when I met a couple of my girl friends in a group going down town. It wasn't nice, but by next day I put it out of my mind. Yet two weeks later(when by guy standards) it was gone and forgotten, two of them came separately each and apologized. I didn't understand why - its the only reason why I still remember the incident.

2. Can you explain why it is acceptable for a primarily online community whose very existence is predicated on the ideas of freedom and “openness” to exclude a group of people based on their physical characteristics? (Think carefully about this one. Would you find it similarly acceptable if the higher barrier applied to, say, fat people, or people with ginger hair?) I do NOT exclude these people - they choose to exclude themselves on a personal offense that they percieve - I consider it a mix of obnoxious riff raff that happens on a large scale (noise in a big full room?).

3. Why are you commenting anonymously? I cannot comment on this for a third person

quoth janus:

The point is “why is it worse for women?” Take this as a generalisation - partially correct, partially incorrect - they tend to take offense more personally. If you dig into me once, I hardly notice - and so do my male friends. I noticed that women, and girls, tend to take offense easier. Why?

• o0o -

I can answer that.

Because for me, it's not "just once" that people dig into me online. In the past, it has been frequent enough, and frequently with malice enough, that it became a pattern. Many women online experience this. Sometimes it's someone "testing" us, but sometimes the person on the other keyboard actually is out to get us. Sometimes it's funny, but sometimes it's just vile.

And it can be hard to tell the difference.

This is probably also why your female friends apologised to you. I bet they know what it's like to be on the receiving end of the third good verbal kicking in a week, and how an isolated playful dig can add to that damage.

Rather than taking your experience as a bloke online as the default, maybe you could learn from theirs, which is just as rational as yours, but stems from different experiences. Do you ever wonder how many people you have genuinely hurt with your testing humor?

Without meaning anything by it, you may be raising the very barrier you cited, making others distrust you further. Is this a good thing? Do you really want to contribute to that kind of atmosphere?

Alex, The following url it supposed to take me to the dojo api documentation: http://api.dojotoolkit.org/ Instead it is redirecting here: http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/

Alex, I enjoy you site very much! I also own your book! So how can I get to the dojo api documentation page?

Thanks, -- Bill