An Open Letter to the Open Source Community (Matt Zimmerman)

[Chris Puttick]

Well, I keep being dragged back into this one, but it is because I
hate discrimination. Passionately.

(comments inline below)

On 23/05/07, sounder-request at lists.ubuntu.com
<sounder-request at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 12:03:18 +0100
> From: Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com>
> Subject: Re: An Open Letter to the Open Source Community
> To: sounder at lists.ubuntu.com
> Message-ID: <20070523110318.GA9404 at alcor.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 10:56:18AM +0100, Andy wrote:
> > I am not at all surprised that there is a low number of women in Open
> > Source/Free Software/GNU/Linux/Ubuntu (covering everything here ;)).
> > The problem with Linux and to a certain extent Free software in
> > general is it needs a higher level of skill and knowledge to use.
>
> Your implication is that women are less likely to have this skill and
> knowledge, which is a circular argument.  "<group> are less likely to be
> involved in <activity> because of a lack of experience and familiarity with
> <activity>".  Hogwash.  What we are talking about here are the attitudes
> which discourage women from becoming involved in free software in the first
> place (which is how one learns about it).
>

Hold on there - the attitudes that are being demonstrated by a small
minority of people on a small minority of of lists, attitudes that are
held by, at very least, the same proportion of people in the wider
world, these are discouraging millions of women from becoming more
involved in free software? Nonsense. Whatever it is that is
discouraging women from being (visibly) involved in free software, it
is not these rare occurrences.

We could get into a lengthy debate on whether it is some difference
between men and women (averaged, in general, etc. etc.) which makes
men more likely to be involved with free software, and whether that
difference is historic, cultural, chemical, genetic or some
combination or all or some of these, but surely we can agree it is not
these few specific instances of specific behaviour.

Consider that it is unlikely that a woman, getting active in the
community, is deterred by such a low incidence of offensive activity;
consider the improbability that large numbers of women are joining
lists or viewing sites at the very instant that one of these instances
occur and that they all immediately generalise this instance to the
entire community and sign off in disgust. Maybe it is the culture of
the average list/forum/site that is in some way alien to many women,
and a change in that culture would be needed to make women feel more
welcome. But if we change the culture do we then alienate the existing
members?

> > So what has this to do with the number of women in Linux/FLOSS. Well
> > in my experience women tend to be less well educated in the field. Go
> > and have a look around some Universities Computing departments, look
> > at many of the CS courses. Notice something? The ratio of Men to Women
> > isn't anywhere near 1:1.
>
> If you read Melissa's letter, you will see an extraordinary statistic there.
>
> "Currently, according to FLOSSpols, in 2006, the average female
> representation in Open Source is 1.5%. This is compared to 28% female
> representation in the proprietary software industry."
>
> A gender imbalance of 28% is evidence of a need for further improvement.  An
> imbalance of 1.5% is a travesty, especially in a community which has been
> founded on principles of openness, equality and freedom.

A gender imbalance is not evidence of sexism. There is a gender
imbalance in everything. Modify the "thing" to remove the imbalance
and it more or less invariably becomes imbalanced in another way (see
UK university gender numbers for example). In this particular case, it
is clear that the gender imbalance is sourced in something way below
the software industry and seemingly way below even secondary education
(K12, age ~11-18, for comparators in different countries).

The comparative case is also highly problematic as evidence of
anything - this almost certainly not a like-for-like comparison. The
FLOSSpols survey would not have counted my partner and her team, yet
the team is 2/3 women and contribute to open source in their area
(digital preservation and repositories); FLOSSpols was presumably a
voluntary survey; the general industry figure will be collected
corporately and probably from countries where gender imbalance is on
the poliical agenda i.e. the figures may well be inflated for the good
of the individual company. And then there is the job-type question: do
we have a list of the different types of jobs counted in FLOSSpols and
the breakdown of women v. men in each type, and the same for the
industry figures?

<snip>

Stop calling people sexist without evidence that they are in any
particular way. People are different: gender, culture, race, religion;
all differences that contribute to individuality. Take any group with
the same any three of those factors and you'll find more similarities
than you would with a randomly selected group. Exclude no one and
eliminate discrimination; discriminate and discrimination continues.

Chris