An Open Letter to the Open Source Community

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 09:22:59AM +0100, Chris Puttick wrote:
> 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?

This question bears no relation to the position I have taken in this thread,
so I have no answer for it.

> Whatever it is that is discouraging women from being (visibly) involved in
> free software, it is not these rare occurrences.

Having spoken to women about this problem, and hearing their experiences, I
can say that this behaviour does in fact discourage women from getting
involved, as does the fact that it is tolerated in the community to an even
greater extent than (for example) in the corporate world.

I have also seen it personally, as will you if you spend any length of time
on an IRC channel with a name containing "women", or use a nick which people
interpret as female.  It is not nearly as uncommon as one might think
without being exposed to it personally.

Just last week, for example, when a ban on the TOR anonymizer went missing:

May 16 21:38:33 <encrypto>      ok this is fantastic me alone with all these freaky linux chicks. So who wants to marry me ? :>

This is not abstract inequality.  It is objectification and harrassment, and
it is not an isolated incident.

> 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.

This is a recurring problem, and even for individual incidents, the effects
do last much longer than an instant.  There is a very real ripple effect,
but more importantly, there are regular offenses, and in private as well as
in public.

> 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?

Hostility and discrimination are not worth defending, and I refuse to
believe that they are an essential part of the open source movement.

> 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).

No one would suggest that the open source community is responsible for all
inequalities concerning women.  Most women are exposed to these issues well
before encountering the open source community.  However, the fact that this
occurs elsewhere does not excuse it here.

If anything, the cause for action is even stronger in an environment like
ours, where social contact happens at a blinding pace, we can easily
interact with hundreds or thousands of new people in a day, and relative
anonymity is common.

> 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?

The FLOSSpols numbers are certainly not perfect, and it would be impossible
to be representative of every population.  However, the general trend is
easily reproducible in most any public open source population.  Based on a
rough first-name survey, and admitting the inherent measurement error, there
is a similar ratio among Ubuntu members, for example (low single digits).
Ubuntu developers, most of whom I have met in person, correlate as well.

> Stop calling people sexist without evidence that they are in any
> particular way.

I have not made any such personal accusation, but I do recognize that as a
community, we have work to do, and that denial and indignation are
counter-productive.

-- 
 - mdz