An Open Letter to the Open Source Community

[Tristan Wibberley]

On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 02:32 -0700, Micah Cowan wrote:
> Tristan Wibberley wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 09:20 +0100, Pete Ryland wrote:
> >> Sheesh.  First hit on Google for "linux women" provides this:
> >>
> >> http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/x28.html#AEN41
> > 
> > That howto itself is sexist. The first comment it points out as being an
> > attack on women claims that it diagnoses the problem as an
> > "over-stressed female" when actually it doesn't. It neither diagnoses
> > the problem nor says the female is "over"-stressed.
> 
> I'm sorry, but how can you possibly try to make such a claim? The
> messages were clearly referring to her, and were clearly implying that
> it was because she was an "over-stressed female" that she had managed to
> force the DIMM in backwards. The exact quote:

uhh... Steve's is the email that the how-to refers to first. and that
doesn't diagnose the problem, nor say the female is "over" stressed. It
says that a woman will demonstrate capabilities that Gnuthad thought
impossible when stressed. The how-to takes *one* sexist comment in the
thread and claims another comment in the thread to be sexist simply
because it discusses the female gender and is from a male. If you're
going to represent the message I was referring to, please do not claim
that I was talking about Gnuthad's second email that you printed below
as evidence.

> ---
> Catie:
> > I ended up frying my other 128M
> > stick by, er, putting it in backwards. It's now a nice keyring.
> 
> Gnuthad:
> > How did you even manage to get the memory into the slot? Last time I
> > checked, DIMMs and DDR were both keyed and can only be inserted one
> > way without physically brweaking either the slot or the stick.
> 
> Steve:
> > Never underestimate the strength of a stressed-female installing more
> > RAM.
> 
> Gnuthad:
> > Uh huh, the reply of "over-stressed female" appears to be totally 
> > correct :P
> ---
> 
> Tristan (quote repeated here):
> > It neither diagnoses
> > the problem nor says the female is "over"-stressed.
> 
> Even if you were correct, from what do you derive the claim that "[t]hat
> howto itself is sexist"? That seems quite non sequitur.

I suppose I was pointing out that sexism can be felt when sexism is not
applied and that runs into the rest of my email (which I see now is
quite badly written and quite inflamatory, sorry about that everyone).
The core point being that social discourse is unpleasant for one group
while normal for the other when the numbers are so skewed. With about 50
men to each woman, each woman will received gender-comparative banter,
attempts at flirting that go horribly wrong, and those occasional plain
rotten remarks at a rate 50 times greater than what she would normally
receive. That is bound to be unpleasant but you won't change the natural
behaviour of each man just as you won't change the natural behaviour of
each woman.


> > The message points
> > out how strong a woman can be in a manner that indicates the poster is
> > respectful of that strength (in the same manner as the phrase "hell hath
> > no fury like a woman scorned" which many women seem to like).
> 
> The poster is being respectful of what he attributes to be the cause of
> someone jamming RAM in backwards?
> 
> ...Look, the reason "over-stressed female"/"stressed-female" is a sexist
> remark, is that there was no justifiable reason to bring "female" into
> the equation. If they had said, "never underestimate the strength of an
> over-stressed person", nobody would've complained. But what does being
> "female" have to do with it?

And here's the bit where sex is relevant. I suspect that Steve was
trying to flirt (by trying to apply a complement while trying to make a
joke and suggesting that his "competition" underestimates Catie -
usually a potent combination in the courtship game). Gnuthad, however,
looks to have misinterpreted it as an insult and jumped in with a direct
personal attack based on his prejudice (so I *would* consider that
message sexist) - unless he was trying to compete with Steve's flirt,
trying to get Catie to think about him instead of Steve by being more
outrageous, but he would have to be *really* bad at it. 

You can't label everything related to, or as a result of, gender
differences as sexism.


> Bear in mind too, please, that this is a gender whose mistakes have been
> continually blamed by men upon PMS- and menstruation-related stress, and
> against whom the word "bitch" is a commonly applied term when referring
> to any ingraciousness. It is also frequently the case that a woman who
> voices a complaint--or God forbid, loses her temper--is simply written
> off by her male audience as simply "Pee Em Essy".

The history of previous generations does not make the majority of
interactions of today (which I think are mostly normal interactions)
sexism. There is no such thing as positive discrimination to make up for
dead and old peoples ignorance. Regarding highlighting the word "bitch",
ingraciousness[sic] in men is commonly judged as being a "wanker".
People use gender specific terms to mock each other. The PMS reference
is used by some men about angry women just as women will mock a man who
is immodest about the sounds or objects he can produce by referring to
traits of his gender. Again, it goes both ways, it is (on the part of
*most* people - especially in geek circles) not done *because* of gender
(which would make it sexism) but the words and jokes used when a feeling
or claim is imparted are sometimes chosen to be relevant to socially
conventional beliefs *about* gender. That isn't true about everybody
though. If you want to remove gender from the communication toolset, you
have to remove the capability for sex from the species.


> > A woman
> > could have said the same thing and it would not have been taken as
> > sexist but rather a simple boast[...].
> 
> A "boast"? No. It would have been taken as a joke, just as it was when a
> man said it. 

When a man said it, it was a joke carrying a compliment, if a woman says
it, it is a joke carrying a boast (and I've heard similar things from my
mother on numerous occasions). 

> The difference being, that it would have been made by
> someone perhaps more entitled to say it.

What's that? To paraphrase: "Women have a communication entitlement that men don't"? Nonsense.


> > The only reason gender was even highlighted here is due to the
> > scarceness of female community members.
> 
> I'm sorry; is that a reason to be less careful not to offend?

Why would I want to be *less* careful? I'm just saying that you can't
and shouldn't attempt to engineer a fifty times more restricted
communication/social bonding toolset than is natural but should rather
try to even out the numbers so both genders can have a normal toolset
where "normal" is based upon which species they are, ie, homo-sapiens,
and how much of which hormones they have in their body at the time.


> > If you put a hand-full of men into a chat-room full of a diverse
> > selection of single women he'll be bombarded with suggestive comments
> > just as women are in a chat-room (or mailing list) full of a diverse
> > selection of single men.
> 
> I have never witnessed this. If you have, you had probably better post
> log links, as it appears many others on this thread have also never
> witnessed this.

I don't have log links from my teenage years, and the geek forums that I
use nowadays are not full of single women. And even if I had log links
to my courtship attempts I probably wouldn't show them off. Getting so
many single women into a chat-room with so few men following is not
something that happens very often.


> What I /have/ noticed, is that, in a chat-room with a high
> male-to-female ratio, there is a tendency for a few assholes to
> immediately start in with "a/s/l?" and the like.

That is courtship and it's normal for single men to ask women that
online, and I'm sure it *is* unpleasant when each woman receives it at
fifty times the normal rate which is what women see when they compare
forums full of geeks to other social forums. It's actually probably more
than fifty times the normal rate because there are a lot more single men
in geek circles than other communities.

BTW a/s/l is suggestive of someone who uses dating or is a teenager
using teenage forums a lot - what are you going to suggest to get sex
out of his mind in order to solve that particular problem?

> There is often also a
> more subtle variety of general chauvinism (usually just ignorance, not
> willful harassment, but the effect is the same) or "gentle" teasing.
> When teasing is a consistent experience whenever and wherever a girl
> arrives online, it of course ceases to be "gentle".

But individuals are not doing it more than would normally be considered
acceptable for them to do (except a percentage of people that always go
too far, Open Source developers or not, men or women).


> This is why "it's
> just due to the scarceness of female community members" is not an
> acceptable justification to dismiss acute feminine sensitivity to sexism
> or perceived sexism; if women online are more sensitive to sexist
> remarks than men are, it is because men have /conditioned/ them to be
> more sensitive to such remarks.

That is a stark and prejudiced claim.


> Conversely, in a chat-room with a high female-to-male ratio, rather than
> seeing the women teasing or ribbing the men (and even if they were, see
> the above on justifiable relative sensitivity), I've seen _exactly_ the
> same sort of thing as in the high-male-to-female situation: some asshole
> logs on with ":) :) :) is anyone here looking for a boyrfiend? :) :) :)".

That's not sexism, that is (a rather unimaginative attempt at) flirting.
To remove efforts at courtship and courtship practice, you must remove
the humans. There's always an asshole among a group of men - we attempt
courtship a lot, its what we do. Women don't often date guys that won't
try it on, so we try it on.


> > The problem is not that men think of women in a way that women do not
> > think of men, causing them to act in a sexist way (although there are of
> > course some of those). The problem is that men and women do not converse
> > in the same way and due to the disparity in population in these forums
> > women end up taking more sexual pressure and gender-related banter than
> > feels right and comfortable. If the populations were more "natural" that
> > pressure wouldn't be there and it would go both ways in equal measure
> > just as in every other walk of life where it is normally regarded as a
> > bit of fun by both sexes. Hell, in the absence of women men make
> > comments to each other that are far more suggestive than anything they
> > would say to a woman - for example "while you're down there" is my
> > personal favourite.
> 
> All true. How then, does this mean that we should therefore be less
> aware of when our "normal" banter has a greater potential to offend than
> if the ratio had been more even?

I suggest that the speaker will find it difficult to be aware of the
abnormal imbalance in the population in such an artificial environment
as a text-based forum.


> > IMHO, the problem is only in the ratio of men to women. The "women's
> > clubs" like ubuntu-women are therefore only slightly useful in changing
> > the proportion as they provide somewhere where women outnumber the men
> > rather than a balance (although due to the nature of the forum any men
> > there will be unlikely to receive much of the attention I mentioned
> > above).
> 
> AFAICT, it is not the primary goal of ubuntu-women to merely provide a
> place with a higher proportion of women to men

You're right, it was unfair of me and rude - although not sexist but
rather a sleight where gender was the first natural tool to arrive in my
mind given the nature of the cause of my bad mood at the time. I was in
a state of irritation at what I felt was an affront to my very nature
throughout writing that email. It's quite easy to make me be "bold" in a
text format I'm afraid - but I normally don't feel like people are
telling me my gender is shameful very often outside of TV panel shows. I
only thought it was a deliberate affront early on while reading the
thread, but my mood held on a bit.


> And don't deceive yourself: women in the FOSS communities /are/ feeling
> threatened.

I never said they didn't. At several points I acknowledge those
feelings. I intended to argue (and I *did* intend to "argue") that it
wasn't something wrong with men that was causing it (except perhaps a
strong tendancy to join geekdom). Nor do I suggest that it is something
wrong with women.


> And we need to stop asking, "should the women feel
> threatened?" or "are they right to feel threatened?" or "is there a
> basis for them to feel threatened?", and start asking, "why /do/ they
> feel threatened?".

I wasn't asking "why do they feel threatened?" because I believe I have
the answer, I think women feel threatened because the gender-specific
comment flux is abnormally imbalanced, and flowing in the direction of
women with fifty times the current than it flows in the direction of
men, yet with similar frequency per individual as is normal.


> Does it seem an isolated thing? Aren't women in a variety of forums
> saying essentially the same thing? How many women have you heard
> claiming that there is no problem with sexism, or questioning the
> experiences of women who have encountered sexist behavior?

I couldn't count them, but I think most of the women that I've noticed
enjoying my flirting where the topic has arisen say many of the things
claimed to be sexism aren't, even if I'm not actually courting them but
we're just having fun practicing flirting and teasing. For the ones not
enjoying my flirting, the conversation does not get that far.

It's important for me to acknowledge, at this point, that there *are*
more sexist men than sexist women (but there certainly *are* sexist
women too). But this is culture specific and not software development
methodology specific, nor as a result of men being bad things, and I
think they are a result of a cultural history in most continents that
values aggression. Men *are* generally more aggressive, and this is why
I don't think sexism happens much in geekdom, because these men
generally value aggression very little. As aggression becomes less
important, so people respect more the non-aggressive members of the
population - women and geeks of all genders, the latter we have seen
gaining respect over the last ten years the former over the last
hundred.


> The problem isn't spite; and I don't think anyone is claiming a general
> attitude of willful harassment. The problem, AFAICT, is overwhelmingly
> one of ignorance, and at a very fundamental level. Men simply aren't
> aware of how offensive many of our attitudes are. Couple this with an
> unwillingness to accept that there may be any offense, and the reason
> why so many women are so frustrated is revealed.

You've misinterpreted what I was saying. When I flirt with women (which
I don't normally do online these days because I know it doesn't often
work in text form), I *know* that some of them are offended, but most
just ignore me, and the remaining few fancy me as a result. But I know
that if each woman had fifty times the number of flirt attempts, fifty
times the number of gender related jokes as she makes, fifty times the
number of assholes, then she would either think she was being
"conditioned" to think, or actually end up thinking, that she was less
of a person than all those men, that she was a sex object, or that the
things she thought were insignificant.

Just please stop asking me that I mustn't act like the gender I am or to
restrict the things I can say to less than the things that women are
allowed to say.

Women mostly choose not to be involved in computers when they are
teenagers (even mocking "boys and their computer games" which I also
don't think is sexist) - if you want to solve the problem in the
computer industry you will have to start there. I suggest creating
puzzles and games for girls, with themes that girls in the western and
eastern cultures are more likely to enjoy that lead into programming and
logic to get them hooked - for consoles like the Wii which are being
marketed more toward women than has traditionally happened. I suggested
western and eastern because that's where most of the people are that
will be able to devote time to getting involved in online development.

How about a girls-games team to devise and develop such games that lead
into software development like problems?

-- 
Tristan Wibberley

This is not derived in any way from any opinions of my employer, they
are my own opinions.