On 01/15/2012 07:12 PM, Matt Giuca wrote:
The drastically lower rate of participation in free software suggests
that the free software community is worse behaving than society at
large.
Wait. You're operating under an unstated assumption that the only
factor influencing the percentage of women in a particular community
is how well the males in the community behaves towards women. That's a
GIANT unproven assumption. This is a complex problem and there are
undoubtedly many factors.
For example, maybe it is the case that women are naturally inclined,
to some degree, towards a professional career in computing, but are
much less inclined to pursue computing as a hobby. I'm not trying to
put a case for that, but just suggest one possible explanation for
this apparent gap between women in free software versus women in the
software industry -- one that doesn't have anything to do with
behaviour of the other people in the community.
Taking the rate of women's participation as a proxy for the happiness
of the ones there seems reasonable to me. So I don't think they are
such different questions.
I think Alex got the point I was making. I think one possible
explanation is that closed source computing is far less political that
open source. The Free Software cause is political in nature in a way
that a closed source job isn't. It's not just about developing
software, it's about ideology and how intellectual property is handled
in society. You'll find in other political organisations along similar
lines but not software related, the same issue. It is harder to recruit
women. My experience with them, is they ask the exact same questions,
how to encourage women and they try the same things, with little success.
Why? I would just say that those who analyse this phenomenon and
comment on it for society, are biased towards finding sociological
causes that they can also be employed to solve. So you are much more
likely to have someone say that the problem is some latent cultural
bias, where they can position themselves as being the ones to solve it
for us.
I've discussed this phenomenon with others quite a bit and all I can
say, is that perhaps there is an inherit difference which means men are
more likely to get involved with a particular style of organisation.
The problem is when you say it's a problem, which is what I think people
should avoid. I think the issue is more to do with the fact that
society doesn't seem to value women until they fill traditionally /male/
roles. There is also an issue where any difference or inequality is
seen or assumed to be a female inadequacy.
Who's to say there aren't /too many/ men in Free Software? Why assume
the problem is lack of women? We base the standard on male behaviour,
because that's what progressivism has defined as the goal. But to do
this, is to assume that the men know better. It is to assume that if
women behave differently, then it is the woman's behaviour we need to alter.
Yes, we should eschew behaviour which places barriers and difficulties
to women getting involved, and it can, from ones point of view seem that
women are 'under represented'. But that only from your point of view,
and that's something we need to keep in mind.
Our culture doesn't deal with this well, which is ultimately what the
problem is.
That is, again, not a very good proxy. If we take a hypothetical
example in a school where Grade 6P spontaneously starts a
finger-knitting craze. It spreads within the class, but not so much
outside the class. Now a couple of students from Grade 6S hear about
it and also start finger-knitting. But it never really catches on in
Grade 6S, because there isn't an "everyone else is doing it"
mentality. Basically, finger-knitting is in the culture of Grade 6P
but not in the culture of Grade 6S. However, there are still 3 or 4
students in Grade 6S that are doing it. They occasionally hang with
the 6Pers at lunch time and they knit together. You could look at this
situation and say "well only 5% of finger-knitters are from Grade 6S
-- therefore, we must assume that Grade 6S people are generally
unhappy with finger-knitting." But that's not true at all. The 3 or 4
Grade 6S students who are in the community are very happy indeed. They
just haven't been able to convince many of their fellow 6Sers to join
them, because it is not in the Grade 6S culture.
By way of analogy, I am trying to say that just because only a small
percentage of a particular group is participating in some activity
does not mean that the ones that are participating are unhappy. It
also doesn't mean that, were that percentage to increase, that the
ones already participating would become happier.
You seem to be unhappy that there aren't enough women in free
software. If you are being genuinely offended because people are
treating you differently as a woman, then that is a legitimate problem
which should be addressed. But if you are merely unhappy because of
the low numbers, then what I think some of us are trying to say is
that it shouldn't matter: we're not here in our capacity as men and
women, we're here to discuss and appreciate free software, and we
should be able to do that without consideration of gender.
Matt
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