[Pan-users] Re: updated info

[Duncan]

walt posted on Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:12:20 -0700 as excerpted:

>> to
>> prevent the otherwise female assumption.  Could/will that some day
>> happen to computer coding?  I don't know.
> 
> It's already happening.  I tune in occasionally to the video streams
> from M$ and Sun/Oracle and Adobe to listen to the geek-talk, and the
> number of women participants keeps climbing as the years go by.

One of the topics of discussion (and alarm, in some quarters, from both 
sides) in the FLOSS community (various talks at conferences, articles on 
LWN and the like) has been the fact that while women /do/ seem to be 
getting more common on the proprietary side, it doesn't seem to be 
happening to anything like the same degree on the FLOSS side.

Various reasons have been propounded.  At least two of them have to do 
with the volunteer and meritocratic nature of FLOSS community 
participation and recognition, thus focusing on the obvious difference 
between the proprietary and freedomware side as a cause.

One propounded viewpoint is that in western society (sub-debate as to 
whether it's nature or nurture, but the fact remains) when it comes to 
jobs, women tend (IOW, exceptions there are, to go a bit Yodda =:^) to be 
more focused on the practical benefits for themselves and their families, 
and thus don't rank the benefit/reward of peer community recognition as 
high as men tend to do, while ranking monetary compensation rather higher, 
with the obvious effect in a community where if monetary compensation 
comes, it's generally well after the peer recognition has accumulated to a 
good degree.  This viewpoint therefore holds that women in general aren't 
attracted to FLOSS because the practical compensation they value is in 
general too remote and not sufficiently guaranteed, coming only after the 
community recognition they don't value as highly.

I'm honestly not sure on this one.  It's worth noting, however, that the 
gender ratio of engineers and the like is far more even in societies such 
as those of the former Eastern bloc, Russia and the like.  Their share of 
the FLOSS community is lower as well, tho that may have to do as much with 
opportunity in a formerly closed society as it does with recognition/
monetary compensation priorities.  By contrast, East Asian culture could 
be seen as /too/ peer recognition oriented, a point often made by both 
sides as an explanation for the relatively low level of their 
contributions to the FLOSS community.  It's now considered a recognized 
fact that Asian engineers participating on LKML unfortunately do so at the 
risk of loss of stature and possibly their job with their employer, due to 
the frankness of the criticism on the list early on in the patch 
submission and revision process.  Where in the west, that's unpleasant and 
may cause people to give up, but if they persevere, they may well get a 
much better product ultimately merged, in Asia, the early process can cost 
the submitter their jobs, as such a level of criticism is seldom seen, so 
if it is, the submission is seen as *HORRIBLY* below acceptable quality 
standards, to the point that they're considered no longer employable.  At 
least in the kernel community, there's now people active in reaching out 
and support of such Asian contributors, private replies instead of to the 
list, helping the contributor shape what gets presented to their bosses, 
etc, so they can hopefully get thru that stage and the valuable 
contribution accepted into the kernel as at the level it can be, given the 
chance.  Of course, there's similar projects for women (LinuxChix, KDE 
women, Gnome women, whatever the specific names are, etc) in the 
community, tho I'm not sure about the kernel in particular.

Another viewpoint, often heard from the women in the community themselves 
(thus one I put more weight in), is that due to the volunteer and 
meritocratic nature of the community, and lacking a solid acceptability 
standard to the contrary, often brutish behavior is simply accepted, where 
it should not be tolerated.  The other side of that of course is that 
generally recognized social oafs are often the most talented and 
intuitively understanding of the nature of the computing problem coders.  
See Asperger Syndrome (wikipedia has an article, and google it).

But, there are some solid examples.

At this point it's appropriate to take a cue from the geek-feminism wikia 
and insert this warning:

******
TRIGGER WARNING The rest of this post, or links it contains, contain 
information about sexual assault and/or violence against women which may 
be triggering to survivors.
******

This one's a well known classic from 2000.  It's an ad for QSOL (a Linux 
server company now out of business, for the best, many would agree, after 
this, after the reaction they apologized and pulled the ad, but ran it 
again (!!) in 2007) that appeared in Linux Journal.

http://img341.imageshack.us/i/qsoladvertisementps2.jpg/

OK, I can see both sides of that one.  As a guy, it's amusing, but 
offensive as well, because I can empathize with women.  But I can 
certainly see how it might have provoked the desired response from the 
(male) curly-haired-boss types it's obviously aimed at.  But I'd not want 
my wife, daughter, or simply peer that happens to be female, to have to 
deal with that, and thus consider it the embarrassment to the community 
that it was, that it'd be tolerated even to the point that LJ would even /
consider/ running it in the first place.

(Ugh, wrap bug!  "/consider/")

One of the most recent (July, 2009 Gran Canaria Desktop Summit), and it's 
a shame it's only now being addressed as he's been making the references 
in public presentations for years, is the Richard M Stallman references to 
"EMACS virgins".  The ruckus was triggered when he did a presentation at a 
GNOME conference.

>From the geek-feminism link below, here's a quote of the remark in 
question (tho from a different presentation where a transcript was made):

"""""
[W]e also have the cult of the virgin of emacs. The virgin of emacs
is any female who has not yet learned how to use emacs. And in the
church of emacs we believe that taking her emacs virginity away is
a blessed act."
"""""

Even when I first read of that remark, the "taking away" of the virginity 
sounded uncomfortably like rape, to me.  After a bit of analysis using 
"take" in other contexts, for instance, "he took the keys", vs "he took 
away the keys", I realized that inserting the word "away" dramatically 
strengthens the implication that it was NOT voluntarily given.  Try it 
with other examples if you like.  If you come up with one or better yet a 
class where that's NOT the case, please post it, as I'm not aware of it 
and it could well change my thinking on the subject.  Mistakenly or not, 
RMS adding the "away" implies it's NOT entirely voluntary, thus in the 
context of virginity, implies rape.  If RMS had simply said "taking her 
EMACS virginity", it would have been in what many consider bad taste (I'm 
too close to the issue now to honestly evaluate whether I would or not, 
tho I think I would), but not nearly as offensive as the "taking away her 
EMACS virginity" was.

While thankfully not rape/sexual, I am an abuse survivor.  This isn't 
something to be joking about.  FWIW, that I am a (male) abuse survivor 
also means I don't read as much into RMS' choice of gender specific 
language there as some do, but do take offense to the "taking away" bit, 
implying that it's not voluntary.

This from someone who it's worth pointing out quotes RMS in his sig, so 
it's not that I'm an anti-RMS person by *ANY* stretch.  Rather, I believe 
it's a shame that this comes up, because it further provokes people to 
treat his /entire/ message, as that of the kook he clearly is in this 
context.

Here's the geek-feminism wiki entry on the incident:

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/EMACS_virgins_joke

Here's a big long comment thread on lwn.net about it (the main article is 
an announcement that the FSF is hosting a mini-summit on Women in Free 
Software, the subthread starts with an a comment observing that this might 
be the FSF's attempt to get RMS' foot out of his mouth).

http://lwn.net/Articles/348475/

Here's a reaction from a girl who was 15 at the time she first heard RMS 
use that reference, apparently some time ago (one comment of many on blog 
reporting an email to RMS on the subject, this comment is one of the links 
in the above LWN thread, but given the length of the thread...).

http://opensourcetogo.blogspot.com/2009/07/emailing-richard-stallman.html?
showComment=1247268813706#c2710654169843897013

(GRR!!  Wrapping case in point!  Of course the auto-wrapper doesn't know 
that's a URL and can't be wrapped, but if I hit the unwrap button, it now 
unwraps everything, fairly recent pan behavior, as in the past, the 
existing post would remain as it was, and only new content would be 
unwrapped, so I could at least unwrap the URL just before I sent, without 
having to manually wrap the entire post!)

Finally, it's well known that women within FLOSS are unfortunately the 
target of death threats on occasion.  Again from the geek-feminism wikia
(and here's the trigger warning I found a good idea and used above):

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Debian_death_threats

My take on all the above is that regardless of the validity of the 
peer-recognition/monetary-compensation argument, the community **DOES** 
have a BIG problem with unacceptable but at times accepted conduct, that 
can and does drive many women (and some men) away.  Were some of these 
things, the RMS "joke" for instance, to occur in private email, or even 
arguably on limited distribution lists (or IRC channels, but that'd be a 
topic for a different post), it'd be one thing, and I'm not going to say 
people can't forward emails because they might be offensive to someone.  
But that these things are often found to be acceptable, or even simply 
tolerated, in the wider public community is itself unacceptable.

I look forward to the day when if someone makes a remark like that in a 
presentation, RMS or no RMS, half the room (more, it'd be great if it were 
the entire audience, but there's always the few) gets up as if one body 
and walks out, end of presentation, beginning of message that such 
behavior will NOT be tolerated.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman