Browsing the names of contributors, I was surprised at the lack of gender diversity. Four or five female contributors at the very most.
Rates of female participation below 5% - wow. Why is Rust lang so anti-female?
Rates of female participation below 5% - wow. Why is Rust lang so anti-female?
As a long-time member of the Rust community I am seeing this changing over time, but much more slowly than I'd like. Rust is a very friendly community; we have an actively-enforced code of conduct (which has been in place since the project started >5 years ago); and some people in the community have recently put resources into things like sponsoring women and minorities to go to the first http://rustcamp.com/ conference. The RustCamp CFP had a blind review process to help avoid bias. The Servo team is currently sponsoring an Outreachy intern. And we are definitely looking for more ways to be as welcoming as possible to everyone.
Then the problem now becomes why there aren't that many female contributors out there. This is just a theory, but I think it is because males' nature make them do free labor to obtain fame. I admit this is purely my experience, but females are more likely to refrain from such labor that does not pay off.
Also, most of the people I know in the Rust community now are now "users" of the language, rather than people working on the compiler/platform itself. (This wasn't true for me a couple of years ago.) My impression is that the Rust community as a whole is growing and changing much faster than the compiler/internal developer population.
Would more women in tech be good? Of course! However there is some crazy SJW stuff going on at the moment in a lot of projects. People pushing for things like Master/Slave to be renamed to Leader/Follower. Wanting things like man (as in the man command on Linux) renamed to something non-gender-based. I mean fucking come on.
I am all for a more inclusive environment but some things are just stupid and it is getting a little crazy in place.
And I would assume anybody accusing the man(ual) command of being gendered is being disingenuous until proven otherwise.
(That said, growing up in the American South, I've seen enough disgusting attitudes still persisting that preserving established replicated systems terminology is not a hill I'm in the mood to die on.)
Any time a community increases in diversity, there's a chance for friction. Maybe it's from old-timers with poor social skills who don't realize they've been in a bubble. Maybe it's from new people with their own problems, trying to blame the old culture for their own difficulties fitting in. You know what it's not? A conspiracy or a trend. The only constructive, grown-up thing to do is to try to understand and have empathy for both groups, while pointedly not belonging to either one.
In my experience, any time there's a kerfluffle about someone wanting to rename man(1) or <kerfluffle of your choice>, it's a very small group or an individual getting outraged over something silly, and an equally small group getting outraged over the first group's outrage. It's pointless and meaningless to the vast majority of the group, who just want to move on with their lives and get something done.
If these things seem like they're more common now in open source than they were 10-20 years ago, (a) you'd be mistaken, and (b) if anything, that's just a sign of more people becoming involved, which is a good thing. Let 100 more people in, and chances are one of them will be a little crazy. That doesn't mean they all are, it just goes with the territory.
If a goal of yours is to attract as many people to contribute to your project as possible, then it only makes sense to avoid using terms that might discourage others by making them uncomfortable, at least in the context of the project (issue trackers, documentation, etc). Saying, "well those words are defined as ___ in the dictionary" doesn't change the fact that you are losing potential contributors. Especially when there are other terms that work just as well, it only makes sense to avoid potentially problematic ones.
I'm not going to say you (as an individual) should stop using those words. That is your business, not mine, and if you run into any consequences of using specific words, that is also your business.
I'm just trying to be practical, not trying to force PC-think down anyone's throat.
Tell that to the MySQL cluster I inherited at my last job ;-).
In all seriousness, I have to disagree with you, in that I think leader/follower captures the relationship fine. But at this point, I think "whether the word captures the relationship" is very subjective.
> "Masters and slaves have always existed in human history and will probably always exist"
I don't understand this argument. I'm not saying your statement is wrong, but I fail to see how this is a justification for using the words in a technical context.
(I agree that changing man is a little silly as it's obviously short for manual)
Additionally, I think it's worth looking at the issue with a wider perspective. Slavery is bad, but really what most people in the west think of when thinking of slavery is racial slavery, which is a more recent issue (at least at scale), and is a much more pernicious problem,since it's not really slavery that was the base problem, but extreme racism. Historically slaves could be anyone, and as such it was much more acceptable to have people into and out of the ranks of slavery. Historical slavery is more akin to indentured servitude.
That said, I imagine with a few hundred years experience, assuming we can drastically reduce the still present racism we have in our societies, we might have an different response to the words master and slave, one more in line with historical context, and not the short but all to horrible period where it meant something worse. That's not to say it's good, just that we often use words that aren't pleasant in reality without thinking twice, such as steal, clobber, etc.
But that's irrelevant. This is about terminology and wording. Do you really think anyone that's an actual subject of slavery cares if master and slave are used in some esoteric context to describe the relationship between inanimate objects and processes? Do you think they would prefer people spend their time arguing over this instead of actually doing something about the problem? The last thing we need is to cleanse our vocabulary of these terms. If we actually want to make a change, hiding is not the correct thing to do.
Armchair terminology censoring isn't actually doing anything to help the problem, it's just providing a way to make people feel like they are helping without actually addressing any part of the real problem. Ultimately it's not just ineffective, but since it fulfills people's desire to feel like they are making a difference it's actual harmful in that it prevents some people from actually getting to the point they would do something.
To make my point absolutely clear, using master/slave as a terminology to describe non-sentient processes is in no way condoning slavery, does not affect slavery, and does not harm anyone. Artificially linking the this concept with actual human slavery and the slave trade for the purpose of denouncing it is selfish, dishonest, and harmful. That said, I don't think most people are necessarily conscious of what they are doing when doing so, but that still leaves us with harmful.
The terms are clearly, obviously and unquestionably inspired by actual human slavery. That's in bad taste at best. Using the master/slave terminology so casually further weakens their original meaning.
Not using the terms master/slave in a technology concept in no way erases awareness of the problem. Frankly to defend usage of these terms by suggesting using them in anyway promotes awareness and helps the victims of slavery, is disgusting. That's clearly not the case and not the goal of those defending the usage of these terms.
I did not say they weren't I just said they were accurate in many aspects of what they were describing.
> Not using the terms master/slave in a technology concept in no way erases awareness of the problem.
I did not say removing them erases awareness, I said (in summary) that it provides a placebo effect that keeps people from doing something that actually matters. I agree removing them will not affect awareness of the problem, because they have no relation to the problem.
> Frankly to defend usage of these terms by suggesting using them in anyway promotes awareness and helps the victims of slavery, is disgusting.
Then it's a good thing I didn't do that then.
> You question a change to a status quo but ignore that the status quo deserves to be questioned just the same.
Anyone wanting to change the status quo should not focus on this specific case to the detriment of similar ones, if they really care about it. Why stop at master/slave, when there's also captive as in captive portal, or for that matter serve, since one original meaning in the root latin was "slave",and all we care about is the original meaning, not how it evolved over time to mean additional things (such as how slave as a verb can mean to work hard), right?
It can and is used to refer to deaths of stars, bacteria, plants, abstract concepts, and humans, without any connotation that these deaths carry equivalent moral weight.
genocide(2), on the other hand, would be in very poor taste.
Honestly of all the engineers I've worked with, I think less than 5% have been female.
To assume when asking that question that the project is misogynist is a bit of a stretch, however. It's worth checking the project's policies and behaviors, to make sure it isn't doing anything that provides some kind of bias, but simply starting out by claiming that Rust is "anti-female" goes a bit far.
A few things that I can think of off the top of my head:
Some of the prominent contributions from women don't show up in the list of contributors because they are not directly to the compiler and standard library which are what are tracked in this contributor list, but rather to the broader ecosystem. Julia Evans has written some good blog posts on writing an OS in Rust, that have inspired other people in this space: http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/03/12/the-rust-os-story/. Emily Dunham does some excellent work on Rust infrastructure: http://edunham.net/2015/05/20/open_infrastructure.html There are of course many more that I'm not listing here, but the point is that the Rust community, and even the upstream project, consist of more than just the compiler and standard library, though those contributors are the ones that get credited in a release since that is what is being released.
Rust is still a nascent language; while it is starting to gain traction in the industry, it is not yet broadly adopted, and thus investing a lot of time and energy in joining the project is still a bit of a risk. People who have more social capital and more free time can afford to spend more of that on projects like Rust with a lot of potential but a higher amount of risk. Unfortunately, in our society men tend to have both more social capital, and more free time as domestic labor and child rearing is still seen as primarily women's work.
There are probably a large number of other factors at play. The Rust community that I have seen has been very supportive of women contributing, and has been doing a better job recently of outreach, but there is still probably more that can be done.
Can you provide any suggestions; any place you see the project structure, or contributors, being "anti-female", or any positive action that could be done to increase outreach or increase participation?
In any case, with just 150 contributers it's hard to make any statistically significant statement.
- Require all contributors to specify their gender; - Do not allow new contributions if they exceed gender quota for release.
Good luck.