Fortunately the Rust community isn't GamerGate, but if we can eliminate those attitudes sooner, then that's in Rust's long-term interests.
A common line of argument is that "being more welcoming" will lead to more contributors and thus to more diverse perspectives. Browsing through Rust's documentation and bug tracker alone makes me skeptical of that. I can't find a thing that will turn away someone interested in Rust.
There's definitely sexism in the industry, no question. But I have yet to see someone present numbers of how e.g. their Code of Conduct lead to more contributors. I doubt that any of these undertakings do, unless the project really does have an asshole community. But Rust surely doesn't.
No matter how egalitarian your code of conduct is, there's no substitute for not being a shitty person.
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
I don't follow the Rust conversations enough to tell you anything about what goes on there. That they adopt and enforce a Code of Conduct designed for censorship of non-believers in that cause with a few, strong supporters on the team is enough to worry anti-censorship people. Regardless of Rust project or somewhere else, we opponents block it on grounds of fighting forced compliance with political views with no consensus. Fighting political domination on forums that are supposed to be about tech. That its author has hit many places from Opal to Github means we prefer to block her CoC even more.
Rather have a Code of Merit with clauses for keeping things civil. Minimal to no politics: just project-focused code, docs, and support of people in project-related conversations. That's it.
https://github.com/rosarior/Code-of-Merit/blob/master/CODE_O...
I have no idea what you're talking about. Rust's code of conduct is older than the Contributor Covenant, and we've modified it very, very slightly since its inception.
(I also disagree with the rest of your post as well, but that's offtopic and I don't particularly care to discuss it.)
1. Node.JS (semi-fitting of my post) and Contributor Covenant (target of my post) per current site.
2. Citizen Code of Conduct per Reddit. Looks just like Contributor with same provision that people must follow the politically-dominant group's rules on every forum or be blocked. It claims to be derived from Django Code of Conduct (partly-political/partly-good) and a feminism wiki. The latter mentions things like "Verbal comments that reinforce social structures of domination" with long list following to be subjectively evaluated according to their politics. Just like my post again.
So, even if your people did one before Contributor Covenant, it's similar to that pushed by the same kinds of people shoving politics down everyone's throat with some of the same content. My post still stands with the correction that you borrowed from different leftist, control-freak politicians initially with minimal modification from the one I mentioned. Each of the source are very clear about their political agenda and intended censorship.
I cannot, because I haven't investigated to see if it exists or not - hence this exercise :)
I'm not saying it isn't; I don't know. I just don't see why should we assume that it is.
At least at the university I went to it is something like 5-10% women in computer science and electrical engineering.
(Side note: the word "privilege" is really poorly chosen, because in practice it has a strong implication of blame and guilt assignment in our culture.)
It was hard, sweaty, backbreaking labor, especially for a 12 year old; I did it because I wanted to program. I used that computer to teach myself to program, and got my first real programming job from someone who I'd never previously met in person, over IRC.
According to today's identity politics, I need to be aware of my privilege as a white male nonetheless, and my position on the coarse-grained intersectional hierarchy of privilege.
I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with that once aware, or why they get to decide where everyone fits on that hierarchy on the basis of traits they deem important.
Yup. That's because as a white male, you are still "privileged".
I'm using quotes here, because, as mentioned earlier, I don't think the word is a good fit for the concept it's supposed to describe. Privilege implies something above and beyond what you are normally entitled to; something that you don't necessarily deserve (I think that's the main reason why it elicits such a strong negative emotional response in people). As a white male, you are not getting such things - you're getting normal treatment, in a sense that no-one is making negative assumptions about your intellect, your ability to learn etc on the basis of your race or gender (they may well be making them based on other traits, and you can be underprivileged on the corresponding other axes). The problem is that others do get negative points solely on account of their gender, color of their skin, or even their name alone (http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html).
So you don't really have a "white privilege", but rather they have a "non-white handicap". It's not your fault - but because of said privilege, you're in a better position to try to correct it somewhat.
> I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with that once aware
Try to do what you can to even things out. I'm not even necessarily talking about politics, but just day to day things. Have you ever seen a female colleague being talked over in a meeting in your presence? Try to steer the discussion to give her voice. Ever been on a hiring interview loop, and heard dismissive racial or cultural stereotyping of a candidate based on their name alone ("I wonder if he codes like an Indian" etc)? Point it out. And so on.
The 'white' part is just as problematic. There are many other things that make life hard too. Having a mental illness, for example, or being molested/abused as a child. Yet no one talks about non-mentally-ill privilege or unmolested privilege. Just because skin color is something that can't be hidden when we go out in public doesn't elevate it above all the other difficulties or challenges in life. I've known people from all those groups and would say that depressives, schizophrenics and victims of molest have far more challenges in life than do minorities. Which is not to say that there aren't people who have more than one set of challenges, just that the focus on race and the implication that life is easy for someone who's white is not productive and frustrates people with other legitimate challenges in life.
This is, to me, why many reasonable people have a problem with identity politics. In an effort to bring awareness to the struggles of some, it actually ends up making others feel marginalized and their experiences minimized and is confrontational in nature. Empathy is about envisioning yourself in someone else's situation. The way we do identity politics today, it's the reverse. Instead of the desired, "I imagine myself in your position and I see how hard it must be" it's "I imagined myself in your position and, trust me, it's easier than mine."
I have a parent who is a psychologist. Growing up, I was taught that the right way to handle conflict was to always talk about your personal experience. Saying, "you're being insensitive" is accusatory, controversial and bound to cause an argument. Saying, "I feel unappreciated" is an unequivocally correct statement that can't be argued because no one else can know how you experience something. The only way to sort of refute that is to say, "I don't intend to make you feel that way." The problem with the term "white privilege" is that it's not a personal experience term. It's a term that encapsulates a projection of the white experience from the perspective of minorities. Anyone who doesn't feel they lead a privileged life will instinctively reject it. We need to be using terminology that's in line with the "I feel..." way of expressing oneself...terminology that helps convey the difficulties that some people face rather than the lack of difficulties everyone else faces.
Actually yes, we do talk about that stuff as well. The things that you hear most - racial, gender, wealth and religious privilege - are talked about more simply because they affect proportionally more people.
I'm not saying it isn't; I don't know. I just don't see why should we assume that it is.
Have a read-through on http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Geek_Feminism_Wiki, or any of the other excellent references online.
Yes.
I'm not following that logic - if a reason to use male pronouns is that current programmers are male, then does it not follow that, yes, it actually matters?
(And if it doesn't matter, why care? Why not let the people who want to use other pronouns use other pronouns?)
By itself not much: but I see it as a necessary-but-insufficient step, in much the same way it is necessary to remove public statues deifying US Civil War Confederate "heroes" (I'd prefer the term "traitor"...).
> Are women really put off of computing because of that? It all seems so trivial.
Not "because of that" directly, no - of course not, but projecting an inclusive image is important to attract people who might not otherwise be interest for fear of not being a "cultural fit" despite having the skills. (Most) people are not robots: there is a very human need to feel accepted and fit-in.
I quickly went through the Wikipedia article on Men in Nursing just now to write this reply and it's already having me reconsider how I perceived gender bias in industry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing
This doesn't need to be a hypothetical question. You could find a woman programmer and ask her. (A woman might even chime in on this thread, although given the ridiculous level of toxicity on this thread, if I were anything other than a het cis white man, I'd be staying the hell away from here.)
Or you could even Google it, and find some woman programmers talking about this. Here are a few references to get you started. https://geekfeminism.org/tag/pronouns/
There's other ways to address that too. I've used https://textio.com/ in the past for job ads and it's really interesting to see examples of how seemingly minor word choices can land depending on the reader. It'd be a relatively simple task to run documentation, RFCs and Github comments of core team members through such a service and automatically generate a report (which wouldn't have to be released publicly, but could be sent to authors to aid in using more inclusive language going forward).
The thing that's really difficult to do is to be inclusive in a way that doesn't feel exclusive towards people who aren't in the target demographics. Using these types of automated tools doesn't have that downside. Has anything like this been suggested/done by the people working on Rust?