Designers, Women, and Hostility in Open Source

This is often asserted, but it has never been my experience. Have you attempted to contribute to Wikipedia and had that experience? In which areas?

My observations have been, on the contrary, that there are very few areas where reverts are common, mostly areas with political controversy or recent events. And deletion is only an issue in a small minority of article classes as well, mostly things like software projects, music groups, and professors, where there's a grey area between "obvious keep" and "obviously this guy just wrote an article about himself". Some more solid data would be nice to tell either way, but I'm confident that if you ran the numbers, the percentage of edits that get reverted or deleted is tiny; probably under 0.1%.

Most articles I create have the opposite problem: they languish unimproved for years, with no edits besides the occasional maintenance bot modifying a category.

But just like the larger Internet, it all depends on where you go. There's been sort of an IRC revival in development communities and I've found them largely jerk-free.

IRC is just a protocol, and there are thousands of IRC networks, each with potentially thousands of channels. It's a really great communication mechanism, so please don't let a few racist trouble-makers keep you off of it.

Legitimate question: What leads you take the statement about the industry as a personal attack?

Myself, and most of the girls I know, were raised to be "ladies." That means that skills like cooking, drawing, and playing classical instruments had a higher value placed on them than computer hacking or coding skills. Just as you say, many of use don't learn to use a computer until we reach college and have to start writing essays (for our acceptable "girly" majors: I chose to major in French because I didn't even feel like computer science was an option for me at the time I entered college.) It's girls like this who need the support of a female community before they can feel comfortable enough to dive into programming. No matter how talented, not all girls are going to be able to write their first code at age six because parents often actively discourage their daughters from spending time in front of the computer - just look at the comments your neighbors made! My own parents frequently booted me off the computer so that I would go practice violin, etc. My brothers on the other hand, were allowed to use the computer and often received tech-related items as presents. For whatever reason, computers are still perceived as a boy's plaything rather than a girl's plaything.

While I don't think shaming men is going to solve this problem, I do think there needs to be a supportive community that welcomes women into the tech world, which is exactly the point of Gina Trappani's article.

Actually she says the opposite: The tech industry is by and large a boys' club, and that's a shame, because homogenous teams turn out one-dimensional products. That may or may not be a fair assessment of the "tech industry", but her point is that the industry is treating men specially. She wants the same treatment for women as for men, which means either treating women better or not catering so hard to men.

Of course, she brings up one other thing: most people in tech may be men, but there just are not very many people in tech. The environment is hostile in more ways then simple sexism.

edited for correctness

The other problem is that in relation to how many developers actually exist, there are very very few that garner any respect just for being who they are. With the ratio's the way they are that means there are virtually no women in these spots. That could make it appear that us male developers only give any respect to other men which isn't the case (well it's at least not a true cause/effect).

Anyways I've seen quite a few of these articles/blurbs but have never seen any actual examples of real sexism. Also I tend to have bias against any article that claims to be pro-feminism.

So [women] have to be spoonfed? What makes them so goddamn important if they haven’t proven they’re willing to contribute? I have actually tutored many people before, but if they don’t express an interest to learn and willingness to contribute I am not going to waste my time on them.

The problem isn't that women need special treatment to be accepted. The problem is that open source projects are not accepting of anyone who isn't a male programmer.

That is, open source projects are sexist, because their members are sexist. They explicitly treat women worse than men. They also explicitly treat non-programmers worse than programmers. What's worse is they think they are too smart to be sexist or unwelcoming, so that behavior goes unchecked.

A normal community would include instructive socialization. From my original article, "Hi, welcome to the community, here's a housewarming present, here's how things work, we could really use some help over here and I'd love to show you how to work on it, but anything you want to do, feel free and I'll be here to answer and questions and walk you through every process until you feel comfortable."

This is the process that ThinkUp espouses, which almost all other open source projects lack.

Anyway, sounds like the article agrees about the usefulness of helping more people get on IRC and contribute to wikis, and I agree too. They're fundamental tools for community projects.

It's both and more. The world is a complicated place.

However, I think you're too kind to open source, and as Anil Dash commented after my original article, "i find everyone who hates the word 'feminism' defines it differently from those of us who identify as feminists."

Please feel free to read my original article and see if that explains the stance any better.

The author is not saying that OSS communities are explicitly anti-women. This does not appear anywhere in the article. What she does argue is that OSS projects can be unwelcoming to newbies in general. There are no gender arguments being made here. In fact, she seems to feel that she herself has been guilty to an extent here. She cites a UX designer who argues:

"There’s no perceived value in open source for mentoring, facilitation, disciplining of unruly users, training of newcomers or non-technical users, etc., which are needed to support both designers of any gender and women in any role."

Again, I think a very poor summary of her argument is "She asserts there are few designers and women in open source software because men alienate them", as this suggests that the only issue is too few women being present. If you simply introduce more women, this argument would go, the problem would disappear. This is emphatically _not_ what she is arguing. Men and women are equally well suited to implementing the solutions presented in the article, and the mistakes are equally easy to be made by engineers of either gender.

I don't mean this to be disrespectful but it's not as simple as it sounds. Especially, if the committee is clueless (or in disagreement) about the usual questions: What do you want? What do you need? What goals should be accomplished?

It even gets more tricky if membership for the committee is not well defined.

I think women basically have two role models for how to "dress for success": One is basically as a "boy toy" and the other is to dress like a man, neither of which cuts it. I think a lot of women who dress "sexy" really aren't specifically intending to come across as "sexy". I think they are trying to come across as "successful, as a woman" and we really don't have much for them to draw from. We have female entertainers who make big bucks, in part because they are sexy (Demi Moore, Madonna, etc). And then we have male role models for business and such. Dressing like a man risks coming across as one or both of the following: 1) Sexy, because it only serves to emphasize that she is really a girl, not a guy or 2) Second class citizen because it only serves to emphasize that she is not a man. In the US at least, we don't have a history of female presidents and such, so we have clothing that signals "successful for a woman" (which almost always means either someone's wife or you got your money because you are sexy) and we have "successful for a man" (which doesn't work well as a clothing style for a woman).

As a woman working in corporate America, I am painfully aware that most stuff you see in magazines is something I would be sent home over as "not appropriate" if I showed up at work in it. Most women who have devoted themselves to becoming competent enough at core skills for their career to get anywhere aren't fashionistas and won't have spent gobs of time studying this topic. I think about it a lot and I think the lack of good clothing options for signaling "successful business woman" significantly contributes to the rampant amount of office-slut-wear out there (which makes me basically cringe on a daily basis).