Another conference season, another dumb sexist 8
Mum was often the only women [at British Leyland sales conferences]. In those days it was apparently common for presenters to slip the occasional naked lady into the slides – “just to keep everyone awake”. When this happened, there’d be slightly embarrassed laughter and a few heads would turn to look at mum. Who ignored it. It doesn’t happen so often any more
That was me writing about Women in Open Source in 2005. This is Sarah Allen writing about Matt Aimonetti’s talk, “CouchDB + Ruby: Perform like a Pr0n star” which:
If he had left it [the dodgy images] at a few introductory jokes, I would be writing a very different post. Instead the porn references continued with images of scantily-clad women gratuitously splashed across technical diagrams and intro slides. As he got into code snippets, he inserted interstitial images every few slides (removed from the slides below). The first time it happened, he mentioned that he wanted to keep everyone’s attention.
Apparently, the difference between 80s truck salesmen and Matt’s audience is that at least 80s salesmen had the grace to look embarrassed.
The sky is not evil 11
Joss Whedon writes strong female characters, he’s the mind behind some of my favourite TV ever and he a wise man. Here he is reacting to seeing camera phone footage of the murder of Dua Khalil Aswad on CNN almost alongside the trailer for Captivity:
The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.
“I’m sorry.”
What is wrong with women?
I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.
How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.
You should read the whole thing. Seriously.
Dress for success: wear a white penis
Sexual violence and intimidation isn’t an ‘over there’ thing, it’s not a muslim thing or a hindu thing or a christian thing. It appears to be a humanity thing. We live in a culture where ‘She was asking for it! She wore a short skirt!’ actually seems to carry weight in rape cases, where an intelligent, confident woman can be brought to the point where she feels it necessary to put herself into some kind of purdah because she fears for her life. And where she is castigated by some sections of the community for writing about it.
Not long ago, I blogged about the organizer of a professional programming conference who thought it was good business to advertise his conference by laying on an after show party with lovely girls pouring drinks that the delegates were encouraged to chat up. In response I had my sexuality brought into question1, got phoned up by the organizer and threatened with violence and, funniest of all, got called a sexist. Charming.
Closer to my current programming home, Audrey Eschright has blogged about the #railsconf backchannel and don’t get me started on some of the parties at OSCON.
The odds are depressingly good that, if you’re reading this, you’re a man. I’ve written before about the gender imbalance in open source communities (2% women, 98% men at the time I wrote it) and the poisonous nature of some of those communities. We’re so used to it that we hardly even see it any more, and when we do, there’s always someone ready to stand up and blame women for it.
We have met the enemy, and he is us
We geeks pride ourselves for our intelligence, so why do we have this huge blindspot about the fact that we are (consciously or unconsciously) excluding nearly half the population from our community for because… er… what is the reason?
There isn’t one. It’s irrationality, pure and simple: a Big Lie, and we bought it.
Yes, there are bigger fights than the cause of equality for women in the open source community, all of them worth fighting. But so what? This is something we can do something about simply by deciding to speak up when we see or hear abusive behaviour. We don’t have to put our bodies on the line, we just have to play fair; it shouldn’t be much to ask for.
Further reading
- Why geeks should study acting by Giles Bowkett
- The Male Privilege Checklist from Alas, a blog which is a source of thought provoking and occasionally discomforting articles for this white european male. It’s also my original source for the Joss Whedon article that inspired this entry.
1 Don’t get me started on the geek attitude to homosexuality…
Privilege
Further to my post about Women in Open Source, I recommend you all go and read ampersand’s Male Privilege Checklist
Women in Open Source 3
On the last day of EuroOSCON there was a panel discussing why there were so few women in the open source community. It turns out that the predictable claim that “It’s the same throughout the industry, it’s not an Open Source only problem!” doesn’t really stand up. Danese Cooper pointed to a study that found that 12% of all developers were women, but only 2% of Open Source developers are.
12% is bad, but 2%?
Bad enough that one man in the room stood up and made a “But girls are different!” argument, but looking at some of the responses to the Portland OSCON panel, it’s positively mild. How about this reply from an Anonymous Coward in a Newsforge thread
It would be good if the debian-women, whilst on a bus, got hit by a bigger bus (and thus perished).
Death To Women’s Rights
Women’s Rights activists and Feminists: I hope you die, whether by murder or by accidental occurrence.
Or how about this one from an unrelated discussion on the London.pm mailing list:
Aside from [your] obvious feminist brainwashing … I like the fact that most geeks are guys. I am far more comfortable coding and working with fellow men, and heaven forbid that gender equality should ever infiltrate our ranks.
And this guy didn’t even hide behind anonymity.
I didn’t have to look far for these examples, they are all too common. I would ask if their authors would be comfortable describing black people in a similar way, but if there’s one group that’s even less represented in Open Source than women, it’s black people.
Iterative Processes and Emerging Behaviour
Yes, girls are different. But apart from the obvious physical differences, how much is inherent and how much cultural? Reports from primary schools support the view that kids are just kids. There is no gender divide in ability. Boys are just as good at needlework as girls. Girls are apparently better at maths and science. The fun begins when they hit secondary school and puberty. Puberty hits back. As I’m sure we all remember, the implicit pressure to conform is enormous, both to the expectations of your peers and to perceptions of wider society.
My step daughter wanted to do technical drawing at school, and the school was, on the surface keen for her to do it, but both the girls on the course had dropped and switched to another subject by the end of the first year — the sniping from fellow pupils and the tacit encouragement of it by the teachers saw to that.
Western culture tends to put women in the ‘nurturing’ box, and breaking out of that is hard. As we grow up, we get our initial ideas of what’s the Right Thing from the memes our parents and the culture give us. And the “Women stay at home, doing the housework and raising the kids” meme is a strong one. There are exceptions to the stereotypes, but look how often they are cast as a ‘lunatic fringe’ by the mainstream. Or they become like That Bloody Woman1 – more like a cartoonish man than the men under her.
Women on the panel had similar stories to tell about those boxes. For example, Jo Walsh talked about assumptions that the technical bits of her work had been done by her boyfriend. I was rather uncomfortable during this portion of the talk – acutely aware that in previous conversations with Jo I had tended to lump her in the ‘Girlfriends of hackers’ category. Jo, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time.
Being part of the solution
I grew up with the assumption women were tall company directors who drive fast cars very well and earn more than their husbands. That’s what my mum does. Okay, she had a leg up by being a director of a family firm, but she did the job as well as anyone and helped see the company through some very tough times (and no, she wasn’t the HR or marketing director). Mum doesn’t really do explicit feminism; she just gets on with it. In fact, she can take delight in telling stories about unconscious sexism she’s been on the receiving end of: the firm used to be a main dealer for British Leyland, which that meant occasional sales conferences and product launches. Mum was often the only women there. In those days it was apparently common for presenters to slip the occasional naked lady into the slides – “just to keep everyone awake”. When this happened, there’d be slightly embarrassed laughter and a few heads would turn to look at mum. Who ignored it. It doesn’t happen so often any more2.
People like mum are great role models. Visible, but not strident, just getting on with it. The Open Source movement needs people like this; people like Allison Randal – one of the technical leads on Perl 6. We men need more ‘“But she’s a girl!":http://www.rousette.org.uk/’ moments. Only by having our expectations confounded can we realise how silly those expectations were in the first place.
We also need role models like my dad. On the day that mum started to earn more than he did, he took her out for a meal to celebrate. Being married to a woman who earns more money and drives a nicer car isn’t a challenge to his masculinity, it’s something to celebrate.
The problem isn’t Women in Open Source, it’s the Men in Open Source. It’s not really about being ‘women-friendly’, it’s about being friendly. As geeks, we tend to be terrible at it – I know I am. Don’t tolerate the bearpit. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been part of too many poisonous ‘communities’ – places that were actively newbie hostile. No matter how often you have to do it, the right answer is almost never “Read The Fucking Manual” – even if the answer can be found there. Be polite. So what if the person asking you is clueless – they’re not the only one listening to you; maybe you just scared a listener who would be an asset to your community away. Maybe they’re afraid to ask a question that will help you nail down and fix that bug that’s been troubling you for weeks. Be polite. Be an angel not an arsehole. There’s a place for acting like a 13 year old gamer, and that place isn’t your project’s mailing list, IRC channel or other public place. Save it for Xbox Live or something.
Traditional roles are a trap for men as well as women. I sometimes think that ‘Feminism’ is a misnomer – what we want is humanism. It’s not about women having the right to have it all, it’s about everyone having that right.
1 Margaret Thatcher
2 Well, there were a couple in that one keynote at EuroOSCON this year.
