On 01/15/2012 07:12 PM, Matt Giuca wrote:
The drastically lower rate of participation in free software suggests that the free software community is worse behaving than society at large.
Wait. You're operating under an unstated assumption that the only factor influencing the percentage of women in a particular community is how well the males in the community behaves towards women. That's a GIANT unproven assumption. This is a complex problem and there are undoubtedly many factors.
For example, maybe it is the case that women are naturally inclined, to some degree, towards a professional career in computing, but are much less inclined to pursue computing as a hobby. I'm not trying to put a case for that, but just suggest one possible explanation for this apparent gap between women in free software versus women in the software industry -- one that doesn't have anything to do with behaviour of the other people in the community.
Taking the rate of women's participation as a proxy for the happiness of the ones there seems reasonable to me. So I don't think they are such different questions.
I think Alex got the point I was making. I think one possible explanation is that closed source computing is far less political that open source. The Free Software cause is political in nature in a way that a closed source job isn't. It's not just about developing software, it's about ideology and how intellectual property is handled in society. You'll find in other political organisations along similar lines but not software related, the same issue. It is harder to recruit women. My experience with them, is they ask the exact same questions, how to encourage women and they try the same things, with little success. Why? I would just say that those who analyse this phenomenon and comment on it for society, are biased towards finding sociological causes that they can also be employed to solve. So you are much more likely to have someone say that the problem is some latent cultural bias, where they can position themselves as being the ones to solve it for us. I've discussed this phenomenon with others quite a bit and all I can say, is that perhaps there is an inherit difference which means men are more likely to get involved with a particular style of organisation. The problem is when you say it's a problem, which is what I think people should avoid. I think the issue is more to do with the fact that society doesn't seem to value women until they fill traditionally /male/ roles. There is also an issue where any difference or inequality is seen or assumed to be a female inadequacy. Who's to say there aren't /too many/ men in Free Software? Why assume the problem is lack of women? We base the standard on male behaviour, because that's what progressivism has defined as the goal. But to do this, is to assume that the men know better. It is to assume that if women behave differently, then it is the woman's behaviour we need to alter. Yes, we should eschew behaviour which places barriers and difficulties to women getting involved, and it can, from ones point of view seem that women are 'under represented'. But that only from your point of view, and that's something we need to keep in mind. Our culture doesn't deal with this well, which is ultimately what the problem is.
That is, again, not a very good proxy. If we take a hypothetical example in a school where Grade 6P spontaneously starts a finger-knitting craze. It spreads within the class, but not so much outside the class. Now a couple of students from Grade 6S hear about it and also start finger-knitting. But it never really catches on in Grade 6S, because there isn't an "everyone else is doing it" mentality. Basically, finger-knitting is in the culture of Grade 6P but not in the culture of Grade 6S. However, there are still 3 or 4 students in Grade 6S that are doing it. They occasionally hang with the 6Pers at lunch time and they knit together. You could look at this situation and say "well only 5% of finger-knitters are from Grade 6S -- therefore, we must assume that Grade 6S people are generally unhappy with finger-knitting." But that's not true at all. The 3 or 4 Grade 6S students who are in the community are very happy indeed. They just haven't been able to convince many of their fellow 6Sers to join them, because it is not in the Grade 6S culture.
By way of analogy, I am trying to say that just because only a small percentage of a particular group is participating in some activity does not mean that the ones that are participating are unhappy. It also doesn't mean that, were that percentage to increase, that the ones already participating would become happier.
You seem to be unhappy that there aren't enough women in free software. If you are being genuinely offended because people are treating you differently as a woman, then that is a legitimate problem which should be addressed. But if you are merely unhappy because of the low numbers, then what I think some of us are trying to say is that it shouldn't matter: we're not here in our capacity as men and women, we're here to discuss and appreciate free software, and we should be able to do that without consideration of gender.
Matt
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