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mjg59John Scalzi recently wrote a piece on straight white male privilege. If you haven't read it already, go and do so. No rush. I'll wait.
So. Some facts:
(If you disagree with any of these then that's absolutely your right. You're wrong, but that's ok. But please do me a favour and stop reading here. Otherwise you'll just get angry and then you'll write something ill-tempered and still wrong in the comments and then I'll have to delete it and why not just save everybody the time and effort and go and eat ice cream or something instead)
I know I've said this before, but inappropriate and marginalising behaviour is rife in our community, and at all levels of our community. There's the time an open source evangelist just flat out told a woman that her experiences didn't match his so she must be an outlier. There's the time a leading kernel developer said that most rape statistics were basically made up. There's the time that I said the most useful thing Debian could do with its money would be to buy prostitutes for its developers, simultaneously sexualising the discussion, implying that Debian developers were all straight men and casting sex workers as property. These aren't the exceptions. It's endemic. Almost all of us have been part of the problem, and in doing so we've contributed to an environment that has at best driven away capable contributors. You probably don't want to know what it's done at worst.
But what people have done in the past isn't important. What's important is how we behave in the future. If you're not angry about social injustice like this then you're doing it wrong. If you're reading this then there's a pretty high probability that you're a white male. So, it's great that you're angry. You should be! As a straight white male born into a fairly well-off family, a native English speaker in an English speaking country, I have plenty of time to be angry before going back to my nice apartment and living my almost entirely discrimination-free life. So if it makes me angry, I have absolutely no way of comprehending how angry it must make the people who actually have to live with this shit on a daily basis.
(Were tampon mouse able to form and express coherent thoughts, tampon mouse would not put up with this shit)
The point isn't to be smugly self aware of our own shortcomings and the shortcomings of others. The point is to actually do something about it. If you're not already devoting some amount of your resources to improving fairness in the world, then why not? It doesn't have to be about women in technology - if you're already donating to charity or helping out at schools or engaging in local politics or any of the countless other ways an individual can help make the world a better place, large or small, then keep on doing that. But do consider that many of us have done things in the past that contributed to the alienation of an astounding number of potential community members, and if you can then please do do something to make up for it. It might be donating to groups like The Ada Initiative. It might be mentoring students for projects like the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, or working to create similar programs. Even just making our communities less toxic by pointing out unacceptable behaviour when you see it makes a huge difference.
But most importantly, be aware that it was people like me who were responsible for this problem in the first place and people like me who need to take responsibility for solving it. We can't demand the victims do that for us.
So. Some facts:
- Women are underrepresented in free software development
- Those women who are involved in free software development are overwhelmingly more likely to have been subject to sexual harassment, belittling commentary or just plain ignored because of their gender
- When asked, women tend to believe that these two facts are fairly strongly related
(If you disagree with any of these then that's absolutely your right. You're wrong, but that's ok. But please do me a favour and stop reading here. Otherwise you'll just get angry and then you'll write something ill-tempered and still wrong in the comments and then I'll have to delete it and why not just save everybody the time and effort and go and eat ice cream or something instead)
I know I've said this before, but inappropriate and marginalising behaviour is rife in our community, and at all levels of our community. There's the time an open source evangelist just flat out told a woman that her experiences didn't match his so she must be an outlier. There's the time a leading kernel developer said that most rape statistics were basically made up. There's the time that I said the most useful thing Debian could do with its money would be to buy prostitutes for its developers, simultaneously sexualising the discussion, implying that Debian developers were all straight men and casting sex workers as property. These aren't the exceptions. It's endemic. Almost all of us have been part of the problem, and in doing so we've contributed to an environment that has at best driven away capable contributors. You probably don't want to know what it's done at worst.
But what people have done in the past isn't important. What's important is how we behave in the future. If you're not angry about social injustice like this then you're doing it wrong. If you're reading this then there's a pretty high probability that you're a white male. So, it's great that you're angry. You should be! As a straight white male born into a fairly well-off family, a native English speaker in an English speaking country, I have plenty of time to be angry before going back to my nice apartment and living my almost entirely discrimination-free life. So if it makes me angry, I have absolutely no way of comprehending how angry it must make the people who actually have to live with this shit on a daily basis.
(Were tampon mouse able to form and express coherent thoughts, tampon mouse would not put up with this shit)
The point isn't to be smugly self aware of our own shortcomings and the shortcomings of others. The point is to actually do something about it. If you're not already devoting some amount of your resources to improving fairness in the world, then why not? It doesn't have to be about women in technology - if you're already donating to charity or helping out at schools or engaging in local politics or any of the countless other ways an individual can help make the world a better place, large or small, then keep on doing that. But do consider that many of us have done things in the past that contributed to the alienation of an astounding number of potential community members, and if you can then please do do something to make up for it. It might be donating to groups like The Ada Initiative. It might be mentoring students for projects like the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, or working to create similar programs. Even just making our communities less toxic by pointing out unacceptable behaviour when you see it makes a huge difference.
But most importantly, be aware that it was people like me who were responsible for this problem in the first place and people like me who need to take responsibility for solving it. We can't demand the victims do that for us.
Why stop there?
Date: 2012-05-22 03:57 pm (UTC)Second, you never talk about non-white people, why? There are close to zero black people in the Open Source world, as a matter of fact, I can think of a single one. And I don't see anything being done about that.
Third, even though I think we've made great progress in the last few years in women inclusion, I do agree with you that we must do more.
Re: Why stop there?
Date: 2012-05-22 04:32 pm (UTC)Re: Why stop there?
Date: 2012-05-22 05:41 pm (UTC)-meskarune (Dolores)
Re: Why stop there?
Date: 2012-05-22 05:59 pm (UTC)Did you read the linked article? It explains that being straight, and being white, and being male, are going to result in your life having statistically less difficulty ("more privilege") than the alternatives. That's why it talks about straight white men. For a gay man, it's suggesting that you have statistically less need to learn about how it feels to be discriminated and excluded, because your group experiences these things more frequently; if it hasn't happened to you, it's probably happened to some of your friends, and so on. You are playing life at a higher difficulty level, in the language of the article.
They aren't talked about as statistically having an comparatively easy life because they don't statistically have a comparatively easy life.
You shouldn't criticize people for working on correcting a problem just because other problems exist too, when most people are not working on correcting those problems at all!
It's a matter of triage; there are more potential female contributors than black contributors. If we want to have the greatest impact, perhaps we should start with the largest groups that are being excluded, and then move on to the next, and so on.
This doesn't mean that we don't want more participation by racial minorities -- I bet that many of the changes we would make to improve participation by women would also improve participation by other under-represented groups! -- but that it's not what the people whose writing you're reading have chosen to concentrate on right now. There are some other people who do care about it; for example, see Asheesh Laroia's (http://www.asheesh.org/note/debian/indians.html) blog post about South Asians in free software.
-- cjb.
Re: Why stop there?
Date: 2012-05-23 12:33 am (UTC)