I've been a terrible person (and so have most of you)

[mjg59]

John 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:

• 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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I've seen examples of the "obvious offenders", and I don't remain silent when I see someone say something they shouldn't. However, I haven't seen any examples of "little comments and thoughtlessness" on any systematic basis (just in the form of the aforementioned "obvious offenders"), likely because I don't know what to look for. I'd like to learn to recognize such things when I see them; where would you suggest I start?

[(Anonymous)]

"I'd like to learn to recognize such things when I see them; where would you suggest I start?"

The geek feminism wiki is a great place to start. :)

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Issues

-meskarune (Dolores)

[(Anonymous)]

I've actually read a significant amount of the Geek Feminism wiki. However, much of what I've found there tells me about things to watch out for that seem (to me) highly blatant. Many of the issues described as subtle, that I'd interpret as "little comments and thoughtlessness" (such as othering, pigeonholing/social expectations, or choice of pronouns) tend to stand out to me when I see them (especially in writing, but generally in speech as well). I've also read all of the "Elementary mistakes" pages, and my immediate reaction to all of them was "what kind of person would think any of these things were OK in the first place?".

I guess I'm asking as an attempt to make sure I'm not missing something due to privilege here. My first instinct would be to guess that I see these issues when they occur only because I've read a great deal about these issues and have learned to recognize many of them, and that the problem comes in because most people *don't* notice these issues or don't know to avoid these issues themselves. However, that line of reasoning also leads to the conclusion that I fall outside the "most" people who commit these issues; that's certainly the conclusion that I'd *like* to reach, but a privilege check (and an attempt to avoid wishful thinking) suggests that I should hesitate before reaching that conclusion. :)

[tim]

It sounds like you have made an effort. To broaden your horizons further, I'd recommend trying to get to know women and people in minority groups and truly listening to them when they talk about their experiences (avoid falling into any of the traps that the Geek Feminism wiki categorizes as "silencing tactics" -- it's surprisingly hard to avoid sometimes). If you don't already, that is. Even then, people in those groups aren't necessarily going to trust you by default -- some of them may not talk about their experiences when majority-group members are around, because of too many past experiences of being silenced/shut down/invalidated. Try to make it clear that you're a safe person (*saying* so explicitly is approximately the worst way to make it clear, though).

The other way is to give people with less privilege the benefit of the doubt when it comes to sensitivity or lack thereof. Maybe it hasn't happened yet, but in the future, if a woman / minority group member reacts to something and you think "oh, that's really not that bad" -- consider that they're the expert on the subject of what harms women / minority group members, and listen.

Perhaps these are things you're already doing. If so, perhaps the most important thing you can do is set an example for other people *like yourself* -- even when you're in a group that's entirely white het cis men, call out oppressive comments when you see them. There should be plenty of work to do (in my circles, for example, there are so many casual uses of "lame", "crazy", and "retarded" as pejoratives that I can't hope to call out every one).