My parody post on sexism was done without my being aware of the current polemic about RMS’s keynote joke, but got dragged into it, and thus forced me to read up on what happened and ask this question myself.

I have at times spoken at length with several female FOSS activists such as Fernanda Weiden about their perceptions and while I have heard them say that the FOSS community is not always welcoming to women, that they often feel excluded and out of place – I have never before heard them complain it was actually sexist.

But now the question has been raised, we as a community have to answer to it. For starters, lets break down the question then. Are there sexist elements in our community ? Absolutely and without question, you will be hard-pressed to find any community of this size in which any particular belief however stupid is not represented. Political philosophies in this community range from extreme liberationists to socialist and everything in between and off to the sides – no doubt there are some sexists in there.

I won’t use the word male-dominated because “dominated” has enormous and in this case largely false connotations – but it is true that in the vast majority of the world the IT sector is largely filled by men, and that in the FOSS sector this discrepancy is worse. There are exceptions of course, in Malaysia the trend is reversed, more than 90% of IT workers are female and it is seen as a traditionally female job – boys are expected to do manly work like becoming policemen.

So that suggests, that there is a strong cultural influence on this. I have also always believed that FOSS community has a unique culture that is significantly more progressive than most. It’s a universal culture for starters – not one you enter by birth but by choice, and we never ask what country you came from, what color you are or even what your sexual orientation is. Most of our interaction happen in a sphere where this is invisible and we wouldn’t care if we did know. I have on occasion seen when stories were posted about FOSS projects in or from Africa that some commenters made racist remarks about the idea of computers in Africa.

Such elements exist, but I don’t think they represent our culture. In the same way our culture includes some sexists, but I don’t think that is typical either, and I don’t think RMS is a sexist, quite the contrary, his opinions on equality and his track record in promoting it proves he has no sexist ideas. He does have a very open and liberal approach to sex, but if anything that is in fact supportive of a large section of the feminist movement. Mentioning sex in mixed company is
most certainly not anti-feminism, doing it during a parody as far as I’m concerned is automatically critical of the idea about it you are presenting.
If anything then, his cult of the virgin mary joke was a feminist statement ! He was mocking the chauvinism that is a prevalent aspect of Catholic history…

But that’s one example – currently in the news, I’m trying to look at the bigger picture .I think sexism is a minority thinking in our community – but what about the other question – is the FOSS community unwelcoming to women ?

Actually no, I don’t think so. It isn’t unwelcoming to anybody – but it’s not particularly welcoming either. It’s a strongly meritocratic culture where one earns your position and respect through achievement. Anybody who can live up to that, will find themselves welcomed – but the community won’t make any particular effort to pull you in or adjust to you. We’re a community of strong minded individualists bound together by mutual self-interest – and we respect people for their
contributions.

I don’t know any single decent programmer who is not in awe of Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper – for their achievements they retain a demigod stature in our community equivalent to that of an RMS or a Linus Torvalds – but they played by our rules. Their equals are out there, and true they are still a minority but it is growing.

The problem right now with women in FOSS I believe is a circular one, there aren’t many women there, so new joinees feel singled out, so there aren’t many new joinees and some of them leave again, and the cycle repeats. Slowly it is changing, eventually I believe we’ll see a much fairer representation of women in FOSS than we do now, ultimately I expect it will be fairer than in the rest of I.T. because we are so open to individual ideas and reasoning. Furthermore because we judge by merit and merit alone – women will find that our community has far fewer glass ceilings than the rest of I.T. does, particularly corporate I.T.

This will also change the culture I believe, and I accept that. We have always been a culture that was happy to make fun of things, anybody, anything. This has been a cornerstone of our culture for years, and it’s interesting that in that “anybody anything” we include ourselves. Nobody makes more jokes about the false stereotype of the “nerdy men who can’t talk to girls” than we ourselves do.

It’s blatantly untrue, but we joke about it as much as we joke about anybody else, it’s practically a cornerstone of our expression of the free speech we believe in – that nothing is too holy to be made fun off.

This joking attitude I guess can actually make a woman feel exposed when we make a joke about sex, especially as she may well be highly outnumbered. I understand the feeling, it also suggests an answer to why my experience is that most of the women who cope well in FOSS happen to be the younger, more liberal kind who find jokes about sex funny rather than offensive (I’m describing a trend, I know it’s not an exact representation and it’s not even a specifically accurate one, just a trend) – because they will handle those situations more confidently and with less offense.

I personally think that, that is a healthier attitude and in fact certainly a lot more pro-feminist (women should feel just as
comfortable laughing about the silliness that is human procreation as men do – that they don’t is a symptom of the remaining double-standard in how we raise our children).

So then, the final question. We know there is an imbalance, we can identify at least some things that perpetuate that imbalance. They are not sexism, meritocracy and sexism are by nature exclusive ideals – you cannot support both, but they are real – and the question is: should we do anything to speed up changing it ?

I say “speed up” because I am convinced the problem will solve itself in time – we don’t need to do anything to fix it, but we may lose a lot of talent if we wait it out. So how can we help this happen faster ?

Well, I don’t have the slightest clue. We dare not let our core values, individualist communalism and meritocracy be affected – but other cultural expressions and traditions are up for debate. I don’t think however that I can or should make any statements about which should change or how. I know who can and should – the women already in our community.

Adrianna Pinski, Fernanda Weiden, Chani Armitage, Christel Breedt and all the rest of you – you are our women heroes, our pioneers.

We need your voices here. We built this culture without them – and it is not all it can be because of that. Speak up – don’t look for sexism where it doesn’t exist, but tell us how to reduce that feeling of being singled out.

Do you want us to just ignore your gender ? Well we’ve been doing that, pretty much just treating you like on of the guys (the ruby porn thing was a particular example of that – you felt out of place in this guy-joke thing, but that’s just it – nobody bothered to be sensitive to you as women because that you were women was never even considered or thought about).

Apparently this actually made you some of you feel more singled out.

So what would you prefer ? How can we do it better ? Not everyone will do what you suggest, and that’s okay – we’re after all, an individualist society and we put individual choice and freedom of expression to be higher virtues than social acceptance or pleasing others – but some will, some of the time.

Some of us will care about it because you are not just women in FOSS – you are our friends, and we don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. We shouldn’t be limited to those girls who are “one of the guys” – but before that will change – there needs to be enough of you that “one of the geeks” doesn’t actually mean “one of the guys” as it does now.

I think the FOSS community can do better here. I reject the allegation of sexism outright, but I do believe it brings to light an opportunity to improve our culture to make it more inclusive and more comfortable for people whose talents we provably need.

I do know that it’s not an easy thing to find answers for. I have heard many women in the FOSS world complain that they constantly get asked out at technical conferences. Being asked out is probably not bad, but being asked out ten times a day because you’re the only girl there… that must suck and I fully understand their feelings about it.

Of course, you can’t predict where you’ll meet your perfect person either, some of the happiest geek couples I know met at conferences. Maybe the answer is that in such a milieu until there is parity in the gendercount, the women can ask the men out if they wish, not the other way around ?

Like I said, I’m asking questions. I don’t know the answers, we need the women who are in our community to help us come up with them.