Standing out in the crowd: my OSCON keynote
If you weren’t at OSCON this morning, here is what I spoke about in my keynote, Standing Out in the Crowd. I’m including most of the key visuals, so my apologies for the image-heavy post. I’ll also be uploading to slideshare.net (with voiceover I hope) and I’m told there will be video up at the OSCON blip.tv channel in due course. (ETA: it’s up.)
Anyway, on with the show.
They asked me to speak about women in open source, and most specifically about two recent open source projects that have a majority of women developers. But first, I need to give a bit of context.
This is a normal sort of open source project. I’ll give you a minute to spot the women in the picture. Sorry, make that woman. She’s on the right. Can you see her?
This is normal for open source.
In 2006, the FLOSSPOLS survey (a broad survey of open source usage and development, funded by the EU) found that only 1.5% of open source contributors are women.
In 2007, my survey of the Perl community — both contributors to Perl and users of Perl — found about 5% women. The Drupal community is doing even better, around 10%. And in technical professions and in computer science in universities, reports vary: it can be anywhere from 10% to 30% depending on who you ask and how they’re slicing it. Let’s say 20%.
So in most technical communities, women are in a minority. But in open source communities, we’re in an even smaller minority — by a factor of about ten or more.
So what does it feel like to be a woman in open source? Jono Bacon, at the Community Leadership Summit on the weekend, said — addressing the guys in the room — that if you want to know what it’s like to be a woman in open source, go and get your nails done at a salon. He did this a week or so back, and when he walked into the salon he realised he was the only man there, and felt kind of out of place.
Another example someone suggested is walking into a sports bar on game night wearing the wrong team’s jersey. It can be the most friendly sports bar in the universe, but you’re still going to feel pretty awkward.
So as a woman in open source, it can be a bit like that. You walk into a space, and you feel like you stand out. And there’s enormous pressure to perform well, in case any mistake you make reflects on everyone of your gender.
And that’s just the subtle stuff. There’s also more blatant problems, like sexist jokes, pornographic presentations at conferences, harrassment, and even death threats against women in the open source community. I wish I was joking, but I’m not.
The FLOSSPOLS survey asked open source contributors whether they had witnessed sexism, harrassment, or discrimination in our community. Here’s what they found:
80% of women had noticed sexism in the open source community. 80% of men never noticed anything. That’s a pretty big gap.
Well, enough of this depressing stuff. Let’s talk about something more cheerful.
Majority-female open source projects
There are two new open source projects I’ve been involved with this last year, which are have a majority of women developers.
The first is the Organization for Transformative Works’ Archive Of Our Own (AO3 for short). The OTW supports creators of fan fiction, fan videos, and all other creative things that fans do, like this:
They’re lobbying against the DMCA, they have an academic journal called Transformative Works and Cultures, and they’re working on creating a fanfic archive, by fans and for fans, that won’t cave to over-enthusiastic takedown notices or pressure from nervous advertisers.
When the OTW decided to create the archive, they set up an open source project and they went out recruiting developers. But not necessarily experienced programmers — just anyone who was interested in taking part, and had a passion for making this project work. In fact, they made an effort to include non-programmers early on, and decided to choose a language based on what was easiest for non-programmers to learn.
You can see their process in this LiveJournal post. Basically they said flip a coin: heads is Ruby, tails is Python. Go learn that language to a basic level, install the development toolkit on your computer, and write a simple “Choose your own adventure” style program with a couple of conditional statements in it.
They got about 70 people to do this — all non-programmers, and almost all women from the fan community — and used their feedback to choose Ruby as their programming language of choice.
The AO3 project now has about 60k lines of Rails and Javascript and HTML and all that (the count is for non-comment non-whitespace LOC). There are over 20 developers who have submitted code, and every single one of them is female. (There are some men in other parts of the project, like sysadmin, but as far as I know none have submitted code to AO3 itself.) I’ve put together a Google spreadsheet with vital statistics about the project.
The second project I wanted to talk about is Dreamwidth, a fork of the LiveJournal codebase, which means it’s a blogging and community platform. It was founded by two ex-LJ employees, one male and one female. It’s currently in open beta and has about 40,000 users, 210,000 lines of Perl etc, and 40ish developers of whom 75% are female. You can check that same Google spreadsheet for more stats.
Like AO3, Dreamwidth makes a point of encouraging new developers, who they call “baby devs”. For instance, there is an IRC channel called #dw-kindergarten where they can go for non-judgemental help. Dreamwidth also provides hosted development environments called “Dreamhacks” for anyone who wants them.
From the very start, Dreamwidth has had a diversity statement that welcomes developers from every walk of life:
We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, size, nationality, sexual orientation, ability level, religion, culture, subculture, and political opinion.
Their disability/accessibility policy is also great, and has led to a high proportion of developers with disabilities:
We think accessibility for people with disabilities is a priority, not an afterthought. We think neurodiversity is a feature, not a bug.
The result is an open source developer community that looks like this:
Or, to be more exact, like this:
I surveyed women on the Dreamwidth and AO3 projects and asked them about their experiences. You can read a fuller report of their responses on my earlier blog post, Dispatches from the revolution.
One of the first things I asked them was whether they had previously been involved in open source projects. They gave answers like:
I’d never contributed to an open source project before, or even considered that I could.
I didn’t feel like I was wanted.
I never got the impression that outsiders were welcome.
I considered getting involved in Debian, but the barriers to entry seemed high.
Those who got a little further along still found it hard to become productive on those projects:
It’s kind of like being handed a box full of random bicycle parts: it doesn’t help when you don’t know how they go together and just want to learn how to ride a bike.
People without a ton of experience get shunted off to side areas like docs and support, and those areas end up as the ladies’ auxiliary.
But on Dreamwidth and AO3…
What I like most is that there isn’t any attitude of “stand aside and leave the code to the grown-ups”. If there’s something that I’m able to contribute, however small, then the contribution is welcome.
And this one, which is my favourite:
Deep down, I had always assumed coding required this kind of special aptitude, something that I just didn’t have and never would. It lost its forbidding mystique when I learned that people I had assumed to be super-coders (surely born with keyboard attached!) had only started training a year ago. People without any prior experience! Women! Like me! Jesus! It’s like a barrier broke down in my mind.
So, what can we learn from this? Well, one thing I’ve learnt is that if anyone says, “Women just aren’t interested in technology” or “Women aren’t interested in open source,” it’s just not true. Women are interested, willing, able, and competent. They’re just not contributing to existing, dare I say “mainstream”, open source projects.
And this is great news! It’s great news for new projects. If you are starting up a new open source project, you have the opportunity to recruit these women.
Here are some tips based on what I’ve seen on Dreamwidth and AO3.
Recruit diversity.
From the very earliest days of your project, recruit the diversity you want to see. The first two or three members of the project will set the tone for what follows. People will look at the project and think, “Is this somewhere I can see myself fitting in?”
If you’re working on a desktop app, recruit desktop users. If you’re writing a music sharing toolkit, recruit music lovers. Don’t worry about their programming skills. You can teach programming; you can’t teach passion or diversity.
Say it. Mean it.
Get yourself a Code of Conduct or a Diversity Statement, or possibly both. Use it to set expectations around how your community should treat each other. And don’t just mouth the words. Stand by your policy, and uphold it.
Tools. (Tools are easy.)
Put up a wiki and make sure it contains plenty of information for new developers. Set up your bug tracking system to flag easy tasks for beginners to do. You could even provide a hosted development environment like Dreamwidth’s Dreamhack system, with all the tools and libraries and configuration already in place, to get people hacking as quickly as possible.
Transparency.
Communicate. Not just to existing developers and users, but to newcomers and outsiders as well. Take the time to show what’s going on inside your project — teams, sub-projects, internal processes and communication — so that people who are interested can envision what it would be like to be a part of it.
Of course, all these things are easy to do when you’re starting a new project. It can be harder to implement them in an existing project, maybe one that’s been around two or five or ten years, because you have a lot of inertia in place. Which is not to say you shouldn’t try, but I recognise that it can be difficult and frustrating.
So here are some things that you can do as individuals, no matter what project you’re on.
Don’t stare.
If a woman joins your project, don’t stare. Just welcome her (politely but not effusively, because that can be creepy), give her any information she needs to get things done, and thank her for her contributions.
Value all contributions.
Large or small, code or docs or bug reports or organisational tasks. All are valuable to your project. Say “thank you”. You don’t have to be the project leader to do this; anyone can do it, and it makes a big difference.
Call people on their crap.
If someone’s being an asshole, call them on their crap. How do you tell if someone’s being an asshole? Well, if there’s a naked woman on the projector screen, that’s a good sign.
Let them know that their behaviour is making people feel unwelcome, and that you don’t like it.
Pay attention.
Pay attention to your own behaviour and the behaviour of others. This is possibly the hardest piece of advice I’m going to give. You’re not used to noticing this stuff. 80% of you haven’t noticed the sexism in our community.
As men, you are able to glide through life ignoring these things. If you are white, and straight, and speak English, and are university educated, there are a bunch of other things you’ve been able to ignore so far, too. I’m asking you to try not to ignore them. Keep your eyes and ears open and be aware of how things feel to people who don’t share your privilege.
So, those are a few tips I’ve picked up from Dreamwidth and the Archive Of Our Own. They’re only two projects, and they’re both still new, but I think it’s a start.
I’d like to leave you with a parting thought.
What do you think would happen to this picture if we got more women into the open source community?
Do you think some of those little blue figures will turn pink? Do you think there will be less of the blue?
That’s not how it works. Any step you take to improve the diversity of your project will work to increase the developer pool overall.
We’re not far enough along in our plans for world domination that we can afford to turn anyone away.
Thank you.
If you attended OSCON and saw my keynote, please take a moment to rate it. You might also be interested in this write-up by Robert Kaye on the O’Reilly Radar blog.
ETA: Both Mark Smith and Denise Paolucci (the two Dreamwidth founders) have posted about their experiences at OSCON and conversations they had there about Dreamwidth and its development processes and community: Denise’s post, Mark’s post. Very much worth reading. Check the comments too.
ETA2: Comments are moderated. Anonymous comments are not permitted. Anything excessively argumentative, vicious, or personal will not be posted. I don’t mind constructive criticism or differences of opinion, but I won’t take abuse. Thanks.
Comments are closed.
I came over here from the link in your comment on Geoff Livingston’s post about women being snubbed as social media conference speakers.
Although I had not heard of you before and don’t know a thing about open source coding, I would now kill to hear you speak at SXSWi or any other geek conference. :) Thanks for a dynamite preso.
Re: the “coddling” argument. Just two observations…
Right now, many of the women with the aptitude for programming (or even the experience) have been dissuaded from it, one way or another. So, it is not wrong to look for new ways to bring them back into the fold.
Also, the female ratio problem is just one manifestation of a deeper rot. Some time ago there was a long email thread about this at Google and a lot of the men chimed in they had been nearly dissuaded from leaving programming themselves due to the culture, many times. I myself dropped out of a science and programming education for similar reasons (the web sucked me back in). So in my view, the education system and culture surrounding programming rewards behaviors that are not male per se, but are only typical of a certain *kind* of male.
This idea of using hosted ‘hack’ environments might be a great step forward for teaching computing in general.
Awesome work Skud! You totally rock :)
I enjoyed your keynote at OSCON! I think it’s definitely important to be aware of the culture we create in our projects. Alienating any potential contributors, regardless of gender, is bad for the health of the project. Initiatives like the “kindergarten” for developers to get up to speed in a non-judging environment are a great way to attract new developers who might be frightened of all the established process. We’re doing something similar in Mozilla, our channel is #education (since it was primarily targeted at students). It’s great seeing people get interested and becoming contributors who might have otherwise been scared off just by being too frightened to ask their newbie questions in the development channel.
@Skud. Thanks for your comment. I agree to most of your statements. Believe me, if we knew each other personally, we’d get along very well.
I agree that using pictures of or references to naked women (or men) on slides of a presentation isn’t a good thing to do (unless it’s a presentation about underwear, anatomy or so, of course). That’s why I called it “bad style” (and I should have actually called it a total “no-go” for an OSS presentation).
Regarding political correctness. I may sound like I’m misusing this term for defensive, pro-status-quo matters. Sure, a lot of people do. In my case however, this has solely to do with my fear of censorship (let’s not forget that for ages in human history, censorship has been used not to protect minorities, but to prosecute them). I think it’s absolutely necessary for any debate to be able to talk about things freely, no matter what subject. This doesn’t mean we shall use the freedom of speech as a fig-leaf for discrimination. There needs to be a healthy, commonly agreed balance between opposing freedoms and that’s what the constitution and laws are generally good for (things that do not need regulation, generally aren’t regulated). Supposed these laws have been established in a democratic process, which isn’t always the case (BTW, as we all know, even the fairness of democracy as a principle is debatable. Democracy, as a matter of fact, is a “dictatorship of the majority”. Personally, I do think it’s the best of all dictatorships to live in, however.)
Freedom of speech is a particularly important freedom in that it is an essential base for many other freedoms and our ability to actually discuss these other freedoms.
Some of my statements are rather provocative, agreed. I just like to question things regardless of common believes or political correctness. That doesn’t necessarily mean that my questions are any indication of my personal opinion. My statements are here to be discussed, not necessarily to be followed.
@Anil, @Fin: Believe it or not, but I agree with most of your points. Regarding my “privileged” position: That may be true for OSS projects in that I’m a heterosexual man (which I indeed never considered to be of any importance in an OSS project until now). However, I’m not privileged in general. E.g. I live in a very small, highly democratic country (our world is ruled by the big, ruthless and powerful ones), I’m an environmentalist (only a small percentage of people actually care about our environment), I value our constitution and rights highly (most people of my age don’t care about them that much). And last but not least, I happen to like Windows. You see, I don’t fit into a particular scheme.
Wow, great piece, thank you so much. I am a designer, and worked on a big open source project for years, and felt the sting of the exclusivity in a different way. I work in commercial software now and manage a team, and your post is relevant in this setting as well. It’s sad to me though that the social interactions and diversity in this commercial in environment are so much more rewarding that they were in my open source experience.
@George, please read “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, both I (white privilege) and II (straight privilege).
@Skud – this was awesome. My friend is one of the team division heads for OTW and was delighting in your keynote – i can now see why!
For myself I have had an interest in coding previously, but have always felt like it had to be something I already had skill in in order to learn – nothing ever seemed to suggest that I could start from scratch and learn from an organisation or project and become someone who had the skills.
When I’m less swamped with university, I’ll be volunteering with OTW in order to learn coding – I /know/ that they’ll happily teach me from the ground up and that I’ll get to contribute to others being able to do the same thing.
I love the fact that OTW is all about voices being heard, and those voices being preserved and celebrated.
Thank you again!
@George:
Fin has already pointed to an excellent resource, but I want to specifically speak up from one white straight man to another.
Identifying the areas where you’re *not* privileged doesn’t get us off the hook for examining the privilege we *do* carry around. I’m not religious, and I live in the US, where declaring your devoutness has certain political benefits under many circumstances, but I still benefit tremendously (and without any effort on my part) from being white. and straight. and male.
it’s *extremely* easy for white straight guys to take a stand for “the liberty to say whatever we want” — the truth is, *we already can*. We can’t be hurt by slurs on our whiteness, on our maleness, or on our straightness. Those words just don’t hurt, the way the words hurt that crap on people who are not white, not male, or not straight. “male chauvinist pig” is quaintly outdated and lacks the power to silence, while “bitch” has stayed in fashion, alas.
I think everyone here — *everyone* — supports freedom of expression and freedom of conversation. Nobody has suggested that men be silenced. By taking a stand for “freedom of speech” here, you seem to be suggesting that Skud’s talk — or the other commenters here — want to silence people. But read carefully: the request is really “you’re hurting me, and making me want to go away from your community. please stop, because I’d like to be part of it.” This is not a request “please never speak out” or “men should be punished”.
It’s uncomfortable to know that we (the white straight guys) have been given something we didn’t work for — the liberty to say whatever we want, and to hear whatever we want, and know that we won’t be doubted or dismissed on account of our race, sex, or sexuality. For me, it makes me uncomfortable because I don’t like the feeling that the communities that I care for (OSS among them) aren’t as fair and free for everyone as they are for me.
I have a defensive reaction to that uncomfortableness: I want to say “no! really, it *is* fair and open, and I know because it feels that way to me!” and I suspect you’re having such a reaction too. Please check. if you are, consider that Skud’s original post addresses this question with statistics and suggestions, and no implication — anywhere — that men should be silenced.
a few things.
regarding genderqueer/trans issues: perhaps you can count up all the bio (maybe even straight) males and then put everyone else together in an “other” category, instead of forcing them to pick female. i prefer not to have to pick between one of the two standard genders, but i definitely don’t fit under “bio male.”
second, i really appreciate what you’re doing. it is incredibly difficult to get people to be aware of their prejudices. often, i notice that people think they are not being prejudiced or discriminatory just by keeping the status quo. however, i think the status quo tends toward prejudice. to truly challenge this, we must act to change things. i’m glad to see you call out specific methods for changing behavior in the OSS community — perhaps you could add some more questions that individuals could ask themselves to reveal their prejudices? not easy, i know but perhaps worth looking into for future presentations where you have more time.
as many of the posters have pointed out, there is a definitely a ton of posturing going on. i work in IT (there are NO women programmers at my company) and i’ve been in grad school for cognitive science. the amount of work i’ve needed to do just to prove that yes i can and do understand what’s going on….well it’s truly a waste of everyone’s time. i’m not sure how to change this general attitude other than to make people more aware of it when they do it and to constantly challenge their prejudices by bringing more minorities/women/etc into the technology fold.
finally, i wish all my coworkers and all schools would read through this and try to understand it. that would be a major success in promoting some level of awareness. at least this is out there now and hopefully more and more people will stumble upon it, as i have.
Skud, thanks so much for this outstanding talk, and shining some light on the exceptions to the rule in open source culture.
I need to especially thank you for how effectively you’ve responded to the same old “counterarguments” presented here in the comments. These counterarguments can be especially deflating when reading the comments sections of any blog posts touching the issue of women / minorities in programming, and I’m thrilled to have your responses as a reference for these occasions. Kudos for your conciseness, clarity, and understanding the value of speaking up!
@Fin thanks for your suggestion.
@Jeremy K Did I ever mention my ethnicity? Ok, you’re right, I am a white guy indeed. I hope nobody minds. Rest assured that my ethnicity doesn’t affect the quality of my code.
I agree we might not always be aware of our privileges. And I support equal rights and fight discrimination. The unfortunate thing is that people often confuse equal rights/chances with quotas. And that’s a very different thing.
I already said above how great this post is, but wanted to amplify JB’s point. I am a confirmed and long-standing guy, and I contribute less to open-source projects than I otherwise would because of the relatively unsupportive, sometimes jerky atmosphere that’s so common. If I’m going to deal with that, it’s not going to be for free.
It may be that women are on average more inclined to want or create a less hostile, more inclusive, and more welcoming atmosphere; I dunno. But I can promise that it’s not only women who want that. I want it. Many *people* want it, regardless of their particular naughty bits.
I really have a hard time with the logic behind generalizations. We shouldn’t make generalizations because a generalization will never fit all the facts. Yet in saying that you’ve said something about “all the facts.” Our words and how we group people always seems to leave something out.
I know what it’s like to be left out, and that’s what I really connected with in this piece.
The question that’s always been in the back of my mind is why do people leave other people out?
@Anil wrote, “Technology is better when it’s inclusive.”
Then doesn’t that mean that the only solution, the only political solution that will work is one that doesn’t leave anyone out?
In the world I walk in, I don’t want to view things through the lens of race, class and gender. Yet that lens seems to be created by those that believe half-solutions that leave out people are the only way. Maybe we all have to try harder for whole-solutions.
No more secrets.
Moshe Zadka, I agree with you whole-heartedly. This feels sexist to me. Let’s not encourage diversity by coddling “baby devs” — let’s improve the state of the american workplace and education system. As the only female engineer in most of the engineering teams I’ve been on, I appreciate how gender issues can have an impact on one’s life. However I don’t appreciate the implication here: “Coding is HARD! Let’s make it easy so women can play!”
And holy moly am I the only one creeped by the big fat graphic of kirk kissing spock?
@Kristen thanks for your thoughts. I certainly didn’t meant to imply that coding is hard, merely that getting into an open source project can be hard — as the interviews show. In fact, most of the DW and AO3 devs I’ve spoken to have found coding surprisingly easy once they got over their initial hesitancy.
I certainly agree that we can be doing things in workplaces (worldwide, not just America) and the education system. But the two efforts needn’t be mutually exclusive!
@Kristen but you’re ignoring the fact that there’s a lot more female CS majors then female open source developers. There are problems in workplaces and educations systems… but its not obvious that addressing them would affect what happens in open source.
Terrific post! I blogged my immediate reactions here: http://avdi.org/devblog/2009/07/31/80-of-men-never-noticed-anything/
I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic lately, to the point of initiating a session on the subject at Baltimore BarCamp. A common theme both in the discussions there and in your presentation is that in order to bring more women in it is necessary to be more welcoming to newbies (of any gender). The question I’ve been wrestling with is this: how do I apply this at my day job (a small startup)? In my experience the only employers I’ve seen with sufficient slack to support the care and feeding of a fledgling programmer have been giant, stodgy, slow-moving corporations. Most small agile software companies don’t have the resources for education, so they try to hire only the best of the best. How can we get more women (and minority) programmers involved at the cutting edge, when we don’t have the resources to bring them up from novice to craftswoman?
@Avdi there are women professional software developers. Look at the tech community graph. 20/80 is *a lot* different then 2/98 for everyone involved.
So the issue is why women aren’t in open source.
@Avdi if you’re in an “agile” environment, as you mention in your blog post, I would recommend pair programming! It’s an awesome way to bring people up to speed, and also a great way to really see how they work and understand their skills and ability. I personally learn *so* much faster while pair programming, and I suspect that you could bring an inexperienced-but-smart person up to speed in no time flat that way.
@Ian in my experience the percentages for women programmers in cutting-edge Web-based software (dynamic languages; cloud computing; social media) are a lot closer to the OSS numbers. And there’s a lot of overlap – these are companies which use and contribute to a tremendous amount of OSS software. I believe 80%/20% for general Java enterprise development. Ruby on Rails? Scala? CouchDB? Not so much.
@Skud I swear by pair programming and I agree it is hands-down the best way to bring different members of an organisation to the same level of skill and knowledge in the shortest period of time. Still, I would never recommend a novice Ruby programmer for hire at my current company (a very small startup) – even with pairing in my toolbelt the time lost to ramp-up would be too great.
Thanks for the comment, though!
Thanks for this. Some of us have been hitting on similar issues from within the Rails community, which has had some notable incidents in the past and remains heavily skewed. http://railsbridge.org is the result. Would love to see plenty more happening.
@Moshe:
I took it as “girls tend not to have the same early exposure to computers as boys. For women coming from that background, there’s some catch-up to be played.” Plus, only about 1/4 of people getting computer degrees are women, so the number of women already-trained is much lower than the number of men already-trained.
Now, if only we could figure out why the ones who are trained don’t join us…. Probably something to do with being expected to do the laundry, dishes, make dinner, and watch the kids while the hubby hacks.
@George what do quotas have to do with anything? You seem to be grasping at straw men in your refusal to fully apprehend a challenging point of view; which is to say you are reflecting a political correctness all your own.
For those that haven’t, you really need to view the presentation. It’s not very long, and the text here does not describe it in its entirety. I really thought it was good. But then I’m a female observer of the open source community rather than a participant.
well it is pretty much here in its entirety but the gist of it is much better if you view/listen to it.
Thanks for this. My freshman engineering honors program had fewer than a half dozen women, and by the end of the year, only 2. I think that we all suffered as a result of this. As men, we failed to get the chance to see different ways to approach problems, learn different ways of communicating, and to re-think the ways in which we used our knowledge and talents. While the blatant sexism was troubling, perhaps even scarier was our complete unwillingness to question why the demographics of our program looked the way it did, how that might impact our education and our lives, and what we might be able to accomplish if we didn’t just accept this framework. This reluctance seemed completely contrary to the rhetoric of innovation that popped up so frequently in our early engineering classes.
Perspectives and questions like the ones in your talk are so important, not just within the FLOSS community, but in our culture as a whole. I’m excited to see the push to transform the way we make software things, however, because it seems like one of the least innovative and transformable spaces when it comes to thinking about how gender mediates the way we live and make. I appreciated that you highlighted examples that show that a different way of making things is not only needed, but possible.
@Moshe, Kristen: I think that discussions of encouraging diversity always run the risk of fetishizing participation by some, and reinforcing stereotypes, in this case ones about gendered programming ability. However, I feel like with FLOSS (and lots of other things) there is already as much of a “coddling framework” for men (or the majority group in a given context) as the ones proposed in this talk and comments. I feel that the ones for men have just been so institutionalized that we don’t identify it as coddling. This makes me think of seeing the transgender professional mountain biker Michelle Dumaresq speak where she said that her greatest advantage over her born-biologically-female competitors was not of physical strength, but of growing up as a boy and the culture that encouraged boys aggressively skiing and riding.
I’m responding as a relative outsider to the OS discussion, although I’ve certainly watched it from the sidelines and been irritable about how male-dominated it seems to be. I’m responding as a user of LJ and Dreamwidth and a “fan” in the sense of OTW, and secondarily as a tech industry woman myself. (And years ago I edited a book called Wired Women about women on the internet – not a huge amount has changed since then.)
First: Media fans online have been women, and users of technology, mostly self-taught, for a long time now. Long before Dreamwidth and OTW. They taught each other CSS, html, some scriptng, and set up story and picture archives without male help. They have conventions at which they teach each other nonlinear video editing for fan video making. Their work gets airtime in news articles and at academic conferences (DIY Video being one), but is often pointed to with amusement – “look at the weird obsessive girls and what they’re up to with Kirk and Spock” (among others). LiveJournal is primarily where they ended up after USEnet and mailing lists didn’t scale and/or weren’t private enough. LJ has problems with financial viability, and fans are a loose self-organizing community that exists independent of a technology platform. When LJ got press for eliminating jobs, fans on LJ got moving to Dreamwidth. DW was passed on as “a fan-friendly, fan-run” alternative.
My long-winded point is that I believe many of the people involved in DW, at least the media fans, are doing it for a point that’s not about being a woman in open source or for the fun of being in open source at all, they’re doing it to create an alternative venue that’s needed. It’s a goal-driven project, for an existing community. Not an end-goal in itself. To vastly generalize, I think women in technology (and women in tech classes) are often more motivated by the end-goals than about the symbolism or getting patted on the back for being “hackers.”
So one way to get more women in open source might be to provide more end-goals that are meaningful to them. That connect them to purposes they care about.
Finally, I agree 100% with Mackenzie who said maybe women are too busy doing laundry and making dinner etc while their husbands hack at night. If open source is voluntary and after hours, you are competing with other things women are still doing with that time, if they are not single. Better have a good reason for them, like I said above.
And lastly (really finally), as some posters above said, there are lots of ways to be marginalized in the tech industry. Social scientists among computer scientists, artists among developers, designers among engineers… these are all minority positions, sadly, who face minority-problems on their day-to-day jobs. And yes, a lot of these minorities are also women.
Thank you. Your talk is SO cool.
I can’t remember how many times I’ve had discussions along the lines of “Hey, but we’re nice and friendly and we don’t mind women (and they are/do) and I have no clue why women just don’t join – what can we do?”. From now on it’ll be this URL.
@Lynn Cheney: I fail to see your point about end goals. Every open source project has a very clear end goal: the product produced. Why isn’t an awesome music player enough of an end goal?
So perhaps what you mean with the example of Dreamwidth is that the development community was drawn upon an existing community, instead of the community growing up around a program as it happens usually in open source. Dreamwidth did do things a bit backwards: usually software creates a community which then creates software (hopefully a positive feedback loop). Dreamwidth skipped the first step as they had a community. :)
Ian, since Dreamwidth is a fork of LiveJournal, they had the software at the beginning too.
But one of the things that makes this example unusual is that unlike most software projects, Dreamwidth/LiveJournal actually is software explicitly intended as community-forming infrastructure, so self-hosting takes on some added significance (blog and wiki software projects are unusual in this same way as well, as well as a few other categories, such as mailing lists and version-control systems).
Well when you put it like that, I realize its software project community with the intent of supporting its own community. Its a bit zen. :)
Most open source projects are for money or to build a fun application. Part of the fun is the creation of the community. But its not the goal itself. :P
@Ian, I think it’s naive to say that most projects are to build a fun application and no more than that. We’re complex animals, and we have lots of motivations. If we just wanted to build a fun application, why make it open source? Why invite people to collaborate with us? It seems to me that quite often we do these things because we want the application to have wide distribution, to benefit from other people’s skills, or to improve our own sense of self-worth or reputation. That’s quite apart from projects that have an external political goal or the like: I’m talking about projects that eg. provide a free version of something that’s encumbered with patents or other IP restrictions (Ogg players would be an example of this) or to promote a social good (eg. the OLPC). And that’s before we even go into free and open source software released by businesses to improve their reputation or interest people in their commercial offerings — I’m talking about anything from Open Solaris on down.
To be honest, I’m having trouble thinking of *any* open source software that doesn’t have some sort of social goal in addition to a pure software creation goal.
@Skud – Thank you. Kudos to O’Reilly for giving you a slot to speak, shame it wasn’t longer. I second the calls for an opportunity for you to speak again.
The thing about all this which amazes me every time the issue is raised is the number of people who step up to comment and defend our community’s lack of diversity by using the same tired old arguments like it’s some sort of natural order. It’s curious.
So – on top of the great keynote, I also want to thank you for your efforts in founding the geek feminism site on wikia. It has become a truly fabulous clearing house for info, argument and anecdote. It’s a good place to look when trying to debunk those myths. I myself have stopped trying to argue against political correctness, free speech, ‘let me be myself’, and ‘we are all emotionally retarded and can’t bring ourselves to appreciate the needs of others’ type arguments.
We should also remember this is a particularly western issue – there are more women coders in Iran and Malaysia, a lot more.
And the low numbers of women coding in open source also has much to do with women – generally – having less time to hack and tinker. Women’s roles as care givers and home makers eats up more of their ‘spare’ time, often preventing them from contributing to open source projects. Dreamwidth, OTW and Drupal are also now showing the broader community that there is a different way of doing things.
This is a complex issue – but it has been fought and won before.
There are slightly more women graduating from medicine than men. Just as there are slightly more women in the population. The numbers of women graduating from maths, physics, chemistry and engineering also continues to grow, and yet in western countries the number of women graduating from computer science and software engineering has been falling. Why?
We need to learn from those other so called ‘hard’ disciplines, that have been male dominated for so long, and see if we can borrow a strategy or two.
@Donna good point about it something odd going on in our culture regarding women in computer science. OSS itself is mostly a western thing, so we can’t compare that I suppose.
I disagree that it has much to do with the free time of women vs. men. A common reason for men to leave OSS is because they have children. Also I would want to see some evidence that women have less time for hobbies as you seem to be saying. I suppose its possible. Even so I’m sure it doesn’t account for much of the huge gender difference, especially given that plenty of people do open source as a job.
So really we’re back to why the CS major (in the West) is weird. Good point regarding chemistry etc. I think it goes to the CS (and physics for that matter) major being seen as nerdy. I like this explanation since then its really the broader cultures fault for calling us nerds and/or having a problem with women nerds. ;)
@Ian:
See my comment regarding the fact that even today, not all couples share childrearing and housekeeping equally, leaving many women to cook, clean, and care for children while the hubby has fun.
@Ian: Will an OECD report on leisure time and gender do for you? Here’s a recent blog post about it: http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/07/30/the-gender-gap-in-leisure-time/
Also, take a look at the “second shift”, which in feminist terms refers to the fact that when women get home from their dayjobs, they usually have a second shift of home-related stuff to do, to a much greater extent than men do. It’s not hard to find reports online about the division of household labour. Here’s one: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-08-28-housework_N.htm
Did you bother to Google before asking us to provide stats?
As for men dropping out of open source because they have kids… that might well be true, but I can think of dozens who have not. On the other hand, I’m having trouble listing women with kids in open source; there are some, but they’re few and far between. Can you name a man with kids in open source? A woman?
Ok actually I’ve seen this study before, sorry I didn’t remember or try to google for it. :)
Anyways lets put it this way: there are no developers with children in the all-male-programmers open source team I work with (some volunteers, some not, all started as volunteers). So just intuitively the free time gender gap didn’t make much sense to me (not saying the gap doesn’t exist for the childless, but I’m sure it looks much different). And I wasn’t saying it wasn’t a possible factor, just that I don’t think it accounts for much. We can all think of time-heavy hobbies dominated by women (fanfic being the example here I suppose). And women go to college just like men, more then men, which is the main aquafer of fresh talent for the volunteer open source community.
I also think about this guy in our community who is underway in a submarine for half the time. Obviously he isn’t the most involved open source dev, but he still is one despite having little time. I would accept the gender gap as an explanation of why (in a hypothetical universe) women contributors contributed less time, but we’re talking about raw #’s of people.
Why there is a gender gap betweeen programmers and non-programmers in open source communities? A free time gender gap doesn’t explain this either. Programming doesn’t take less time then managing the release cycle or a user support forum really.
Plus I think we would’ve noticed if a disproptionate amount of women open source devs were Norwegian. :)
@Ian: I know you’re trying to understand why there is a gender disparity, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to explain it all here in comments on this blog. I, for one, don’t have the time or energy for it.
I think you need to go read some books and stuff. One I would recommend is “Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women and Computing”, which breaks down many of the reasons why girls and women don’t go into computing. Your local library should have it, or of course it’s on Amazon etc.
I’ve been following this thread for about a week and I’ve become increasingly frustrated with categorizing the ideas in the original keynote/post as simply advocating for politically correctness. I know that people across the political and ideological spectrum don’t take political correctness very seriously. I can understand this, but not because I think we should ignore the repercussions of our words and actions. To me political correctness has always been about (self) policing language because of worries about the repercussions of offending a particular group. This is problematic because it generalizes the expected response of what is often a group of people with diverse experiences. It also makes assumptions about those groups of people and how they’ll respond, often with little knowledge of, communication with, or accountability to that group. Finally, political correctness says that it’s good enough to change how we speak or behave publicly without critically examining our internal ideas and choices and how they shape our relationships, culture and institutions.
The ideas in this keynote and subsequent supporting comments seem less like a call for just modifying speech and superficial actions and instead highlight the actual experiences of FLOSS developers with regards to gender. I think its harmfully dismissive to ignore people’s stories of being frustrated with developer communities because of gendered dynamics. Furthermore, I think it’s a conversation that developers of software so steeped in ideas of community and collaboration should be deeply concerned about. What might we be losing if our software ecology is a gender monoculture? Why are things the way they are? How could they be different. There aren’t easy or quick answers and people with all different orientations around these questions are likely to make false assumptions or generalizations about each other. The discussion will likely be heated and for those who haven’t been forced to think about how their lives are mediated by gender, a frustrating, confusing one (I know it has been for me). It’s really hard to see the advantages that one has had as disadvantages and the ways that one is used to making and communicating as needing major refactoring.
This is complicated stuff. Dismissing this important dialog as mere political correctness does us all a disservice.
Geoffrey:
I do, however, think that how we speak can influence how we think. When I was younger, I would defend transfolk and recite the rhetoric regarding respecting them, even though in my head I thought they were freaks. I wouldn’t say it out loud though, because I felt like that would be bad and disrespectful. After a couple years, I went to college and we talked about transgender issues in Allied in Price (our LGBTQ group on campus), and I found out that some of the kids I knew there were trans. Knowing intellectually that hating someone for being gender non-conforming was a jerk thing to do made it easier to get over the surprise and stay friends with them (and gain more trans friends as the years go by). Now you’ll find me helping the local Trans Coalition with their grassroots campaigns.
@Mackenzie:
> I do, however, think that how we speak can influence how we think.
For sure. Just as I think it’s okay to, as you described with your story, to have trouble bridging the gap between what we say (or what we feel is correct to say) and how we actually feel. Obviously what’s important is the consciousness of that disconnect.
I was trying to comment more on the tendency to try to kill a discussion by simply labeling it as being about political correctness. It’s a loaded term and I think framing the debate in this way prejudices people against taking a more introspective look at the questions. I hope that however tough social questions are framed, people can try to look at them thoughtfully.
Dreamwidth looks fantastic… on paper.
I tried very early on to get involved with Dreamwidth. I am not a coder. I was pretty much shunted to “Blog about us!” status.
I’m a sysadmin. My offers of sysadmin help were met with “Sure, you can help!” and then getting ignored when I would ask for details of where I could help (ie. “We need help with X” would not come with access to X). My offers of help with support stuff were met with, “We’re doing everything the way LiveJournal did it, only this time With Feeling!” Suggestions on how to improve/change/update things were ignored. Offers of assistance in various areas were ignored.
I know you can’t change the world overnight, but it became apparent to me that the only “diversity” encouraged in DW are for coders and LJ-ex-cronies. After months of trying to get involved I redirected my energies for other Open Source projects that can use them.
Yeah, I’m bitter about my experiences with DW. I wish them the best and I hope they’re still around 10 yrs from now. But everytime I read about how “open” DW is I can’t help but think, “Sure, it’s open for everyone but me – and probably others.”
@Moose: I’m sorry to hear that. I’m interested to hear what path you took to trying to get involved. I see you’re on the volunteers in waiting list; unfortunately that list didn’t work out so well. We should probably get rid of it or something, I guess.
Excellent talk! I care a lot about the (painful lack of) diversity in CS, and things like this give me hope that it is an aberration, and not the “natural order”. Also: Concrete steps! That have helped in at least two cases! Thank you VERY much for those.
Thank you! I’ve tackled this topic several times in conference talks, for example here at CLT09.
I think your point is extremely well-made and illustrated. It’s a pleasure to read through.