Gender Politics [A Bug's Life]

Early this morning I read a paper on gender and the Open Source movement, following a pointer from

rmc28. 75 pages about how women are/feel excluded from Open Source communities due to their overarching meritocratic nature and lack of tolerance for other factors. Everyone should be equal, it is a pure meritocracy! Yeah, but one that boys started to build from a young age when they tended to shun girls with their girl cooties. Did their sisters get a fair share on the family computer? Women are competing in the communities (gracious, that's an odd phrase to use!) with men who have some years head start. How do you catch up with that? You don't get a place of respect until you can manage that.

Then

maviscruet posted a link to this article by Douglas Hofstadter which uses "outrageous" parallels with racial discrimination to draw attention to how our "natural" language is rife with sexism.

And now my brain is spinning with far too many ideas to write down, certainly as a cogent standalone post.

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Yes, and for values of "meritocratic" in which a leader of said movement [ESR] has no qualms about stating racist opinions in public.

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But it's a meritocracy! There's no reason $other shouldn't be able to do just as well as us! But until they do, we'll keep kicking them while they're down and turning them out of the clubhouse. That should motivate them to work harder and join our elite and special class.

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Do you have a cite for that, btw, or are you just talking about his mundanes are bad/hackers is good stuff?

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129

Eurgh! That's horrible. I want to wash my hands now, as I handled one of his books once.

People with "useless" higher levels of proprieception than of general intelligence - they'll be the popular, sporty kids who picked on you at school, will they? And now you're justifying your little spiel about how you're actually genetically superior to them, from a lofty perch they can't reach you at?

That may not be a true conclusion but it's an easy one to draw.

Lower down in his piece, where he is pointing out how some ethnic groups have lower average IQ than others, he seems quite sympathetic - but previously he refers to lower IQ people as "dimwits". Which I would find really endearing. Test scores can improve with practice, and with a good diet. Culture-specific elements can have a great effect, more so if they are so deeply ingrained in the test culture that they don't notice they're present. Are his "general" tests really testing the ability to concentrate for short periods? Who lives generally in the sort of distractionless environment of a test?

If that makes you feel dirty the just look at his views on religion, with extra added ego!

She started to babble something about last week when she was studying, looking outside at the quad and seeing me walk by "...and the leaves were following you!" And it was like I was the Spring and the life in the grass. And a whole bunch of other stuff that made me wonder what drugs she'd been doing (this was 1976 or early '77; every second dorm room had a bong and blotter acid was easier to score than good music). So I shook my head dubiously and rolled on upstairs and visited my buddies.

I was walking home, idly puzzling over this peculiar incident, and damn near fell over when I finally got it. That girl had been trying to cope with a theophany; she had looked at me and seen a god. A particular god. And I knew, suddenly, with utter shattering certainty, which one it was. And that it probably was not the first time I had inadvertently triggered such an experience, and would almost certainly not be the last.

If it were a meritocracy then ESR would have been drummed out years ago for fetchmail.

Just so you know - I agree with your reading of the document. In fact it was such a strong arguement it got em thinking. The reason being the two married ladys I was visting are very strong on certain issues and read the document as attacking the idea of gender neutral langauge.

They appear to have done the racist/sexism mapping the article expects you to do - and then accepted the person writing the article meant the things he was writing - when if he'd wanted to do that he could have just writen the article 'natural' like.

And judging by some of the comments on my blog - there not alone in doing that......

The first few paragraphs had me thinking he was mocking gender neutral language by drawing such extreme parallels - of course we can't change the language, that would be silly!

But further on, I started to identify more as a minority (or less powerful) group and how that language would make me feel. Now I'm horrified at how deep rooted it is, and how it affects so many aspects of society.I've been an apologist for it for many of the reasons Hofstadter draws out, because I've been living in it for so long and there isn't an alternative. And how did I take so long to notice? Arg!

When I use "men" to mean "men", or "men" to mean "all humans", it does trigger a different part of my brain, I think. We are used to interpreting words like dear(expensive), dear(darling), deer(animal) or Deere(tractor) from context, I imagine I do the same with chairman(authoritative designated leader), or mankind(all members of my species). I also imagine other people do the same, so this linguistic remnant should not have anything to do with society. But I might be wrong.

How would you allocate respect in a community the purpose of which is to produce an output other than ability to produce output?

Now, yes, there's no need to be rude to people who are just starting out with small stuff and who might need help now and then - but I don't see what's so gorram awful about giving people more respect when they do $whatever *well*. And *obviously* any group will want to feel that their sort of merit is the *best* sort of merit and within that group it is that merit that counts not some other merit - that's just how it works! The Oscars don't reward bad actors just because they happen to be amazing cooks and OSS isn't going to reward mediocre programmers just because they happen to be genius chemists.

And how do you catch up? You start doing the things that life, unfortunately, didn't allow you to do when you were younger. Or you get a job that comes with training. Or you take some courses off your own back. Or you start at the bottom and watch the experts.

And along the way some people could do with a kick up the arse and some lessons in how to ignore obnoxious trolls (why do people take this crap seriously?). And some other people (and some of the same people!) could do with a kick up the arse and some lessons in how to say "your code doesn't work" without using any swear words.

Meritocracy is fine, but the attitude of many open source people is far from helpful, and most projects don't have a way to introduce people to a project in a sensible fashion (like getting people to write test cases, or having more experienced developers mentor new project members) so it's often a case of sink or swim.

It's not just a gender issue either, the whole, "if there's a bug then you can fix it, because you've got the source," thing only really works if already pretty familiar with the source or you've got time to go and understand it properly. For most people neither of those is going to be true.

Er, but if you don't want to put in the time to understand it... just where do you expect to fit in in a community for fixing it?

(disclaimer: I'm far far too lazy to engage in such time intensive hobbies, maybe I'd find I'm too stupid to do them well - I don't know, but I'm not about to blame other people for my laziness (differing time priorities) and/or stupidity)

The difference in time required to contribute usefully to a project with some help in getting started, and contributing usefully with no help at all is huge. I wouldn't expect somebody at work to sit down and start writing test cases without at least a quick talk through the architecture, and the expectation that they'll write simple ones to start with and will need to ask lots of 'stupid' questions.

Of course, not all men are loud and crap. Just the loud, crap ones :-)

Merit is not the only factor that applies in the hierarchy, much though people claim it is. There's also aggressive posturing, and gaining position by belittling other people. It looks like merit is binary, not a continuum - and if you don't have enough merit, you shouldn't be here at all. Women receive a lot more sexually-related comments than they should if the community is all about output: conclusion - it is not just about output.

Also, some sorts of output (coding, bugfixing) are rated more worthy than other sorts, women's work - touchy feely usability, documentation, arranging workshops and meetings.

The set of rules they claim applies, does not.

People may want to avoid the hassle of talking nicely and not being offensive, in order for communication to be more efficient; but this does not stop them crafting belligerent responses. More efficient to let it go, eh?

Yeah, OK, so immature prats make stupid insulting remarks. OK, they should grow up and develop some tact or at least a professional facade. But why does this have to be a mega issue? If someone calls me a rude name I might decide that I don't like/respect that person much but I'm not going to have much more reaction than brief anger at that person for being an annoying prat - stop caring and people will stop being stupid at you to get a cheap rise - arguing just feeds the stupid troll.

I think it's the scale that is the issue. You go to join in, expecting people to be developing software with a semi-professional attitude, and get not one but several people flaming you and commenting on aspects of you that are nothing to do with the project. I'm used to a work environment where that is not acceptable, and a lot of legislation and education has been targetted at stopping this. You can ignore one bully but not most of the rest of the office joining in and jeering at you.

I've not been a member of the communities discussed in the paper, but in similar situations I have sometimes given up, as my presence is unwelcome there, and gone to play with my dolls.

But now? Some anecdotes I've heard of the sort of abuse on these lists is shocking, and I would not want to watch them escalate while I tried to stop caring.

"Ignore the bullies and they'll go away" didn't work when my Mum suggested it in school, and I don't suppose it'd work now.

So what's the difference between an abusive meritocracy and an oligarchy?

An oligarch's parents are oligarchs and they're born into the system, whereas success in a meritocracy depends on someone exploiting their individual, personal intelligence (the intelligence that some people believe is hereditary) in a benevolent environment (good diet, no worries about heating or lighting, own computer and large amounts of leisure time to devote to it) usually provided by their parents.

Take the literalism out of 'parents' and there's actually not much if a difference between the cultures. Someone introduces you to Unix, and it goes downhill from there...

A Bug's Life

Gender Politics

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