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Posted to community@apache.org by Julie MacNaught <jm...@apache.org> on 2004/10/19 22:32:03 UTC
Re: Open Source, Cold Shoulder (fwd): One woman's comments
I'm an ASF committer (WSRP4J) and PMC member (portals, webservices), and
I'm female.
I've never tried to hide it, although the thought crossed my mind.
I've often wondered why there aren't more women around here, but I'm
used to it. At least I don't have to wait in line for the bathroom at
conferences.
I am a big corporation's employee (IBM), not an individual contributor.
I've been accused of being a geek, however, in my defense, I always say:
"you think I'M a geek, you should meet my friends at Apache.".
Seriously, the article does make some good points. I think there is some
merit to the suggestion that women are less likely to spend their free
time hacking on the computer at home, and they don't come from the
gaming culture.
However, I would like to offer my own theory as to why women are not as
active in Open Source communities as they are in other computer science
jobs. My theory has to do with women's aversion to speaking up in
public, which is an essential aspect of open source participation. It's
been documented (don't ask me when or where) that in a meeting with both
men and women, the men will speak up and the women will not (obviously
there are always exceptions). If the room only contains women, the
women will speak up. This is also relevant to classroom participation
among girls in school. I think this may have to do with a fear of
ridicule, but I'm no expert.
I think that treating everyone with respect is the key to encouraging
participation among all population groups. Noone, male or female,
should ever be ridiculed or humiliated in public, on a mailing list, no
matter how stupid or ridiculous the post (including this one :-)).
It's been my experience that this is generally the case. Off topic
posts or seemingly stupid questions, are usually handled patiently.
However, I have also seen some unecessary and unfortunate remarks made
on mailing lists. My observation has been that this occurs between folks
who have some history together. Nevertheless, a new person might get
the impression that they will be subjected to similar unpleasantness if
they post, and may well choose to merely lurk. You have to have a pretty
thick skin to jump into the fray.
Conclusion? Just play nice.
Respectfully,
Julie MacNaught
jmacna@apache.org
Brian Behlendorf wrote:
>
> Use www.bugmenot.com if you need a password.
>
> Comments? Is there anything the community thinks we could do to address
> the situation?
>
> Brian
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 14:09:41 -0400
> From: Greg Wilson <gv...@cs.toronto.edu>
> To: brian@collab.net
> Subject: Open Source, Cold Shoulder
>
> Hello everyone. I'm very pleased to announce that an article Michelle
> Levesque and I wrote about why so few women get involved in open source
> computing, and what that reveals about open source's weaknesses, is now
> on-line at:
>
> http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/sdm0411b/
>
> You may have to register to view it, but registration is free.
>
> Thanks,
> Greg Wilson
>
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>
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Re: Open Source, Cold Shoulder (fwd): One woman's comments
Posted by Henning Schmiedehausen <hp...@intermeta.de>.
On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 22:32, Julie MacNaught wrote:
Hi,
[...]
> I've been accused of being a geek, however, in my defense, I always say:
> "you think I'M a geek, you should meet my friends at Apache.".
[...]
Wow. Define "being normal" by pointing at people that are even weirder.
I never thought of that. Seems I'm a member of the latter group. ;-)
Regards
Henning
--
Dipl.-Inf. (Univ.) Henning P. Schmiedehausen INTERMETA GmbH
hps@intermeta.de +49 9131 50 654 0 http://www.intermeta.de/
RedHat Certified Engineer -- Jakarta Turbine Development -- hero for hire
Linux, Java, perl, Solaris -- Consulting, Training, Development
"Fighting for one's political stand is an honorable action, but re-
fusing to acknowledge that there might be weaknesses in one's
position - in order to identify them so that they can be remedied -
is a large enough problem with the Open Source movement that it
deserves to be on this list of the top five problems."
--Michelle Levesque, "Fundamental Issues with
Open Source Software Development"
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Re: Open Source, Cold Shoulder (fwd): One woman's comments
Posted by Stefano Mazzocchi <st...@apache.org>.
Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Julie MacNaught wrote:
>
>> Conclusion? Just play nice.
>
>
> Right on! It's amazing how well a bit of humility, encouragement of
> others, and responding to fire with ice works in online communities -
> whether technical like this one, or social, or whatever.
>
> I'm haunted, though, by whether there's a sort of cognitive dissonance
> in "being nice" and the "Apache" name. I'm not suggesting we rename
> ourselves the "Cute Nice Fluffy Bunnies Software Foundation". :) Just
> wondering if it's something we should overtly work to overcome rather
> than just inertly hope we aren't setting the wrong tone...
Let me remind of when Marc Fleury of JBoss once named us "the fat ladies
drinking tea" while he named the JBoss people "the knights fighting the
big evil corporations".
How many girls does JBoss has?
--
Stefano.
Re: Open Source, Cold Shoulder (fwd): One woman's comments
Posted by Martin van den Bemt <ma...@mvdb.net>.
On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 04:56, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> I'm haunted, though, by whether there's a sort of cognitive dissonance in
> "being nice" and the "Apache" name. I'm not suggesting we rename
> ourselves the "Cute Nice Fluffy Bunnies Software Foundation". :) Just
> wondering if it's something we should overtly work to overcome rather than
> just inertly hope we aren't setting the wrong tone...
Our logo is good : a soft feather :)
Mvgr,
Martin
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Re: Open Source, Cold Shoulder (fwd): One woman's comments
Posted by Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>.
On Wednesday 20 October 2004 10:56, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> I'm not suggesting we rename
> ourselves the "Cute Nice Fluffy Bunnies Software Foundation".
ROTFL... From a feared native-american tribe to cuddly... :o)
My vote goes for
The Bambi Software Foundation
or
The Kitten Software Foundation
Cheers
Niclas
--
+------//-------------------+
/ http://www.bali.ac /
/ http://niclas.hedhman.org /
+------//-------------------+
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Re: Open Source, Cold Shoulder (fwd): One woman's comments
Posted by Brian Behlendorf <br...@collab.net>.
On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Julie MacNaught wrote:
> Conclusion? Just play nice.
Right on! It's amazing how well a bit of humility, encouragement of
others, and responding to fire with ice works in online communities -
whether technical like this one, or social, or whatever.
I'm haunted, though, by whether there's a sort of cognitive dissonance in
"being nice" and the "Apache" name. I'm not suggesting we rename
ourselves the "Cute Nice Fluffy Bunnies Software Foundation". :) Just
wondering if it's something we should overtly work to overcome rather than
just inertly hope we aren't setting the wrong tone...
Brian
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Re: Open Source, Cold Shoulder (fwd): One woman's comments
Posted by Henri Yandell <ba...@generationjava.com>.
On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Bill Stoddard wrote:
> Henri Yandell wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Julie MacNaught wrote:
>>
>>> I am a big corporation's employee (IBM), not an individual contributor.
>>
>>
>> My current pet theory is that due to quotas,
>
> Dang, so much for sensitivity and respect...
Took me 10 minutes of head scratching to even see what Bill meant by this.
I assume it's that somehow I'm insulting women by suggesting that larger
corporations have a higher ratio of women and that quotas are a part of
this. I can't see the insult myself so apologies to any women or men who
feel aggrieved.
Hen
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Re: Open Source, Cold Shoulder (fwd): One woman's comments
Posted by Bill Stoddard <bi...@wstoddard.com>.
Bill Stoddard wrote:
> Henri Yandell wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Julie MacNaught wrote:
>>
>>> I am a big corporation's employee (IBM), not an individual contributor.
>>
>>
>>
>> My current pet theory is that due to quotas,
>
>
> Dang, so much for sensitivity and respect...
>
> Bill
Henri, your email could be interpreted in an unfavorable way but I know you had no ill intent and I should
have added a :-) to my comment. :-)
soap box:
No one wants to be thought of as 'a quota'. The US policy of Affirmative Action is often called a "quota
system" by people who are against it. AA would be a quota system only if one assumes that there are no members
of a so called "protected class" (women, some racial minorities, etc) that are capable of doing the job. The
fact is, there are lots of really talented folks that are members of 'protected classes' and companies like
IBM aggressively recruit strong talent wherever they find it. Rightly so imho. My personal opinion (based
solely on my experiences inside a big US multinational company) is that AA has about outlived its usefulness.
No sane recruiter ignores talent based on gender, sexual preference or race and those that do deserve what's
coming to them (failure in the marketplace).
Julie, Thanks for your post. I think your observation is spot on. Women are, on average, not as assertive as
men in mixed company. Communicating via a mailing list 'hangs you out there' so to speak on the assertiveness
scale. I know in my early days in the Apache HTTP Server community, I had my head handed to me on a platter
on a couple of occasions (by someone whose opinion I trust and respect, fwiw). That's a pretty typical
experience I expect. Those types of experiences tend to filter communities for a certain set of personality
traits; being averse to confrontation is not one of the traits folks in the Apache HTTP Server community tend
to have, for better or worse. :-)
Bill
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Re: Open Source, Cold Shoulder (fwd): One woman's comments
Posted by Bill Stoddard <bi...@wstoddard.com>.
Henri Yandell wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Julie MacNaught wrote:
>
>> I am a big corporation's employee (IBM), not an individual contributor.
>
>
> My current pet theory is that due to quotas,
Dang, so much for sensitivity and respect...
Bill
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Re: Open Source, Cold Shoulder (fwd): One woman's comments
Posted by Henri Yandell <ba...@generationjava.com>.
On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Julie MacNaught wrote:
> I am a big corporation's employee (IBM), not an individual contributor.
My current pet theory is that due to quotas, the large corporations are
gobbling up all the female graduates. Apart from the ASF ties to IBM/Sun,
and obvious open-source corporates (IBM, Novell, Red Hat etc), most
open-source committers come from smaller companies. This is a completely
unproven belief I admit. A survey a few years back showed 50% ASF at
IBM/Sun and 50% elsewhere, but I'm not sure if it looked at the size of
the elsewheres.
I think it would be interesting to look at the gender ratio of where
graduates go in terms of size of company, and then look at the ratio of
where open-source committers work.
Hen
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