There's a discussion going on about women and IT, starting with a post by Richard Jones: Why there's few women in IT. Phillip Eby responded in Is porn driving women away from the computer industry?, The Real Reasons There Are Few Women In IT -- And What YOU Can Do About It and Why (Most) Men Don't Get It -- and I personally find his analysis much more useful.
Richard's original post talks about a case where someone used porn in a presentation, and he's basically saying that is "why there's few women in IT". I don't buy it.
First: is anyone claiming that IT as a field is more discriminatory than other fields? I don't think that's the case, despite the fact that the gender balance is worse than many other fields. Therefore I don't think this particular anecdote points to a larger problem specific to the community, nor does it explain the gender imbalance in the field, nor does it point to solutions.
Second: we have to accept each other as whole people; with the greater transparency of the internet we have to adapt our expectations and recognize people have lives that are larger than just the one aspect we would normally see in professional settings. Using pornography in a presentation at a conference of course isn't appropriate, but something like Acme::Playmate is not inappropriate in any way. Phillip is right to call the nature of the response patronizing. What are people trying to say? That women do not realize that Playboy exists? Are we trying to create a world where you can be completely insulated from pornography? To try to create or enable such a worldview is unreasonable and insulting to everyone's intelligence. We do not need to eliminate all sexual expressions from our community.
Third: the Free/Open Source community is not a professional community. Many participants do not participate professionally, or participate both as professionals and as hobbyists. Someone wanted to be able to grab playmate metadata easily... for what reason I'm actually not sure; to graph changes in average measurements over time? It doesn't really matter; the author doesn't need to justify it, and CPAN doesn't need to justify why it lists it (in fact there's little reason for either -- it exists, therefore CPAN lists it).
We should generally be careful about creating hostile environments -- hostile towards anyone. This is something that needs to be constantly considered, but is best dealt with person-to-person, and in response to specific situations. If our communities are so fragile that we cannot deal with an occasional mistake, then we've already lost. Of course you still need to correct mistakes; the quality of the response should be the judge of a community, especially open communities like F/OSS communities.
We should not try to protect our communities by limiting our expression to what is considered appropriate in a professional environment. We should not limit our expression to those things that are appropriate for female ears or eyes -- and of course the very phrase is discriminatory! But that's the sentiment underlying Richard's original post.
This post doesn't offer any constructive suggestions about what to do about the gender imbalance. That's a much harder question. I just don't think focusing on discrimination is the right line of thought. I think it's the easy line of thought -- that if we just stop discriminating and stop creating a hostile environments we'll see more women. Following that path will create a chilling effect on personal expression and will hurt our community. Of this I am confident, because I and everyone else here knows what professional communication styles are like -- they are dull and disingenuous -- and that is exactly what people are calling for by making general arguments based on this one ill-considered presentation.
(If you read through the comments on that post, and PJE's posts, you'll see a wider discussion than just this one issue -- but it's not fair to fold all those ideas together into one response)
Heh, the ads at the moment include two ads for lawyers specializing in sexual harassment, and one ad to increase your libido. Sex and gender make for odd bedfellows. Pun obviously intended, many apologies.
# Ian Bicking
Oh, and another anecdote: in the comments on Richard's post a guy actually says that in the U.S. the proper response to someone putting up porn at a conference would be to call up the police and have the presenter arrested. He of course doesn't know his law, and the police would laugh at him (there's nothing criminal about showing porn to adults), and I doubt there were many people that agreed with him (no one disagreed, but I should probably just assume people dismissed him as being a troll). Still I found it disturbing that someone would even suggest such a thing.
Second, lots of people seemed offended that lots of people didn't immediately walk out of the presentation (which was itself just a lightning talk, so there wouldn't have been much to walk out on). I can't imagine they understand the social dynamics involved. They seemed to feel the presenter was, of course, disrespecting all women by using that image. Well, I can't say exactly what his intentions were, but I bet it was to get a quick laugh, and to make a comment on the underlying motivations of certain open source contributors. Do they really think he was trying to be exclusionary? That he was trying to offend or harass? That's not to say that some women didn't feel excluded or offended by it, but there's a difference between a mistake and a deliberate act. Mistakes should not be dealt with through exclusion, which is all that would have been accomplished through walking out. They should be dealt with by directly communicating any disappointment, and publicly clarifying what is appropriate. But that one guy's mistake shouldn't make him the symbol for all discrimination.
Lastly, people complained about things like people having provocative backgrounds on their laptops. And maybe they were right. But are they saying that those people shouldn't be allowed to have such backgrounds on their laptops at all? If they are allowed to have such backgrounds, one can only expect that some people won't think to change them before attaching their laptop to the projector. This can be a little embarrassing to the presenter and audience, but when it comes to "embarrassing" I have no problem with telling everyone to just suck it up and move on. This is the nature of our leaky personal boundaries, and I do not accept people being accusatory simply because they see a confirmation that their fellow humans also are sexual beings. Similarly I do not accept people placing social pressure on women not to breast feed in public -- sometimes when you find something embarrassing and uncomfortable you just have to suck it up and deal with it on your own, you shouldn't tell the world to conform to your feelings. (It's unclear to me if there were actually women who were offended or excluded by these unintentional images; I doubt it.)
Anyway, I realize I didn't provide a lot of context for why the responses there bothered me, and maybe this is a little more context.
# Ian Bicking
"Lastly, people complained about things like people having provocative backgrounds on their laptops. And maybe they were right. But are they saying that those people shouldn't be allowed to have such backgrounds on their laptops at all? If they are allowed to have such backgrounds, one can only expect that some people won't think to change them before attaching their laptop to the projector."
Since I made that comment, I'll elucidate: when conducting public business you have to behave in an appropriate fashion. No-one is saying that people shouldn't enjoy their favourite erotic desktop backgrounds: I'm just saying that people should consider that their own attitudes may differ from others and that others may be uncomfortable when they show such material in public. People do make mistakes, but if someone made mistakes similar to those originally being discussed in other kinds of conferences, they'd be in trouble; if they made them in a business context, they'd risk being disciplined or fired.
It's quite possible that ignoring differences in attitudes promotes a culture where people believe that everyone else has the same view as they do. This is where a community risks becoming some kind of clique, and with that the danger that people's behaviour becomes exclusionary. This isn't about whether people should or should not feel entitled to be offended according to what you, I or a number of other commentators believe to be offensive or inoffensive - it's about whether people actually were offended (reportedly the case), whether the presenter anticipated it, and whether the presenter was acting according to the norms of the community.
If normal (or perceived to be normal) community behaviour involves offending people, then examining the effects on the community is an obvious line of further inquiry. It may be an oversimplification to say that community behaviour is the only reason for the absence or underrepresentation of a particular group, but that's no reason to disregard it as a source of legitimate concern.
I made that comment about calling the police, and I stand by it. In Minnesota (Not the entire US, it is a state law) it is illegal to show porn in a public setting. If this was a pron conference the police are likely to laugh, but since it wasn't, it was a tech conference.
# Henry Miller
What's basically wrong with PJs position is encapsulated in the following paragraphs :
[quote] See, the difference between me and the people who are talking about how we should fix this "problem", is that they believe that it's possible to reform the attitudes of the uncivilized en masse, and I don't. Instead of trying to reform them, I simply don't hire them in the first place. No amount of technical competence is enough to make up for somebody being an a**hole, and it's not my job to teach somebody how to be a decent human being. I'm running a place of business, not a charm school or etiquette academy.
...
If women aren't applying because they aren't interested in IT, is that really a problem? If they're not applying because they're being discouraged by society in general, well, perhaps that's a problem, but it's not especially actionable on an individual level, so why worry?
[/quote]
In other words, individualistically oriented PJ doesn't believe that problems due to "society in general" can be actioned on an individual level.
But society-wide behaviour is nothing but the sum of all the little actions. To re-use the other quote you posted (I assume, approvingly) "Is living your life in an individually responsible way enough to bring about the kind of change that you would hope for? I think the answer is no. It takes collective action."
We all know that individually driving our cars doesn't hurt the environment. It's only because we all do it, so much of the time, that it becomes a problem. So does that mean this isn't "actionable" individually?
Maybe. And, if so, only concerted political power can have an effect. Maybe not.
What's the difference in the case of women discouraged from certain life-possibilities by society?
An individual joking reference to soft-porn means nothing on it's own, and every man or woman who thinks about it logically knows this. But cumulatively, we live in an atmosphere polluted by certain conceptions of the appropriate and inappropriate roles for women and men. Women are to be soft, caring, emotional, certainly not abstract, rational and detached from their bodies. Women are told by society, via institutions like Playboy, to be thin, pert, sensuous, concerned about their appearance. And we're surprised they don't embrace a culture that celebrates 24 hour hackathons fueled by pizza and Jolt-Cola?
Showing stats from playboy is not "insulting" - which is a meaningless idea, easy to dismiss - but it is another release into the memeosphere of contaminated ideas. Playboy is in the same position as a factory pumping out sulfur-dioxide. It makes it harder for everyone to breath an air free of these stereotypes.
But it's not impossible to "action" this on an individual level. You can do it by a) choosing not to promote, even with sympathetic humour, this kind of stereotyping publication, b) reminding everyone that this kind of publication is problematic and hoping that they agree with you and do the same. That's not "authoritarian" or creating an even more hostile environment.
Eventually, in the very long term, you hope that less of this propaganda => women feel less pressurized to conform to these social norms => women with more freedom to explore the possible space of career opportunities => more women in IT. (Not because more women in IT is necessarily an important goal, but because their absensce is likely to be a symptom of their lack of freedom.)
BTW : the "protecting women == insulting women" argument is crap. Harm is harm. Whether it's "wrong" to harm someone or not is independent of their capacity to absorb your attack. We wouldn't argue that I can rob your house because it's insulting to assume you don't have the economic capability to recover from the loss. Or that racist language shouldn't be discouraged because it's insulting to assume that blacks can't rise above being called "nigger". (Or maybe there are people who argue that second.)
Systematic problems need collective action to resolve. Education may not be sufficient, but it's hard to see how to get started other than by talking and suggesting that it's everyone's "job" or responsibility to try to teach others how to be decent human beings.
PS : Obviously, all causal hypotheses are open to criticism. Maybe Playboy doesn't have any causal effect on the way women see themselves. But I don't see arguments like yours or Eby's being grounded in actual engagement with that debate. They just assume, axiomatically, that there's no case to answer here.
You wrote:
In other words, individualistically oriented PJ doesn't believe that problems due to "society in general" can be actioned on an individual level.That's not quite correct. I'm saying that my individual action isn't going to change everybody else's. That's not the same thing as saying it's not actionable, period. I'm just saying that if I'm already hiring 50% females, there's not a whole lot more I can do to improve the industry at large.
An individual joking reference to soft-porn means nothing on it's own, and every man or woman who thinks about it logically knows this. But cumulatively, we live in an atmosphere polluted by certain conceptions of the appropriate and inappropriate roles for women and men. Women are to be soft, caring, emotional, certainly not abstract, rational and detached from their bodies. Women are told by society, via institutions like Playboy, to be thin, pert, sensuous, concerned about their appearance. And we're surprised they don't embrace a culture that celebrates 24 hour hackathons fueled by pizza and Jolt-Cola?I'm not surprised either, but I don't think women avoid a culture of hackathons because they are watching their weight. Let's be serious -- there are a huge number of societal factors in how a person chooses their profession, and the relation between body image and computer science is not at the top of that list. Is it discriminatory not to offer healthy snacks at user group meetings? Would healthy snacks help bring in more women? This line of thinking is silly.
Body issues are important to women's role in society at large, but it's really not important to this discussion.
Showing stats from playboy is not "insulting" - which is a meaningless idea, easy to dismiss - but it is another release into the memeosphere of contaminated ideas. Playboy is in the same position as a factory pumping out sulfur-dioxide. It makes it harder for everyone to breath an air free of these stereotypes.
[...]
BTW : the "protecting women == insulting women" argument is crap. Harm is harm. Whether it's "wrong" to harm someone or not is independent of their capacity to absorb your attack. We wouldn't argue that I can rob your house because it's insulting to assume you don't have the economic capability to recover from the loss. Or that racist language shouldn't be discouraged because it's insulting to assume that blacks can't rise above being called "nigger". (Or maybe there are people who argue that second.)
Showing a naked woman is not the same as being racist. Again, this is where the argument becomes unreasonable. If someone made misogynist jokes or statements in their presentation, people should walk out, and they should be very angry at the person. Porn is not hate. I would be bothered if someone was racist or misogynistic even if they didn't express their opinion, or if they couched their language in ways to make it seem acceptable. I am not bothered that someone looks at porn. I'm not going to be offended if someone says that they themselves look at porn. You still shouldn't put actual porn up on the screen, but it's a reasonable item of discussion anywhere where the internet or the web is being discussed.
Eventually, in the very long term, you hope that less of this propaganda => women feel less pressurized to conform to these social norms => women with more freedom to explore the possible space of career opportunities => more women in IT. (Not because more women in IT is necessarily an important goal, but because their absensce is likely to be a symptom of their lack of freedom.)It's a different issue, but I don't entirely believe this line of thinking. Women aren't in IT because women choose not to be in IT. That is a choice they make as individuals -- sometimes for bad reasons (e.g. fear or pressure), but often for completely reasonable reasons (they don't want to sit in front of a computer screen for eight hours a day). That women and men make very different choices does not necessarily imply that there is coercion involved. That women on the whole tend not to go into certain professions does not necessarily mean that they are victims of any societal injustice.
# Ian Bicking
[quote]
Showing a naked woman is not the same as being racist. Again, this is where the argument becomes unreasonable. If someone made misogynist jokes or statements in their presentation, people should walk out, and they should be very angry at the person. Porn is not hate. I would be bothered if someone was racist or misogynistic even if they didn't express their opinion, or if they couched their language in ways to make it seem acceptable. I am not bothered that someone looks at porn. I'm not going to be offended if someone says that they themselves look at porn. You still shouldn't put actual porn up on the screen, but it's a reasonable item of discussion anywhere where the internet or the web is being discussed.
[/quote]
Ian, the reason I'm pushing the pollution analogy here is to get away from terminology like "hate" and "insult". Sure, porn is not hate. But it may nevertheless be harmful.
Your assumption seems to be that if there's no malign intention behind something then it's OK. But there's no malign intention behind pumping out sulphur-dioxide into the atmosphere either. It's just a side-effect of a perfectly acceptable intention : wanting to make more widgets. The same can be true of pornography; we just want to stimulate ourselves. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have malign consequences.
- [quote]
- Eventually, in the very long term, you hope that less of this propaganda => women feel less pressurized to conform to these social norms => women with more freedom to explore the possible space of career opportunities => more women in IT. (Not because more women in IT is necessarily an important goal, but because their absensce is likely to be a symptom of their lack of freedom.)
It's a different issue, but I don't entirely believe this line of thinking. Women aren't in IT because women choose not to be in IT. That is a choice they make as individuals -- sometimes for bad reasons (e.g. fear or pressure), but often for completely reasonable reasons (they don't want to sit in front of a computer screen for eight hours a day). That women and men make very different choices does not necessarily imply that there is coercion involved. That women on the whole tend not to go into certain professions does not necessarily mean that they are victims of any societal injustice.
[/quote]
Actually, I'd say this is the core issue. Sure, you don't believe that there's a causal connection between soft-porn in culture and women not wanting to go into IT, or any other constraints on women's freedom to choose a career. I don't know if there is or not. But isn't this the main point worth discussing? Is there or isn't there?
Personally, I think we can hypothesize many causal paths (of which my hackathon is a slightly frivolous, but not entirely absurd example) which can't be dismissed out-of-hand. Even Eby believes, and has written a lot, that the mind is hackable, that we can train ourselves in new patterns of thought and behaviour. If you believe that, it shouldn't be hard to accept that we get a lot of default configuration from watching how other people parse the world within our culture. And that should be enough to make us sceptical of some naive picture of women "making a choice" independent of any external influence. Is this injustice? It depends. I think if the space of options appears larger to men than to women, and that's due to our cultural defaults rather than real insurmountable physical constraints, then, yes, there's a kind of injustice there.
"""Even Eby believes, and has written a lot, that the mind is hackable, that we can train ourselves in new patterns of thought and behaviour."""
That's a major oversimplification. A big part of what I write about is that there's quite a lot of the mind that is not open to direct extension or hacking, that requires "workarounds" at the conscious or extraconscious (e.g. external systems) level.
An example of this is the idea that men looking at porn are "objectifying" women. The notion of "objectifying" presumes that women are seen as persons first, and then treated as objects. However, this is based on an erroneous assumption about the level on which images are processed. Men have hard-wired pleasure responses to certain visual stimuli, so it's erroneous to attribute any sort of intention to men's response to those images. It simply feels good to look, and it doesn't matter what the man thinks. The most a man can do about the response is to berate himself or feel guilty about the fact of pleasure; there is no way to turn that pleasure response off, only to create various forms of other responses that occur after the fact.
Thus, it makes no sense to me to talk about objectification as if there was some intention on the part of men to "treat women as objects", and this produces non-useful assumptions and behaviors on the part of people whose intention is for men to treat women better. It's more useful for men to learn to accept their pleasure responses and let them go, than to have to spend time fighting them or blaming themselves as bad people for having "objectified" a woman by their response to visual stimuli.
This is really only the tip of the iceberg with respect to non-conscious hardwired responses men have towards women. It's not just pleasure that's activated by the image of an attractive woman, studies have shown that greater helpfulness and risk-taking behavior are also enabled, as well as protectiveness to the female in question. These responses are unconscious and involuntary; they do not require the man's awareness or consent, and are unrelated to the man or woman's availability as a sex partner. The testosterone level of men exposed to the pheromones of ovulating women are also automatically elevated for about 30 minutes, which affects behavior on many levels.
Unfortunately, many branches of feminist thought begin with an assumption that all of these behaviors and responses are voluntary. That is, they attribute to men's actions the intentions that a woman would have to have in order to display the same behaviors, and come to erroneous conclusions. It's this kind of thought that leads to the idea that porn is in some way harmful or toxic because it "encourages men to objectify women". But the reality is that men have their own ability to separate impulse and behavior, and porn is neutral with respect to that. Jerks will be jerks, with or without porn. Likewise, gentlemen will be gentlemen. Porn is 100% a red herring that distracts from the real issue, which is helping men learn empathy.
See, it's not that most jerks are malicious (to women or men), it's that they don't know how any other people feel, because they project their own feelings on to everybody else. A jerk plays mean practical jokes on people, because they're funny to him. A jerk feels arousal in the presence of a woman, and projects that arousal as being shared by the woman, leading to harassment and even rape.
These things aren't because the jerk is "objectifying"; it's because he lacks actual empathy. And today's "sensitivity" training and sexual harassment workshops are piss-poor at actually teaching it to anyone. To be honest, I'm not sure to what extent it can be taught, because to learn it, you'd have to want to. And if you're a jerk, you just go through life wondering why everybody else is so uptight, can't take a joke, etc.
This is why I treat some basic empathy as being essential for hiring into a team. I don't know if it's teachable even in theory, let alone in practice, so from a business perspective I can't afford to hire people without it.
I think you've been quite unfair in the way you've summarised Richard's post. If you look behind the words a little, or read the HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux document he's linked to, its not about one particular incident, or even porn in general.
Second, I find it a little upsetting that you call Richard's response "patronizing." He apologised once, on behalf of the committee, for allowing a talk that included provocative, openly sexualized and titillating pictures of women, on a six metre screen, in front of 150 people. His apology was concise, and to the point. I would also say, "professional", but he wasn't being paid. Richard did not condemn CPAN, and he did not cast aspersions upon the morals of the presenter. Like you say, porn is inappropriate in such a setting, so is it that's patronizing about an apology from the committee for allowing it? Please get off his back.
And people wonder why it's so hard to find committee members to run OSS conferences. (OK, yes, I know, it's not just because the general public feel free to complain and nitpick, but that's certainly part of it.)
Third - and tangentially - how can you say that we need to be more accepting of one another's sensibilities in one sentence, and, in the very next, write that "Acme::Playmate is not inappropriate in any way", like it was a self evident fact?
Finally, I agree with you that we need to be careful when we declare particular lines of thought and behaviour "bad". However, I don't really see any way around it in this case. Whatever the setting, if men start acting like they're at the pub with their mates, then - more often than not - women are going to feel uncomfortable and leave. I think OSS communities can work toward being more friendly to women without becoming dull and disingenuous, because I've been part of communities that have managed it.
I also agree that more needs to be done than simply avoid giving offense. The HOWTO has some ideas, but I know - from your previous posts - that you've thought a lot about this, and I'd like to hear your ideas.
Thanks, Alan, for getting to this before I did. Claiming that Richard's response was patronising is the worst sort of nonsense. Some inappropriate material that offended more than a few people in the audience was shown. At the first available opportunity Richard, acting as Program Chair, apologised on behalf of the conference for the talk.
This was extremely professional of him, not "patronising". If OSS conferences (particularly volunteer-run ones like OSDC, PyCon and YAPC) want to actually be treated seriously, they could do a lot worse than bear this example in mind. You can't plan for all contingencies. You can, however, step up and deal with things when they go pear-shaped.
I'm not going to comment any further on this, although I have considered it - but I'd suggest you actually ask the people who were in the talk (particularly the women) as to whether they were offended. Hint: It wasn't just a couple of booby shots that was the be-all and end-all of the offensive material. Hint 2: The women (and some of the men) I've spoken to were offended, and in some cases, very offended.
"""Claiming that Richard's response was patronising is the worst sort of nonsense"""
For the record, I said that Richard's post was patronising, not his response. However, if his response mentioned women specifically (as opposed to saying the porn was inappropriate), then it was patronising, too, and counterproductive to his goals (for more than one reason).
I find it interesting that all of the people involved in this discussion, now including me, are men. Have any of you any connection to or involvement in the ACM Committee on Women in Computing? http://women.acm.org/.