Sun, 07 Aug 2011
Women, men, and accidentally being a jerk (at the Desktop Summit)
The first day of the Desktop Summit was yesterday, Saturday, August 6. I loved it and gave a presentation. There are two very different stories I can tell on the topic of gender equality in free software. I'll start with the bad.
It's pretty easy, in the U.S. at least, to get people of privilege to stop using terms that evoke centuries of oppression from slavery. It's harder to ask people to stop doing that to women. I'm writing this post to ask for that.
There were two different times that people I generally respect used words that historically have been used to hurt and minimize women.
"Cygnus Solutions is prostitutes." Dave Neary was delivering a talk (that I found impressively informative) called, "The cost of going it alone". When the talk covered the cost (in time and money) of getting your corporation's code into the community branch of an open-source project, he pointed out you could hire someone with the skills. Cygnus was the go-to company for that in the 1990s; to explain that Cygnus does not care who they work for, he said the sentence in bold.
"The OpenSuSE Build Service is a slut." I was at a party at a hackerspace last night. Someone who I admire for his work in free in free software, both technical and community, was joking with me about that no one should compile (or use) GTK. I riffed on the joke and remarked, "The OpenSuSE build service will build anything." He replied with the sentence in bold.
"Slut" and "prostitute" are terms that recall the objectification of women. They're terms that attempt to measure a woman's worth as a sex object.
It's not nice to the many women in attendance to bring that up.
You might not have thought this through. You might want to read one woman's take "On Sluts, Rape, and Fuckery". Give it a read.
Then, give it a rest.
The thing is, this matters all the time. That's why I have to call you two out on it.
Now for the happy story.
While watching the Desktop Summit's intern showcase, I was floored.
One hacker implemented Off-The-Record instant messaging for Telepathy. Another implemented pluggable back-ends for Getting Things GNOME, a task manager. I heard about overwhelming documentation and usability improvements to GNOME mainstays Cheese and Anjuta. In a short summer, these students made huge changes.
For most of them, this was the first time they delivered any sort of presentation. Every single talk was delivered in earnest and enthusiasm. They told us about the work they had done and what might happen in the future.
The other remarkable thing about the intern presentations was the demographics. I didn't keep count, but it seemed like as many women as men presented. We heard about hugely-important changes to documentation, code, and usability. People from central Europe, South Asia (yay), and Brazil took the stage.
I hope that is the future of free software.
There are two things I want to see for our community.
I want to know that people are respected and not reminded of centuries of oppression.
I also want to see our community grow in size and diversity.
I treat these issues as separate. We should choose respectful words when we speak not because we want more women to show up, but because it part of the expectation of decency that we should be able to expect from each other.
And I failed the community when I did not make it clear there and then that this kind of language is not okay with me. It took me a day to understand this failure, so here I am writing this blog post.
P.S. Thanks to Karen Rustad for her feedback while writing this post.
