Today’s The Day

In a few days time will be International Women’s Day. Excuse me? What’s that? We need a special day to remind people we exist? Have we not moved on from needing this kind of positive discrimination? So far as I can see, it being International Women’s Day will make no difference. Will I get a card? Will the female driver jokes stop? Will the invisible barriers to women in various careers and hobbies suddenly disappear? Will any of the oppressed women of the world get any increased respect and recognition on or because of this day? No, of course not – for one thing, it’s far too broad a subject to be of much use in specific situations. We have an entirely pointless Special Day just to hang around and devalue all the meaningful Special Days. Well, I can’t say that I feel particularly Special.

Yesterday was St David’s Day. Here is a Special Day with some history and at least some meaning. Hurrah for all the Welsh people celebrating their heritage, and hurrah for the Christians remembering their history.

The Specialness of recent days that means most to me, however, is that on 1st March, it was Self Injury Awareness Day. This day is important because self injury is very misunderstood, and if its existence can help people understand a little better, then it is a good thing. People assume that if you’re going to cut yourself deep enough to bleed, there is something fundamentally wrong with you and you’re going to cut yourself deep enough to die. Over the years I’ve known a few people who have self harmed. I know from having been around them that it is not a mental illness, it is not just teenage angst, it is not a failed suicide attempt and it is not, in and of itself, a problem – it is a coping technique. They don’t do it for kicks and giggles, they do it because they feel driven to do it by some other, underlying issue. Sometimes, the emotional pain inside is easier to deal with if it’s translated into physical pain outside. So if you discover that someone you know has deliberately hurt themselves, don’t act shocked and horrified, don’t run for an ambulance, and don’t assume that they’re going to do any serious damage. Instead, be prepared to listen and try to understand what’s behind it. You might find their reasoning surprisingly rational.

STFU

Dave Neary’s post got me thinking. There’s a huge amount of truth in the open letter he linked to has a lot of truth in it. I’ve been thinking about the people who dominate the LUG meets I’ve been to. All of the people who spring to mind are men. Now, partly, this is due to the simple numbers game – there have been more men than women at every LUG meet I’ve been to. However, I don’t think it’s just that – even when there are women present in reasonable numbers, they generally take a quieter role. A lot of what that letter goes on to say is about formalising processes in meetings that are designed to achieve something. I got to two kinds of LUG meet – serious ones with a proper speaker, and social events.

At the serious ones, the speaker has always been given the respect they deserve and have generally been allowed to conduct the meeting as they see fit, but there have been occasions when one person (invariably male) has decided that they need to say almost as much as the speaker. Sometimes it’s purely because that person is particularly interested, and therefore asks questions and allows the speaker time to answer. Sometimes it seems to be because they like the sound of their own voice. I’m not sure there’s a huge amount I can do to help that directly, given anything I might do is likely to be seen as either me being a whinging woman or being just as bad as the guy trying to take over. Hopefully if people take a look at that letter and think about things they might not be that person in future.

The social events are a different breed of animal. They seem to suffer more from one or two men dominating the discussion – perhaps because they can get away with it as they have no speaker to rein them in. These events I think maybe I can do something about. None of the people who spring to mind that dominate these gatherings (and I think you know who you are) do it on purpose, and I doubt they even realise they’re doing it half the time. They also do want to hear what others have to say, you just have to fight to get their attention first. I know none of them will be at all offended at me saying “Oi! STFU!” and therefore that’s what I’m going to do. So if you’re at a LUG meet and I say that to you, it’s probably because you’re winding me up by talking over people and not letting someone else get a word in edge-ways. Please take it as it’s intended – STFU and let someone else have a turn.

I’ve been thinking

I know, it’s a dangerous thing to do, but sometimes I can’t help it. Several things have triggered this particular spasm of thought, including Kat’s blog post about Women in IT, Aq’s blog post about compromise and a discussion on the LUGRadio forum about ethics beyond software. They’re all about the same basic principle: making the world a better place.I’m a big believer in ideals. I don’t believe we’re ever likely to reach them (not least because people will never agree on what they should be), but I do believe in working towards them. So I’ve been thinking, what do I do to help the world move towards my ideals, and is it enough?

I use Linux at home and have done for a couple of years now because, among other things, I like the fact it’s Free. But is my install Free enough? Maybe Aq is right, and I should purge my system of all non-Free packages.

I believe that women can be just as capable as men at technical stuff, so I help people around me with technical stuff so they get used to the idea – I’m becoming the one people turn to in the office when things like the projector break. But should I be more proactive, rather than just taking the opportunities that arise?

I like to do my bit for the environment, so I reduce/reuse/recycle waste and have energy saving lightbulbs. But should I be doing more?

I could do everything in my power to forward these aims, but firstly I’m not convinced zealatory helps and secondly I like being able to do stuff like drive to Wolverhampton for curry with a small corner of the Linux community – and community is another ideal I hold in high regard – even though I know the exhaust fumes are Bad and Wrong. I like the convenience of microwave meals occasionally because I can spend my time doing something other than cooking, but they use a lot of packaging and I’m not convinced about their content. Too many of the things I like have negative consequences somewhere along the line, so it looks like I’m not going to be living the ideal life any time soon. I’m not sure I’ve come to any conclusions, but I think I’ve decided that the question isn’t “am I doing enough?” but “have I got the balance right?”

Manpower, or even womanpower

Sometimes, when people decide they should do something about the situation, they attack it from completely the wrong side. They start attacking percieved symptoms, instead of the root cause. They overcompensate in areas that are meaningless.

The English language is littered with words based on the word “man”. They refer to “man” as in “human” rather than “man” as in “bloke” – manpower, chairman, man hours, mankind. Every now and then, someone, almost always male, tries to suggest that we should change all these words and have feminine variants (chairwoman, postwoman, womankind…) or they amend themselves in conversation “Hello guys…and Jen.”

This annoys me for two reasons. Firstly, the words themselves are not the problem, so all it would achieve is making conversation more cumbersome and awkward. Secondly, whether a person in a particular role happens to be male or female is almost always irrelevant, so why bother drawing attention to it? Can’t we just accept that all those words refer to human and get on with more important things?

I can’t imagine a girl hobbit

For some reason that predates me and has never been explained, in our company techies are known as hobbits and we, the admin staff, are known as pixies. We’re currently recruiting hobbits, and had one potential who was female. My boss’s comment was “I can’t imagine a girl hobbit.” I considered myself very restrained by not rising to the bait and just calmly stating that I knew loads of them. I can’t quite decide if I was more annoyed by the fact it was said (and meant), or by the fact that it was said by a woman.

Women In Open Source

This blog came into being because of the Women In Open Source talk I did with Kat and Phated at LUGRadio Live the other week. So, I thought I should probably start it with something about that talk.

The main aims of the talk were to highlight the rather shocking statistic that, according to FLOSSPOLLS, only 1.5% of Open Source Contributors are women, and to get people to think about things. The fact that the gap isn’t nearly so broad in proprietary software (28% women) suggests that technology or ability that are not the (only?) problems, but it’s something fundamental in the difference between the two. What makes propreitary software and Free software different, in terms of getting involved in them, is the community surrounding them. The Free Software community is excluding women.

While it’s interesting to look at the situation objectively and try to figure out why it’s happening, I’ve no interest in pointing fingers or throwing around blame, because it won’t solve anything, and besides, I don’t believe there is anything deliberate or truely mysogynistic about what’s going on. I think it’s a general lack of regard for new members of the community coupled with and exacerbated by fundamental differences between men and women. All too often when someone goes looking for help, they get told RTFM, or that they’re asking the wrong question, or that they need to learn how to ask a question before anyone will deign to answer them. While it’s good for people to learn how to ask questions, if they’re not given a chance, they’ll never try. Besides, some people will never learn that particular skill, and I don’t think we should be excluding them from the community completely, unless we want to be known as elitist.

Women tend to be less confident and less capable of putting themselves forward than men, especially in an area which is male dominated. I’ll no doubt blog about the whys and wherefores of that another time, but it does seem to be true, and it explains part of why more women than men are put off by the poor response to requests for help. Add in that the poor response can be easily misinterpretted as the men being patronising and basically telling the women that they shouldn’t get involved with things they don’t understand. Then add in the common responses to a woman turning up at a LUG meet or similar – lewd comments, assumptions of low technical ability, a room full of quiet guys unable to speak to her. This kind of thing doesn’t have to come from everybody in the community, just a small number can ruin the good efforts of everybody else.

I’m still amazed by the response the talk got – I had people from all corners of the event wanting to talk to me about it, and so did Kat and Phated. Just about every conversation I had for the rest of the day related back to the talk, and all of them gave me something new to think about. There is only one part of my thinking that hasn’t changed significantly since agreeing to do the talk, but has been considerably reaffirmed: why the situation the descrepancy exists is fascinating, but the more important question is how can we improve things?