The subject of this article is that of gender issues in IT.

I reused some of this material for my article compilation book
Tech Book 1 - Published articles Oct 2006 - June 2008, ISBN 978-0-9560813-1-5.

Some of the information in this online version is out of date. The best way to read the most uptodate version of this content is to either use the free Adobe PDF excerpt below, download free complete e book, or purchase a print copy of the book.

A look at two gender tech articles (Exerpt from full book. Free download - 172k. Note that this version has the same page numbering as the print book and you can cite it as a print source).

Tech Book 1 - Published articles Oct 2006 - June 2008 (full e book - 6.5 megs. Free download. Smaller page margins for better reading on screen.)

Tech Book 1 - Published articles Oct 2006 - June 2008 (Find out more or purchase print copy of book).

I keep this version online for legacy purposes.

[edit: blog post about this article - OSNews: Article rejected]
Part 1 of this article is a quick overview, featuring some general observations of feminism in general.

Part 2 applies some of these observations to an analysis of two recent tech articles and an exploration of the issues that they raise.

The two articles under discussion are:

SCALE 5x: Women in Open Source

The hidden engineering gender gap

Part 1 - On feminism and other things that make you want to shout “Kaaahn!”.

Introduction

There isn’t room in this article to make a fully comprehensive attack on every part and every school of feminism but I’ll give you a quick example. Remember, this isn’t political correctness and it isn’t feminism: I am not telling you what to think, I am showing you what I think. You can take a look at this example, mull it over and come to your own conclusions.

The Feminist Flip

I’ll give you a quick example of something that I call The Feminist Flip:

A point raised by some recent tech articles is that men are unfairly over-represented in some occupations. The argument is that this situation is unfair because men and women are equal, comrade! This argument often used a justification for compensatory, affirmative action.

If men are over-represented in a desirable job, this is proof that they must have received some sort of privilege. This must be true because, if men and women are equals, men could not have a greater level of aptitude in a given role. A further point that could be made is that, if women are under-represented in a given role, they must have been oppressed or disadvantaged in some way.

I’ll summarise this with the following statement:

Men and women are equals in terms of intellect and emotion. Therefore, if women are under-represented in a given type of job which is universally desirable, this must be proof of disadvantage.

Or more analytically:

Given that Sex A and Sex B are equal, if Sex A is more prominently represented than Sex B within a desirable role, then Sex B must have suffered disadvantage and Sex A must have experienced privilege.

The two above statements are in agreement with my own sensibilities. Let’s test that statement by applying it to a different context. If a statement cannot be generalised, the statement and perhaps the sentiment that inspired it have been poorly conceived.Transposing this reasonable sounding statement to a different context reveals a dichotomy of feminism. A paradox, in other words.

It is observable that men are more prominently represented in the prison system. Few would argue that being in prison is a desirable role. Therefore, women are over-represented in the desirable role, that of being free from imprisonment.

So, if men and women are equal, these men must have been tremendously oppressed into such an undesirable role. A feminist might explain this away by stating that men have a natural predisposition towards criminality. But the core value that supports feminist argument on the subject of female disadvantage in the workplace is that “men and women are equal”. If men and women are equal, then the overwhelming correlation between maleness and criminality must be due to an external influence that acts upon the given individuals. Either the character, intelligence and personality of men and women is equal or it isn’t. It can’t be both.

It can’t be that men and women are sometimes equal and sometimes not. There is no biological explanation for the fact of male over representation within the prison system that could not also serve as an explanation that men might be better at things like business, science or IT.

If feminists believe that men and women are fundamentally different, perhaps due to the amount of testosterone present within a man’s body (or due to brain topography or genetics), why is it automatically unfair that men be over-represented in some jobs? The feminist proof that it was unfair and that compensatory, affirmative action is justified, was that men and women were of equal ability!

Victim-orientated feminism.

Most feminism is ‘victim orientated’. That is, every situation is given an interpretation in which the woman is a victim of oppression. Unfortunately, this is far from harmless because to be a victim, a person must have an oppressor and feminist theory normally demands that this oppressor be personified. The agent of this oppression is nearly always a man or men in general.

Part 2 - A Look At Two Tech Articles.

I’ve decided to comment on two recent tech articles. They are:

“SCALE 5x: Women in Open Source by Jem Matzan

and

The hidden engineering gender gap By Joyce Park

As with a lot of feminism, both articles suffer from something that I call “roving subject”. Sometimes the subject would seem to be the barriers which prevent women from entering into commercial software development, and in other places, the subject becomes the lack of female involvement in FOSS development. When the switch between the two subjects is made, the implication is that what is a reasonable assumption for one situation must also be applicable to another.

My judgement of “SCALE 5x: Women in Open Source” is that it’s a rant. On the other hand, in my humble opinion, “The hidden engineering gender gap” is an interesting exploration of the issues but ends with a conclusion that I find unsupportable.

SCALE 5x: Women in Open Source

Earlier in the month, OSNews linked to this article. I think that it’s fair to characterise the bias of the article as ‘feministic’. It’s written by a woman and is an account of her experiences of attending some talks given by women on the subject of female involvement in open source.

One thing that I think that this article, in common with other articles covering this subject, overlook is that an analysis of female involvement in open source software provides an interesting opportunity to explore the broader issues of female involvement in IT. One of the attractive aspects of taking part in FOSS development is the lack of barriers: you don’t have to ‘get the job’; there are no academic entry requirement; commitment is minimal - you feel like doing a bit of coding? Go do it.

So, for example, if I were to make the following statement:

“Women are less likely to choose a career in software development because they would be less likely to study CS.”

we can test that statement by applying it to the world of open source development. Within the world of FOSS development, there are no educational entry requirements. There are plenty of examples of people who contribute to FOSS yet do not have a degree. Even amongst those who are graduates, many of those have a degree in something other than CS.From this, we can see that there exists a context in which: people code software, there exist no barriers in the form of educational entry requirements and yet female involvement is minimal. So, it’s reasonable to conclude that simply removing barriers (real or imagined) by implementing affirmative action in education probably wont be very effective.

We could also use observations of FOSS to test a hypothesis such as:

“Men are attracted to IT work as it is it is relatively high salary compared to a job such as being an infant school teacher.”

Applied to the FOSS we can see that there are lots of men who contribute without any financial reward.

The hidden engineering gender gap

The author of this article seems to have reached many of the same conclusions as myself in regard to the problems that prevent more women from becoming involved in IT. That is, the problems are that women (in general) seem to lack a fundamental interest in computer programming.

She says:

“Everyone in professional or Open Source software development has worked with countless male colleagues who are essentially self-taught, lacking all or most formal training in computer science, and in not a few cases bereft of any post-secondary degree whatsoever.”

and in the final paragraph of part 1, she moots some interesting questions about the issue of women in IT:

What opportunities might be lost if we continue to do nothing about the gender disparity in software engineering, or simply wait for long-term educational efforts to take root at some unspecified future date?

[...]

For those who care about women in the technology industry, I would argue that these questions should be very pressing and our ignorance of their answers should be equally troubling.

However, as I stated before, no exploration of gender and workplace has much value if it only examines the conditions affecting 50% of the people in the world. The real issue at hand is the problem of over or under representation of the two sexes in various parts of the world of work. It would be both immoral and meaningless, in my opinion, to expend effort in order to get more women into computer programming and to at the same time expend no efforts in exploring the issues involved in creating more male infant school teachers, for example. Part 2 of her article contains the real meat and the content that I find more contentious.

Women seem to be disproportionately attracted to careers where they feel they can help others ? for instance medicine (which of course requires rigorous, highly competitive scientific training) ? rather than careers that promise high pay or entrepreneurial possibility.

Another explanation that fits the facts would be that women are not forced into bread-winning roles in the way that men are. Most women would feel no ‘dishonor’ in taking a low hours, low responsibility job for example. Women often demand a job that will fit around their life aspirations; they may want to take a five year sabbatical for example. They may want to work a 16 hour week. Many of these ‘caring’ jobs fit this profile.

Also, I can see how a subject such as sociology is an ‘interesting’ subject compared to something like business studies or mathematics. Maybe, many men would like to study such a subject that would allow them to work with young children, for example, but might decide not to as such a career would not be a high salary one.

In the final section of the article, the author begins to pursue a course of reasoning that I find objectionable: that of affirmative action.

She begins by stating that:

Faced with this unpalatable conclusion, we can choose to blame the individuals; we can choose to put our faith in long-term efforts; or we can choose to treat the symptom without necessarily fixing the root causes.

That is, perhaps, a not unreasonable assessment of the different possible approaches. I think that she summarises the issue very well. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, the suggestion is that we should choose to treat the symptom without fixing the root causes! The treatment that she moots is an affirmative action based program of creating female orientated educational courses.

Affirmative Action

Both of the articles seemed to favour some sort of “affirmative action” in terms of providing encouragement to women wanting to study IT. The ploy here is the classic feministic “restrict any investigation to exactly 50% of what is going on”. Women don’t need special, extra facilities put in place to encourage them to study for a degree. In the academic period 2005/2006 there were about 353,000 people studying at degree level as full time students in the UK. Of that, about 205,000 (58%) were women and 148,000 (41%) were men. My source for these statistics is the Higher Education Statistics Agency website. The statistics for North America are similar. In a nutshell, in England and the US, more women study at degree level than do men.

One counter-argument to this point would be that feminists only want the extra resources and privileges in order to reduce barriers for subjects that are currently male-dominated. I consider this argument to be a weak one. Referring to the HESA website statistics again reveals that men are underrepresented within, for example, the social sciences.

I for one believe that it would be for the betterment of society if men were better represented in jobs such as counselling and nursery school teaching; I think that this would do more for society as a whole than the goal of getting more women into IT. However, I would accept an initiative that identified areas in which either sex were under represented and that made attempts to provide the right sort of encouragement to redress these inequalities. Such a program could be extended to include race, perhaps.

Feminism In The Forums

A point that was raised in the “SCALE 5x: Women in Open Source” article was that women apparently face barriers within the FOSS development communities. I quote:

Not only did the majority of the predominantly female attendance agree with Peters’ compilations of data, but several had appalling stories about men behaving terribly toward them on free software mailing lists, in IRC channels, and indeed even in real life at Linux User Groups (LUGs).

[...]

One woman, close to tears, told a story of how she was turned away from her first LUG meeting because some jerk there told her that it was a Linux-related gathering, not a singles event.”

I’m certainly not going to call any of the women who related those anecdotes lairs. However, the implication of what is being said is that phenomenon of that type is typical in that type of environment. The first thing that strikes me about such a statement is that it is not in keeping with my own experiences. Indeed, I would have thought it far more typical and characteristic that women in technical forums would receive a somewhat favourable treatment.Perhaps the incidents were the result of a misunderstanding; I don’t think that I’m being unfair when I make the observation that feminists can sometimes be a bit, shall we say, over-sensitive.

Maybe these incidents were the result of misinterpretation? Surely, everyone has witnessed a user of a forum who makes a fool of themselves and storms off because no one else seems to ‘get it’. I bet that most of us have, unknowingly, been the fool in that situation at one time in our lives.

As with much feminism, as a study, her report isn’t very useful in scientific terms. The data gathering method was that of “asking people”. At such an event as the one detailed in the article, there would at all times be an air of expectation and consequently a certain type of response, inspired by that expectation. A question such as “Who here has been the victim of sexism in a technical forum?” is a leading question that is loaded with such expectation.

Had I been sitting in the audience, would I have raised my hand, stood up and said:

“It is my opinion that contribution to FOSS is often noble and altruistic. Women benefit from this sort of work and yet contribute very little. Given that there are no real barriers, why don’t more women contribute or even start their own projects? The only requirement of getting started is a computer with an Internet connection.”

Of course not. I would have been afraid to present such an idea in the context of such a forum. I would probably have been booed out of the room for being a sexist.Obviously, the women who attended this talk were not representative of the general population or even representative of all women who are interested in IT. Women are no more stupid than men and many of them have no time for feminism. A woman who calls her own shots in life, makes her own mind up about the issues and consequently has no time for feminism, for example, wouldn’t have attended such a talk.

I’m not going to carry out a scientifically study of the treatment of women in technical forums. However, you can make some observations for yourself. Do you often witness women being treated badly in technical forums? In the case of such forums that have a rating system for comments, do women normally have a lower score than men?

Along these lines, it’s worth noting that when the “SCALE 5x: Women in Open Source” article was published on OSNews, some women took part in the debate in the comments section. One thing I noticed about those women is that the average comment score associated with each of their accounts was conspicuously high. Surely, if in such an environment women were always abused, ignored and overruled, their average comment scores would be low rather than high? Although far from being a definitive study, such an ad-hoc approach does at least contain a numerical element. This outcome does seem to support my own, informal observation of women’s participation in technical forums: that they are more commonly the beneficiaries of favourable treatment.

In the article, it is reported that Jean T. Anderson, an attendee of the conference, stated that she felt that these were the main barriers to female involvement in software development:

• Women frequently don’t know how to get started with a project.
• They are afraid of looking stupid.
• They don’t want to be flamed on the public mailing lists or IRC.
• The feel that they do not speak English well enough to participate.
• They are uncomfortable with publicly accessible and archived email lists.
• They are not comfortable “selling” their ideas to the group.
• Sexist jokes and demeaning comments create a negative atmosphere for women.

And I would say that each of those points is either simply a falsehood or a claim that could be could be answered with “It’s the same for men”. Strangely, the comments of Anderson seemed a bit confused from that point onwards. The article first states that:

Anderson explained that these perceived barriers were mostly unfounded fears, myths, and cultural prejudices, and proceeded to explain that in practice, there were few things to fear,[...]

which sounds sensible. But the article then goes on to say that:

Anderson charged us all to be intolerant of all comments on free software development IRC channels and mailing lists that demean women, reminding us that such behavior harms men as well as women.

So, in summary, this phenomena does not exist and also must be confronted whenever it is encountered. It sounds to me as though Anderson was trapped between representing the views of both feminism and common sense at the same time!

Fighting Against Feminism: Why Fight?

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” - Edmund Burke

One good justification for the fight against feminism is one of female liberation. Women could be forgiven for reading feminist nonsense about how victimised and oppressed they would be if they had a go at getting involved in open source software. Or, a woman with an interest in computers might, quite reasonably, when considering Computer Science as a degree course, look into Internet based resources for women study IT at degree level. Unfortunately, she’s likely to come across feministic, polemic nonsense that assures her that she would be the victim of the male conspiracy against women. Consequently, she might never give it a go.I’m not blaming the women who have been taken in by the propaganda, as victim-oriented feminism is sugar coated. The idea that every situation has a fitting interpretation in which women have no control over their own lives due to the villainous oppression of men has an understandable appeal.

If you’re a man, ask yourself this question: if someone offered you a theory which explained that people like you were innately superior and that any instance of apparent lack of superiority was the result of the thousands of years of oppression that you have, personally, be victim to, could you be forgiven for ‘going along with it’?

(If your name is Godwin, please look away for a moment.)

Chances are that if a representative of a local chapter of the Nazi party knocked on your door and then started blathering about his proof of the innate inferiority of the Jew, you’d send him away. It’s this difference between the uptake of feminism and Nazism that offers a clue as to how to fight against feminism.

Feminists are bullies and like all bullies, they are cowards. As I quoted earlier, “even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day”; it’s sugar coated and persuasive, and occasionally, a feminist idea makes sense but on balance, most feminism is nonsense. The enabling principle that allows feminism to prosper is that of chivalry. You can employ your brain and your common sense to oppose feminist propaganda. Certainly, you will be told that you are ’sexist’ every time you say something like “That explanation doesn’t make sense, it would imply that men are inferior, we aren’t” but you just have to be brave. Every feminist argument is a weak one and anyone who has been seduced by a sugar-coated but weak argument can be persuaded otherwise.

The alternative is to suddenly and unexpectedly shout “Kaaaahn!”. In my experience, most feminists will become frightened and run away at that point.

(c) 2007 Michael Reed