Open Source Feminism
Last week at the Flourish conference, Angela Byron, who contributes to Drupal, gave a talk on women in free and open source software. I really liked her slides, which you can see here: women-in-floss.pdf. It was neat to see the talk about the talk beforehand on mailing lists and I’m eager to see video, or anyone’s notes on the discussion afterwards. The section where she lists horror stories is quite short, because most of them never go public, but I think it gets a point across.
Angela’s talk addressed “How to Deal with the following situations”:
* Sexist jokes
* Posting sexual material (porn, etc.)
* Verbally attacking/dismissing women (time of the month)
* Death threats
I’d include with that:
* having to go an extra mile to prove competence when men don’t
* being ignored, men only talking with each other
* constant commentary on appearance of yourself or other women
There’s a super amazing dissection of gender issues in open source on culturecat’s blog: >Gender and Open Source.
In other nerdy tech news: Blogger Beth Kanter won the first annual NTEN prize, for “most valuable person in the nonprofit tech community“. Or it might have been simply for “Fantasticness”. Way to go, Beth!
Bad Link for Gender and Open Source.
http://culturecat.net/node/889
[...] Liz Henry blogs about an amazing presentation that Angela Byron did about women in free and open-source software at the Flourish conference: Angela’s talk addressed “How to Deal with the following situations”: [...]
Thanks for the shout out! Also, thanks for pointing out the presentation.
Nice one that you got the award. Awesome.
Interesting subject.
HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux:-
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/
Womens Electronic Village Hall is hiring (but is not yet using much FOSS AFAIK)
http://www.wevh.org.uk/aboutUs/vacancies.html
I wrote on my blog (http://watchyourmouth.livejournal.com/203514.html) about an incident at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on Tuesday that got some bad press on the Silicon Valley tech gossip website that everyone reads in this neck of the woods (http://valleywag.com/tech/spock/human-females-prove-highly-illogical-253339.php)
I was called “illogical” by this website read by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and practically everyone in tech in the Silicon Valley. A commentor called me “vain”. I thought I was simply blogging and reflecting the rising level of displeasure over lack of any rebuttal about a demo made in bad taste.
I am starting to wonder how to be a feminist in technology, and most importantly, how to do it effectively. Seems what I said in the end HURT women in technology because my speaking out makes women look like hysterical man-haters who cry wolf at nothing?
Please give me your thoughts.
~ang*e
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