
How to educate me about prejudice in the open-source community - nayuki
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6758
======
Certhas
So I'm coming at this with more of a background in academia than open source
culture. So these are to some degree outsider comments:

If your culture makes it hard for people to enter, then demanding that people
prove they belong to it before they can comment on their difficulties is an
immunization strategy.

Demanding strong evidence for the difficult to measure impact of social habits
of the in-group on outsiders is a good way to eliminate debate.

What he is saying is reasonable for dealing with discrimination within the
scene (and particularly point 5 is very important). It is useless when talking
about the place of the scene within wider society. Why are girls less likely
to develop interests in computers? I doubt that this has anything to do with
actual sexist judgements within the scene. But I do believe that it has a lot
to do with the overall social norms of the scene being aligned with male
gender roles. Ideally we just get rid of gender roles, but we are far from
that. In the meantime we need practical solutions.

Finally and most importantly: The idea that the open source community is so
meritocratic as to be immune to biases that have repeatedly been shown to
exist, for example in academic mathematics, is ignorant at best. Wilfully so
at worst. It shows an anti-scientific mindset on this particular question that
belies the "show me the evidence" rhetoric.

~~~
ummnooo
"Finally and most importantly: The idea that the open source community is so
meritocratic as to be immune to biases that have repeatedly been shown to
exist, for example in academic mathematics, is ignorant at best. Wilfully so
at worst. It shows an anti-scientific mindset on this particular question that
belies the "show me the evidence" rhetoric.”

YES VERY MUCH THIS!

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ebbv
What a terrible post. It is no wonder ESR can claim to have never seen cases
of discrimination with such a list of demands any victim must pass before even
being heard.

People do make false accusations. But you know what is a lot more common than
that in the world at large? Actual discrimination.

The problem is that most of the time Person A discriminates against Person B,
Person A will swear up and down they have done nothing wrong and had no ill
intent. That is what makes it such a difficult issue and one where people need
to be open minded when hearing from people who do not share their life
experience or social status.

It's a lot more healthy and beneficial in my view to approach any complaints
with an open mind. Obviously in the end we have to try to come to terms with
the facts, but when you put up a bunch of barriers before a victim can even be
heard you are protecting the status quo. Which probably sounds great if you
are a person who is really comfortable, but might not be so great for someone
else.

~~~
moon_priestess
> People do make false accusations. But you know what is a lot more common
> than that in the world at large? Actual discrimination.

This is really all that should need to be said. Anyone who takes ESR's claims
of mental illness of accusers for granted but refuses to accept the claims of
those who experience discrimination is part of the problem.

------
moon_priestess
I think this post is a perfect example of bias in the open source community.
Who the hell wants to put up with people like ESR who use ridiculous lists
like this to determine if you've been _actually_ been discriminated against or
not?

Obviously ESR is not a socially normal person. Most people can see that from
his history and I don't want to beat him up for that because I don't think
it's his fault: He just came that way. This post is still utter trash though
and an example of the sort of attitude that pushes women and minorities out of
the community.

~~~
mjolk
Drop the identity politics and re-read. This is him saying "if you claim
prejudice, show me the evidence and that it's not a manipulation for personal
gain."

~~~
Certhas
No. It's really not. It's him demanding exacting standards of evidence for
people even raising the topic, while ignoring vast scientific literature on
persistent biases.

There are difficult conversations to be had about how we should go about being
inclusive, and what exactly that should mean, but this post is a terrible
starting point.

How do you proof that you didn't get a spot to speak at a conference because
your equivalent work was valued slightly lower by some organizers, especially
when the organizer was not aware they were making gendered assessments?

How do you measure people who decided not to engage with a particular
community due to unnecessarily adversarial technical discussions. Especially
before the background of women not interrupting men at nearly the rate as men
interrupt women. This has nothing to do with the technical merits of what is
said and everything with who gets to speak.

Whenever you measure these things using science you find that gendered
behaviour is absolutely pervasive. Sometimes you learn that things aren't
gendered in the way they first appear. For example it often turns out that
women discriminate nearly as much as men do against other women. What we can't
do is pretend all of that doesn't exist simply because the discrimination
isn't manifesting itself as overtly and blatantly as it used to.

This is an important achievement by the way. The fact that overt blatant
sexism is almost universally condemned is after all what makes the charge:
"That's sexist!" so problematic.

~~~
mjolk
> How do you proof that you didn't get a spot to speak at a conference because
> your equivalent work was valued slightly lower by some organizers,
> especially when the organizer was not aware they were making gendered
> assessments?

The way I read what ESR wrote, if you have someone that has a demonstrable
history of technical contributions (or per his second point, other
_interesting_ factors that make the person notable), then it's objective
information that can be used when saying "wait, why isn't Person on the
schedule?" Evidence is strong and interesting; identity politics or
accusations, far less so.

> How do you measure people who decided not to engage with a particular
> community due to unnecessarily adversarial technical discussions. Especially
> before the background of women not interrupting men at nearly the rate as
> men interrupt women. This has nothing to do with the technical merits of
> what is said and everything with who gets to speak.

This is back in the realm of anecdotes. Men interrupt men. Women interrupt
women. Vice versa. Some people are jerks, often on accident. ESR is talking
about open source culture and, for most participation in it, people only know
about your physical identity what you offer.

> Whenever you measure these things using science you find that gendered
> behaviour is absolutely pervasive.

If you can link provide actual evidence and not the kind of poor-method
pseudo-science that comes out of gender studies, then I suspect this would
fall into ESR's:

> If you pass all these filters, maybe you have something to teach me, and
> maybe you’ll get to see what I’m like when I am righteously pissed off
> because hacker norms have been violated in a serious way.

> This is an important achievement by the way. The fact that overt blatant
> sexism is almost universally condemned is after all what makes the charge:
> "That's sexist!" so problematic.

Speaking from my perspective, and not ESR's (or speaking from/to his article),
this is where I think evidence and dispatching of witch hunts in tech is
important -- give evidence of _real_ sexism in tech and we can fight it
together. If it's constantly trying to blow something out of proportion for
personal gain or is something entirely without evidence, "that's sexist!" is
going to start falling on deaf ears.

~~~
Certhas
No, simply evidence does not pass ESRs filter. It has to be evidence collected
by insiders, not outside scientists who don't understand how things function.

There are plenty of studies that show that in collective discussions of womens
qualifications are questioned more, but not in a gendered way. Questions like:
What was the role of the supervisor in the thesis? are not sexist. That they
are raised more with respect to women is.

I could spend an hour on google collecting studies (e.g. a meta study on
interruptions [1] the studies on talking time are methodologically simpler and
with very clear significance and large effect size, I am not aware of
convincing criticism of the studies on the perception of interruptions, e.g.
[2], a study that got some attention recently actually had the result that
when it comes to interruptions, men interrupt women at about the same rate as
women interrupt women, it's just that women interrupt men less Table 1 in [3],
etc... again, the literature shows pervasive biases (some strong, some not) of
a complex and varied nature). But honestly, I don't see the point, you just
dismissed decades worth of studies out of hand. You called these studies
anecdotes, but your gold standard of evidence seems to be individual events.
When really we are in a much more subtle phase of the struggle for equality.

From your comment I don't think you really care about scientific evidence on
this question. Or you haven't bothered educating yourself. Evidence of _real_
sexism is massive, and everywhere. It just doesn't look the way you (and maybe
many a SJW, too) maybe imagine it to look. It doesn't show up (usually) in the
form of individual events that can be proven to be sexist, but it shows up in
social patterns all over the place.

[1]
[http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018802521676](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018802521676)
[2]
[http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/si.1995.18.1.59?mag=man-...](http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/si.1995.18.1.59?mag=man-
interrupting) [3]
[http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0261927X14533197](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0261927X14533197)

------
ummnooo
Thank goodness we are only talking about felt and percieved stigma, imagine if
this guy was talking about rape, police violence or some other atrocity.
Basically it’s a Gaslighing 101 list of how best not to ever see
discrimination and pretend it is everyone else’s problem.

~~~
mjolk
It's pretty crazy that you're trying to equate this with rape or violence.

~~~
moon_priestess
It's the exact same attitude that is often extended to rape and violence.

~~~
mjolk
The suggestion that they're the same is histrionic.

If you mean "evidence being desired is wrong", then please do not show up to
serve on a jury.

~~~
moon_priestess
This is exactly the same thought process used when saying most women who claim
they've been raped weren't really raped and they just did it to manipulate
someone. Obviously the severity of the accusation is different but it's the
same thought process.

Also, stop all of this talk about a jury. This is about addressing issues in a
community. It's not a legal proceeding. OBVIOUSLY in a court of law we'd need
strong evidence to convict someone, but we're not trying to convict an
individual here. We're just trying to get people like you and ESR to stop
claiming our experiences are either invalid because we're mentally ill or
entirely constructed because we're trying to manipulate you. It's gaslighting
exactly as ummnooo said.

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
Please also remember that ESR has previously written "One was: their skin
color looks fecal. The other was: their bone structure doesn’t look human. And
they’re just off-reference enough to be much more creepy than if they looked
less like people, like bad CGI or shambling undead in a B movie. When I paid
close enough attention, these were the three basic data under the revulsion;
my hindbrain thought it was surrounded by alien shit zombies."

------
mjolk
This is a great post. I'm not sure that I consider ESR to be a "tribal elder",
but I imagine I'll be linking to this article at some point in the coming
year.

I hadn't previously read his article on "kafkatrapping"
([http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122)), but it
rings eerily true to how it feels to be the target of a manipulation attempt.

