A friend of mine once took me along to a kind of postmodern sorority party in West Oakland. My friend was the only non-female at the party (he was DJing, and i think wanted me along as the functional equivalent of a “beard” – a “muff?”). The crowd were all peers, all about 10 years younger than me, and having a triumphant experiment with the cultural stance of lesbianism.
What blew my mind, was that everyone there was mimicking the polarisation of gendered self-representation which is in the world around them. They were either in baggy plaid shirts, jeans and shaved heads, or terribly, ostentatiously femme, long hair and lipstick and PVC miniskirts. No-one there really knew how to look at me or talk to me; you have short hair, but you’re wearing a skirt? Where do you fit? How do you fit? I spent most of my time at the party hanging out with a couple of gangster girls who didn’t fit either (long hair, but jeans and black t-shirts), who taught me to make the different West Oakland gangster hand signs, and tried to explain which ones not to make where.
Another friend took me to a transvestite party in the basement of a nondescript office building on the edge of the City. I’d never been in a scene like that before, but once my eyes refocused, i started to relax and have a great time right away. My highlight was, taking a break from the dancefloor and gossiping in a corner; my friend gleefully pointed out a particularly beautiful and unusual person across the room. “You see that girl, there? She’s really a girl!“
In the course of what i do, because i enjoy talking about the toys that i make, i speak at a lot of open-source oriented technical conferences. More than once, especially when i started out, i’ve been billed as ‘Mr.’ on the programme. It often seems to be a default assumption about any active and vocal technologist.
It used to drive me crazy, when i first became a software hacker and started going to meetups and talks by Famous Geeks, how unbalanced the “gender ratio” was. I got used to being one of three women in a room of 150 people (usually me, the Lost Journalist and the Fearsome Stalwart), or the only woman in a gathering of 20 people. I saw one technical community i was involved in, really change shape, gain balance over the time i was there, following a slow momentum. I moved away for a long time, and when i came back to visit, the balance was gone again.
Ten years later, the balance does not publically, visibly seem to be getting better. I didn’t start speaking at technical conferences because i wanted to address this; i just wanted to spread messages about the tool-building techniques, the evocative prototype applications, that were burning a hole in my head. I used to think i got more slots than i “deserved”, because conference organisers are concerned about addressing gender balance issues in who they put on the stage. I come to realise that most people don’t even think about it.
At a big Euro Open Source conference last year, i got hauled in, right at the last minute, onto a panel on “Women in Open Source”. I felt abashed about it, because the other panellists were all Big Names with Big Affiliations. But that was not the only reason i did not think that i belonged there.
It’s such a difficult thing to resolve. Back in 2001 i met a lot of people from the original genderchangers – a group who’d all got together to teach each other computer recycling, linux sysadmin and hacking, because they felt more comfortable that way, had more fun, and got to throw off their dependencies. I tried for a while to start my own local chapter. There was an internal imbalance in the people i knew; they were either hardcore , Sun-trained network admin gurus, who weren’t really motivated by teaching because there didn’t seem to be much they could learn; or they were complete newbies, very enthusiastic, but without enough bootstrap knowledge to teach linux to each other collaboratively.
Recently, I hear a lot more people trying to make noise about the appearance and possible reality of gender imbalance in open source software culture. Gender Dimensions of FLOSS development was a recent summary article in MetaMute – they tend to notice a lot of things just before they come to the surface. The article claims that only 1% of people actively involved in open source software development are non-male. I struggle to believe that absolute; but even if the true figure (echoed in the balance at technical conferences) is 5%, that’s still really not very good.
This is one of the cores of what i am talking about, here on this blog and in the book, but it’s part of a nested complex of shared cores: not, i think, something that can be “fixed” on its own, especially by staring harder at it directly, by selecting highlights of hackers who represent an ideal of women’s engagement in the many different threads of how the open source software creation process, the open source culture process, generally work. I tend to think that the bar to casual contribution, of an improvement however small, however irrelevant, is often set too high; it takes a long time to bootstrap yourself into the position where you have the skills, and the rights, to commit to a project.
Ubuntu Linux seems to be thinking about this pretty hard – i see tabs on some of the system user interface saying things like “Translate this into your own language right now”. I wonder how this process works on the inside; is someone at Ubuntu always watching, being rapidly helpful, encouraging. I hope the people making even the tiniest contributions are being given a conduit through which they can read a message which says,
Your smallest action improved the life and effort of someone who’s working really hard at being committed to this.
