La la la, I can’t hear you!
Comments (0) There’s a post over at Slashdot, FOSS Sexism Claims Met with Ire and Denial (warning: the discussion has gotten large, which means the page takes a while to load) that’s prompted some interesting discussion. (FOSS = Free, Open Source Software) Basically, someone wrote an article about sexism within the FOSS movement, as well as a followup article about the responses to his first article, and was met with a…less than enthousiastic reaction:
Raise the subject of sexism, and you are met with illogic that I can only compare to that of the tobacco companies trying to deny the link between their products and cancer. Because I took a feminist stance in public, I have been abused in every way possible — being called irrelevant, a saboteur, coward, homosexual, and even a betrayer of the community.
As Slashdot is a mostly-male discussion site, I expected resistance to any claims of sexism, and wasn’t disappointed. To be fair, some of them were totally legit, indicating that the examples given in the article weren’t representative of the community as a whole:
If I haven’t seen it, and no around me has seen it, isn’t the onus on you to give some more proof other than, “Really, guys! Sexism in OSS is real!”
At the same time, there were a lot of people who missed the point, and trying to find examples of tactics listed at Derailing for Dummies quickly got old – there were just too many of them.
However, there were also some great comments in support of the idea that maybe, just maybe, the highly educated and libertarian individuals who tend toward FOSS can also be sexist, and that simply dismissing cries of sexism isn’t really helpful.
random, theory
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feminism, foss, technology
Themocracy