Re: Women in GNOME (Was: Code Of Conduct)

["Murray Cumming" <murrayc murrayc com>]

>> I think it is a natural step to take after the EU and FLOSSPOLS report
>> has shown that women are being excluded from the community.-
>
> This rubs me the wrong way. It's not like we're actively working to
> exclude women, Asians, or Martians from GNOME. Nor are we actively
> trying to make GNOME a boys-only club. Simply put, there's no
> conscious, malicious intent behind the disproportionate male/female
> ratio, or "Western"/Asian ratio. And I think that this matters...

Yet it may require conscious intent to fix it.

>> If we want to se some change in attitudes and behavior in GNOME and
>> FLOSS, and se more women involved in the future in all parts and
>> capacities of our projects, we need to find out why only a little more
>> than 1% of are women.
>
> ... because I don't believe that actively pursuing "diversity" for its
> own sake is a valid goal. I may sound myopic here, but I don't see
> what the goal of recruiting women qua women or Asians qua Asians gains
> us as a community.

Other than the obvious morally repellent idea that we might be perceived
as unwelcoming to arbitrary large groups of people [1], there are plenty
of selfish reasons for doing this:
- We are a worldwide project aiming to create a project to make the world
a better place for humanity, so we really should be trying our best to
involve representative parts of the world in that. It makes it more likely
that we will create a product that helps with their goals.
- Women + Asia are two huge groups of potential contributors. That many
contributors can make a huge contribution if we can get them on board.

[1] The idea is so awful that we should be doing whatever we can even if
we are not sure that it's going to work or that we are the cause,
certainly as long as those things are not going to hurt us. What we have
to gain is far more than we have to lose.

> I refuse to measure diversity based on one's
> genitals or skin color.
>
> [However, (for example) recruiting Asians as an attempt to understand
> their needs, skills, and mentality in order to acquire a greater Asian
> market share, however, could be ok. Asians are the means. A rockin'
> version of GNOME on lots of Asian computers is the end.]
>
> Instituting open-door policies, non-discriminatory policies/"codes of
> conduct", and the like are worthwhile goals in-and-of themselves. They
> advertise what the core tenets of our community are, and this is
> something we should become better at. But one should not necessarily
> abandon established (nay, endearing) traits of our community just to
> grow it larger. You'd give up something concretely cool about the
> community for some undefined, possibly non-existant benefit. And that
> ain't diversity, it's its opposite.
>
> I'd rather see us resolve to do a better job of marketing how open,
> cool, and charismatic we are as a community, and let the chips fall
> where they will. Get the word out to as many people as practicable,
> welcome everyone, and let the diversity come to us as an organic
> result of our general openness and coolness. Where we have some
> specific goal in mind, change as necessary to meet that goal. But
> don't change for change's sake alone.
>
> Recruit interesting people. Recruit smart, talented people. Recruit
> people useful for your ends. Welcome all people. But don't recruit
> genitals and skin colors. They're neither interesting nor useful for
> free software's purposes. Justice is blind, and so should we be.

This unfortunately ignores the conclusion that many have made that some
groups will not feel at home in a community until their are people like
them in the community. To get to that critical mass we may need to help
the process along a bit. I think Callum said it well:
http://spooky-possum.org/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/womenoss.html

The code of conduct doesn't try to address that directly, however. It's
just a small part of it.


Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com