Management Toolkit

Story: Berners-Lee challenges 'stupid' male geek culture

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Elitism...expectations of failure...

A female hacker I know was at a hacker conference when another female hacker walked up and asked (in a very rude tone), "so, are you actually a geek, or just a scene whore?" She spat back "I had my ham license when I was 14." Once she'd thus "proven" that she was "worthy" of being at the conference, the other one was all buddy-buddy and nice. That'd be an example of woman-on-woman.

For man-on-woman:
I walked into a computer science class, and someone asked "What's a girl doing in this class?"
Someone once asked me "why are you programming? I thought you were a girl."
A girl I know was told "home-ec's that way" when she walked into a computer science class carrying a laptop and wearing one of those ThinkGeek-type t-shirts that make a joke only geeks would get...pretty obvious she was in the right place.
One of my friends dropped a computer science class because she wasn't comfortable with the fact that for the entirety of every class, all of the students turned to stare at her. She changed majors soon after.

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Flosspols [1] found that in open source development, only 1.5% of contributors were women. If you want an example of a fairly unregulated society of geeks that's very much into intimidating the new people so that the majority just stay away....look at open source software. It's a tiny improvement, but in Ubuntu we believe the numbers are slightly higher: 2% of contributors are women. Yeah, it's only 0.5%, but that's a 33% improvement. The difference is that Ubuntu has a Code of Conduct. Respect is expected. Those who are disrespectful, discouraging, or just plain mean are asked to leave. I think the fact that we try to keep the environment pleasant makes it easier for new people to get involved and makes it harder for things like what I mentioned above to happen in our community.

[1] http://www.flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf

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