You´re right, and this is why I wouldn’t want for people how are not like the majority of the communtiy to (just) be asked about their being a minority, but about interesting things they do.
But some degree of affirmative action in presenting interesting people would be warranted - and this could consist in making an effort to find such people, rather than relying on feedback loops that perhaps reinforce/perpetuate the present, skewed selection.
And the wider point is that by being a more inclusive and all-encompassing community more interesting and brilliant things would happen - there is an instrumental side to emphasising the point.
I think this is where you are not getting my point, @chaymard - there is no skewed selection. We only pick people based upon if they are interesting. We don’t secretly prioritize men or white people, we just pick people who we think are interesting.
Now, I appreciate that perception is important, but I feel we have been more than clear that we don’t see gender and race in picking guests…we see content, experience, and stories. If anyone has any ambiguity around this, I am more than happy to clear it up.
What I don’t feel comfortable doing is compromising the quality of the show just to get the diversity numbers up. As @VulcanRidr says, I feel this would actually have the opposite effect…I feel it would be (a) discrimination, and (b) defeat the purpose of what I consider to be equality - that everyone has an equal opportunity to be welcome in our community without prioritizing people based on gender/race…I believe deliberately targeting guests based upon their gender/race would be against my own set of ethics.
Sorry, that formulation wasn’t quite clear, but in the sentence you quote I meant the selection of people partaking in the open source community as a whole, not that BV’s selection is skewed.
I am fine with you selecting the guests you find interesting: my point was more that it’s important for a forum like BV to do what it can within itself to achieve a more equitable representation of society at large in the open source subculture.
What is the point in BV reflecting the norms of open source culture? Surely it should be looking for the best of technology and open source. In terms of the racial and and gender bias I think BV already reflects the norms. Technology in general and open source in particular is dominated by white men.
I think this is a shame and would love to see a wider racial and gender mix but the BV guests reflect the reality of the technology/open source community. Positive discrimination is still discrimination and I am against it. One makes it in the technology/open source field according to your abilities; not your gender, race, religion or sexual orientation.
I would be the first to condemn the BV presenters if I thought they would refuse to have a guest because they were female or Asian or a lesbian but I would also condemn them if I believed they chose an Asian lesbian because it made up the numbers. What matters here is quality: they must continue to strive to produce the best podcast they can and that includes choosing guests on merit and entertainment value.
That said I do not believe any of the presenters is, even slightly, sexist, racist or homophobic and fully believe @jonobacon when he says that sexual orientation, gender and race are not even considered when choosing guests. I hope these guys continue to produce an educational and highly entertaining podcast for a long time to come.
Finally, I’m sure there are lots of other people the BV presenters should be talking to and some of those are not white men. Feel free to suggest some but we should not get into a numbers game where we say the last five guests the show had were men so it is time for a black woman the quality of the show would suffer.
I am sorry, but I think you are misapprehending both my point and the issue itself.
They should reflect values as they ought to be, not as they are.
The thing is, because what you say in your first paragraph is true, we don’t have a choice of being in a situation in which there is no discrimination. Because participation rates in the tech industry and culture are stacked against women, there is ‘positive discrimination’ in favour of the already dominant group. In an ideal world you would be right, but to get anywhere near fair representation, affirmative action is necessary as a catalyst of transition towards it.
Again, they don’t personally need to be any of these things for there to be a problem, and that issue was pointed out by the original poster of this thread.
I have - and after all, I listen to the podcast because I think the presenters know more about what they are talking about, and the community, than I do, that’s the whole point of it.
I think part of the challenge here is that “the tech industry” is a pretty broad brush. Sure, the wider industry has challenges with diversity, but that doesn’t mean the entire industry is the same. Some communities (and I would consider Bad Voltage one of them), are very open and accessible to diversity of gender, race, and anything else.
Also, and this is a difficult point to articulate without people yelling at me ( ), I think part of the reason that there are fewer women in technology is because many women are just not that interested in tech.
There is this meme out there that we have lower numbers of women because the tech world is so misogynistic - while this is definitely true in parts of the tech world, I think another driving force is that many women are just not interested in technology as a career path.
Now, to be VERY CLEAR, I am not saying that women or not good enough to be in tech, that all women are not interested, or that women shouldn’t be interested in tech…I am merely saying that I think a reasonably chunky reason why there are so many men is that technology is an area that is generally more interesting to men than women.
Now, the affirmative action bit is where I think people draw different viewpoints.
This is where I draw a middle-ground conclusion. I am of the view that any discrimination is bad. This includes deliberately discriminating positively for a particular demographic.
The challenge with affirmative action is that for it to really work, in some cases you have to choose someone for their gender/race, knowing full well that another candidate in the more dominant demographic is more suitable. I find this entirely unfair; I don’t think it is right to discriminate against some as a justification to not discriminate against others.
My view is that we don’t positively discriminate, but we actively message. In other words, we make it very crisply clear that everyone is welcome to be a part of our community. Here we could work with special interest groups to make it clear that our community welcomes those groups, and we are open and accessible to all. A good example of this is the GNOME Women’s Outreach project - they have not tried to compromise the openness of GNOME to everyone to get the numbers up, but they have specifically reached out and welcomed women to be a part of the community, and with great success.
Before I wrap, @chaymard, I just want to say…even though we don’t entirely see eye to eye on this topic, I really respect your candor, frankness, and respect in sharing your views. This can be a thorny topic, and your conduct (as well everyone else’s in this thread) is admirable. This is one of the things I love about the BV community…we can discuss complex topics, with a core modicum of respect and dignity.
I also think the discussion here was productive and conducted in good argumentational faith, which is nice to see. I maybe wnat to make just one more point lest things get repetitive.
That may be true - I don’t know whether it is or continues to be the case - but it’s not a primitive fact. It’s a product of what gender roles are exihibted to children growing up, in the people they see doing certain things, the toys they are given, the things parents do with their children etc. Also, talk about broad brushes-)
Gnome’s outreach programme is a great initiative, and interesting not least for the criticism they get for it (see Karen Sandler talking about it in the current issue of Linux Voice).
While I agree that society has imposed certain expectations on gender roles we should never forget that men and women are different in some core primitive ways.
We are not the exact same machines with different peripherals hanging out of the base unit. There are some ways in which men and women just think, behave, inspire, act, react, and live differently.
Totally agree, girls and boys do not behave the way they do just because that is how society wants them to.
Recent studies have shown that there is an element of nurture here in that if you take a group of people put them in a room full of toys one by one and ask them to mind a baby they will pick gender appropriate toys for the baby. That is if you tell someone the baby is a boy they will give him the tools or the car while they will give the doll or pram to the girl. It does not matter what the child’s true gender is only what the individuals being tested are told.
On the flip side a bunch of toys, cars and dolls, were placed in a field for a group of monkeys to play with and while I would be lying to say that the males exclusively went for the cars while the females wanted the doll there was a clear and obvious bias in that direction.
We simply don’t know to what extent the differences between typical male and female behaviour are down to nature or nurture. As a society we should keep the playing field as open as possible in terms of opportunities but also need to recognise these differences exist.
I don’t know why there are fewer women in technology than men. It may be, in part, because it has historically always been the case so few girls growing up see it as a possible career but I don’t believe that’s the whole story.
Oh come on, that is quite flimsy. Do you have a link for the source of that by any chance?
It is extremely difficult to say whether there are natural differences, since there hardly is any control group to test against. I would give the constructivist story a lot of credence - and I think a few of the things you said are not very future proof, so to speak.
Sorry I don’t I did not get the information off the internet but from a TV program on the BBC in the UK.
Horizon: Is Your Brain Male or Female?
I’m not sure if its available to watch online any more but there is a little more information here
In the program Dr Alice Roberts argued that gender bias was not genetic but learnt while Dr Michael Mosley argued the opposite that much of the way we behave is hard-wired.
By the end of the program they were both agreeing that it was a combination of nature and nurture though they still disagreed about the extent.
Edit: If you are in the UK it is available on BBC iPlayer here but only for a few more days. I don’t think iPlayer lets anyone outside the UK watch however.
I am in the colonies, so I can’t watch the iplayer [ btw, what is the point of still being a sort of colony, when you don’t even get access to things like this? ]
it doesn’t seem like much rigorous thinking in there to be honest.
Putting science aside for a second (and I trust there is science that tells us that there are natural differences between men and women, as @WarrenHill shared), are you seriously telling me from your experience of the world and interaction with men and women, that you don’t think there are any natural differences, and that any differences are all imposed by society?
If you do think this, this is mind boggling to me. In my mind, it is a no brainer. I know hundreds of women who are strong and empowered and not conditioned by society (my wife being one of them), who are definitely different in may ways.
This is a good thing. We need to celebrate our differences, not try to boil everyone down into the same template.
There is lots of science on differences between male and female brains. As they grow they are effected by different hormone levels and there are clear differences in the structure too.
We need to recognise these differences and celebrate them. I am certainly not claiming that men are better than women and I certainly wouldn’t accept that women are better than men either. Neither is better than the other but we are different and the world is a better place as a result of having both.
There are certain areas where men on average perform better than women, and there are areas where women tend to outperform men but there is a very broad range of abilities in both genders.
Societies work best when we make the best use of the talents available and recognise that we each have different things to give.
I am convinced that our actions are a combination of our biology and our environment. It is difficult to know exactly how this is split because the only experiments I could design to test it would be very unethical and so are unthinkable of putting into practice.
no, i don’t think i am saying this. there are obviously differences. the qualifications to that I would like to make are:
i think they are distributed more along a continuum than in a binary opposition, and attribution is more difficult than one might think
I couldn’t of the top of my mind think of differences between men and women that would be relevant to the discussion here, that is relate to participation in technology comunities
It’s hard to say where the line between natural and cultural determinants is to be drawn
For what it’s worth, I’ve noticed better gender ratios in what I consider more niche areas on the tech industry. I see lots of female security professionals (compared to other areas.) I also see lots of female data base admins. The hardware hacking / maker scene seems to be more equal than any other area of tech I have personally observed.
To me, that seems to suggest that there is a cultural, generational shift happening. I imagine the next generation will be more diversity.
), I think part of the reason that there are fewer women in technology is because many women are just not that interested in tech.