Women and Ubuntu
Carla Schroder of Linux Today published an essay recently dealing with the low level of female participation in open-source projects. Although the article doesn’t deal with Ubuntu in particular, it nonetheless prompted some thoughts about the role of women in the world’s most popular Linux distribution.
The near-absence of women from free-software development is not news. It’s been a clear problem for a long time, with a wide range of explanations and suggestions offered.
Some commentators, like Schroder, blame “sexist” tendencies on the part of male developers. Others cling to the notion that women are naturally less inclined to work with computers–a weak argument, and one that fails to account for the discrepancy between the large number of women employed in IT in general and the very small proportion who work on open-source software.
Women and Ubuntu
Ubuntu has yet to suffer a major gender-relations issue of the order of, for example, the ConFusion fiasco in 2008. There was some controversy about wallpaper that shipped with Ubuntu in its early days, but that was resolved, and no one swore off the distribution because of it.
Despite the apparent lack of public sexism associated with Ubuntu, however, women remain quite under-represented, at least among developers. For example, I counted only a single female on the list of current MOTUs, if first names can be interpreted as accurate indicators of gender.
The Ubuntu Women project has existed for some time with the goal of promoting female participation in Ubuntu development and use, and deserves more credit than it receives. But the group has a long way to go if it hopes to smooth over the current gender imbalance.
Making things better
The lack of participation by women in Ubuntu may simply reflect women’s under-representation within the free-software world in general. But given Ubuntu’s goal of becoming “Linux for human beings,” rather than merely another Linux for geeks, the project would do well to attract more females to its lists of developers and users.
How to achieve that goal is a pretty complex question, and I’m not qualified to give a good answer. A blog post by Elizabeth Krumbach of Ubuntu Women offers some good suggestions for raising the profile of female contributors to Ubuntu, but none of those suggestions has yet been acted upon, as far as I know. Nonetheless, this is an issue that can’t be ignored if bug #1 is truly to be eliminated.
HI. I have also been lamenting about the same thing. I strongly believe that women are so much needed if Open Source is to move forward more than it has. It is very sad to see the low number of women in FOSS. It is my view that there should be a more concerted effort at getting more women involved. That will ultimately push FOSS to the next grand level.
Let’s talk about Mark Shuttleworth’s sexist remarks. Shall we?
http://geekfeminism.org/2009/09/23/open-letter-to-mark-shuttleworth/
@neo
I wonder in what context Mark made that remark
neo: this post went to press before Shuttleworth’s remarks at LinuxCon came out. I agree that they’re very embarrassing for Ubuntu, but we’ll see how it ends up playing out.
[…] http://www.workswithu.com/2009/09/24/women-and-ubuntu/ a few seconds ago from IdentiFox […]
Chris:
No its embarrassing for Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth!=Ubuntu.
It will only be embarrassing for Ubuntu as a community..if the Ubuntu community chooses to give their patron a pass on this mistake in judgement. If the Ubuntu community does not publicly challenge Shuttleworth over his remarks.. that would be hypocritical in terms of an overall community response considering how outspoken the Ubuntu community has been about sexism showing up in other contexts.
If Shuttleworth gets a pass, then Ubuntu as a community will be an embarrassment. It’s real easy to point fingers at other people and other projects… the hard part is looking inward either in yourself or in your own community and being able to call out bad behavior and start trying to make a change. This is an opportunity for the Ubuntu community to show they mean what they say about wanting to be inclusive.
This will be an interesting dynamic which puts the hero worship of Mark Shuttleworth in conflict with the stated ethos of inclusion that forms the core mystique of the Ubuntu community. Maybe we’ll find out which one of those two elements is more important in discourse which follows.
Will Canonical employees who have previously spoken out against other sexist remarks publicly.. feel comfortable calling Shuttleworth out publicly? I doubt it…he does pay their bills after all. I don’t think any Canonical employee has the balls to publicly challenge Shuttleworth. But I certain expect the external Ubuntu community to challenge Shuttleworth over this. What will be really interesting is if some of the previously outspoken Canonical employees suddenly turn into apologists for Mark’s remarks. I’m keen on watch to see that happen.
-jef
sinaisix.
The context was Mark Shuttleworth “joking” that he had a hard time teaching “girls” about Linux. Regardless of the context, it is clearly sexist and should evoke a straight apology.
neo:
Apparently Mark missed his first opportunity to apologize right after his talk if the chatter over this incident is accurate. But I can verify that, as I haven’t seen the person’s identity who went up and talked to Mark.
Since Mark didn’t see this as a problem when it was first pointed out to him, just apologizing might not be good enough, its going to have to be meaningful one. Luckily people have provided a roadmap for what that looks like:
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Apologies
-jef
Sexism exists.
Admittingly Mark should have somebody look over his speeches better but he’s human like everybody else.
Since there was a mention about the tone of his voice and all I can’t really say anything until I see the video.
In any argument there are 3 sides… his, hers and the truth, and NEVER shall ANY of them be the same.
🙂
My ex-girlfriend introduced me to Ubuntu.
And is anyone else sick of these “feminists” and their manufactured outrage? I wouldn’t apologize, either.
@dragonbite everyone makes mistakes, that’s what apologizing and trying harder next time is for 🙂
Steve:
I think one of the best male perspectives on this subject currently is Matt Zimmerman, CTO of Canonical.
http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2009/07/13/backlash-feminism-considered-harmful/
http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2009/05/02/do-not-stand-by/
http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2009/08/16/geek-feminism-blog/
I look forward to Matt taking his own advice and publicly calling out Mark over his remarks. Watching how the very outspoken Canonical CTO publicly confront the very outspoken Canonical CEO over this incident will be very instructive for other projects as a model on how to constructively handle these incidents.
-jef
Steve,
Explain to me what you are saying. Are you claiming that all the women who claim to be offended by such a keynote are faking it? Do you think they have no right to be offended? Or you just don’t give care?
I find my self wondering what the ratio of women in IT in general is compared to men?
Frankly I don’t see anything embarrassing about Mark Shuttleworths comments. The guy is entitled to an opinion and if that’s his experience then why shouldn’t he express that? Is open source about to be dominated by the PC brigade?
I also think it’s a bit ironic that someone who runs a wiki which specifically targets women, the implication being women need “special” help to understand the subject matter, should be complaining. Maybe I’m a bit thick. But I’ve never understood why women who wish to be seen as equals to men need “special” groups to be “equal”.
Isn’t there also a little irony in someone who is part of a movement that encourages the freedom of expression telling someone else how they should behave?
aikwolfie:
My last comment got stuck in moderation. I would encourage you to read Matt Zimmerman’s blog (he’s the Canonical CTO) to get a male perspective about what is going on.
mdzlog dot alcor dot net
This site holds up posts with urls.
Specifically read his posts entitled “do-not-stand-by” and “backlash-feminism-considered-harmful”
-jef
aikiwolfie: most estimates I’ve seen for women employed in IT in the United States are around 25%; cf. http://www.ncwit.org/about.factsheet.html Apparently it’s higher in other countries, which is interesting, but still not close to 50%.
As for women in the open-source/free-software world, a study in 2006 found only 1.5%: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/06/18/women-in-open-source/ I’ve never seen figures higher than 3%. Even keeping in mind that the open-source world is difficult to define, and that accurate numbers in this realm are harder to come up with since a lot of contributors to open-source projects are not paid for their work and sometimes contribute anonymously, the figures are still pretty shocking.
It would be more helpful to read an article titled “Women and Ubuntu” if it was written by Christine Tozzi.
[…] Women and Ubuntu Thursday, September 24, 2009 By jfeedor Carla Schroder of Linux Today published an essay recently dealing with the low level of female participation in open-source projects. Although the article doesn’t deal with Ubuntu in particular, it nonetheless prompted some thoughts about the role of women in the world’s most popular Linux distribution. Take a look. […]
I think you’re referring to my article and although this was in some wicked sense my intention, few have been able to figure out what I was trying to do. We’re coping with two separate issues here: sexism in FOSS and the low participation of women in FOSS. The tendency of Carla was to imply a direct causality between the two by using some figures of a three year old survey.
I merely posed a possible different explanation for the same phenomena without addressing sexism at all. The differences between commercial software and FOSS can also easily be explained by the hypothesis that commercial software has a radically different way of working, which requires different skill sets. Some of these skill sets may be more appealing to women.
The survey in case even acknowledges this by stating that the work women do in FOSS is very different from what the men do. Women tend to write documentation, moderate comments, create graphics, etc. Very few of them code, which is the main activity in the FOSS way of creating software.
My objection is that before any causality is applied to both phenomena, further research is needed. Also in the interest of getting more women in FOSS. Otherwise the measures applied will not have the required effect. Those who read the survey in question carefully have to acknowledge that a multitude of reasons is mentioned, making it more nuanced than is posed in the press.
The survey in question failed to recognize the differences in FOSS and commercial software in a sufficient way, which is not surprising because that is not their field of expertise. They even implied that the way of creating commercial software could be applied to FOSS (software engineering) as this would increase the number of women in FOSS (or vice versa, it isn’t really clear).
They also stated that the quality of software (which they didn’t define) would increase, which is hardly imaginable, because FOSS already has one of the lowest error rates (defects/KLOC) in the industry.
In short, before assuming root causes for these differences, they should be properly investigated. Jumping on political bandwagons doesn’t solve any problems on the long run.
“and one that fails to account for the discrepancy between the large number of women employed in IT in general and the very small proportion who work on open-source software.”
While true, this contains a flaw of its own. IT is a very large field, so one need to get a look at the individual work areas within it, and see where one find the majority of women.
Hmmm. I’ve mingled in the subset worlds of gaming, SF amp; fantasy media, and computing, and I can see it from both sides.
Sexism exists in all those genres, and yet women have managed to carve out niches in all of them, some for a number of years now. I’ve met some, befriended a few, married one.
I think it’s a fair question to ask how much women are involved, and how we might draw them in more. It’s also not an unfair statement to say that Linux DOES appear to be dominated by men, and about by the same amount that the other things I mentioned are. Perception does count for a lot.
I’m getting tired of people blathering as if there were not a severe shortage of women in programming and IT in general. It’s not a problem peculiar to FOSS.
If women are interested they will participate if they are not they will not participate. What cheeses me off are the women who blame men for all women’s perceived problems. Grow a spine and take some personal responsibility. The question should be how do we draw more people into FLOSS not just women.
I saw it live and it was nothing. Just an honest experience every guy in FOSS has had. It really is hard explaining FOSS work to females you meet and want to impress .. I have experienced it myself, so don’t tell me how things are.
Everybody who makes a fuss out of this should get a life (a real one) These stupid feminist fundamentalist with their black and white view of the world have to stop.
The number of technical men vs technical women in Silicon Valley is about 10 to 1. From a personal experience perspective women who are non-technical are just not interested in any thing technical period, whether it be changing oil types or tires on a car.
Computers must be easy to use for 90% of women. I would ballpark about 75% of men need computers that are easy to use, BUT about 50% of men are technical at something: cars, construction, plumbing, etc..
Most geeky guys do not have any experience with women who are technical and even less with women who are non-technical.
I have seen women with master’s degrees in computer science(H1-B’s) not be able to change their own *nix PATH variable in their .bash_*** start up file. They told me “I just want it to work I do not want to have to figure it out.”
The perception that men have of women not being technical with anything is based on a lot of personal experience.
This has nothing to do with sexism. It’s all about self-victimization – the primary method of worshiping the Almighty Bulls**t in the Great Church of Political Correctness. How come I never have met a woman who would be offended by what Mark said? How is it that basically every feminist I know would rather be offended by the notion that women need to be protected from basic human freedoms (we’re talking about freedom of speech, and simply not feeling guilty for your human nature, after all)? After all the only people who need protection from anything are those who are too weak to deal with their problems themselves (whether the nature of these problems might be). Doesn’t saying that women need to be protected from that imply that all women are intrinsically to weak to be free? Not a very feminist thing to say. Why doesn’t all this make any sense to me?
…oh right! Im not from US, I’m not being spoon-fed this crap every day of my life since early childhood by politically motivated hypocrites and their brainwashed, self-victimizing victims.
Seriously America, wake up. Please do. You used to be great, now you’re just poisoning world’s culture.
I think the simple fact of the matter is, there are people out there in the world making a fuss about something that was nothing. When that happens there are clearly ulterior motives.
none of those suggestions has yet been acted upon, as far as I know
We at the Ubuntu Women project actually did move forward with the interviews series in Full Circle Magazine, it’s been a really nice initiative for us. We’ve also tried to be more encouraging to others to speak at conferences, we’re pushing geekspeakr.com and personally I’ve started speaking at events and conferences (leading by example and all that :)).
After reading this thread I cannot help but rofl. Is this a victimless crime … is it a crime at all. Maybe its just the nature of how things turn out. There certainly were more than 60% women in my computer classes and I cant tell you that many ended up in core computing fields. Maybe there are better things in other fields, or life simply happens.
There is a great divide between aptitude and the general desire to learn. When it comes to technology there are people, a very large proportion of people, that just don’t get it and sex has nothing to do with it. I have met a greater number of men that are bumbling idiots when it comes to computers, and worse that they don’t know or care to be vocal about their need for help. Just yesterday this dude is staring at an Ubuntu desktop with nothing but icons of five major web browsers (with the name of the browser and a statement following that says web browser) and had the audacity to express his frustration at not being able to find the web browser. The intelligence argument is about people not men or women, and I doubt its about the intellect at all but about resistance to change and fear of the unknown.
I respect Carla because she speaks her mind and to real issues. There are lots of people out there that lack social filters in their interaction with others. Maybe guys need sensitivity training with mothers given liberty to whip their kids into shape. Then I think that more than 50% of the worlds population is women, women being mothers. Is this an indicator of where they have gone wrong in nurturing respectable men or is there just a batch of men with regrettable social qualities. I cringe and get turned off a forum when I see lewd comments directed towards a woman.
There should be a code of conduct in organizations and organized conferences where people should be disallowed from using colorful language regardless of the audience. Its just respect 101 in life that unless you are being paid to be a comedian you don’t stand in mixed company and be disrespectful to your audience.
Elizabeth Krumbach hits the nail on the head: Its about mentorship. I love what bumpy says, that there is no shortage of women. We just need to see more women with the visible success of Carla Schroder mentoring others not just women but men also. This can help create a critical mass of Linux adoption by consumers and enterprise since people are decision influencers and advocates.
Um..Tim…you just proved the points made by everyone who is criticizing Mark’s speech. “It really is hard explaining FOSS work to females you meet and want to impress” How is that not exclusionary? You’re assuming only male devs, or at best male and lesbian devs.
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[…] ideologue pursuing goals that will never be practical. Meanwhile, Shuttleworth’s history of offending women and making bold promises about Ubuntu that haven’t always held up to reality have made him […]