That said I just had a longer conversation with a female coworker about the issue and her relating her experiences is causing me to re-evaluate my stance on how much sexism there actually is in the community in general. While I do think the general tendency in online discussions to degenerate to play a major part in this issue, I do see that the general degeneration can easily and often take a sexist tone towards women.

I guess part of my ‘problem’ is that I spend most of my time in sub communities which hold a pretty civil level in its discourse in general, and thus the opportunities for sexist behaviour is rather small compared to projects where the normal mode of discourse is more scathing. This of course colours my view of things.

Anyway, while I ponder this issue I will back of this debate a bit.

When Group A accuses Group B of oppressing them, Group B can’t unilaterally declare “No, we’re not”.

Men’s opinions on societal misogyny are absolutely worthless. Men are blind to it—it’s called “privilege”: http://ur1.ca/3of5

So, ignore me and *actually listen to a woman*. Don’t talk back. Listen.

It’s frustrating participating in these conversations as a woman. The usually quiescent sexism, latent and imported from our culture, rears its ugly head. The talk shifts toward treating us like outsiders and externalities, that we need protection. Partly, it’s the fact that women will be absent from many discussions — I’m the only I know of on this thread! — and so can only be represented by proxy, but I suspect a lot of the attitude here is internal sexism, the chivalry of trying to protect the ‘weaker’ sex. Stop that. It’s really, really annoying. We’re not.

RMS is, himself, I suspect a product of woman-free hacker culture. I consider him annoying, sexist-but-self-mocking-enough-to-ignore. The St. Ignucius routine is a schtick that’s offensive on a bunch of levels. I think that’s a symptom of the real problem, not the problem itself. I wouldn’t be put off from participating by him any more than I would by a presentation that makes reference to strippers. That’s the day-to-day sexism that I’m quite used to dealing with.

In general I think the reasons why there is an under representation of women (or blacks for that matter) is probably explained by a long range of complex historical and socio-economic factors and that we are grasping at sexism as an explanation model due to failing to understand those factors, more than a lot of evidence that
the open source community is in fact riddled with sexism.

Probably, yes, his statements would be considered unprofessional at most technical conferences. But that is not the right frame of mind in which to approach the act. It’s obviously unfortunate that the act didn’t match the audience and possibly not the setting, but that’s more of a failure of communication on both parts than anything else.

Given the relative difficulty of picking out sexist content from that act compared to some other presentations in the FOSS world (in which I include blogs), if the occasionally misplaced nightclub act were the worst problem the community would be in much worse shape than it is.

The statistics we do have indicate that women in free software largely feel that they’re treated differently to men and that this discourages them from involvement. I’m not overly pleased with every aspect of how those statistics were generated, but they tightly match the experience of many women that I’ve spoken to on the subject. You’re arguing that I should ignore that evidence, but you’ve got no evidence to support that argument.