On Thursday, July 25, 2019 at 9:39:08 PM UTC+2, Atlas Atlas wrote: > For example men in general more aggressive then women, they also pursue different social goals. You cannot ignore this, or blame the men for what they are. You also cannot ignore the fact that people in general driven by their sexuality.
This kind of idea is the heart of the problem I'm trying to highlight. Recent (and old) studies show that considering men and women as having different motivations driven by their gender is false and was created by most modern societies as a way to justify social differences by finding a fake reason in "the laws of nature". In the beginning of IT, writing computer programs was considered a low value job and was assigned to women (as always). Then men started to realize that it might be an important task after all, and got rid of women as soon as they found out it was some kind of "engineering", therefore a highest valued job. Barriers were closed, women were left behind. If a woman wants to work in IT today, she has to: - Work twice as hard - Let men get the rewards from her work - Bear with the fact that every time she says something in a meeting, a man will repeat it and get more traction - If she has a blog or a social media account, bear with sexual harassment and rape threats every single day - Bear with more aggressive code reviews - Accept to earn less money and don't get promoted - Be told that she was not able to "seize opportunities" When a woman tough enough to cope with this comes into an open source community.. guess what? She faces the same issues! After having experienced all that, will she accept to be told that "it's natural", that "men and women have different social goals", that "people are driven by their sexuality" ? I'm a man, but I couldn't accept that if it happened to me. I couldn't accept to see the violence perpetuated on me justified by my gender and some kind of "law of nature". I got into IT because I love programming and solving problems. But I must never forget that I got here easily because I'm a man. I must accept that I benefited from some kind of artificial privilege. This is not a blame on me, but a responsibility I must take to make sure that I can help people who don't benefit from such privilege. This is why saying "look, we are open" will never be enough. Companies which say they are "open" are the same which say that they fired this woman because "she didn't fit well", "she didn't have the right spirit", "she didn't come to after-work parties because she can't take jokes". "Look, it's not our fault, she is the one not being open enough". Enough of this, please. Racket is one of the communities in which I feel the most at home, because of threads like this one. Because people actually take the time to think about what we are doing collectively and question our direction every day. I am confident in Racket to be the perfect community to experiment new ways of being an open source community. I am confident in Racket to be exactly the playing grounds in which we can differentiate ourselves from the classic white-male-tech-bro culture that is commonly found in every open source groups. I am NOT trying to make this community restricted to such or such minority group. Everyone is welcome. But we need to acknowledge that even if we welcome everyone, we don't welcome people with the same story, the same background, the same culture. We tend to think that everyone who come here are by default "a smart guy who like lisp languages and has comfortable income". We need to shift from that lens to a broader one. We need to accept that some people might come here with memories of rape threats and bad racist jokes. We need to understand that there is no "one-size-fits-all" way to welcome people in a community. I'd like some parts of the Racket ecosystem to involve women, some part of Racket to involve black people...etc This is in no way a restriction, but an evolution. There is enough room for all of us. Black women programmers are already there. They are just told everywhere they go that they don't "seize opportunity". If we can be the first open source community to prevent that, we can be the best open source community that ever was. Some links to go further (I recommend this wiki to anyone trying to get more insight about this issue): - https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Women-friendly_events - https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Promotion_to_women - https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Women-friendly_forums -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/d94c4624-9e66-40ef-9bda-f3259d3f6702%40googlegroups.com.
