<legalnotice><para> Copyright (c) 2002 Val Henson This document may be reproduced or distributed in any form, without prior permission, provided that all such copies or distributions include this copyright statement and the warranty disclaimer contained in this paragraph. This document is provided on an "AS IS" basis only, with no warranties, express or implied. All usage of the information in this document is at your own risk.
</para></legalnotice></articleinfo>
<abstract><para>This article explains some of the difficulties and biases women face in the Linux community and
examines various strategies for addressing those difficulties in order to encourage more participation
by women. </para></abstract>
<sect1><title>Introduction </title>
<para>At the 2002 Ottawa Linux Symposium, I hosted a LinuxChix Birds
Of a Feather session. During the BOF and throughout the conference, I
heard the same set of questions:</para>
<para>"My girlfriend hates Windows, how can I encourage her to use
Linux?"</para>
<para>"Almost no women attend my local LUG. How can I fix this?"</para>
<para>"Why aren't there more women in open source?"</para>
<para>Clearly, people in the Linux community would like for more women
to be involved in Linux, but most people don't know why so few women
are involved or how to change that. This HOWTO is an effort to
summarize the explanations, recommendations, and opinions of the women
who already are interested and active in Linux. This document began
with the verbatim recommendations of the women who attended the
LinuxChix BOF, and was added to by many more women in the months
following the original BOF. In other words, this HOWTO represents the
feelings and opinions of real women involved in Linux. While we
represent the women who "made it," we still have fairly important
insights into why other women left or never entered the Linux
community, as well as being keenly aware of the pressures which are
currently pushing us out of the community.</para>
<para>In this HOWTO, we'll talk about why women stay out of computing
in general, why they stay away from Linux in particular, and what you
can do to help encourage women in Linux. We hope that this HOWTO will
result in more women using, installing, and developing Linux.</para>
<sect2><title>Audience</title>
<para>This document is intended mainly for the male Linux enthusiast
who would like to see more women involved in Linux. Its secondary
audience is both men and women who have been too busy having fun with
Linux and computers to sit down and think about why most women don't
share their interests. We hope you'll come away from this HOWTO with
some understanding of why women stay away from Linux and with a few
ideas about what you can do to reverse that trend.</para>
<para>This HOWTO is not directed towards people who aren't concerned
about the lack of women in Linux, or think that women are better off
staying away from Linux. If you don't already believe that women are
being driven away from Linux and computers by external causes, this
HOWTO probably won't convince you otherwise (although it may give you
some interesting avenues of research to follow up on).</para>
<para>This HOWTO is definitely not intended to help male Linux geeks
find female Linux geeks to date. The central paradox of women and
Linux is this: often, the people most anxious for more women in Linux
are also the people most likely to accidentally drive them away.
Frequently, men who want more women in Linux solely so they have a
better chance of finding a girlfriend end up acting in ways that end
up driving women away instead! This HOWTO will try to explain which
behaviors drive women away from Linux and which behaviors encourage
them.</para>
</sect2>
<sect2><title>What problem? Sexism is dead!</title>
<para>A sentiment I hear frequently: "What problem? There's no
problem! Sexism is dead! Women are staying out of Linux because they
want to!" If you feel this way, you may change your opinion by the
time you finish reading this HOWTO. I also used to believe that
sexism was dead. Shortly after joining several women in computing
mailing lists, I realized how wrong I was. Week after week, women
have new stories about how they were discriminated against and
insulted because they were women. These stories aren't decades old,
nor do they involve people who grew up when sexism was more
acceptable. These are day-to-day experiences of today's women, in
modern settings, who are being driven out of their chosen profession
by sexism. This isn't theoretical--many women actually leave the
field of computers entirely because of blatantly sexist incidents
involving superiors at work or at school.</para>
<para>Read the links below for my favorite example of modern-day
sexism: </para>
<para>Initial post to the Sydney LUG mailing list, by a woman:</para>
finding gender-related mental differences while ignoring the (far more
common) studies which find no difference at all. Frequently, other
researchers are unable to duplicate the results or find flaws in the
original researchers' methods, but those stories tend to get much
less press. These studies also make no attempt to control for
differences in the upbringing of men and women. For example, studies
frequently show that women have better developed linguistic capability
in some way. This is taken as proof, at least by the press, that
women are genetically predisposed to be more verbal than men. But at
the same time, studies also show that young women are rewarded more
than young men for verbalization. The sheer existence of physical
differences between male and female brains (an idea still in dispute)
is not in and of itself proof that men and women are born with
differences in mental capacity. We still need to separate out what
differences are caused by genetics, and which are caused by the
environment. As a result, if you ask the experts, the only consensus
on gender-related mental differences is that there is no consensus.
This is an area of ongoing research, where results will continue to be
hotly debated for decades or centuries. (My personal opinion is that
men and women do have some innate, genetically based differences which
result in tendencies towards different behaviors, but I won't guess
what they are or how strongly they influence behavior. Human beings
are extremely adaptable creatures, so I suspect the genetic
differences are minor compared to differences in environment.)
</para>
<para>
Something else to keep in mind is that similar arguments have been
made about many other fields when women first began joining them, from
medical science to education. For example, women couldn't be doctors
because they weren't physically strong enough to set broken bones,
would faint at the sight of blood, or didn't have the proper bedside
manner. Those arguments were abandoned when women turned out to be
just as good doctors and teachers as men were. Maybe men will turn
out to be better at computer science than women, but history does not
support that hypothesis.</para>
<para>A good reference for the general topic of measuring differences
between human groups and the motivation behind those measurements is
<citetitle>The Mismeasure of Man</citetitle> by Steven Jay Gould.
Scientists have been "proving" differences in the brains and bodies of
groups of humans for centuries, although in hindsight both their
methods and their results were flawed. For example, Stephen Jay Gould
reviews the methods of one scientist measuring skull capacity in men
and women of different races (and by implication, brain size and
intelligence). The scientist originally measured the volume of the
skulls by packing them with linseed, which is somewhat compressible,
and confirmed his hypothesis that white men tended to have larger
skulls. When he later remeasured the volume of the skulls with
incompressible lead shot, he discovered that much of the differences
in volume between the skulls disappeared. He had been subconsciously
stuffing the skulls belonging to white males with more linseed than
the skulls belonging to women or non-white men. Keep this story in
mind when you read studies claiming to find that some brain structure
is a different size in men and women.</para>
<para>Now that we've addressed some common misconceptions about women
and computing, let's look at the real reasons why women stay out of
Linux and computing. I personally believe that the tendencies and
behaviors I'm about to describe are the result of the way most women
are raised, in other words, they are the result of gender
socialization. I'm not claiming that women are born less confident,
or anything else, I'm just observing general tendencies in women and
pointing out how Linux culture discourages people with those
tendencies. Many of the reasons I'm about to list also apply to
other underrepresented groups in computing or science.</para>
<sect2><title>Women are less confident</title>
<para>Women severely underestimate their abilities in many areas, but
especially with respect to computers. One study about this topic is
<citetitle>Undergraduate Women in Computer Science: Experience,
Motivation, and Culture</citetitle>: <ulinkurl="http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~gendergap/papers/sigcse97/sigcse97.html">http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~gendergap/papers/sigcse97/sigcse97.html
</ulink></para>
<para>For example, while 53% of the male computer science freshman
rated themselves as highly prepared for their CS courses, 0% of the
female CS freshman rated themselves similarly. But at the end of the
year, 6 out the 7 female students interviewed had either an A or B
average. Objective ratings (such as grade point averages or quality
and speed of programming) don't agree with most women's
self-estimation. I personally encountered this phenomenon: Despite
plenty of objective evidence to the contrary, including grades, time
spent on assignments, and high placement in a programming contest, I
still didn't consider myself to be at the top of my class in college.
Looking back objectively, it seems clear to me that I was performing
as well or better than many of the far more confident men in my
class.</para></sect2>
<sect2><title>Women have fewer opportunities for friendship or
mentoring</title>
<para>Like any other discipline, computer science is easier to learn
when you have friends and mentors to ask questions of and form a
community with. However, for various reasons, men usually tend to
mentor and become friends with other men. When the gender imbalance
is as large as it is in computer science, women find themselves with
few or no other women to share their interests with. While women have
male friends and mentors, it's often harder and more difficult for
women to find a community and then to fit in with it. Many women
leave the field who would have stayed if they had been male.</para>
<para>It's true that this is a feedback loop, fewer women in computing
leads to fewer women in computing. It's important to understand that
this feedback loop causes women to leave computing who wouldn't have
left if, all other things being equal, they had been men. This is
important because male classmates often assume their female
counterparts leave the field because they "just aren't good enough."
Women's low self-estimation contributes to this false
impression.</para></sect2>
<sect2><title>Women are discouraged from an early age</title>
<para>Societal pressure for women to avoid computing begins at an
extremely early age. Preschoolers already have conceptions about
which jobs are men's jobs, and which jobs are women's. An excellent
review of studies documenting gender role socialization from an early
age can be found in Dr. Ellen Spertus's excellent "Why are There so
Few Female Computer Scientists?" paper: <ulinkurl="http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ellens/Gender/pap/node6.html">http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ellens/Gender/pap/node6.html</ulink></para>
<para>Once you realize that men and women are treated differently
from, practically, birth, it becomes hard to claim that any woman
hasn't experienced discrimination. Sure, if you're lucky, no one ever
explicitly told you that you couldn't work with computers because you
were a girl, but every time you raised your voice, an adult told you
to quiet down, while the boy next to you continued to shriek. This is
a handicap later on in life, when being loud and insistent is the only
way to get your opinion heard--for example, on the linux-kernel
mailing list.</para>
<para>The most striking example of a subtle bias against computing for
women is that, in the U.S. at least, the family computer is more
likely to be kept in a boy's room than in a girl's room. Margolis and
Fisher give several telling examples of this trend and its effects on
pages 22-24 of <citetitle>Unlocking the Clubhouse</citetitle>.</para>
</sect2>
<sect2><title>Computing perceived as non-social</title>
<para>Working with computers is perceived to be a solitary occupation
involving little or no day-to-day human contact. Since women are
socialized to be more friendly, helpful, and generally more interested
in human interaction than men, computing tends to be less attractive
to women. I want to stress that computing is only perceived to be a
non-social activity. While it is possible for a programmer to be
relatively successful while being actively anti-social and programming
does tend to attract people less comfortable with human interaction,
computing is as social as you make it. During college, I spent most
of my computer time in a computer lab at the school with several of my
best friends. And recently, I changed jobs specifically in order to
have more day-to-day contact with other programmers. For me,
programming by myself is less fun or creative than it is when I have
people around to talk to about my program.</para>
<para>
Oddly, many occupations which are arguably less social than computing
are still very attractive to women. Writing, either fiction or
non-fiction, is a good example of a field that requires many hours of
solitary concentration to be successful. Perhaps the answer to the
paradox lies in the perception of individual writers as still being
interested in social interaction, and just not having much opportunity
for it.</para>
</sect2>
<sect2><title>Lack of female role models</title>
<para>Women in computing do exist, but most people aren't lucky enough
to meet a female computer scientist. Women are socialized to be
modest and avoid self-promotion, which makes them even less visible
than they might otherwise be. Mothers and female schoolteachers
regularly protest that they don't know anything about computers. As a
result, girls grow up without examples of women who are either
competent or confident with computers. I encourage all women in
computing to be as visible as possible--accept all interviews, take
credit publicly--even when you don't want to. You may be embarrassed,
but by allowing yourself to be publicized or promoted, you might
change a young girl's life.</para></sect2>
<sect2><title>Games, classes aimed towards men </title>
<para>We all know that most computer games are written by and for men.
They feature non-stop gore and women with unrealistically huge
breasts, but hey, if that's the market, what's the problem?</para>
<para>The best way I know how to illustrate the problem with the
computer game industry is to tell a story from a Salon.com article