i believe a number of makerspaces are doing pretty well here. it’s not uncommon that i’m introduced to some interest in an online or workplace setting that’s >90% male, and then a meetup takes me to some makerspace that’s notably less skewed. i can think of many reasons why that might be (women in prominent roles, scheduling events which intentionally bring usually-separate interests into a context where they overlap, promoting themselves in places which are less skewed, and upholding way stronger social norms than you would see in our space or any other online space adjacent to us – to the point that more of the posts in this thread than not would get the poster censured, just by their tone); but i’m going to make a note to ask the leadership at my own makerspace about this instead of speculating further.
https://pythondev.readthedocs.io/diversity.html
https://lwn.net/Articles/952146/
https://lwn.net/Articles/793927/
https://lwn.net/Articles/786304/
https://lwn.net/Articles/765674/
https://lwn.net/Articles/746546/
https://lwn.net/Articles/745705/
Apologies for the short message; I thought I could provide some surface-level documentation and practical strategies. However, it seems there’s more interest in discussing the issue at length than in addressing it directly. I’d rather invest my time in communities genuinely committed to solving this problem, so I’ll leave it at that.
If the question (as it has been posed a few times here) is “how can we make the community more gender-diverse, how do we even start” then I would suggest that the very first step to get there is for the men to stop Opining™ about this topic and let other people decide the approach here, and until that happens I’m not sure there’s much more to be said here.
My apologies for being blunt here but this whole discussion seems to be taking the exact same unproductive path as every previous discussion on the topic and for all the same reasons, and I really don’t have the energy to re-run that whole debate again. And well, this is the answer to your question.
Sorry, but I was asking for something different: I was curious if there was an organization that succeeded in closing the gender gap, or at least made some kind of substantial progress. But Python’s gender demographics just look like ours:
Could be that the JetBrains survey is just skewed I suppose.
FWIW I’m really not trying to waste people’s times, a terse answer is absolutely fine with me.
(Furthermore, I think the reason why this thread is continuing in a less actionable direction is because there’s an off-shoot thread for actionable things.)
edit: In retrospect after re-reading my original post, I definitely did not make it clear that was what I was seeking. Sorry.
I thought your question was really thoughtful
I was curious if there was an organization that succeeded in closing the gender gap
I believe the answer to why that is not going to be the case for larger organizations (smaller projects might be outliers, but here you’d have to look at larger numbers of smaller projects) can be found in my earlier arguments.
If big projects like Nix or Python are getting their members from the overall population of developers - and not the overall general population - they are competing for the same 10% of women. (Assuming we have a rightly 9 to 1 ratio for men to women) Since these 10% of women have only finite time to spend, they can’t be around in all projects. And that is why projects tend to reproduce the overall distribution with a bunch of variance here and there.
In conclusion: The diversity initiatives that work on the individual project level but have zero causal impact on the overall industry are doomed to failure. At the very best they are a waste of all our time.
I also believe they are harmful on many levels, but I did not spell this out.
Python and us here most likely have no discrimination problem at all, given the individual project data and the overall industry data. (If the data would start to look radically different on either end, that judgement would not longer be valid of course.)
But some people just want to exclude everybody from the discussion who states this simple fact.
Can you elaborate on how you find them harmful? Aside from just saying it takes away from other projects, which seems kinda silly. I think you have some actual reasoning behind caring this much
In the abstract, I don’t really see the harm in doing outreach work, at least certainly not on its face. It’s clear that some people enjoy doing it, and I’m certain it still has some positive side-effects that don’t necessarily show up in a survey.
However, if there really are no other big organizations that have succeeded in a big and measurable way in closing the gender gap, then I think we should at least acknowledge that it might not be reasonable for us on our own to have a big impact on this front. (I am not saying there is no such organization. I am not personally aware of one, though.)
I think this goes both ways. Acknowledging that it might be improbable for us to do much about the gap allows us to not set unreasonable expectations for the success of outreach efforts, and future survey results.
We can still strive to make the community better overall: even this very thread has plenty of interactions that I think reflect poorly on the state of our community (though I admit I hold the belief that this is also not actually a NixOS-specific issue on the whole). But, nothing will ever be perfect. As usual, we’ll just have to do what we can.
That’s more or less what I tried to do over at Improving diversity in this community, albeit admittedly with less success than hoped for so far.
Some people driven away by a community will not go to another community, but leave the industry altogether. Others will not necessarily go that far, but decide that they can’t participate in online communities, or they can’t participate as much.
Also though the whole underlying principle of “we shouldn’t try to be better at attracting or retaining contributors, because we’ll only be taking them from somewhere else” is just bizarre. Anyone we “take” from another community in this way, we’re doing so by offering them a better experience and better enabling them to contribute and thrive here. If we manage 20% while everyone else is stuck on 5%, maybe they need to copy what we’re doing? And maybe if they do, we stand that much better a chance of reaching 20% everywhere, by drawing in people who had previously been repelled by the whole industry or found that it didn’t work for them. (And if we do, we can go for 30%…)
Of course, giving people a better experience requires upfront investment. So, wherever we are in this process, when deciding whether we have capacity to go further, we need to ask: what concerns are people raising, what ideas are they suggesting, what do they cost, can we afford them, and how much will they improve things? I would love to be focused more on those questions than on the basics of “is there even a problem to talk about here”. Not “are we good?” but “if we wanted to be better, how would we do it?”
There are a more quantifiable aspects to this and more qualitative. I am hesitant to go deep on all that here though, because of aggressive reactions already coming from all sorts of corners. If I were to explain things in detail, I’d probably start with the more qualitative aspect because it’s easier to explain and less work for me to spell out.
But before any of that, I’d like to ask you a question back. You sometimes appear to me to be genuinely curious about what is really going on. Like when I first started to raise some questions. But then somewhat later you become very dismissive again.
So I am unsure what it is. If you are genuinely curious, we could talk this through over a somewhat longer time horizon. I am on Matrix still, every now and then. Unless it gets too buggy again.
Thanks for that comment! I am afraid you missed one of my main points though.
I would love to be focused more on those questions than on the basics of “is there even a problem to talk about here”. Not “are we good?” but “if we wanted to be better, how would we do it?”
I just think you cannot start to evaluate a policy without asking that first question. If you don’t ask it you can basically argue for all sorts of policies on all sorts of issues. It creates an enormous overhead.
I would also hold that the aggressive atmosphere of this discussion, which I perceive as coming mostly from people who think the problem I am disputing is “self-evident”, is helping at all in “giving people a better experience.” And that has sadly a long history, here, and elsewhere.
This aggressive atmosphere should be the first problem to tackle. Only then can we have a really meaningful discussion about the second one. If we don’t do that I can’t really take the idea seriously that we really want to improve the lived experience of people. But it is true that that requires some upfront investment.
I will probably end my public participation in this topic for the foreseeable future, I need to attend to some other things.
You are also invited to write me if you don’t understand some things I am saying or you have any questions.
Quoting from https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/05/10/tone-policing-and-the-assertion-of-authority/:
Tone policing is when someone (usually a privileged person) in a conversation about oppression shifts the conversation from the oppression being discussed to the way it is being discussed. Tone policing prioritizes the comfort of the privileged person in the situation over the oppression of the disadvantaged person.
At its core, tone-policing is first an argumentative move sideways and then a stall. It first shifts the focus from the content of the conversation to the tone, language, or manner of discussion (as the quote above says) and then – unlike other interventions about tone – policing announces that the shift cannot be reversed until tone is addressed. The tone-policer doesn’t just declare that their interlocutor’s tone is inappropriate and heightened (usually because it is too hostile, adversarial, or aggressive, upset, or irrational). They insist that the conversation cannot continue until the speaker adjusts it.
This “aggressive atmosphere” is a direct product of having a thread slowly nearing the 100 comments and little to no productive discussion having happened because it constantly got dragged by down some dudes being stuck at the very most basics at best and actively sabotaging the discussion at worst.
And yes, to state explicitly what is implicit, I consider you –among many others in this thread– to be a part of this problem. Here, as well as in other past discussions which ended up similarly. And also part of the problem is a moderation culture which does not act upon such a persistent stream of micro-aggressions, thus fostering a culture where this is acceptable behavior.
Is that a direct attack against my person? I think this entire notion of tone-policing is a faulty one. It serves just one purpose: justifying uncivil aggression against people to allow for intimidation, in order to eliminate their viewpoints from debate. It is deeply authoritarian at heart.
That’s all there is to it.
And since Respect and Civility are the very first of the community values that we have adopted, we need the ability to make a critique of tone. And the tone needs to be civil and free of attempts at intimidation.
On factual level. I basically made one central argument. Except for people claiming some stuff, nobody really addressed it. You claimed you could, but didn’t have the energy. Other’s claimed that things I had explicitly disputed were “self-evident”. None of that is productive, I grant that
If people wanted to have a productive discussion, they should have addressed the argument head-on. And nothing else.
That being said, the other things I said stand I will leave now. And sign off. I have switched-off notifications off from here a long time ago already.
Why must we compete for the same “10% of women”? Why can’t we seek to increase that percentage, or get more women to work on our projects as well as others? There’s no reason that someone can’t work in multiple FOSS projects, or FOSS and a job, etc. You seem to be treating this as a zero-sum game where there is a fixed pool. There’s no reason we can’t create an inclusive community and bring more non-programmers of all stripes into our fold.
Also, as an LGBTQ+ person, I do take issue with your implication that genderqueer, genderdiverse, non-binary, or other genders don’t exist. Going from your post, the industry is 90% men, 10% women, and apparently 0% non-binary. That simply isn’t the case(Hi, I’m agender!) and going from the statistics, we have nearly the same amount of nonbinary folks as we do women. Therefore, there’s no reason we can’t also focus on helping increase the number of non-binary folks in Nix and FOSS, as that is overall a win for everyone, and helps better represent the entire community of non-male identifying folks.
Also, as an LGBTQ+ person, I do take issue with your implication that genderqueer, genderdiverse, non-binary, or other genders don’t exist.
Sinec I am still seeing this. That’s a fair point. It’s just harder to follow the more numbers you throw around. I thought about whether I should include all these others or not.
Therefore, there’s no reason we can’t also focus on helping increase the number of non-binary folks in Nix and FOSS, as that is overall a win for everyone, and helps better represent the entire community of non-male identifying folks.
This stuff however I am happy to explain in a direct change if interested. It would also mean repeating some stuff I already said with rephrasing it a bit maybe.
You’re exactly right. You can. Or at least should have the support to try.
Above is at least one response to your argument.
The way your argument is formulated is deeply flawed. The way you articulate it very assertively jumps to some conclusions, and then challenges the rest of the community to prove you wrong.
Whether or not there is a “10%” of women, it would absolutely be best to hear from women about what they think about being involved in Nix.
Maybe learning about what is possible with Nix via that outreach would actually spark ideas, solutions to genuine problems, that could make a difference for people in those other communities? Maybe there are in fact millions of plausible alternative outcomes as to what could happen with such an outreach effort, instead of just one narrow absolute possibility?
I know that when I was faced with a technical challenge in 2017, and first was informed about Nixos, this created opportunities for myself and others that are still paying off for myself and them even up to this day. Nix didn’t steal me away from other work in other communities. Instead, it helped me to enhance work I have been doing, making it simpler to manage and deploy software and infrastructure, and be able to focus more time on other tasks and work. I was able to use Nixos to deploy postgres and other tools to speed up the creating of a system called the “food abundance index” and I was even able to contribute to and help researchers publish findings on this that are benefitting people with food access issues in poor communities in the US Food Security as Ethics and Social Responsibility: An Application of the Food Abundance Index in an Urban Setting (being applied in work at https://www.eastliberty.org/spotlight-food-as-a-community-development-tool-how-food21-is-working-to-create-a-resilient-food-economy-in-larimer-and-beyond/ )
Later/recently, I was able to bring Nix into work I am doing to help build and deliver a fully open source software product. Packaging Supabase with Nix that is just my story. I am not a woman. But what if outreach to women brought these opportunities to women, like they did for myself and many others? Why can’t we try help raise each other up, introduce people to what is possible and see if it will help them like it helped me, and many others?
If someone wants to put effort into outreach for just one category or group of people, I will support it. If someone responds and says we should do outreach for all people, then ok, we can do that too.
I am less interested in talking about why we shouldn’t do it, and more interested in seeing people do it, even if it’s just focused on women, or whatever, to see if the outcome can help and lift up other people.
If everyone in this thread is enjoying the reheated leftovers, then carry on I guess, but I’d like to point out that the community now has a formal (if young) leadership body for the very first time, which means that the process for enacting any community-wide good idea that is too big for you to do all by yourself has gone from ‘post about it until you manage to convince everyone who shows up with a contrary opinion’ to ‘convince seven people’. It’s okay if there are still folks who don’t see things your way.
Want to, e.g., get funding for an Outreachy? Put together a plan. If you want a Nix-community space in which to make those plans that won’t be overrun with ‘Excuse me but I just don’t see the point in doing this’-ers, I’m sure the moderators would be willing to oblige you. There are access-restricted Matrix rooms already, for example. Once you have a plan, pitch the SC. Let the grumblers grumble.
That is the exact opposite goal of a body like the SC. 
If there’s anything good about this thread, it’s the large amount of genuinely good evidence that striving towards diversity is possible, brings results and positive experiences.
Everything else is just more of the same old thing. Some people experience abuse to the point of leaving the community. Some people ask “what’s an actionable plan”, and for some reason banning the systematic abusers is never an actionable plan, apparently. Some people say that there isn’t abuse: I guess people experiencing it are just liars, then? And some people say that solving the abuse isn’t the goal: I guess it’s good that folks who’ve been abused leave the community and make the demographics resemble the shitty common denominator, then.
Sorry, but until we admit that people who’ve experienced abuse to the point of leaving the community did, in fact, experience abuse, that they have a point, and that there is a problem to be solved - nothing will ever get solved. If you simply aren’t interested in solving the problem - please just say so, instead of wasting everyone’s time.
I full agree with the entirety of @rhendric 's post. I’ll start by invoking what I think is the relevant value.
Distribute decisionmaking widely
We are a synthesis of varied but overlapping communities. We rely on distributed approaches: asynchronous communication, clear ownership, deep-dive taskforces, and local decisionmaking.
We focus our attention on working together on our shared goals and working separately in a non-interfering way when our goals are independent.
We build trust primarily by working together on Nix projects.
Therefore, I want to suggest we take a break in this thread from trying to convince each other of various points. This is not likely to be resolved here and the discussion seems to be escalating instead of resolving.
-
distributed approaches: the community is free to pursue and promote Nix/NixOS however they see fit. There is no “one right way” to accomplish this that everyone has to agree with. Please continue to promote and encourage Nix adoption by any mechanism you can.
-
non-interfering: there were concrete suggestions above to use Outreachy. This is a worthy effort and does not interfere with any other effort. Anyone sufficiently motivated to organize such an effort should feel free to do so. Not everyone has to agree to participate in all of them. Having more things like Outreachy, Summer of Nix, and GSoC would be a net benefit to the community.
-
build trust: Efforts like Summer of Nix, brought in a lot of people, of which a significant percentage remained to become long-term contributors. They had a shared goal to work on Nix projects and this led to excellent outcomes. More things like this are good.
The SC has yet to have even an inaugural meeting (though it is scheduled), so speaking only for myself at this point: everyone, please take a short break from debating in this forum. If you’d like to put a proposal together or organize something, do so. If you have a burning desire to discuss this, DM me. Please, take a breath, pause, and attempt to de-escalate.