Planet SoC

Matthew Garrett’s post on (gender) inclusiveness was brought to my attention this morning as something that may be of interest to me, as a female who is starting to get involved in GNOME and open source. This type of discussion seems to come up every once in a while, and has done so already on the GSoC students mailing list, so I’ve had a bit of time to straighten out my thoughts on the matter. The advice of “don’t be a dick” is hard to argue with, but I’m going to give it a shot, and since I’ve got girly bits, I even have some protection against attacks.
The idea that women need to be treated as delicate sensitive creatures just makes me feel patronized and separate from the rest of the community. Believe it or not, some women like jokes. Even so-called offensive sexist jokes. If I complain that I’m having a hard time building a program and someone suggests I try “sudo apt-get remove estrogen” to solve my problem, well, that’s kind of funny. Clearly, whoever says something like that isn’t trying to drive me away from the community - they’re trying to make me laugh and cheer up during my time of frustration.
If a woman shows up on a mailing list, she’s probably read at least a few posts from the archives and has a sense of the general behaviour of the community. Changing that behaviour just because you’re talking to a woman only makes that woman feel different and inferior. If I get into an argument/flame war with someone online and then all of a sudden they say “Oh shit, sorry, I didn’t realize you were a woman”, then that’s basically saying “up until now I was treating you as an equal, but now that I realize you’ve got delicate feminine sensibilities, I’m going to stop being a dick because I don’t want to hurt you”. Aww, thanks. I’m sure you mean well, but to me it’s being more of a dick than just treating me like one of the boys.
Am I saying that you need to go out and be a douchebag to every woman that shows up? Not at all. Some women, just like some men, are easily offended, but most of the time it’s pretty easy to tell who can take a joke and who can’t. Don’t assume that a woman fits into the latter category just because her body is prettier than yours - get to know her, figure out if she can take it or not, and then be a dick, if that’s how you treat everyone else.