Well, honestly? No. Not this year and I daresay not any other. At best, considering the history, that could only be an exercise in overanxious, easily-triggered people (myself hardly least) harshing each other’s mellows. At worst, I’d be forcefully reminded why I exited that group to begin with. Hope not, but you know? behaviors change slowly, and attitudes more slowly still.

As evidenced by a recent uproar on the web4lib mailing list, started by a Swiftian yahoo with a masculine name whose ethnicity I do not know (but I’ll eat my brand-new noise-cancelling headphones if he isn’t as white as I am). The code4lib conference offers two diversity scholarships, one for women and one for people of color. Mr. Swiftian Yahoo doesn’t think that should be. It’s patronizing, don’t you know, and librarianship is female-dominated anyway, innit?

Numbers don’t necessarily equal power, Mr. Yahoo, and in systems librarianship women don’t even have the numbers. Bet you didn’t know that. I bet, in fact, that you still don’t believe it. You don’t have to. It doesn’t mess with your job. It doesn’t cut you off from valuable support systems. You are never the freak in the room. You don’t have to worry that you aren’t credible in the eyes of potential employers, that you’re cut off from one of the more lucrative parts of the profession. You don’t have to go to conferences and watch a parade of people onstage who look nothing like you. You don’t have it assumed that people like you aren’t on that stage because they didn’t put in the effort to get there. You don’t have it assumed that you’re onstage because after all, we gotta have tokens, even if they’re inferior. You don’t have to worry that the vendors on the exhibit floor (or the developers of the open-source software you depend on) aren’t taking you seriously. People like you are not the constant butt of sophomoric locker-room humor and jawdroppingly, grotesquely offensive statements tossed off like they don’t mean a thing. People like you don’t have to watch their profession, their own profession reduce them to their sexualized body shapes. People like you don’t have to cluster at conferences to avoid—well, people like you!

These are my shoes, Mr. Yahoo. My sensible low-heeled librarian Munros. I have big feet; they might well fit you. Howsabout you walk a little in ’em before you open your big fat thoughtlessly privileged mouth? Before you have the gall to assault a few guys who are at least aware of the problem and singing the right notes on the subject?

And if you can’t be arsed to walk in my shoes, or at least listen to me about my experiences walking in ’em, you need to shut the everliving hell up.

And then maybe discussions about women might include women, instead of Swiftian yahoos who think they know all about us and can tell us what we ought to find patronizing. Wow, imagine that. Inclusion. Voice!

The web4lib discussion didn’t include women for quite a space, until Darci Hanning and Karen G. Schneider stepped in at last. It’d be funny if it weren’t so damn angry-making—and yes, I’m pretty mad right now, if you hadn’t guessed. I’m grateful to the men who spoke up for code4lib, don’t mistake me; that’s necessary, helpful, and valuable. Not to mention that it takes guts. But I can’t help being irked at the same old pattern of being talked about, at, and around instead of talked with.

This is bad of me, but I can’t help feeling just a wee tiny bit of schadenfreude, because some of the same people who jumped all over one male code4libber because he had the temerity to challenge a sexist marketing tactic are now finding themselves jumped on in essentially the same way. I think they’re learning the hard way how wretchedly difficult it really is to change behaviors and attitudes.

That’s healthy. Personally, I don’t think the code4lib scholarships are actually about the women and people of color; I tend to agree that in and of themselves, they’re a sop and they don’t accomplish much. As symbols, though, they’re important; they create mindfulness. They’re fundamentally about not letting the privileged folk who don’t have to think about the problem (because it doesn’t directly impact them) turn into Swiftian yahoos because they’ve blithely forgotten the problem exists. It’s about holding their noses to the grindstone until the problem is solved.

And when the problem is solved—when systems librarianship looks like the rest of the profession, when I have the same tech-support networks everybody else does, when I don’t have to put up with sexist crap or people who defend it, when a woman is treated as courteously as a man and taken as seriously as a man in all professional and professionally-liminal contexts—I’ll be the first to say that the gender-diversity scholarship is patronizing and ought to be done away with.

The problem? Is so very, very, very not solved. As Mr. Swiftian Yahoo has amply demonstrated. Kudos to code4lib for being mindful, and defending that mindfulness.

Edited to add: Missed Darci Hanning’s post to the list and shouldn’t have. Fixed omission, and I apologize for it.

Plain-vanilla? I said. Who the heck stops at plain vanilla? Why is that even a useful benchmark?

Naughty Dorothea, no biscuit. (Note to SourceForge: friendly URLs for mailing-list threads, plzkthx.) “Given your experience, passion and know how it would be great if you could work with us in a positive fashion,” quoth the Foundation’s head honcho.

I don’t even know what to say about this, it’s so goofy. Except to note that I do believe there’s a bit of a gender issue lurking, as I’ve never seen a male participant called out for anything by anyone except when I’ve done it myself—good old unladylike me.

I’m willing to stand on my record vis-a-vis DSpace: even if we leave all my snark and criticism aside as wholly unproductive (which I dearly hope is arguable!), I’ve couple-three patches, two extremely successful customization workshops (and wikifying the handouts to boot), a number of how-to blog posts, and some mailing-list answers to my credit. That’s all I need to say, really.

(And funny. I cringed and laughed at once! As usual, don’t miss the tooltip.)

See, what happens (mild spoilers, so click over now if you’re going) is that a woman goes and does something highly technical as well as highly ironic.

And it’s not pointed out as unusual.

And she isn’t portrayed as unusual. Or undesirable. Or pure T&A. Or brainless. Or the butt of the joke. (If anything, the joke is purely linguistic/social, playing on specialized meanings of “write” and on the sillier things that women are “supposed” to commit to paper.)

More like this, please! And once again, a loud shout out to the extreme awesomeness that is xkcd.

At one juncture, in the context of bodies of water, LeGuin points out that names are relative; we all have many, and part of what names do is draw borders around us. But whose borders? We are named individually and as classes of people and things; also, we are named because of the use we are to a mage, or a dragon. (Does an individual rabbit have a name? To a mage, they are all kebbo: a mass plural, or at best an adjective, masquerading as a singular noun. Does dragonspeech even have plurals?) Our names rub up against the names of groups we belong in, and the perspective of the mages who give and teach and remember names.

Naming is power. Using names is power. Remember that.

I’ve been called a lot of things in my life—only a few of them, before you ask, profane. Aside from my own given name’s usage, what I’m called is fundamentally not under my control. Even with my own name I don’t always win; if you look in the ASIST conference-schedule index, you’ll see that I’m listed as “Dorothea (Dorothy) Salo” because of a panel-moderator error, even though my name is not and has never been Dorothy. (Nor is it “Dorthea,” or “Doretha,” or any of the other various manglings. “Dorothea.” Please. If you don’t have eight letters in it, you’re spelling it wrong.)

Oh, I try to guide. I very deliberately pick phrases like “conversion peasant” and “repository rat,” because my stance toward the world is generally one of captatio benevolentiae. But there’s only so much I can do. Not very much at all, really.

Often I am surprised by what I’m called, nominally or adjectivally. I still remember the shock of “wait, what?” when a high-school acquaintance called me “sophisticated.” It was just miles, miles away from anything I would ever have thought of myself. Or when an OEBPS working-group colleague told me in all seriousness that I was a software engineer specializing in workflows. Oh, hell no. I just make stuff work, when I can. Software engineers are people with fancy degrees and advanced skills in math and logic and programming who get paid a lot of money because they’re valuable.

Last night a professional colleague called me a “social epistemographer.” Well, that’s a new one—I had to look it up just to think about it! It doesn’t feel like a name I can comfortably inhabit. Like software engineers, social epistemographers have a context, and that context isn’t the one I live in. I may do social epistemography. I may even do software engineering now and then (though I have significant reservations about that one). That doesn’t entitle me to the name. Naming is power, but it isn’t infinite power.

The names I get aren’t always benign. The mean stuff tends to be just as askew from the truth as the nice stuff. I’ve seen my anger and confusion about graduate school and academia called bitterness. Resentful, okay, yes, but bitter? I’ve been called crazy, and not in nice ways. I have been crazy, but I’m mostly not. “Intimidating” is one I hear with more frequency than I’d like. CavLec is substantially to blame there, as I’m quite a bit meaner here than in more social contexts; the rest of it is physical presence, which there’s little I can do about at this late date.

Another colleague pointed out to me this morning that one reason for the first-initials-last-name practice that drives me (as a librarian who would like a little more authority control in her life) crazy: female scientists can avoid having their work automatically dismissed by male scientists when they go by initials rather than name.

Ouch. Cage match, librarian self and feminist self, tickets on sale outside. This is a real problem—just ask female orchestral instrumentalists—and for an individual female scientist, using initials helps solve the problem. It’s a “go along to get along” strategy, though, and any such strategy has an unfortunate externality: it divides and defeats the universe of female scientists, because it lets the men go blithely on ignoring and undervaluing those they can quickly identify as female by their names.

When I replied to my colleague that using full names may destabilize the implicit sexism of the current system, she answered, in toto, “Some women just want to do science, not be martyrs.”

I get that. I do. I just wanna be a geek, some days; I don’t want to be a martyr either. I don’t have the privilege of martyrless geekdom, and my name shows why. Not because anything particularly pernicious is attached to my name insofar as it identifies me—but a lot of pernicious stuff is attached to it, stuff that I can’t do anything about, insofar as it identifies that I belong to the class of women. Context, again. My name, in some contexts, is harmful to me; it gives powerful others a way and a social license to hurt, exclude, and demean me.

It’s frustrating. I loathe that particular externality. Not only does it mean I both am and look more isolated than need be, it’s at the root of some of the rhetorical tricks I hate like poison, the “I don’t see sexism!” trick, also known as “I’m doing fine; what’s your problem?” Not to mention the “If you’d just stop kicking up a fuss, we’d all be fine, including you” trick.

I’m fond of my name, for all its polysyllabicity and the spelling difficulty it causes others. I guess when it comes down to it, I’m willing to live with a little martyrdom to keep my name. I shouldn’t have to choose, though—and neither should anybody else.

Alas, that most excellent cartoon has been relegated to second place. Just too much win in today’s. I laughed, I identified (I’ve been in that IRC room!), I pumped my fist, I Twittered it, I rejoiced.

I’ve seen some concern here and there that “Joanna” isn’t the person in the ’toon who has voice; Hat Guy explains it all. This does not in fact bother me, because I think a subtle point is being made (and unfortunately missed): women should not be the only people put off by this buffoonery, and men can damned well speak up about it too, and should.

Plus, Joanna gets the EMP cannon. Mua-hahahahahahahahaha. I want one!

Rock on, xkcd. You just rock right the hell on. The title text (hold your mouse over the image) is just the crowning glory.

And for those who think the Wyoming mudflap girl is no big deal, consider this non-work-safe variant. Still no big deal? Think about your reactions. Think hard, damn it.

(The notion that the Wyoming campaign is somehow “reclaiming” the mudflap-girl image is just weak. Reclamation of offensive terminology is done by the offended group, y’all. If that’s going to happen to mudflap-girl, it has to be done by women, the group that the image systematically turns into raw meat. Librarians != women, and women != librarians. Try harder, people, really.)

I am a feminist and a geek, I grant you; I would seem to be Wiscon’s ideal demographic. And I quite gave up on other SF/F cons after the Harlan Ellison debacle; they’re by geek guys, for geek guys, and I refuse to give that style of social atmosphere credence any more, nor is it my responsibility (or, frankly, desire) to reform it.

But Wiscon is for the serious feminist geeks, the ones who engage with the intersection of feminism (as well as other -isms) and geekdom on a daily basis. Me, I’m just an idle eye-roller. I read some of the right blogs and work on being attuned to representation issues and occasionally try to mess with others’ heads when that seems like a fruitful thing to do…

… and that’s it. I’m just a dilettante. Wiscon isn’t for me. That’s just not my crowd. It’s not like they’re having any trouble with attendance, either; Wiscon sells out months in advance. So I’d only be taking up space that could go to someone who’s better at all this than I am—which, admittedly, isn’t hard.

So, no, I’m not at Wiscon. I wave happily at those who are, though.

You don’t know me at all, but a friend pointed me at your “What some folks can do, if they choose” post, and it’s important to me. I’m a youngish woman (about to turn 27) in computers. I’m actually in the third generation of my family to program professionally: my grandmother was one of the first… programmers, back when it was a low status (and thus female) technician-type job. It’s clearly better for me than it was for her, or for my mother. I don’t have to fight to overturn an official policy that women will get less pension than men. It’s not assumed that I’ll go to a business meeting in a strip club.

Instead, there are subtle things. Every interviewer comments on my gender. Some coworkers have opened meetings with “Gentleman… and Mary”. More than once. I’ve had an interviewer ask me if I were married and if I had or planned to have kids. (Illegal, but not something I had sufficient energy/interest to pursue.)

I’m relatively butch-presenting, and I’m fairly sure that that’s helped me, that being [tall], stocky, and low-voiced has made me more acceptable to those around me. I know that not all of my gender presentation is natural — some of it is from early and extensive exposure to Golden Age science fiction, where men fixed machines and piloted rocket ships, and women came out of gumball machines…

Strangers will always have shallow gender-based conversations with me in professional settings. I will always end up in small talk conversations that boil down to “So you’re a woman, then. There are so few women in this field.” from people who aren’t interested in doing anything to fix that themselves.

My husband is more extroverted and more well-known in a subfield I’m interested in, so I’ve gotten one or two comments implying I was at user groups for his sake, not for mine. I get to wonder how many similar comments don’t make it past the internal censors of more diplomatic people.

The Kathy Sierra thing also hit me hard. I was deeply interested in user interfaces and human-computer interaction at the end of college. The career she’s being driven out of is one that I once would have considered a dream job. She’s not being driven out of it because her ideas are bad, or because technology has shifted faster than she can keep up, but because she dared to be a public woman. I find that both abstractly depressing and deeply personally terrifying.

I’ve been trying to speak up about things that bother me. It’s depressing when, by and large, the result is shocked incomprehension. A few of my male friends get it, but an alarming number really don’t think there’s anything wrong with having the entire poker-game conversation be about how having sex with a penis-having person means you’re more worthless than pond scum. These weren’t cloistered men who hadn’t seen female people since they were in diapers — all but one of them were married to women. One of them now has a seven-month-old daughter, and still makes prison anal rape jokes over family dinners, except when I ask him to stop. One of them is my husband.

I’m doing my best to remember that hard work and persistence often do make things better, as generations roll by. Right now there are few technical women, and pretty much all of them (without false modesty) are the cream of the crop. There aren’t female equivalents to the good-enough-but-nothing-special men. I’m still a dancing bear as much as I am a kick-ass debugger, a process-improver, someone who can offhandedly make a temporary backup system that works. In my head, the latter qualities should be far more relevant to my employability than my being a Mary instead of a Timothy, even though all of them are on my resume. If I can’t have a world like that for myself, it’s comforting to think that maybe I can help build one for baby Kathy and baby Lillian, and for all the other kids that I don’t know.

One of the definitions of privilege is that those who have [x]-privilege have the choice of ignoring [x]. I’m white; I can ignore race, or read about it, or become an activist, as it suits me. I can change my decision from day to day. I can stop thinking about race if other stuff becomes more important to me. I will never be allowed to stop thinking about gender.

I’m sorry that this meandered so much. Thank you for writing the essay. Thank you for setting out, clearly and concisely, something that can be done. Thank you for pointing out the amount of effort that it takes to pit yourself against “just a joke”s and “just talk”. Thank you for telling me that it’s not trivial meaningless oversensitivity, and that it’s not all in my head.

Another thing that every techie regardless of gender can do is let women in tech tell their stories in their own words, and then listen to them. There really isn’t any excuse for “shocked incomprehension.” I’ve heard many such stories, because I am perceived as a sympathetic ear. Funny thing is, people think I’m angry on my own behalf, but on the whole I’ve had it pretty easy. The stories I’ve heard, though!

And the stories I’ve read. For more on women like “Mary”’s grandmother and the early history of computing, let me recommend the article “When Computers Were Women” by Jennifer S. Light (Technology and Culture 40:3, pp. 455–483). Project MUSE has it, so if your institution has a subscription, you’re golden.

My thanks and admiration to my correspondent for her sincerity, her eloquence, and her courage.

Over at Meredith’s, a couple-three men are saying how much the episode sickens them, and how helpless they feel to do anything about it. This post is for them, and folks like them. I don’t actually think there’s nothing they can do. I do think that what they can do is non-obvious, difficult, slow, laborious, frustrating, and courage-sapping, though.

My sense of what can be done to stop specifically misogynistic bullying depends on what I hinted at in my earlier post: it’s a broken-windows problem. (Yes, I know the sociologists debunked the broken-windows hypothesis long ago. I still find it a convenient analogy.) I don’t think the hateful language or the rape ’shop jobs or the threats could go nearly as far as they have (and still do) were it not for a widespread and unchallenged culture on the internet that insults, demeans, and irrelevantly sexualizes women millions of times on millions of websites every single day.

It’s worse in geekland. It always has been worse in geekland. There’s a strong (but by no means 1.0) positive correlation between the strength of a woman’s belief that misogyny on the internet is a serious problem and the strength of her connections with geekland. (It’s not just the computer geeks, either, which is why I use the vague term “geekland.” Gaming of various sorts, comics, science-fiction fandom—same story. Also, my remarks may extend to homophobia, which is likewise endemic in geekland, but I welcome refutation from people closer to that problem than I am.)

It’s all over the place—the pr0n jokes, the “I’d hit that” (hit, equating sex to aggression, that, reducing a human being to a thing), the “I bet she’s hot,” the “I bet she’s a fat whore,” the “I did your mom” one-offs. Everything about a woman, any woman, reduces to sex and sexual attractiveness. Even compliments are invariably phrased in terms of sexual attractiveness; geekland doesn’t know how else to compliment a woman.

All this is deeply ingrained in geekland culture, so deeply that if your connections to geekland are strong enough, it is inescapable… so inescapable that perhaps you’re already accustomed to it. Me, I have never gotten accustomed to it—call me sheltered, but I honestly didn’t ever run into people who thought and talked that way until I joined geekland, sometime after graduate school—and so I get angry about it and people hate and fear my anger, and try to delegitimize it.

It’s out of this earth that attacks like the one against Kathy Sierra grow. I firmly believe this. If you don’t, then click away; there’s not much point in reading further.

I can’t do anything about these particular broken windows. I’ve proven that the hard way—by trying repeatedly and failing repeatedly—and believe me, I hate my helplessness. My sense is that geekland culture only listens to women when they behave like honorary guys, which means silently accepting the prevailing misogyny (because after all, the guys do). Long ago, I tried to fix a broken window in my corner of the blogosphere. I failed, failed abjectly, and I came within an inch of leaving blogging because of it; if you want the gory details, hop all the way back to the beginning of my “Grunchy stuff” category. More recently, I tried to fix a broken window in the code4lib IRC channel. I failed, failed abjectly, though I hear others have picked up tools and are perhaps making progress with them.

I’m dubious that women can fix these windows on their own, in fact. It’d be nice, but geekland culture has got a cozy little cycle going: demean women, then accuse them of overreacting (I’m being kind here; the accusations are generally much nastier than that) if they protest it, then demean the protesters, who are after all women, until they are driven off. Then demean women some more; who will be left to protest? And who will be left to protest should merely demeaning women escalate to threatening them? Threatening them sexually? Threatening their lives?

No, a Kathy Sierra debacle won’t happen in every community whose norms allow sex jokes. But I will venture to say that every community with those norms has driven women out of it, mostly but not always silently. Argue with me about that. I dare you. I’ve been that woman too often.

But the cycle can be broken. It just has to be broken by men. And, I believe, it needs to be broken as early as possible in the cycle, while the norms of a particular community are still forming. Once they’ve crystallized such that pr0n jokes and “I’d hit that” are acceptable, the battle is lost. That community is inevitably going to drive away some woman sometime, and probably a lot of them. Moreover, I have yet to see such a community reform itself.

So here is what you do, if you’re a man wanting to help. You say, “Um, was that supposed to be funny? Because, not laughing here.” You say, “Hey, could we not use that phrase? I don’t like it.” You say to the main perpetrators, in IRC whispers or private email or whatever, “Hey, would you mind toning down the jokes? That kind of talk really bothers me.”

The key here is to express that the demeaning of women bothers you, you personally. Don’t appeal to nebulous higher causes; geekland scoffs at that stuff. Don’t even say the words “sexist” or “sexism,” much less “feminism,” and avoid “woman” and “women” whenever you can. If you say “that kind of talk,” trust me, they’ll know what you mean; whereas if you invoke the loaded words, they’ll shut down like a portcullis before an invading army.

And don’t say that you want the talk to stop because you want a comfortable environment for women, or even for a specific woman (your significant other, your sister, your daughter, your boss, your employee). Geekland doesn’t care. You can’t even say that you want more women to join the community. Some geeks will openly say “Why?” (Or, less openly, they will say that women aren’t there because they don’t want to be—without answering the question begged—or aren’t smart enough or good enough or “tough enough” to be. The last-mentioned, of course, is code for “honorary guy.”) The rest will simply assume that you want women for sex, because that’s all that women are for in geekland.

In fact, don’t get drawn into discussing why sexist talk irks you; doing so has probably been my major mistake. Geekland is very, very good at attacking feminist arguments, and dismissing and besieging the arguers. If they ask you why you’re bothered, just ask “Shouldn’t I be? Doesn’t it bother you? Uh, isn’t it wrong?” and like that—let them defend. (They will, don’t mistake me. But at least they have to.)

I reiterate: You must say that “that kind of talk” bothers you personally, and you must not get drawn into fruitless arguments about why you are bothered. That’s the only thing that breaks the cycle.

Sounds easy. Isn’t. It’s no good to do this in safe spaces, like the comment section of a female (much less feminist) blogger. You have to do it in spaces where you will not feel welcome or possibly even safe in saying it. And you will have to repeat yourself until you are blue in the face, this happens so often. Welcome to my world.

You will be told you’re overreacting. You will be told nobody means any harm. You will be ordered to lay off. You will be asked why you care, why you don’t have anything more important to worry about, why you’re ruining the great social environment. You will be shunned. You will be hassled. You may even be told to get the hell out. You will be called a feminazi, very possibly to your face. You will be told you’re pussywhipped, because in geekland, women are properly subordinate to men and nobody better damn well forget it. You will even be called a pussy or a cunt, because in geekland, nothing is worse than being compared to a woman, and her genitalia specifically.

Not easy. Not easy at all. It will take astonishing amounts of courage and persistence, in fact. But aside from getting in early and setting norms up front, nothing else works that I’ve ever seen. Think you’ve got the guts? Step up and prove it. Sing with the chorus.

And for those of you who already do—thank you. Thank you, Walt and Roy and Brad and Kevin, just to name four. Thank you very much.

This is my contribution to Stop Cyberbullying Day. I don’t do tags on CavLec (no philosophical objection, just haven’t bothered), but this post can be appropriately tagged on del.icio.us or elsewhere.

About usual for Thursday, said another regular on the channel. Snorting cocaine off a dead hooker’s leg.

It wasn’t what Kathy Sierra is going through. It wasn’t personal, heaven knows. It wasn’t pointed at me. It wasn’t even intended to be offensive.

But I never went back to that channel after that.

There’s a continuum. All of this stuff is on it. It’s damned hard to tell where stuff falls sometimes.

Please try to stay off it. Please. And I will too.

They pointed out to me that the supposition isn’t necessarily that either partner is evil, just that job situations can force evil choices on good people (especially in academia, noted one correspondent). This is certainly a truth; I’m lucky not to have faced it directly, though my husband’s original intransigence over moving away from Madison got us uncomfortably close to it.

No excuses; I’m stressed lately for all the obvious reasons, but I didn’t have to take it out on my officemates and the world in general. I’ll try not to do it again.