"Die, bitch."
When a man wrote this on computational technologist and coder Svaksha’s personal blog, it wasn’t an entirely new experience for her. Svaksha, who lives in Bangalore, has been an open software developer for the past ten years. And "die bitch" is just one among a glut of harassing comments she has faced both online and offline during her decade-long stint in the FOSS community.
FOSS, or free, libre and open source software, is created mostly by volunteer-run communities across the world, ranging from NGOs to hobby projects. And like the rest of the large and loosely grouped together tech industry, the FOSS community is overwhelmingly made up of men. It’s hard to get accurate figures, but a 2013 survey found that women constituted 11% of the total number of FOSS contributors worldwide. In India, the statistics are equally abysmal. This 2013 list of 90 Indian FOSS contributors (the only list publicly available on the interwebs) has a grand total of seven discernably female names. Yes, seven.
"The comment was posted under the name of a guy I knew from the FOSS community," says Svaksha, who has contributed to major open source projects including Julia, Python, and Ubuntu. "But when I traced it further, I [figured out] that it had been actually posted by his enemy [someone in the community he was at loggerheads with]. So I phoned him and told him that his identity had been faked and [that] I intended to lodge a complaint about the comment.
"He said, 'No, don’t complain.'"
Not only does the presence of fewer women in FOSS mean that increasing numbers of technologies are conceived, designed and implemented without women in mind, but that women who manage to navigate through convoluted entry barriers frequently find themselves at the receiving end of various types of abuse – with little space to address it.
Because in the world of FOSS, if your enemy’s enemy is a woman, he just became your friend.
"Especially if you’re new and trying to learn," she says, "a man will tell you that you are not doing it right because you don’t know enough – and that he should do it instead. Men hog the project and women end up not being able to learn or hone their skills."
Svaksha talks about what women working in tech often call the "brogrammer experience". A few years ago, a man forked (coderspeak for "made a copy of") a repository she had built over two years and published on Github. He took the code from her Github page, copied it, and published it as his own work. "He didn’t attribute it to me and broke its license. When I went public with it, he pleaded ignorance of the licensing terms. He claimed to be a novice – but he knew how to fork.’
In fact, as Svaksha explains, ‘he’d contributed to two other repositories without plagiarising them or changing the license. Both were created and maintained by men. He felt he could get away with stealing an Indian woman’s work because her effort and hard work didn’t deserve any respect."
A lack of respect from men is a thread that seems to runs through women’s experiences in FOSS. In October, Portland-based coder Sarah Sharp quit Linux’s developer community. A prolific contributor, Sarah had created support for USB 3.0 connectivity to Linux – well in advance of proprietary operating systems including Microsoft Windows.
She writes, "I finally realised that I could no longer contribute to a community where I was technically respected, but I could not ask for personal respect. I did not want to work professionally with people who were allowed to get away with subtle sexist or homophobic jokes."
Similarly, developer Katie Cunningham writes about her decision to leave the open source community.
"Why would I ever leave the profession where I got paid real money to do what I love?" she asks. "In short, I got tired of being told to 'lighten up'…This industry is one of subtle sexism: 'Sheesh. Why are you so sensitive? All I did was make a joke about you needing to be in the kitchen!'"
And it’s not only about jokes. "Sometimes, it’s attempts to push me into a traditionally 'female' role," writes Katie. "As [a] woman, I’ve been the only person in the group asked to put together a pot luck, I’ve been the only one asked to take notes in a meeting…even if I’m the one who’s presenting."
Zainab Bawa runs HasGeek, a Bangalore-based tech start-up, together with her husband Kiran. She writes, "Often times, people ask Kiran: 'So you said Zainab is your partner in HasGeek. What does she do in the company?' This question is often asked in my presence, when I am right in front of the person asking. Kiran’s instant response is: 'She runs the company”. The conversation then veers off towards other questions…For me, this is often a reminder of '[W]hat am I really doing in this company? Why am I even here?'"
Joseph Reagle observes in a paper titled "Free as in sexist? Free culture and the gender gap": "Open communities seem particularly susceptible to a vocal minority of people who are not kind, patient, or moderate in their participation."
But the minority often includes a community’s most influential members.
Linus Torvalds, the principal founder of the Linux kernel, called Sarah Sharp’s insistence on civil and respectful interaction "playing the victim card". He stated on a public mailing list, "Because if you want me to 'act professional', I can tell you that I’m not interested. The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m also not going to buy into the fake politeness. People resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways."
(Because, you know, it’s a pretty "normal urge" to ask the woman who is making a presentation to also take notes. Or get her to rustle up some snacks.)
But nobody was likely to speak out against Linus (for whom Linux is named), and throughout the long discussion thread, practically nobody did.
We use several free and open source software in our everyday lives, often without knowing it. There’s the Android mobile operating system, with its alphabetically arranged appetising line-up of versions: starting with Cupcake all the way through to KitKat, Lollipop, and Marshmallow. There’s the web browser Firefox, developed and maintained by the large international Mozilla community. There’s the Mediawiki application that powers Wikipedia. And then of course Linux, an example of FOSS wizardry at its best. Linux is present on supercomputers, personal computers, routers, digital video recorders, and on the International Space Station. It is used by NASA and by the highest rungs of India’s judiciary.
To get these shows on the road, FOSS projects need a variety of contributors: coders, testers, bug triagers, documentation writers, translators, troubleshooters, marketers, managers, graphic designers, artists, community builders, and even end-users who give feedback and report glitches. But despite the fact that FOSS nurtures and is nurtured by this spirit of community and collaboration, there’s always an implicit hierarchy at play.
In the words of Linus Torvalds, "Talk is cheap; show me the code."
All software everywhere is made up of lines of code, and the ability to write code is the holy grail of the FOSS world. Seen as having more technical jobs, FOSS coders, or programmers, enjoy the highest positions in the community’s de facto pyramid.
Oh, and they mostly tend to be men. Cue brogrammers.
"In general, women are stereotyped with qualities such as multi-tasking, relationship building [,] and having better skills at organising," explains Zainab. "[So] we are creating a structure where men largely take on the domain of creation and creativity, while women do the hard (and often invisible) labour of day-to-day management.
"At the end of the day, roles are tricky. They are not merely positions you take up in an organisation. They come with historical, political, and emotional baggage. These roles (and their associated stereotypes) then start defining the structure of [tech] societies."
So much so that ‘show me the code’ or ‘we look forward to your code’ have become common ways to deride people in non-developer positions — several of whom are women. Chinmayi says, "Shaming [women] for being in these roles and making them feel inferior makes them want to not go further in the community."
And for those who do try to go further, there are plenty of stumbling blocks along the way.
"Women have an inhibition that coding is [only] for men," says 23-year-old Neena (name changed), who lives in Kerala. "We conducted a two-day intensive training programme for women. [Here] they were not scared to ask questions because they were in a safe space." But when Neena tried to organise another similar event under the banner of a local tech group affiliated with a multinational tech company, the spaces didn’t seem so safe anymore.
"The event was due to be held. All preparations for it were made. Participants and speakers had been confirmed. And only two days before the event, Rahul Mani (name changed), who handles events at the local affiliate, told me that the multinational company had refused permission to use their [logo]. I did not know what to do." Distressed, Neena emailed a guy she vaguely knew at the large tech company. She was shocked to read his reply: the local group had never applied for permission in the first place. "When I confronted Rahul Mani, he told me he lied about the event permissions because he did not trust a woman to be capable of organising it."
Nonetheless, she managed to pull off the event, and even dipped into her personal funds to make it happen. Then came the icing on top: "But once the event turned out to be a success, he grabbed credit for it and tried to show that it was his event." And here comes the cherry: "He even used his influence to edit a blog post I had published to introduce his name into it!"
Women-only spaces are not seen as safe havens but as girl gangs that lack seriousness or that provide perks unavailable to men. Hyderabad-basedPragya (name changed), who works as a freelance software developer, recalls a discussion about how to increase gender diversity within the Chennai Python community. "Some people started dissing the idea of having women-only spaces 'because men and women are equal'," she recalls. "[And] it went from a discussion on how to bring more women into the fold to one on how to find women who we can trust with the membership of the group."
Because of course, women who want women-only spaces can’t possibly be trustworthy, no? "They want puppets who can do their bidding," Pragya concludes. "Everyone wants women who are docile and submissive."
Berlin-based researcher and information activist Zara Rahman believes that this culture stems from men who are "not aware of the norms that they are propagating and the damaging effect[s] they have within communities". But the damage itself is undeniable. She recalls, "I once tweeted from a talk about encouraging women in technology by making safe spaces available for women to feel welcome." Amongst the range of "astonishingly ignorant" comments she received, here’s one:
"Nobody went out of their way to make me feel welcome as a new member of the community; why should we make extra efforts for these women?"
def get-purpose():
""" Return the purpose """
raise AmbigiousMissionError, "Mission unclear"
In 2013, coder Anand Pillai published a repository to poke fun at PyLadies Bangalore, a group of Bangalore-based women interested in the Python programming language. The snippet from the repository above can be interpreted to mean that PyLadies Bangalore do not have a defined goal and the purpose of their existence is unclear.
Pillai eventually apologised on the Bangalore Python community’s public mailing list, but not before several other, mostly male members (dick joke alert) made it clear that objecting to the nature of the repository was, in their not-so-good books, ‘trolling’ and an unduly harsh attempt to name-and-shame.
"Men in FOSS communities can be like a band of brothers," explains Pragya. "They may quarrel among themselves, but they gang up against common enemies. And when a woman calls them out, she becomes the common enemy."
Speaking out about sexism within the FOSS community is incredibly difficult. In the few cases where, as Chinmayi says, "Entire communities are not aware of the need to implement a code of conduct, the way out is to sensitise the communities. You have to first make them realise they have done something wrong."
But most of the time, people simply don’t want to hear it. Pragya says, "A woman who speaks up is seen as aggressive. If a woman calls out abuse and harassment, she is ostracised, defamed, or thrown out of the community." And so for the most part, "women tend to not speak up", says Chinmayi. "They know they will be blamed back. Most FOSS communities are close-knit; it’s very hard to go to a mailing list and name names. People tend to take non-aggressive approaches such as having a private chat."
Speaking about abuse in FOSS comes with a territory where only the fittest (and the thickest-skinned) survive. Speech, with its slings and arrows, is emotionally draining for the women. For the men, it’s business as usual.
Katie writes of her decision to leave the open source community: "Every time I spoke up about [this] crap, I got some sympathy, but I also got some guy who didn’t understand what the big deal was. If I wasn’t in the middle of being raped or beaten or threatened or fired, guess what I needed to do?
"Lighten up."
"Men gave me the expectations I started with in 1998, of how open source citizens should act in open source communities, about what the rules are, and about the sets of expectations we have about how we talk and work with each other. And I’m wondering what a genuinely different approach would look like."
Sumana Harihareshwara is a programmer, technology executive, and open source expert. She’s also asking FOSS’ million-dollar question:
"Where the fuck are the women?"
Echoing this sentiment, every woman interviewed for this piece strongly feels that the only long-term solution is to increase the number of women in FOSS communities.
Twenty three-year-old Aruna S lives in Bangalore and works as a programmer at Mapbox, an open source mapping platform. "Girls interacting with boys is a social thing [that lacks acceptability] here [in India] – it’s a larger social problem," she says. "If there are inclusive communities with more women, it’s more comfortable for women to ask questions. [They think], 'Oh, she can do it, then maybe I can do it.'"
Which is why the visibility of existing women in FOSS is also crucial. As 21-year-old Nidhiya Raj says, "Indian women in FOSS don’t have role models from within the country to look up to. If Indian women FOSS contributors attend more conferences, they would gain exposure and motivate others [as well]." Aruna adds, "I have personally also felt that when I see a woman who is very strong and who is in FOSS, then my self-belief goes up a notch, because I feel like I can definitely do it."
FOSS spaces need better community guidelines, strong(er) moderation, a code of conduct for online interaction, and above all, non-negotiable and strict enforcement. Even though FOSS communities from the Global North are leading the way via projects such as Geek Feminism Wiki’s codes of conduct, to what extent Indian FOSS communities can adopt these is unclear. As Chinmayi asks, "In India, who in these communities knows what is the right remedy and policy to apply? Communities are male-dominated and there are very few women in admin roles. Even where a code of conduct is present, have the communities embraced it in letter and spirit?"
Of course, not all women have terrible experiences in FOSS. Many are welcomed by virtue of their gender, out of a recognition of open source’s gender imbalance. Chinmayi recalls, "When I joined this community, all the male members encouraged me. To this day they are encouraging and supportive."
Sinny Kumari started as a volunteer programmer with KDE (a free software community) five years ago, and now works in Bangalore with the international open source company Red Hat. Her blog, where she "Loves and promotes Open Source", is full of posts and photos from events and conferences she has been to. Sinny believes that women should not shy away from FOSS. "If you are a student, contributing to FOSS will help your employment prospects. Even otherwise, you will get to know and meet people from across the world, you will develop your communication skills, and your self-confidence will increase."
Several not-for-profit communities and organisations are working towards recruiting more women into FOSS communities. Ranging from RailsGirls (for women who use the Ruby on Rails web application framework), Django Girls (for women in the Django web framework), Women Who Code,PyLadies, WoMoz (Women and Mozilla), and Linux Chix (a Linux and free software community of women users and men who support them), these groups are working towards providing safe spaces for women to learn and build community. Nidhiya, who has been coding and doing outreach for Mozilla for three years, says, "Most of the RailsGirls are from Germany and they are very open and supportive. Women in the global Mozilla community also are very helpful."
FOSS gives everyone the freedom to find and fix problems; to improve each others’ work; to learn about software by breaking it, studying it, reverse engineering it; to innovate together and build stuffs. Your software are yours to use and customise as you like, not constrained by the tactics of corporations aimed at raking in profits. The opaqueness of closed-source software makes its users vulnerable to abuse and surveillance, whereas FOSS is open for everyone to read, making it difficult to hide code used for malicious activities.
And contrary to popular belief, the history of FOSS – like the history of all technology – has never been devoid of women. From Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, to Grace Hopper, who made the first ever compiler (a programme that transforms code written by people to code that is understood by a computer), to Christine Peterson, who coined the term "open source software", the technologies we use today have been made both possible and richer by the presence of women.
Today, FOSS desperately needs more women. It needs more women to create technology that speaks to the needs and realities of women. It needs more women so that teams become more diverse, which in turn makes their work better. And FOSS needs more women because what’s happening in open technology deeply influences what’s happening in the rest of the world. As Linux kernel developer Valeria Aurora says, "If we’re writing Wikipedia, if we’re writing the software that everybody uses, if we’re creating what’s on the internet and setting the culture on the internet, then we are changing…society at large."
In which case, let’s start changing it for the better.
This piece was originally published by Deep Dives as part of the series Sexing the Interwebs.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
When a man wrote this on computational technologist and coder Svaksha’s personal blog, it wasn’t an entirely new experience for her. Svaksha, who lives in Bangalore, has been an open software developer for the past ten years. And "die bitch" is just one among a glut of harassing comments she has faced both online and offline during her decade-long stint in the FOSS community.
FOSS, or free, libre and open source software, is created mostly by volunteer-run communities across the world, ranging from NGOs to hobby projects. And like the rest of the large and loosely grouped together tech industry, the FOSS community is overwhelmingly made up of men. It’s hard to get accurate figures, but a 2013 survey found that women constituted 11% of the total number of FOSS contributors worldwide. In India, the statistics are equally abysmal. This 2013 list of 90 Indian FOSS contributors (the only list publicly available on the interwebs) has a grand total of seven discernably female names. Yes, seven.
"The comment was posted under the name of a guy I knew from the FOSS community," says Svaksha, who has contributed to major open source projects including Julia, Python, and Ubuntu. "But when I traced it further, I [figured out] that it had been actually posted by his enemy [someone in the community he was at loggerheads with]. So I phoned him and told him that his identity had been faked and [that] I intended to lodge a complaint about the comment.
"He said, 'No, don’t complain.'"
Not only does the presence of fewer women in FOSS mean that increasing numbers of technologies are conceived, designed and implemented without women in mind, but that women who manage to navigate through convoluted entry barriers frequently find themselves at the receiving end of various types of abuse – with little space to address it.
Because in the world of FOSS, if your enemy’s enemy is a woman, he just became your friend.
* * *"
"There seems to be a deep-seated belief that women need to be constantly hand-held." Chinmayi S.K is a FOSS coder and hacktivist who lives in Bangalore. An engineer by profession, she’s the co-founder of a tech start-up, and has a lot to say about the FOSS community’s tendency to infantilise women.
"Especially if you’re new and trying to learn," she says, "a man will tell you that you are not doing it right because you don’t know enough – and that he should do it instead. Men hog the project and women end up not being able to learn or hone their skills."
Svaksha talks about what women working in tech often call the "brogrammer experience". A few years ago, a man forked (coderspeak for "made a copy of") a repository she had built over two years and published on Github. He took the code from her Github page, copied it, and published it as his own work. "He didn’t attribute it to me and broke its license. When I went public with it, he pleaded ignorance of the licensing terms. He claimed to be a novice – but he knew how to fork.’
In fact, as Svaksha explains, ‘he’d contributed to two other repositories without plagiarising them or changing the license. Both were created and maintained by men. He felt he could get away with stealing an Indian woman’s work because her effort and hard work didn’t deserve any respect."
A lack of respect from men is a thread that seems to runs through women’s experiences in FOSS. In October, Portland-based coder Sarah Sharp quit Linux’s developer community. A prolific contributor, Sarah had created support for USB 3.0 connectivity to Linux – well in advance of proprietary operating systems including Microsoft Windows.
She writes, "I finally realised that I could no longer contribute to a community where I was technically respected, but I could not ask for personal respect. I did not want to work professionally with people who were allowed to get away with subtle sexist or homophobic jokes."
Similarly, developer Katie Cunningham writes about her decision to leave the open source community.
"Why would I ever leave the profession where I got paid real money to do what I love?" she asks. "In short, I got tired of being told to 'lighten up'…This industry is one of subtle sexism: 'Sheesh. Why are you so sensitive? All I did was make a joke about you needing to be in the kitchen!'"
And it’s not only about jokes. "Sometimes, it’s attempts to push me into a traditionally 'female' role," writes Katie. "As [a] woman, I’ve been the only person in the group asked to put together a pot luck, I’ve been the only one asked to take notes in a meeting…even if I’m the one who’s presenting."
Zainab Bawa runs HasGeek, a Bangalore-based tech start-up, together with her husband Kiran. She writes, "Often times, people ask Kiran: 'So you said Zainab is your partner in HasGeek. What does she do in the company?' This question is often asked in my presence, when I am right in front of the person asking. Kiran’s instant response is: 'She runs the company”. The conversation then veers off towards other questions…For me, this is often a reminder of '[W]hat am I really doing in this company? Why am I even here?'"
Joseph Reagle observes in a paper titled "Free as in sexist? Free culture and the gender gap": "Open communities seem particularly susceptible to a vocal minority of people who are not kind, patient, or moderate in their participation."
But the minority often includes a community’s most influential members.
Linus Torvalds, the principal founder of the Linux kernel, called Sarah Sharp’s insistence on civil and respectful interaction "playing the victim card". He stated on a public mailing list, "Because if you want me to 'act professional', I can tell you that I’m not interested. The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m also not going to buy into the fake politeness. People resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways."
(Because, you know, it’s a pretty "normal urge" to ask the woman who is making a presentation to also take notes. Or get her to rustle up some snacks.)
But nobody was likely to speak out against Linus (for whom Linux is named), and throughout the long discussion thread, practically nobody did.
* * *
We use several free and open source software in our everyday lives, often without knowing it. There’s the Android mobile operating system, with its alphabetically arranged appetising line-up of versions: starting with Cupcake all the way through to KitKat, Lollipop, and Marshmallow. There’s the web browser Firefox, developed and maintained by the large international Mozilla community. There’s the Mediawiki application that powers Wikipedia. And then of course Linux, an example of FOSS wizardry at its best. Linux is present on supercomputers, personal computers, routers, digital video recorders, and on the International Space Station. It is used by NASA and by the highest rungs of India’s judiciary.
To get these shows on the road, FOSS projects need a variety of contributors: coders, testers, bug triagers, documentation writers, translators, troubleshooters, marketers, managers, graphic designers, artists, community builders, and even end-users who give feedback and report glitches. But despite the fact that FOSS nurtures and is nurtured by this spirit of community and collaboration, there’s always an implicit hierarchy at play.
In the words of Linus Torvalds, "Talk is cheap; show me the code."
All software everywhere is made up of lines of code, and the ability to write code is the holy grail of the FOSS world. Seen as having more technical jobs, FOSS coders, or programmers, enjoy the highest positions in the community’s de facto pyramid.
Oh, and they mostly tend to be men. Cue brogrammers.
"In general, women are stereotyped with qualities such as multi-tasking, relationship building [,] and having better skills at organising," explains Zainab. "[So] we are creating a structure where men largely take on the domain of creation and creativity, while women do the hard (and often invisible) labour of day-to-day management.
"At the end of the day, roles are tricky. They are not merely positions you take up in an organisation. They come with historical, political, and emotional baggage. These roles (and their associated stereotypes) then start defining the structure of [tech] societies."
So much so that ‘show me the code’ or ‘we look forward to your code’ have become common ways to deride people in non-developer positions — several of whom are women. Chinmayi says, "Shaming [women] for being in these roles and making them feel inferior makes them want to not go further in the community."
And for those who do try to go further, there are plenty of stumbling blocks along the way.
"Women have an inhibition that coding is [only] for men," says 23-year-old Neena (name changed), who lives in Kerala. "We conducted a two-day intensive training programme for women. [Here] they were not scared to ask questions because they were in a safe space." But when Neena tried to organise another similar event under the banner of a local tech group affiliated with a multinational tech company, the spaces didn’t seem so safe anymore.
"The event was due to be held. All preparations for it were made. Participants and speakers had been confirmed. And only two days before the event, Rahul Mani (name changed), who handles events at the local affiliate, told me that the multinational company had refused permission to use their [logo]. I did not know what to do." Distressed, Neena emailed a guy she vaguely knew at the large tech company. She was shocked to read his reply: the local group had never applied for permission in the first place. "When I confronted Rahul Mani, he told me he lied about the event permissions because he did not trust a woman to be capable of organising it."
Nonetheless, she managed to pull off the event, and even dipped into her personal funds to make it happen. Then came the icing on top: "But once the event turned out to be a success, he grabbed credit for it and tried to show that it was his event." And here comes the cherry: "He even used his influence to edit a blog post I had published to introduce his name into it!"
Women-only spaces are not seen as safe havens but as girl gangs that lack seriousness or that provide perks unavailable to men. Hyderabad-basedPragya (name changed), who works as a freelance software developer, recalls a discussion about how to increase gender diversity within the Chennai Python community. "Some people started dissing the idea of having women-only spaces 'because men and women are equal'," she recalls. "[And] it went from a discussion on how to bring more women into the fold to one on how to find women who we can trust with the membership of the group."
Because of course, women who want women-only spaces can’t possibly be trustworthy, no? "They want puppets who can do their bidding," Pragya concludes. "Everyone wants women who are docile and submissive."
Berlin-based researcher and information activist Zara Rahman believes that this culture stems from men who are "not aware of the norms that they are propagating and the damaging effect[s] they have within communities". But the damage itself is undeniable. She recalls, "I once tweeted from a talk about encouraging women in technology by making safe spaces available for women to feel welcome." Amongst the range of "astonishingly ignorant" comments she received, here’s one:
"Nobody went out of their way to make me feel welcome as a new member of the community; why should we make extra efforts for these women?"
* * *
def get-purpose():
""" Return the purpose """
raise AmbigiousMissionError, "Mission unclear"
In 2013, coder Anand Pillai published a repository to poke fun at PyLadies Bangalore, a group of Bangalore-based women interested in the Python programming language. The snippet from the repository above can be interpreted to mean that PyLadies Bangalore do not have a defined goal and the purpose of their existence is unclear.
Pillai eventually apologised on the Bangalore Python community’s public mailing list, but not before several other, mostly male members (dick joke alert) made it clear that objecting to the nature of the repository was, in their not-so-good books, ‘trolling’ and an unduly harsh attempt to name-and-shame.
"Men in FOSS communities can be like a band of brothers," explains Pragya. "They may quarrel among themselves, but they gang up against common enemies. And when a woman calls them out, she becomes the common enemy."
Speaking out about sexism within the FOSS community is incredibly difficult. In the few cases where, as Chinmayi says, "Entire communities are not aware of the need to implement a code of conduct, the way out is to sensitise the communities. You have to first make them realise they have done something wrong."
But most of the time, people simply don’t want to hear it. Pragya says, "A woman who speaks up is seen as aggressive. If a woman calls out abuse and harassment, she is ostracised, defamed, or thrown out of the community." And so for the most part, "women tend to not speak up", says Chinmayi. "They know they will be blamed back. Most FOSS communities are close-knit; it’s very hard to go to a mailing list and name names. People tend to take non-aggressive approaches such as having a private chat."
Speaking about abuse in FOSS comes with a territory where only the fittest (and the thickest-skinned) survive. Speech, with its slings and arrows, is emotionally draining for the women. For the men, it’s business as usual.
Katie writes of her decision to leave the open source community: "Every time I spoke up about [this] crap, I got some sympathy, but I also got some guy who didn’t understand what the big deal was. If I wasn’t in the middle of being raped or beaten or threatened or fired, guess what I needed to do?
"Lighten up."
* * *
"Men gave me the expectations I started with in 1998, of how open source citizens should act in open source communities, about what the rules are, and about the sets of expectations we have about how we talk and work with each other. And I’m wondering what a genuinely different approach would look like."
Sumana Harihareshwara is a programmer, technology executive, and open source expert. She’s also asking FOSS’ million-dollar question:
"Where the fuck are the women?"
Echoing this sentiment, every woman interviewed for this piece strongly feels that the only long-term solution is to increase the number of women in FOSS communities.
Twenty three-year-old Aruna S lives in Bangalore and works as a programmer at Mapbox, an open source mapping platform. "Girls interacting with boys is a social thing [that lacks acceptability] here [in India] – it’s a larger social problem," she says. "If there are inclusive communities with more women, it’s more comfortable for women to ask questions. [They think], 'Oh, she can do it, then maybe I can do it.'"
Which is why the visibility of existing women in FOSS is also crucial. As 21-year-old Nidhiya Raj says, "Indian women in FOSS don’t have role models from within the country to look up to. If Indian women FOSS contributors attend more conferences, they would gain exposure and motivate others [as well]." Aruna adds, "I have personally also felt that when I see a woman who is very strong and who is in FOSS, then my self-belief goes up a notch, because I feel like I can definitely do it."
FOSS spaces need better community guidelines, strong(er) moderation, a code of conduct for online interaction, and above all, non-negotiable and strict enforcement. Even though FOSS communities from the Global North are leading the way via projects such as Geek Feminism Wiki’s codes of conduct, to what extent Indian FOSS communities can adopt these is unclear. As Chinmayi asks, "In India, who in these communities knows what is the right remedy and policy to apply? Communities are male-dominated and there are very few women in admin roles. Even where a code of conduct is present, have the communities embraced it in letter and spirit?"
Of course, not all women have terrible experiences in FOSS. Many are welcomed by virtue of their gender, out of a recognition of open source’s gender imbalance. Chinmayi recalls, "When I joined this community, all the male members encouraged me. To this day they are encouraging and supportive."
Sinny Kumari started as a volunteer programmer with KDE (a free software community) five years ago, and now works in Bangalore with the international open source company Red Hat. Her blog, where she "Loves and promotes Open Source", is full of posts and photos from events and conferences she has been to. Sinny believes that women should not shy away from FOSS. "If you are a student, contributing to FOSS will help your employment prospects. Even otherwise, you will get to know and meet people from across the world, you will develop your communication skills, and your self-confidence will increase."
Several not-for-profit communities and organisations are working towards recruiting more women into FOSS communities. Ranging from RailsGirls (for women who use the Ruby on Rails web application framework), Django Girls (for women in the Django web framework), Women Who Code,PyLadies, WoMoz (Women and Mozilla), and Linux Chix (a Linux and free software community of women users and men who support them), these groups are working towards providing safe spaces for women to learn and build community. Nidhiya, who has been coding and doing outreach for Mozilla for three years, says, "Most of the RailsGirls are from Germany and they are very open and supportive. Women in the global Mozilla community also are very helpful."
FOSS gives everyone the freedom to find and fix problems; to improve each others’ work; to learn about software by breaking it, studying it, reverse engineering it; to innovate together and build stuffs. Your software are yours to use and customise as you like, not constrained by the tactics of corporations aimed at raking in profits. The opaqueness of closed-source software makes its users vulnerable to abuse and surveillance, whereas FOSS is open for everyone to read, making it difficult to hide code used for malicious activities.
And contrary to popular belief, the history of FOSS – like the history of all technology – has never been devoid of women. From Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, to Grace Hopper, who made the first ever compiler (a programme that transforms code written by people to code that is understood by a computer), to Christine Peterson, who coined the term "open source software", the technologies we use today have been made both possible and richer by the presence of women.
Today, FOSS desperately needs more women. It needs more women to create technology that speaks to the needs and realities of women. It needs more women so that teams become more diverse, which in turn makes their work better. And FOSS needs more women because what’s happening in open technology deeply influences what’s happening in the rest of the world. As Linux kernel developer Valeria Aurora says, "If we’re writing Wikipedia, if we’re writing the software that everybody uses, if we’re creating what’s on the internet and setting the culture on the internet, then we are changing…society at large."
In which case, let’s start changing it for the better.
This piece was originally published by Deep Dives as part of the series Sexing the Interwebs.