There were a couple of blips on Twitter the past couple of days about tokenism and how it may or may not relate to the Drupal community. I'd like to bring this discussion here, since it's really hard to have a deep, meaningful conversation on a medium that's more catered toward people announcing to the Internet what they're having for dinner. :P Also, I like to see spirited discussions in this group. ;)
The Geek Feminism Wiki, which is intended to be "a resource for and about women in geek communities and the difficulties we face," has an article on Tokenism.
From the article:
Tokenism is the practice of including one or a few members of a minority in a group, without their having authority or power equal to that of the other group members. It functions to place a burden on an individual to represent all others like her. The suspicion of tokenism can undermine a woman in tech's authority or perceived right to hold her position.
In practice in geek communities this can take the form of inviting several men whose careers are well established to speak at a conference and, in order to appear gender-balanced, inviting one younger woman whose career is just beginning and who is deemed unlikely to assert herself, make demands, or complain. This type of power imbalance played out repeatedly contributes to community perceptions of tokenization.
Tokenization can also occur when one woman is asked to represent her gender in a field over and over. Rather than seeking out many qualified women, group or conference organizers tend to return to canonizing one or two women as the most famous or as especially expert.
So, the question before us: in what ways does the Drupal community actively participate in, or actively fight against, tokenism? What behaviours have you encountered, or seen others encounter here in the Drupal community? Do you have thoughts on your experience with tokenism outside of the Drupal community? Or anything else you might like to add.
Go!
Comments
My 2 cents... (more like $1.50)
On the whole, I would say my run-ins with tokenism in the Drupal community have been very few. Apologies in advance for a very long, rambling reply.
I wasn't made Drupal 7 core maintainer because I'm a woman. I was made Drupal 7 core maintainer because I worked my ass off for 4+ years, reviewing core patches, contributing improvements to core, discussing strategy and approaches to problem solving with the other core developers, etc. The two things I'm most passionate about are usability and quality assurance, and usability and quality assurance happened to be two of the main focuses in Drupal 7, so it was a good match.
As far as I know, Dries has never been accused of not having enough female representation in the core committer ranks, and therefore felt pressured as though he had to choose a woman, and was forced to select me because I was the most active of women core contributors at the time. I have never been accused of "sleeping" with someone to get my core maintainership position (of course, being a lesbian probably helps with that considerably ;)). Rather, when the news was announced at Drupalcon Szeged, at Dries's keynote, the entire room burst into cheers and applause (which was incredibly humbling). Not because the Drupal project had reached some big equality milestone. But because one of the developers' peers who they'd closely worked with over the years to make Drupal awesome got promoted to an important position.
I've been asked to speak at several Drupal conferences, but always around my interests and experience, not my gender: Drupal.org documentation efforts, SimpleTest, the Drupal.org redesign, Drupal 7, contributing to Drupal, The Drupal Association, Summer of Code, usability testing, and so on. All of the other women presenters I see at Drupalcons are also talking about their areas of expertise: Emma Jane Hogbin and Colleen Carroll talking about theming, Laura Scott and Liza Kindred talking about Drupal businesses, Addison Berry talking documentation and coding for beginners. It actually wasn't until Drupalcon Paris in 2009 that I was asked to speak about What's it like to be a woman in the Drupal community? But I was asked by a woman, whose experiences in the Drupal community are very different from mine, and who wants me there as a voice on the panel telling my side of things.
On the other hand, at several of the conferences outside of the Drupal community I've been asked to speak at (Flourish, Ontario Linux Fest, and most recently Open Web Vancouver), I was asked to speak not about my technical knowledge with Drupal or PHP or MySQL or Linux or networking or hardware, but about "Women in Open Source." That's where I really start to feel tokenism at work. With the OWV folks I finally put my foot down and told them I wasn't going to speak at their conference about WIOS unless they also gave me a slot to do a technical presentation about Drupal, which they happily did. :)
While I think the WIOS talk is important to give, really the whole point of that talk is mainly to raise awareness with men, who frequently come away totally "shocked and awed" that the problem is as bad as it is, and that they might be indirectly (or directly) contributing to it. The hope is that they'll then go out and educate their peers about this and over time the environment will change to where sexist crap is universally considered totally unacceptable. Women, on the other hand, already know most of this stuff, and the talk does very little to help show women other positive role models out there in the open source world and give them practical advice on how to get started (though I tried to change this a little with the most recent version). This makes it doubly frustrating, because you're not only being tokenized by giving the talk, but the talk is primarily for the men in the audience, not the women, who are the ones you want to try and get on board.
So. All of this is not to say that the Drupal community is immune from this kind of crap. Far from it. The DC Paris "Louise" stuff showed that our community has quite a bit of growing up to do in terms of how we react and deal with sexism. I just don't see tokenism as a regular occurrence in our community. But, I also fully acknowledge that I have HUGE blinders on, so I am genuinely interested in what others have to say.
Gender based groups
I've subscribed to Drupalchix in hopes of learning and sharing with peers about Drupal in a positive way without having to deal with any psychological aspect of Victimology. The very name of Drupalchix sends a message of exclusivity, negative implications of competitiveness against the other gender. This group could strive to avoid negativity and stick to the technical aspects of why it was created. Concentrate on what really shines in your drupal knowledge, the ability to apply your drupal skills to your trade. Also the ability to converse on why drupal is the CMS system to use. Do you know anything about other CMS software? As a member of this group, have you asked yourself about how much you have considered delving into Drupal? Can you share your system administration skills and technical knowledge about how to build a server from scratch and implement a multi-site drupal installation (maybe for the advanced Drupalchix here). Are you a novice and want to learn from someone who can perhaps be a mentor?
My summary is that Drupalchix should be more than wearing pink T-Shirts to Drupal Camp and talk of Tokenism.
Once you go down that road, it's twice as hard to go back. Don't lose the focus of why this group was started. Strive to grow beyond the gender competition in the tech industry. At one point, everyone is your competition and it can be a good thing to compete and or it can get emotionally abusive. Focus on your skills and collaborate in a team to allow creative ideas to happen.
Sincerely,
Gigi
My summary is that
I definitely agree with this! But back when I asked What do we want Drupalchix to be?, most people seem happy with the content of the group overall. And one of the specific things people voiced support for was a "safe" space to discuss these kind of broader social issues. There's not really any other place on Drupal.org where this kind of talk is on-topic, and clearly, there's a lot to say about this particular subject. :)
But, the content of this group is what each individual member makes it. So if you wish there was more technical content here, feel free to post it!
By chix, for chix
Hey hey chiX0rs.
I've been active in the aussie chapter of linuxchix for a couple of years now, and I've been building my drupal skillz for about 6 months, having been a mere user of drupal for a couple of years.
One of the advantages the Drupal community seems to have over the Linux community is that there are larger numbers of women involved in web development, than in operating system development. It would also seem that design, info architecture and content skills are just as important as code. One of the things I reckon drupalchix can bring to the 'women in open source' table is promoting tolerance and acceptance of skills other than programming.
There seems to be an alpha-geek hierarchy. The "show us your code" mentality implies you only count if you cut code.
There are actually lots of women in open source... but they are made invisible by the notion that it is commits to the source tree that count, so people's efforts as documenters, usability testers, community managers, leaders and team builders, designers, marketers, integrators and trainers are rendered somehow less valuable.
From my first few steps into the drupal community that problem is no where near as prevalent here.
So what do we want drupalchix to be? A place to champion the work of women in the drupal community. Whether that's code, or not. And for that work to be valued as it should be. As a flow on from that, I would hope we spread that idea to other open source projects too, and acknowledge that it's not just women who are marginalised in this way.
Donna Benjamin
Former Board Member Drupal Association (2012-2018)
@kattekrab
that doesn't sit right
I have to add in a quote for the "Unicorn Law" (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Unicorn_Law) linked to in the "Tokenism" page:
I may get slammed for what I'm about to say, but here goes:
I'm mainly responding to the original article and Webchick (gigi's comment was kind of out of left field, and I don't want to get off topic rehashing the "purpose" of this group) when I say that the comments about tokenism, in the Drupal community in particular, really don't sit right with me.
All of the women who I know who are recognized contributors in the community have certainly earned their recognition and position the same as any of their male counterparts. In fact, I find the community to be shockingly (in a pleasant way) non-tokenistic (making up words here, but you know what I mean...). And as far as the whole issue of women speaking about being women in open source, I think those sorts of comments and rhetoric demean the positive influence those sorts of sessions have for the greater community.
Webchick's talk at Open Web Vancouver couldn't have been given by just any "token" female, she is a community LEADER and has been involved for a long time in the Drupal project, so I think that saying she just got asked to speak on the topic because she's a woman is horribly oversimplifying things.
Well said Araine!
I agree entirely.
I'm skeptical of tokenism
I'm skeptical of tokenism being a huge factor, at least in the Drupal community. I mean, I hardly imagine the Drupal Council in their secret underground fortress, stroking their thick, Drupal developer beards and saying, "yessss, picking Angie will trick the world into thinking that we support women in software. Mwahaha!"
Probably not, right?
However, consider this: how many female web folks do you know that kind of suck at it? Speaking personally, virtually all the female developers I know of are exceedingly talented. Not all, certainly, but many.
At the same time, how many guys do you know that suck? I would argue that there are in fact a disproportionately high number of bad male web developers. The difference between us and them is that we don't have the luxury of getting away with that.
Whether it's related to Drupal or not, we've all heard, "hey, you're pretty good at that... for a girl." I'm guessing if we're all as easily annoyed and irritable as I am, have all wanted to respond, "I'm pretty good at that, period." Sometimes, I just really want to hear, "hey, uh, you really suck at that... y'know, for a girl." (Not directed at ME, of course...) :)
If anything, Drupal seems to
If anything, Drupal seems to do the opposite! You really have to earn your way into a position of respect, from what I can tell from my three years involved with this community. And it isn't always pretty trying to do so -- which is why drupalchix exists. A lot of us didn't grow up writing code (though some did!) and feel like we're playing catch-up, and some of us are still easing into the "meritocracy" of the Drupal world, which requires putting in MANY more hours beyond the 40-hour workweek, especially if you didn't grow up being encouraged in math or computers, like me.
Also, I highly recommend reading Jo Freeman's Tryanny of Structurelessness, which, though written in 1970 for the women's movement, has some interesting things to say about power in unstructured groups, like an open source project. It suggests doing more to spread out the power -- maybe even to those who aren't the most overtly qualified. Because Drupal mandates contributions from people based on skill and availability, a natural hierarchy develops. Creating a non-hierarchical structure that distributes power more evenly would help with that -- but would seriously tamper with how things get done now. :) Just some random thoughts!
how i found that website
(First: I don't think/hope webchick is tokenized by drupal itself, or at least any drupal people I know. I definitely look up to her & she has set an amazing example which encouraged me & others to participate more deeply in an open source community because she's awesome at everything drupal.)
I just wrote a whole bunch - which covers tokenism - but more - why the subject even came up. So apologies for this not perfectly matching the thread. Also, apologies in advance for opening a million cans of worms. I'm probably doing it all wrong. That's because I have no idea, really, what to do in this situation. But I know it is important.
Maybe the fact that webchick has been getting tokenized by the larger programmers community, and as a result it is bringing up geek feminist issues. (and I hope this doesn't last too long because I want to spend my time getting better at writing code, or actually making websites, or helping save the world!)
I do think that being careful to not open a can of crazy worms is important. I've been down that road before and it's SO awful. And it isn't productive either. We can say how this is going to go. I am imagining it going well.
Backtracking
So, the other day, there were tweets posting webchick's women in open source talk. Somehow, those linked to that geek feminism website. A lot of those ideas, in a technical geek context to me - seem both really old (like, are we back in the 1950's??) or they seem like 'but that's what spam filters are for' -- and I started getting sick of thinking about the issues after the first day or so. But I couldn't stop until I read all of the pages and many sub articles. My head is sort of swimming now.
There was a list of things like male programmer privilege which struck me a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot! - and this is more professionally, not necessarily drupally. But those get blended because all I do is Drupal, way too much!
The feminist issues are nothing new, neither are the gender issues. I'm gay, and can be both femme & boyish, and so all this stuff is way old news. But also, I am new to being in a community that is so disproportionately male. It's a little bit of culture shock. I thought if I ignored it, it wouldn't matter. But then, I have started actually interacting with them - and already I've gotten the 'are you at this drupal camp because you are just...hangin' out?' - which honestly I thought was funny at first because it's so conventional. But, ultimately I was disappointed because I was hoping to learn more about writing views handlers. Oh well, I just saw it as unfortunate. It would be so much more helpful in my career if I could figure that stuff out faster. It was helpful to see that that is a common issue facing geek women. Next time, I will have a better plan of action & maybe I will find a way to learn more about the content of what I hoped to talk to a programmer about. I'm stubborn & that's not going to stop me.
For the last year, I've had experiences where people look at my code and only point out the flaws. I have very few opportunities to show my code to anyone, and in all instances it was immediately criticized. I really don't think I'm that awful. So it was relieving to learn that there is a kind of criticism that is interrupting and disrespectful, - and maybe even happens from men when they feel threatened. I stumbled into it blindly and thought it was all me. I don't blame the guys for feeling threatened, but it hurts because I'm so excited about writing code. I'm only so tough, and this is pushing it. As a result, I have developed a full-on complex about this now - could I ever get it perfect enough. I learned the drupal coding standards as best as I could, learned that eclipse was breaking my spacing, switched to coda, learned how to use coda, and then point out to them that actually, they were totally wrong. (don't ever get on my bad side :) ) The heart-breaking part, is that I was doing all this work trying to make it perfect and honestly thinking 'at this rate I am never ever going to be able to contribute a module.) I actually believed that if I did get it perfect that then someone would actually take a look at the logic of what I was writing, or be interested in my contribution. I think my experiences were just particularly weird/bad - but the point is, if I hadn't learned that picking apart people is a way to belittle them - I would still be trying to be perfect instead of figuring out how to avoid these people and find better people to actually talk about code with.
When I would bring this up - most people would only say 'well, Drupal has standards' and I am like 'Duh. I'm not stupid.' I feel like machines can help format code. The issue is that I am writing lots of code and do not have people who can look past a typo and talk to me about the best way to structure objects, or offer more efficient ways of doing things. That's annoying, and that's a barrier. I want to make more complicated things that are harder and more challenging.
At this rate, how are there gonna be a million women drupal rockstars? I'm tough and also work my ass off (though not 100% with drupal, just 40-50 hours per week)
webchick is so awesome
I kind of wish this thread was about how important webchick is to me. :) I cried when I heard that she thought it would take her 20 years of experience to be allowed or good enough to participate in open source. I totally get it - the part about 'god - why didn't anyone show me this stuff when I was younger?' I wouldn't take back any of my experience, it's all for a reason, but why is it such a fight to participate? (by fight, I don't mean necessarily a fight from other people - ultimately there is a fight that only I can do) It's a question of balancing energy of who to build alliances with, and for what purpose.
And it is super important (to me) that if open source wants to be helping the world, that it isn't just about helping women, but about the tools everyone makes for everyone. Mainly, it is important to talk out what we as women need to talk out - but also fight for all inclusions. Everyone matters. That's why I personally care about helping with Drupal - there are many people with great ideas who need websites. Putting the tools in our hands is so important. I love that I've been able to participate in Drupal because I feel like I can make more of a difference. I want this for everyone who cares.
I have no idea what it means to be a woman in open source. I just started, and I haven't even figured out if there is a place for me, or if ultimately I'll just have to be a factory worker, building drupal websites forever - stuck because I do not have enough access to ideas and information. I want to be strategic and work smarter and better. But honestly, I'm temporarily lost!
So - if Drupal is already doing a good job - awesome. Maybe it is important to put it out there that we, Drupal, have a system that is working, and why? Or - maybe - Drupal's system works pretty well, but that doesn't mean that issues that effect women in technology are still not barriers to entry - meaning, participation in creating the software & support in using the software. On a very practical level - such as - 'the drupal community is supportive and helps its participants to become better at using computers & writing code - this puts the design & construction of tools in the hands of more people, which means that everyone benefits from the creation of tools.' DrupalChix gave me a place to start - people to talk to... practical advice like 'you should use TextMate' or 'you should use IRC' - and role models who actively contribute to the code. I'm trying to find ways to give back and help other people technically (which I think means showing people about how to do things with the command line and promoting version control...things that aren't Drupal, but help you do Drupal better)
The thing in the tokenism article about 'singling out a few women' would get squished by the fact that many of us are OBVIOUSLY awesome - drupalchix have their own businesses, drupalchix work on high prestige websites, drupalchix are really good at code. There's tons of us and we all work our asses off! A lot of us are really tough.
Also, I learned that linux has a linuxchix - and there are all kinds of similar resources for women in computer/science/math. I definitely need to find those resources for myself STAT- and band together with everyone who has already dealt with this. No use repeating arguments when really we want to get GOING on being awesome & amazing and having our ideas. Right?
That's what I want to be doing. I am not really interested in being in Drupal to play a game of figuring out how to navigate a dude's world (meaning, not drupal, but the professional workspace, conferences, other programs.)
Mainly, I'm annoyed that old-fashioned issues are getting in my way of creating a much better world - throwing me curveballs, making me second guess myself when I'm not looking.
how tough do we have to be?
I think that the prominent women in drupal are super rockstars. I want to be one too. I don't feel so tough though. It feels really hard and challenging to deal with all this crap. I want to be awesome. I can be tough, but why do I have to? I want to have fun doing it, be smart, work hard and be myself. I've acted like a boy professionally for like 10 years now for my professional career. I'm good at it. It would be really great to be able to bring my actual self to this project. If I can do that, then many other people will also be able to do that, which - I think, is how the open source tool-making for the world issue will resolve that ironic numbers issue of being 98.5% males.
I feel like being soft & luscious should be an option. I feel like admitting that to the world of technology is total blasphemy - because they would say 'but our system works and is productive' - but then I say, but you already lost me, you are trying to beat me down and make me convert to your way (aka imperialism, a very important concept around the world.)
In fact, I think that I should just go ahead and keep trying to do Drupal in a way that suits me. If Drupal can't take it, then I'm out. (I think Drupal people can do it.)
If everyone has to change in order to contribute, then we are becoming all the same - which is kind of a problem. Less people will be comfortable doing that, which means less ideas and inclusion. (I don't mean code standards & peer review and all the Drupal mechanisms...I mean communication, sharing our visions, thinking up modules to contribute which would enhance the project & community, finding smarter ways of working, finding better ways to help and show people about contributing to drupal.)
And I do think that if there isn't diversity, then you wind up playing the stupid tokenism game.
Thanks webchick for putting this here.
different worlds!
Wow, wow, wow Chach. I guess now I can see why you posted that. My jaw literally dropped reading that. I mean, I've met you a couple times now and seem to be on a similar wavelength, so I was confused by your tweet, but now I see where it was coming from!
It's crazy what different worlds we've been experiencing in the community. I can't even find the words to express how totally opposite my experience has been. I've not once had someone treat me like that - granted my foray into more hardcore development was thwarted a bit by me liking project management so much, but when I first started getting into Drupal, I had SO much support from the community in Vancouver (and a few from elsewhere).
I won't name drop, but several of the people who gave me so much support and help without being the slightest bit aggressive or hyper critical, were well known male developers, and I haven't had any different treatment from any of the other men in the community. Of course the gals have been amazing too, but I've really just had such a positive experience overall.
Maybe it's a cultural difference where you live or something, but here in Vancouver, I don't find there are any obvious double standards along gender lines in the development community, and I'd dare someone to give any of that kind of attitude to some of the women developers around here. It would not be tolerated for a minute by the women OR the men in the community.
Which is why it's really crazy to me that this all came up through Angie's (webchick) talk at Open Web. Sure it was a talk about women in Open Source, and was a generalization of the cultural issues women face in Open Source. Sure there are a lot of areas that can still stand some improvement. But the last reason that she was asked was because she represents the token successful woman programmer. Far from it!
Drupal is big in this town, and there was a strong female presence on the organizing committee for the conference, and Angie's a great "role model" (or whatever you want to call it, success story?) for anyone who didn't come from a development background and worked hard.
Anyway, I could go on, but the vibe was just so far from "Hey, let's get a keynote from the token girl" at the conference, and was SO well accepted - I spoke with several guys who made extremely positive comments about the talk and really want to do anything they can to make women feel comfortable and supported within the community. I don't know how other to express it than to say that everything you wish the community was providing is exactly what I've experienced - and I only hope that somehow you get to experience that too!
Wow, lots of stuff! :)
I was really hoping this thread would give you the room you needed to elaborate on your feelings, and glad to see that it did! Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts.
Hey, you never need to apologize for talking about your experiences, least of all here. If it ends up opening cans of worms, that probably means we have a worm problem somewhere, and we should really get to the bottom of it so other people don't have to.. er... eat... worms... too... Uh. Ok, well my analogy kinda fell apart there, but yeah. :) Basically, the point is that for everyone who voices an opinion here there are probably 50 people with the same opinion who don't feel comfortable voicing it. So by raising these issues, you're speaking for others as well as yourself. So, worms up or something! ;)
I kind of had the same reaction when creating this talk back in 2007. I set out to do a talk that was basically "There's no problem here, and women should all get involved in open source, see? here are some other women who have, and here's how you can too." That was my hypothesis, based on my own experiences.
However, then I started talking to some of the other "women in open source" in order to prove this hypothesis, and a whole new level of awareness opened up. Contrary to my own experiences, other women in my field were repeatedly being picked on, dismissed, belittled, sexualized, and threatened, and for no other reason than that they had a female name. Many would specifically choose to hide their gender either to just not have to deal with the drama or because they felt more safe. There wasn't merely a minority of women in open source, there was a striking almost total absence of women in open source. And then came the horror stories of sexually-charged death threats and the like. And on and on and on.
That happy fun picture I had of open source being the ultimate equalizer came crashing down, and I started to become really hyper-sensitive to these kinds of issues, particularly the male privilege stuff. Soon I started to see it everywhere, even in my precious Drupal community, kind of like once someone points out there's a funny smell in the air that you didn't notice at first, you can't un-smell it. :P
So what I've done since then to deal with that hyper-awareness is to try and take opportunities to help educate others about these issues, and call out behaviour that I now know drives other women away, or at least makes us feel really uncomfortable. Sometimes this causes a bit of a kerfuffle in IRC and I get accused of fun stuff like "reverse sexism," but more often than not guys are cool and say "Wow, I honestly never thought of it that way." And nowadays, when someone says something really screwed up in #drupal, they're often banned by one of the other ops before I even get a chance to read it.
So if someone at a local meetup said or did something to make you uncomfortable like this, if you can muster the courage (and the energy), I'd confront them about it privately. Chances are that they literally had no idea that's how they were coming across and what the consequences were (remember the big "blind spot"). And, if they're like most people in the Drupal community who are by and large fairly smart people, they'll appreciate being told and will refrain from the same behaviour in the future, and probably point it out if they see someone else do the same thing in the future. However, it's always a risk. Sometimes guys don't react well to this at all, and you risk creating a big scene, and not a nice pristine IRC scene which completely vanishes from anyone's memory after an hour or so, but a "real life" scene where you get branded as overly sensitive or worse.
It's up to you and how safe you feel the environment, and the individual you'd be confronting, is. But it might help you feel some more control over this new awareness in that you're actively helping to combat the problem and creating that inclusive world that you feel we ought to be living in already. It worked/works for me, anyway. I think that by even raising this issue, you're already putting that new awareness into good use.
This can certainly occur because men feel threatened. I think that's only part of the story though. Let me try and give some background here that might help provide some insight.
When reviewing code, there are a variety of things to look for, ranging from really trivial stuff (are the indentations 2 spaces instead of tabs?) to the more fundamental (does the code actually fix the problem it's supposed to without breaking anything else?), to the more advanced (is this the most efficient way it can be done? does this utilize the APIs most efficiently? etc.). The number of people who can review the trivial stuff is very large, the number of people who can review the fundamental stuff is smaller, and the number of people who can review the more advanced stuff is a tiny handful in comparison.
Yet, everyone who does code review at the fundamental and advanced levels all got their start by doing the trivial stuff. It's a really low barrier of entry: simply familiarize yourself with the coding standards, and you can find a reason to set almost any patch back to "needs work," which is paradoxically seen as a very valuable thing, in the core queue particularly, since we only ever want to commit the very best code to Drupal core. However, there is a big jump in required knowledge between the trivial level and the fundamental level, and an enormous leap from there to the advanced level of code review. So a lot of people hone their trivial skills to an insane degree before they start providing more useful, fundamental code reviews. In fact, some people do the trivial reviews so much they have trouble reading code that doesn't conform to coding standards because the parser in their head will cry out in pain (/me raises hand ;)).
So you may have encountered a guy who felt threatened. Or, you may have encountered someone who is still ramping up their code review skills and is contributing what they know right now. Or perhaps both, since there's a good chance that you can code circles around them and that's why they're pointing out nit-picky stuff because the rest of the code is beyond their comprehension to review at deeper levels, which is in itself threatening.
In short, if all someone can find to nit-pick about your code is your conformance to coding standards, you're either doing something really right (this is often the last step before core patches get marked "reviewed and tested by the community"), or you need to find someone with a bit more skill to do the job. :) This is not a reflection on your skill as a developer, it's a reflection of their skill as a code reviewer. It's an important distinction.
What you present here is an interesting dilemma, though. In order to get more code reviewers (we are always desperately short), we need an easy way for them to get started. Coding standards nit-picking is such a way. Yet, this same coding standards nit-picking is obviously a big barrier to developers who want to get involved, and get frustrated and intimidated when their code is mercilessly picked apart by the coding standards zealots. I'm not sure off-hand of a way to resolve this conundrum, but I think we need to give it some serious thought.
No! No no no no no! :) Please read this: http://webchick.net/embrace-the-chaos
Summary: Never strive for perfection out of the gate because you'll never achieve it; your perfectionistic self won't let you (I say with some authority as a recovering perfectionist myself ;)). Instead, work with others to achieve that perfection, because you'll both learn faster and have a lot more fun in the process, and you'll also elevate your profile in the community at the same time.
It sounds like what you're really struggling with (and you are certainly not alone) are those initial "baby steps" into the community. You've got the developer skills down, you've got the Drupal skills down, what you need are some tips on a way to get from here ("I'm a rockin' PHP developer with mad Drupal skillz!") to there ("I'm the next webchick/add1sun/whatever"). And the fact is, you don't get form here to there without interfacing with the larger Drupal community and doing it a lot. And the larger Drupal community can often seem like a five-headed fire-breathing monster when you feel on the "outside."
Normally in this situation, I'd suggest some initial first steps like interacting with your local Drupal community (the Advantage Labs folks in the Twin Cities are pretty prolific Drupal contributors), and coming to a DrupalCamp or Drupalcon as a way of making those initial human connections. But you've done both of those things and still feel like you're running up-hill.
Maybe the next step would be to drop into IRC and keep your eye open for the mythical phrase "could someone review this patch?" Jump on it. Patch reviewers are generally held in absolute reverence because there are so few of them and it's even harder to extract a more decent review than "spaces, not tabs" from those few who do review patches (which you can attest to from experience ;)). If the patch you're asked to review is a little over your head (I think you'd be amazed by how much you actually know, though), feel free to say so. You'll normally find a limitless fountain of patience from core developers towards someone who is keen to help in this way. I've seen people like chx and catch sit for an hour or more and painstakingly explain any information needed to review a patch. A record for solid patch reviews is probably the best way to raise your profile in the developer community. Just be careful; if you're too good, they might go and make you a core committer someday. ;)
We also do periodic "patch review sprints" on the weekends (a little less periodic lately thanks to my crazy schedule :P). Next time we do one of those I'll ping the Drupalchix group. It's a great way to meet other Drupal folks, and helps raise your karma very quickly, which over time leads to other benefits like people being more likely to help you if you have a question, etc.
I think this is a really good insight. The good news is that the Drupal community is made up of people like you and me, and we together can change things. So let me turn the question back around to you: what would you change to help other eager contributors such as yourself have an easier time and not have to deal with all of the initial frustration? What are the ways in which you are most comfortable engaging that is creating a huge brick wall for you when trying to apply them to Drupal? Do we need easier-to-find and better-drawn roadmaps, do we need some sort of more comprehensive mentorship program, do we need to just burn the whole system down and start from scratch, or what other thoughts do you have?
Chach, you are awesome. In
Chach, you are awesome. In particular, to be in a place where you have code to be reviewed and to want it reviewed is, well, way ahead of most people! There are tons of modules – quite a few in use, too – in contrib that have effectively not gotten any review. Until someone finds something broken! And that's very different from the best code, most efficient, maintainable, etc. that you are talking about. This includes some of mine that I don't consider good enough to ask for review yet. So you are ahead of this male developer (whom too many people assume knows some things, surely benefiting from being male).
By the way, there are two development assistance modules designed to get rid of the nitpicky stuff so reviews can focus on the good stuff. You probably know about them — though Drupal is long past the size where one can assume anyone necessarily knows about any specific thing — but for others finding this thread: Coder and Coder Tough Love modules for code review. (Currently, use the latest dev releases of both.)
I agree that we need more and more help for everyone regarding the tools and processes around Drupal, which have a harder learning curve than Drupal itself. (I'd hoped this DrupalCon session could be about continuing the organizing to do this – locally and reviving Dojo and building projects like it – but it has received little traction.)
To address one of your disapointments, given where you are in your coding, anything you can possibly contribute on drupal.org as a project, you should ("commit early and often"), and seek out better reviewers in the broader Drupal community.
There are many, many barriers to participation to be lowered, some that affect everyone and some that disproportionately affect women. The two types of tokenism – superstars only and well let's just get one in the photo op – are not present in Drupal at all, I don't think, yet the way to avoid it or even the appearance of it is a familiar cure-all: improve the usefulness of our community to people at all points of connection, of contribution. Simply getting "How can I do X" answered should be removed as a barrier as much as possible.
(As I go back to trying to get git to commit to CVS so that some of my modules start getting maintained, I swear this wasn't personal plea for help!)
benjamin, agaric
oh my...
getting facebook messages asking what's up.
just way too much online reading and thinking and a mental explosion after watching webchick's talk. also, we're having a little drupalchix meeting in minneapolis on tuesday, so i've been thinking about it & link spamming to many issues.
I guess I wanted to find a way to talk about this stuff.
it was probably inevitable that one of us would get some issues stirred up from watching her talk! no drama, no drama. all hugs.
Not inaccurate, but not necessarily connected to gender identity
I tend to think that tokenism is present in tech communities in different ways.
I have this conversation on a regular basis about how in the Drupal community, developers are like the G8, adding themers - designers in makes the G20, and adding everyone else makes the G88. (Thank you to the ever insightful sdboyer for allowing me to steal that.)
Project managers, system administrators, business development, end-users, people that interact with Drupal all the time aren't always included in the Drupal conversation.
This is periodically as it should be, because innovation happens because of getting coders together to solve problems. We exist to support the process of development, but we don't really do our own groups. (We'll organize them for you, though.)
I get more tokenism from being someone whose identity does not include 'developer', than from being someone whose identity includes female.
Not inaccurate, but not necessarily connected to gender identity
Very very good point.
Donna Benjamin
Former Board Member Drupal Association (2012-2018)
@kattekrab
sort of related to the 'supporting roles'...
something that's been on my mind a lot is this support stuff - and how it feels like the themeing, documentation, business, design, user experience and all things that are not code are 'secondary'. maybe it seems like they are secondary because people say 'oh that's just themeing' (i have heard developers say this - i love them but i'm not sure they understand!) and then meanwhile the themers are all yelling 'hellooooo?!!! you're drupal product isn't going to help the world if it is a big scrambly mess that no one in the entire world can make sense of!) -- and then there is this third dialogue i have heard which is 'the theme track of drupalcons is VERY important' 'documentation is VERY important' - it's like there's a crew of people that are acting in vigilant defense of the 'support' stuff
i worry that i've internalized some of these issues because i want to be a developer - which means i stopped being a designer/dezeloper person at the advice of at least 3 people who said 'just call yourself a developer' -- so while today i will be themeing all day today for my new job...i am focusing on the fact that 'i'm a developer, i'm a developer'
BUT - more important - i had an idea - which i want to work on as part of my possible presentation about taxonomy. So - for the documentation sprints, one of the the strategies that addison berry promotes is the process of pairing up developers with documentors. (such a great idea!!!) - it is beneficial because the developers have a very very hard time thinking about how their code comes off to other people. This is so so true. I have started having this problem all the time as i started designing information architectures. i come up with new ideas and i can't think of good words for them, so i wind up confusing people so so so terribly. i'm busy thinking about the best way to do things, and it is sort of abstract and non-verbal. (though recently i found this software called 'FreeMind' which i hope might help communicate these abstract ideas) -- so it's really great to have someone who is not you look at your code and ask questions.
and then for people doing documentation, it's great because you can see how the programmer is thinking and help translate it to a verbal language - and then this really will help everyone overall - because more eyes on the code makes it more robust & stronger & less error prone - it makes it easier for everyone to use. this saves us all time and makes us all better at drupal, which makes drupal better & more useful to the world. yay!
So -- my idea is to try a similar process, but for interface design/theme integration for contributed modules. The drupal user experience project is so cool for this reason. I think that when module developers are building & designing the tools that the users actually use to enter in data - I think that there's this really hard task that is creating the interfaces. it might be possible for brilliant drupal super geniuses to write beautiful code that is simple & easy to use. but most of us aren't that well versed in this.
so my (current) plan for the session is to look at contributed modules that extend taxonomy in drupal, find out if there has been any research about user experience of taxonomy (i know for a fact that autoocomplete confuses normal people), and then find out how a user experience designer might approach this problem.
this year, an idea for a group project would be to come up with a way for developers and ux/designers themers to takes some existing contributed modules & improve their user experience (as an experiment). in a thoughtful, reusable way. because it isn't 'just themeing' (yes i heard someone say that!!! and yes, to me, and yes, my role was to help theme the module. but i was just happy to be involved at all... i'm fine with that so long as everyone has to do it.) - in interface design there is a lot of hard stuff that involves understanding how the human mind works, what sighted people see first when they look at a screen, designing for accessibility, understanding users & audiences and what tasks the user is trying to accomplish - and then placing everything so people understand how to use it without reading any documentation! technically, this might be a good activity for themers who want to do more module development & module developers who want their modules to be more usable out of the box. and it might be good for everyone who wants to understand the design process more. it really really seemed like there is a TON of interest in this design process because everyone i know is kind of a crazy fanatic about the d7ux project! I think that project does offer some smaller projects for people to tackle.
i am hoping that this would be another way to show that 'support' stops being support when we all respect each others roles & talents in the bigger picture.
it is beneficial because the
it is beneficial because the developers have a very very hard time thinking about how their code comes off to other people.
Very true in a lot of cases. I think I'd rephrase to say "A lot of developers only work out the use cases they need, and don't think about how others might use their work." I've seen this LOTS of times.
I'd say it'd be nice if the devs wrote out their use cases, because those give a huge insight into their thought processes, but who knows how much of a chance there is of that:)
In Drupal, code talks.
Code talks. Actions are what defines you.
I have never once in my entire Drupal career felt discriminated against. And I do some strange, out of the ordinary things -- just look at the dbscripts module. I do not have a programmer's background, meaning I do not have the language required to effectively communicate code. Yet, despite me babbling on while using odd terminology, approaching it from a skewed perspective, everyone has listened to what I said and responded to how I said it.
And of course, given the statistics, most people I talk to are men.
But this is open source. Not only that, Drupal's project is way too large for a small elite, seniority team to manage it themselves, and everyone knows it. That means anyone who contributes is appreciated.
Contrib gives you a sounding board. You have your own space to showcase your code, and your own issue queue for discussion. Not many other open source communities have this opportunity to prove yourself.
Do the Drupal community leaders tokenize women? I see no evidence. I get the respect I receive because I try. Webchick gets the mentions she does because she works hard. Karen is looked up to because she works on a critical contributed module.
Someone pointed out to me last Drupalcon that my language online was too feminine. She said to me, "You're doing what is most typical of women -- you're being too hard on yourself and too defeatist. This turns people off from your work... it turned me off from your work. But then I gave it another look and realized just how great it was. You gotta be more confident in your language."
I took her advice. Not just in attempting to change my language, but trying to change my attitude. I'm doing work for free here, and giving it out openly. It's OK if it isn't awesome, or perfect, because this is open source. Anything I do helps lay a brick down so it can be built upon by others.
checking back in
Sorry for the confusion! SOOOOO glad it all makes sense now! Honestly I was a little surprised that y'all were like 'what?' - but that all makes sense now too!
Thanks for the encouragement, I've been all anxious today about speaking up about these things. It's so complicated, it isn't just gender & especially it isn't really all Drupal - but other things that seem to touch into Drupal-land.
Ariane - here's the weird thing. I lived in the bay area for like 10 years. I worked with a group of women web developer/designers in the days before cms's. BAY AREA. I had no idea about user groups. never heard of one. I don't think I would have gone to a 'web people' meeting by myself (though here in minneapolis, mndonx finds them online and then a bunch of us go, which is good because meeting strangers from the internet is totally weird!) After I moved to minneapolis, where there are less people, i found a web community and this has been really helpful. the work climate of the two cities is SO different. in the bay area, people seemed more competitive (not drupal-related work) - and the culture of sharing wasn't available to me - but you could be sloppy as hell and no one cared so long as you got it done. in the midwest, they seem more fiscally conservative, and try to work smarter and band together - but overall their expectations are harsher & there's no room for admitting weakness or not doing things according to protocol. Probably too - the web is changing...and my skills, and being in drupal. A lot of things change really fast.
webchick: I will definitely look into this 'patch review' thing. It sounds like a good idea. When I figure that out I will be more than happy to show people what I learn. And that weekend patch things sounds GREAT!!! great great great! I totally want to do that. I thought I would be able to help with some online projects like redesign or whatever, but I realistically need to plan ahead and make some time.
I would be really happy to talk about version control, helpful command line tricks, and using coda. I'm not the most knowledgable, but I think I could explain version control in a happy & humorous way, for anyone interested. In fact, the other day I started explaining how to use git on my website, because i was inspired by webchick's talk and thought that my friends who would never EVER think they could use version control could actually benefit from it because it saves time & headaches. I do feel like I'm pushin' it a little with the ladies reference, but I was in a dramatic mood! :)
To respond to webchick's question about ideas for eliminating barriers...
The most helpful experiences I've had in the last 2 years since I started using Drupal - and most of these are probably not gender-specific:
attending code sprints -- this was the most most helpful for so many reasons. working with developers was totally illuminating. These were super drupal developers and they were EXTREMELY supportive, helpful and encouraging by the way. In fact, I even blogged about how wonderful they were. Being near and involved with the intellectual work of writing code was something that made me crazy happy. That did feel wonderfully equal. That was a special experience and I hope I can find more of that. It sounds like people who are able to do drupal as a hobby do get a better experience overall. The time I have available for that is pretty limited.
seeing people's computer set ups: at the various sprints, user group meetings & drupalcons it is so helpful to see other people's computer set ups. Especially those of developers who actually commit things to drupal cvs. I have my own way of setting up my computer. But watching bangpound & catch on their computers was great. They have their command line all hooked up and were committing stuff with it - and just last week I finally figured out that they must've been in coda because i couldn't find that window that they had but then I finally found it. Honestly, I was a bit shy to ask too many questions (but don't worry, I also learned about the devel execute php block). But I really really wanted to get a better look! Anyways, when I started I didn't have a clue about the extent of the command line stuff, even though I wasn't scared of it and understood the basic of unix - but i didn't have much 'working' knowledge. People told me about drush but on my own I wasn't able to make much sense of it. I think I was just missing some command line fundamentals. I would be more than happy to work with anyone who wants to get familiar with doing stuff in the command line. it is so much faster and easier...and i thinking having people show you is way better.
at drupalcon DC there was a mini how-to session about committing patches that was part of the code sprint. That was really helpful because it helped explain patches and how they work. also, how to use the drupal website to 'check out' patches (which means, how to tell everyone in drupal that you want to work on something)
finding things to help with that have start & end times: time is a huge issue - most of us don't have much, and need to be careful about how we spend that time. I realized today that every time I bust my ass and get rewarded for it - people who don't have the same 'luxury' are not 'progressing.' That's the part about recognizing my own privilege of health (ability to bust said ass) & positive experience & exposure - language, location, whiteness etc etc - basically, I have to identify the ways where I'm playing the game - which means that I am effectively strengthening the game, which might be inhibiting other people too.
That's why I agree with what webchick said - that making it so people can contribute in a short timeframe is extremely important. Baby tasks are awesome! I want more baby tasks, though baby is probably a bad word to use. Getting practice is so useful.
A friend of mine has been working actively on a module and i have been learning by osmosis about all about the drama of working with people on an actual drupal project (as opposed to building a website with drupal). It's SO COOL! However, he does this like 5 days a week after his job. I can't do that at this point in my life, but i do want to keep building my skills. And maybe next year I will be able to have a hobby drupal project, if I can't figure out how to merge my job with contributing to drupal.
Also, at the documentation sprint, mndonx and i spent like an entire hour trying to find some low-hanging fruit to contribute documentation. we eventually finally found a task to do (though I nearly had a coniption fit because i thought I would never figure it out!) And because I had learned about 'checking out' a task from that 'patch class' i took at drupalcon, I knew what to do! So we wrote an exhaustive review of adding images to drupal websites. We worked very well as a team, and I felt a lot better having a partner when trying to do something on drupal - at least the first time.
for the record - about the code standards: My code issues were with showing code to co-workers. My own personal attempt to submit a module & get a cvs account was kindly thwarted by someone somewhere, maybe russia, judging from my google analytics! I think I made it through the tabs, spacing and quotes - and failed by creating a massive security hole! :) woohoo!! The drupal person was really nice and I was so proud of myself for being rejected for something that I actually didn't know anything about. Unfortunately, I have so much work I never got around to fixing & contributing it. I got half the security holes fixed (which means: i was writing files to the server using php and not the drupal file api functions, which i hadn't known about)
here's a scary idea: sign up to do a presentation even if you don't think you are an expert in it. this one is really good though. signing up to present makes you learn it because you have to! you would need time to be able to prepare. The thing to watch out for -- everyone wants to do a great presentation, and people can be really really critical (or at least feel that way). Since it's drupal, it's not like you are going to know the best way to explain an aspect of themeing, or whatever. I don't know how to create a space that minimizes people's nastiness. I gave a presentation on themeing cck stuff and it was hard & scary to represent themeing. There is probably an art to choosing your subject matter which i haven't mastered. i signed up to help with a session on taxonomy in drupal 7 at drupalconparis. Bear in mind that i haven't ever even installed drupal 7! But, this is the theory: i will be helping with the session and i will do some research and then try to figure out what i can present and talk about. I would be able to help do a review of contributed taxonomy modules, for example. (and I know i'm not a token in that conversation - though i do feel pressure like if i didn't do a great job, then i would become one! fortunately i have 2 months to prepare.)
recognize that all this work that we are doing on this subject today is also contributing to drupal...groundwork! making a way! yay! i want to memorize everything webchick said about learning this stuff to call people out on it. I am up for that challenge though it is probably hard.
ok goodnight everyone.
a couple footnotes
wow, that really IS a big cultural jump between the two cities. but i'm glad mndonx (that's amanda right? i think so...) and you have been able to brave the community together!
ps. i totally ditto what angie said about not apologizing for opening a can of worms, i think this is a fantastic topic of discussion! and what she said about if nobody opens the can, everyone has to eat the worms...well, despite the slightly wobbly analogy, it's so, so true...
pps. i've been working on getting my coworkers more involved in contributions, and you are so not alone out there, our devs of both genders who haven't had been to any drupalcons, and few codesprints or camps etc. are quite tentative about how to get involved, and i think like you afraid to make mistakes and get judged by the community. that said, i think all of those suggestions are really great practical ways to improve things.
ppps. finally, i'm so regretting that we didn't get to chat more in DC! really wish the drupalchix meetup had been as intimate as the one in boston, i don't feel like i really got to catch up with too many of the gals! oh well, hopefully next spring!
why it matters
Since I was one of the people who RT'd the original tokenism tweet, I thought I should say something here. I don't know most of you (yet) but had the pleasure of meeting webchick at the Portland Lullabot workshops a couple of months ago. (Hi Angie!)
I'm a mostly self-taught geek, started messing around with computers at work a looooong time ago, because it seemed like the most interesting thing to do. (PC's, at the time, were new in the workplace. Yeah, I'm that old.) I learned DOS, became a sysadmin, learned NetWare (a flavor of Unix), R:Base - a command-line based DOS relational db - and then I found multimedia programming. Learned the Lingo programming language internal to Macromedia (now Adobe) Director, by trying things out and asking lots and lots of questions on Compuserve, and then after the Web came along, in newsgroups. It never occurred to me that I was any less capable than anyone else stumbling around with PC's, probably because - especially in multimedia development, which was so new - it seemed like we were all on a pretty level playing field. (And I was good at it, which helped.) In fact, I probably never would have turned myself into a technology professional, had it not been for one particular guy at my first workplace who basically said, "You can do this." With the exception of one particularly jerky boss and some fairly typical locker-room humor/teasing/one-upmanship in some of my jobs - I've mostly found (or created) non-sexist, supportive, team-oriented work environments.
But I also experienced second-wave feminism first hand, as a kid in the early 70s, when people like my mom had to stand up for herself against seemingly universal opposition, just do things like go back to school and try to have a job outside of the home. It made me a feminist by nature. So as a newbie to open source development, the confluence of open source + feminism sparks my interest. I've also researched the decline of women in IT and CS education, which is drastic. I don't have the statistics at hand, but I seem to recall that actual enrollments by women in CS majors have fallen steeply from the early 80s to now. It was something like 25% then, and is something like 7% now. So there are larger forces at work that shape the entire landscape that we're a part of, simply by being women and calling ourselves developers. In an industry like IT, where it seems women are discouraged from getting deeply involved, whether through cultural exclusivity, tokenism, or open hostility, I think it's important to pay attention to that, and to celebrate where the Drupal community gets it right. But we can't do that by pretending that this exceptional bubble we're in exists outside of the industry as a whole. Maybe it does, in one sense, by being an open source community - but from what webchick was saying it sounds like Drupal is an exception even within open source.
This is also interesting to me because after my career in technology (which to my surprise appears to be continuing), I decided to become a librarian. And something that I quickly discovered about librarianship is that even though it's a profession hugely dominated by women, most of the people who deal with library technology (sysadmins, tech support, IT management) are men. As are most of the people who are considered library technology experts in the blogosphere. Drupal is becoming very popular with libraries, so it's important that there continues to be a strong recognition of women as Drupal developers, because it will have an impact on the ability of women (like, ahem, me) to compete for library systems jobs down the road.
Well, it's all thought provoking. I'm preoccupied right now with learning how Drupal works so I can do amazing things with it someday, but this discussion seemed too valuable to just be a lurker. I'm interested to see where it leads.
Jennifer
Amazing conversation
Hi all -
I am new to this "party" although I've been working in IT (various roles, all self-taught) for, OMG, it's been 20 years now. (How can that BE? :-D )
I have been teaching, mentoring project teams and doing web (mainly large-scale enterprise and CMS) development for the last 10 years or so. I spent the last several years in Europe traveling and working with developers and programmers and trying to bring them up to speed on the latest-greatest stuff in my technology field. I thought I would share an insight.
Here in the U.S. - the coder is "King/Queen". People worship the ground they walk on - figuratively, of course. It is almost the exact opposite in the working world of Europe (and I'm speaking specifically of The Netherlands, here). A coder is considered to be a low-level employee, often just a position one works through on their way to "higher", more responsible positions. For instance, at one large consultancy in the EU, EVERYONE starts out coding for two years - whether they have a knack for it, an interest in it, or training for it. If they last two years, then they get to move up the food chain.
(Needless to say, there is a lot of frantic copy/paste going on among the newbies in THAT crowd! I actually had to lock source code down at KLM because they were copying and pasting a lot of BAD code! And didn't know the difference....)
So, while our perception may be very different of what being a programmer/coder means - it is, perhaps, not reflective of the world in general. In fact, I often got the sense in Europe that the skills that are sort of considered "ho-hum" over here - are highly valued there, i.e. project management, documentation, teaching, etc. I think that the more "level playing field" that some of us sense in the Drupal-world may very well be tied to that egalitarian, Northern Europe, model. As an older woman in Europe, I never experienced the "push-back" that I often get in the U.S. because of my age. (The push-back stops after 10 minutes of lecture when they figure out I know what I'm talking about, of course. The point is, in other countries, it didn't happen at all...)
That said, I'm finding this conversation useful, inspiring and informative. Thanks very much!!!
Chana
What a different perspective!
Thank you for sharing that, Chana. I wonder if the fact that everyone starts out as a coder, regardless of their interest in it or "knack" for it - means women aren't as rare in computer science programs in European universities? I think here, in addition to feeling social pressure or experiencing discrimination, a lot of young women (and maybe non-whites and people who are economically disadvantaged) might drift away from the idea of coding for their career path because it's unfamiliar to them, or they don't think they'd be "good at it". The European everyone-codes-at-the-start model could also reflect stronger universal math/science education at the lower grade levels (I'm speaking of the U.S. - I understand Canada does a much better job of that). Anyway, it's always good to consider cultural differences, and realize that North America isn't the world.
Jennifer
ditto
i had no idea about how this might be different in europe. thanks so much for sharing this!
what's weird is that in the bay area - people who can write code - like, for example, actionscript - get paid a ton. i think the other relevant skills there are if you are timely, don't make things ugly & un-useable by the public at large. i do think that my people & design & code skills, and the fact that i am very dutiful make me an employee that people want to keep. i would always be getting all my work done and some contractor boys that I might work with would be doing god-knows-what. sometimes this annoyed me because i was doing all the work - but i also still have a job.
also - i remember a while back in the earlier days of html - that there were kind of two paths (in the bay area) - there were people who were paid $10/hour for writing code (and i was not about to sign up for those jobs! though i do remember thinking about applying.). but then there were also all the startups & businesses that paid way more - and people did not necessarily have any idea what they were doing. so maybe there's something going on that could have to do with old corporate coding practices of the 80's (which could be more like europe, but really i don't know) - and then maybe when the internet hit so many other people got involved that thought coding was really hard and so they should pay them a ton. (or maybe they had to because our math & computer education is generally crappy here! and then....silicon valley discovered india...)
from what i hear, it sounds like at least one larger drupal company has a model of paying their employees crappy. i did get a feeling that this is what happens to people who went into computer science - cause a lot of drupal people sound surprisingly broke for how smart they are! this could be an experience & age/time thing - I floundered around professionally for so long, and eventually got my act together & now life is more reasonable. it is very possible that if people are coming into drupal from, basically, working on drupal in their bedroom at home - they might not have enough experience of the business world to know they are getting ripped off. allie (of advantagelabs here in minneapolis) has been talking a lot, a lot, a lot about creating sustainable business practices. i think that the economy of giving away your stuff for free is at least worth re-consideration. i got my start making websites by volunteering for projects that i wanted to help. it got messy because there weren't boundaries with my 'clients' - but sometimes it is hard to know if your actual skills are valuable - and relative to what...
allie has proposed a session on sustainable business practices at drupalcon paris, so you might want to vote for it if you are going & interested.
Having been in the SF bay
Having been in the SF bay area for the last decade and change, I have to respectfully disagree with a few points.
It's possible that I've generally been fortunate, but for the most part, I have had bosses who respected my abilities and treated me in accordance with that (I had one real loser, but wiser people figured out a way to get me out from under his supervision before one of us got fired.)
I've always been paid as well, or better than my counterparts (men or women) - because I have been that good at what I do. I've worked in tech support for software as my entire career - and most of my coworkers were women, all of us working for men. Many of the developers I worked with were women, though not as many as there were men. I took more flak for my gender from customers than I ever did from anyone I worked with. ("My title is Senior. Technical. Support. Engineer. I have six years of experience with this product. Now. Can I help you?")
In general, I've found that looking professional made a lot more difference in how seriously people took me than my gender ever did. I built a reputation, and I stuck with it. How well I did my job made all the difference in the world - I did my job better than everyone else, and I got paid a lot of money for it - for a while, I was making more than my highly experienced coder husband... doing tech support.
So, yeah, I know that the non-coder roles aren't always taken as seriously - but that doesn't mean they're never taken seriously, and that people who do those jobs aren't getting compensated:)
When I started my first year
When I started my first year of comp sci in an European university there were 19 girls in a group of 40. Not bad, I might say. There were some dropouts (mostly male) but on the other hand most of the women did not end up working as developers.
At a UK university
At a UK university there was in a group of ~150 comp sci students <10 were female.
There were more women in the "softer" information systems
And for mathematics there was about a 50/50 split.
I'm glad you started the conversation
it's nice to have a place to hash out these issues in public, but still feel a little protected and able to express your opinion. I really like the drupalchix group because it's a good place to dip your toe in and talk about stuff whether it's directly "female" or not.
I've been living on Planet Mom for the last few years, working as an independent producer/maintainer of drupal sites, but mostly working as a mother to my two young kids, so my actual profile in the professional world has been pretty low. I feel lucky to be engaged in such an interesting project, and still limit it to a level where I can fit it into my life a little bit. Until I became a mom, and overwhelmed by all of the hard work involved in raising kids, I think I undervalued and underestimated how distracted and yet how productive working moms can be.
Technology seems to be a pretty dominated by the latest whatever, and I just don't have the kind of time that I used to keep up on things. I think in this society we've got things set up, so it's a little easier for some of the guys to stay fluent with all of that stuff, so they sound pretty important. I think we've got to realize that the guys suffer from the same token thing all the time too, it's just different subgroups that they're pulling from.
That, and I think there are always going to be "doorknobs" putting things together in a way that suits their own unconscious bias, and it's their head trip and not ours, if you know what I mean.
I don't have a good coping mechanism yet. I think it would be really great if we could find some way if making it all really, really irrelevant. I think to do that, you've got to identify the issues, and then find some way to creatively craft some resistance. So if you're invited to be the token speaker webchick, you just go ahead and blow them away with how cool you are, and let the chips fall where they may.
Angie's talk at Open Web Vancouver
I'm the main organizer from this year's OWV con, and female, despite my name. Angie, I'm not sure what was relayed to you but in any discussions we had around getting more women speaking at and involved in our con, both Audrey and I have felt that we didn't want them speaking on "Women in Open Source." With this year's organizing committee, we even discussed your talk and whether or not we wanted this talk presented, precisely because of tokenism, so I don't quite get how or why you had to "put your foot down."
We really, really wanted you as a keynote because you are an awesome example of what women can do in open source; a role model or leader, if you will. We weren't sure we wanted "Women in Open Source" as a talk, let alone a keynote, but decided that it would be great to bring attention to the issue (and I think the end result was awesome - people, men and women, were really motivated and energized by your talk.) Having you give more than one talk was something we were hoping we could get you to do from the moment we first contacted you.
So was there some sort of misunderstanding? Was something conveyed to you in an awkward manner? This year, I was blown away by my all male co-organizers. It seemed to me that they were the ones that worked esp. hard to make my vision, of getting more women to attend our conference and more women speaking at the conference, to happen. In a lot of ways, I've felt that all I did was put my desires out there, and that my co-organizers made it happen. I felt truly lucky and mindblowingly blessed, so I'm confused that you feel you had to put your foot down, re. a "Women in Open Source" talk.
Ack! Major communication #fail on my part...
I'm really, really sorry! :(
I definitely did not mean this toward the OWV organizers! Not even remotely! You all were amazing and awesome! :D I meant this in the larger context of my being invited to tech conferences to speak about women in open source.
What happens is someone contacts me to speak at some tech conference that sounds really awesome and fun and geeky. I get all excited about being able to evangelize Drupal in front of a new audience. I inquire as to whether they want a Drupal talk that focuses on architectural overview, or a more beginner-focused how-to, or deep-diving into API guts, or... and then I get back the response that no, I'm not being contacted to speak about Drupal at all, but about being a woman in open source. And usually, this is hand-in-hand with being the only woman speaker at the conference.
So when I said "I put my foot down" above, what I meant was that I made a personal decision that from here on out, I wasn't going to speak on this topic at any more tech conferences unless I could also speak about the geeky stuff that I do. I hope that this will serve two purposes:
I think this is a really important component for bucking the trend. When the only women speaker at a conference is there to talk about "women in open source" it serves to perpetuate the myth that girls aren't interested in geeky stuff - otherwise they'd obviously be up there talking about a technical topic, right? I don't want to be part of perpetuating that myth. I want to be "out and proud" as a geek, so hopefully other geeky girls will see someone they can identify with and maybe join an open source project as a result (that's always the dream, anyway :)).
So. Absolutely no disrespect/complaint/etc. was meant at the OWV organizers, whatsoever. You all were fantastic. You not only made this topic a keynote at the conference (and several people from both genders came up to me and said they wouldn't have gone if it weren't the keynote), but also gladly accommodated my request to do a "tech talk" as well, AND had women speakers in several of the sessions; I wasn't just the "token" woman up there demonstrating the unicorn law. It's just that the timing of OWV's request got me thinking about all of these various ramifications and that is what made me "put my foot down."
Hope that helps clarify things. :)
Communication #fail
Heh, I figured it was something like that. Thanks for the clarification and keep on rockin!
Speaking of open source projects, here's another awesome talk pointing to two interesting projects, Archive of Our Own, http://archiveofourown.org/, and Dreamwidth, http://dreamwidth.org/, that are majority-coded by women: http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon-....
Hi Great!!!
This is group very Great, I work anytime with open source . I will like conect with friends girl like it too!!!!
COngratulations!!!
@assoritam twitter :)
oh yay!
I haven't read all of the comments yet, but I just wanted to poke my head in and say that I'm very new to Drupal and I'm really enjoying this conversation. I look forward to getting to know you all! :)