Doubting the Daubing Philosophy
We don’t want to only ever achieve a 2% hit rate. We cannot afford to. If we are to get half of the world’s computer users to use a non-proprietary operating system as is the desire behind things such as Ubuntu’s Bug #1 then we cannot afford to scare away 98% of the women and girls (you know, half of the world’s human population) who are exposed to the alternative. Doing so means we need to achieve a conversion rate of 98% of the male half of the population.
To achieve a useful sticking rate, then we are going to need to do something other than throwing every woman and girl we come across in the general direction of the nearest project in the hope she does not get repelled for the next 25 years by the experience.
Looking for opportunities for change within your project is a pretty good start.
Page 2 of 2 | Previous page
Daedala:
November 10th, 2009 at 6:47 am
There is active research on this point: people are particularly averse to betrayal. Their risk models in dealing with other people are different from their risk models in dealing with random chance.
The throwing-mud-at-the-wall idea is the kind of thing you get when you pay too much attention to game theory and too little attention to people.
Dorothea:
November 10th, 2009 at 7:16 am
That was a great read! Thank you.
Liz:
November 10th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Incredibly great post. Thank you!
The betrayal is even worse when it’s teenagers and young women brought in to be thrown into the deep end of the pool. So often I see well-intentioned guys conclude that the solution to “not enough women in the field” is “go invite in some 13 year old girls”. Hello… might some things be wrong with that picture? And IMHO while they have good intentions they look to teaching younger women and girls because they can’t cope with a power dynamic that is anything other than them firmly ensconced in a position of maximum personal power and authority. They could focus on working with the adult women already in their field. Also, men who don’t believe there is actual sexism are not equipped to prepare young women how to react to harassment and sexist bullshit. Instead, as soon as women grow up and complain these same men are ready to throw them under the bus and start anew with fresh “material”. That trend worries me a lot.
Katran:
November 10th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Thanks for the post; I found it a very useful read even though I’m at all involved with open source software (I’m a scientist of the non-computer variety.) This actually kind of reminds me of the “recruiting” strategy that I learned when I was an undergrad at Caltech. After I got accepted, I went down to visit, and the #1 piece of advice I heard from the students there was, “Don’t come here. It’s hard. You’ll have no life for 4+ years. And I’m not kidding that it’s hard. Really. Bye now, I have to go work on a problem set.” Pretty much every visiting high school student heard that same advice, yet somehow enough of us ignored the advice and matriculated anyway. Undergraduate life was definitely not all rainbows and kittens (well, there was a kitten involved, but she took up far less of my time than I would have liked) and I’m glad no one tried to sell it to me like that. [On the other hand, I wish I had heard from some of the female students more about what life would be like beyond the dating scene. I almost want to forward this blog post to the women's center there in the hopes that they'd implement more support for women re: sexist attitudes, since I encountered my fair share of them and was naively unprepared for it, and the programs they offered tended to be more along the lines of self-defense workshops.]
On the other hand, I’m wondering, when I talk to other women who are interested in physical science, how do I communicate to them that life isn’t all fun, all the time, without causing my advice to trigger a Stereotype Threat and have them lose interest/confidence? It seems like there’s a fine line to walk there, especially if you don’t know of a lot of support resources. I don’t want “Life in science is hard sometimes,” to come off like, “Science is hard.”–>”Well, I’ll never be good at it, so I guess I’ll just do something else.”
Asad:
November 10th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
The daubing philosophy actually stems from a decontexualized notion of fairness. Whether and how much fairness should be contextualized is a matter of some debate.
Link: Geek Feminism: Doubting the Daubing Philosophy (Melissa Draper) | Your Revolution (The Blog!):
November 10th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
[...] Geek Feminism: Doubting the Daubing Philosophy (Melissa Draper) [...]
Countering Bad Experiences « Mitigated Frenzy:
November 11th, 2009 at 2:38 am
[...] Bad Experiences November 11, 2009 Melissa Draper writes (on Geek Feminism): If I take 50 women and successfully encourage them to join a project because [...]
G:
November 11th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
How would this work for giving science students a fair warning without driving them away: “My life in science is extremely rewarding. Some of my colleagues are jerks, of course, but the scientific work itself is so great that I’ll be damned if I’ll let them put me off.”
Melissa:
November 11th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
If you add “and I have a great support network in , so I’m never alone”, then it looks pretty good to me.
koipond:
November 12th, 2009 at 4:05 am
This. Seriously.