Is this considered creepy in all cultures?

https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=78146

by restofus • 14 years ago

25 44 14 years ago

rt.cpan.org

restofus• 14 years ago

Additional discussion http://blogs.perl.org/users/steven_haryanto/2012/07/so-appar...

http://blogs.perl.org/users/michael_g_schwern/2012/07/how-no...

rjknight• 14 years ago

I think the issue is the lack of consent. The data is freely available and anyone who wants to use it to compile lists of Perl developers can do so, but if you're going to put up a list of female developers without a) asking them first and b) presenting it in a context that anticipates and avoids the gender-politics objections to doing so, then you're going to get a negative reaction. It's probably something that shouldn't be creepy even without consent and carefully-honed context, or at least no creepier than a list of Russian Perl developers or Perl developers who use Windows or whatever, but that's not the world we live in.

It looks like an honest enough mistake, but I guess we're going to have to listen to another bunch of white male community guardians parading their feminist credentials and belittling the original developer for his backwards lack of understanding anyway.

calibraxis• 14 years ago

So far, the only 3rd party blogpost on this linked here (Michael G Schwern's [1]) didn't link to the module nor author, so as not to "embarrass the author further". Many males serious about feminism (or "anti-patriarchy", whatever you want to call it) take care to not provoke costs which females must bear, and try to helpfully inform.

Now, if you don't want to listen, please don't feel you're forced to. There's... exciting... frontpage articles here about PHP, something Steve Jobs said, a boat which flips vertically...

[1] (http://blogs.perl.org/users/michael_g_schwern/2012/07/how-no...)

ars5• 14 years ago

Wow. Couldn't disagree more with that blog.

"This Is What A Computer Scientist Looks Like" is exactly the wrong way to "empower". It's a photo. Who cares what you look like? You are a programmer - the only thing I should care about is what your code looks like.

> [from the blog] Maybe give them the reigns to make the big decisions and you handle the grunt work.

Are you kidding? I should do that because they are female? That's terrible. You should not care what gender, or anything else, they are - except their ability.

If people need to see that there are others like them in a community (do they though?), then this module list is exactly right.

Loic3• 14 years ago

It is not creepy in all fields. It is creepy in computer programming/science.

The problem is the culture in this special field with a lot of allusion to pornography, sexual abuse, etc. When you have well known figures in the Ruby community explicitly telling that it is good to use porn to sell software technology, you have a problem.

In my field, process engineering and biotechnology, even if some groups are extremely male dominated, I have never experienced such behavior in more than a decade of going to workshop/conferences and working with 100's of people all over the world.

spindritf• 14 years ago

"Sex sells" is the big indictment of Ruby (and programming in general) community?

Loic3• 14 years ago

Yes, with respect to the situation of women in your community this is a problem. When you have highly visible people having such behaviour, it cripples down. It is always easier to cripple down bad behaviour than good one. More about it: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/04/silicon-valley-brog...

anextio6• 14 years ago

In what field is it not creepy to have a man keep a documented list of all the women contributors for purely 'curiosity' reasons?

Loic3• 14 years ago

The fact is, in no other fields you would have people thinking about doing this. It is just that they do not care. It is not part of the culture to focus on women from a sexual/stalking point of view.

They only care about lack of women in management and engineering positions and the salary difference. Or how to better manage the maternity leaves in the company to keep interesting jobs for the women while potentially working only 80% while have small kids.

bsphil• 14 years ago

What about Acme-CPANAuthors-Indonesian?

anextio6• 14 years ago

Wow. This thing is totally inappropriate and extremely creepy in all contexts. Out of "sheer curiosity"? Jeepers.

I hope this gets removed.

Great message to send to the women in the tech industry: come join our community and we'll single you out in a git repository like a museum exhibit. Even better, the whole thing is a perl script, so anyone can programmatically do whatever they want with your personal information! It's all for curiosity's sake!

andyzweb• 14 years ago

I don't think there's any bad intention here. I think this is part of a larger meme in the Perl community: http://search.cpan.org/search?m=all&q=Acme%3A%3ACPANAuth...

Tichy4• 14 years ago

If you are on GitHub (also as a male), you can be singled out in a lot of ways. There is an app that ranks developers by city, depending on their productivity, popularity, connectedness, whatever. Nobody complained - you know that if you go on GitHub, your data is public.

duiker101• 14 years ago

website doesn't seem to work for me. what was it?

andrewcooke• 14 years ago

i never saw the page linked either, but i think these links are what people are discussing:

this cpan module - http://search.cpan.org/dist/Acme-CPANAuthors-Female/ - included this file - https://github.com/sharyanto/perl-Acme-CPANAuthors-Female/bl... (some data also visible in cpan synopsis - http://search.cpan.org/dist/Acme-CPANAuthors-Female/lib/Acme...) - which was later dropped by the author, steven haryanto - http://blogs.perl.org/users/steven_haryanto/2012/07/so-appar...

the file in question lists 10 (or 11) female contributors to cpan.

ars5• 14 years ago

You could look at it in a positive light if you want - as a list of inspiration. (I can't actually see the list, so I'm going by the description as a list of female developers.)

Personally I don't think the developers gender matters - who cares if a developer is male or female? That's not the context in which you are interacting with them.

Tichy4• 14 years ago

What about Twitter lists? I have created all sorts of lists without asking people first. No "women who do x" lists, but still - the idea was I think people creating lists of people who fall into a common category of their interest.

It doesn't seem so strange that people might be interested in female developers. For all I know, that list could have been compiled by another female developer who wants to feel less lonely.

In another context people will rush to present such lists to entice more women into the field. Also, the argument "there are almost no female developers (in OSS)" is common, so such lists might be handy to answer those arguments.

I was just considering how I would feel about a "black developers" list - sure it is a double edged sword, but I think it could be interesting/valid for the same reasons. People will gather those statistics anyway, and I believe public data should be as accessible as possible.

kamaal• 14 years ago

I have seen this in every culture. So as long this is for fun, its OK. But it isn't uncommon to have and list 'y who do x'(y being a set of people who do x). I've failed to understand the reasons for this. Is it because you feel a particular field x is is dominated by non-y people and want fellow y's to get motivated?

If that is so, I don't see anything wrong in it. But if this is to prove that y's are strange and are atypical of regular y's and then stereotyping them from there is on is creepy.

hobin• 14 years ago

I don't think it's necessarily creepy. There is a whole list of classes depending on what 'type' of developer one is, found here: http://search.cpan.org/~ishigaki/Acme-CPANAuthors-0.19/lib/A...

But I know that I'm not known for my extreme sensitivity, so maybe I should withold judgement on this one.

tomerv• 14 years ago

Wikipedia has lots of lists of female X: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=list+of+f...

Is that considered creepy too? In any case, I don't think "creepy" is the right word. It implies a sense of stalking, which I don't think this is.

scotty792• 14 years ago

I think that if you are female developer and you want to encourage other female developers and support the transition to a world where gender of the developer isn't important you should brag about your femaleness everywhere and encourage others to do the same.

You have to see something a lot and often to get used to it, tolerate it and finally accept it as norm.

cloudier6• 14 years ago

I think that the burden of this transition shouldn't be laid entirely on females: there are plenty of examples of plain misogynistic behaviour in the tech world - Loic linked one article on this in another thread (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/04/silicon-valley-brog...).

scotty792• 14 years ago

Lot of that is just sheer stupidity carried straight out of american college. I'm not sure how this culture came to be and why fraternities, sororities and such things are even tolerated. Nevermind. I'm just saying that you can't get acceptance by hiding. Gays weren't accepted at all till they became visible. More visibility, more acceptance. It's positive feedback loop but there have to be brave souls to start.

richardv• 14 years ago

I think it is only creepy when you consider that no benefit can be achieved based on the sex of an author. For instance, your enjoyment levels of a piece of software bares no correlation to the sex of the developer who created it.

This is in contrast to works where the sex of the author can have an impact on the overall enjoyment.

For example, I have playlists with over 100 female artists... because sometimes I do just want to listen to a female singer. My "database" of female singers in the form of a playlist isn't creepy, but a database of female developers could quite easily be considered so, since for the most part it's hard to think why anyone would need this information. (Aside for research purposes?).

Is this considered creepy in all cultures?

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