Tag: geek feminism

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Conference recordings and harassment

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

The problem

At technical and other geek conferences and events it’s becoming increasingly common to either video talks by default, or in some cases to refuse to allow any speaker to opt out of being recorded while still being allowed to give their talk. I have been told a couple of stories of harassment related to conference videos, as follows (all individuals are women, some have been anonymised, none are me):

S gave a talk at a professional conference and related the following experience in chat:

S: linkedin pm I just got: “wow- you’re alot more younger and attractive than I imagined!.Thanks for showing your picture!”
S: I don’t like photographs and don’t let my likeness out much online. But a professional talk I gave a couple weeks ago was videoed (with my knowledge and consent). This was the result.

C gave a talk at a technical conference and a recorded version was also published with her consent. She subsequently received an anonymous email with a list of time offsets for the video and sexual commentary on her appearance at those time offsets.

Geekfeminism contributors also shared stories:

  • Leigh, in reply to S’s story:

    I got one of those on Facebook a few weeks back, from someone I know in the local Linux community, saying I was “so hot” and asking if I was giving any more talks this summer. This is someone I know only professionally, and not even well at that.

    I replied with a link to Juliet’s ‘and she’s cute too!’ blog post…

  • Skud has received several messages with offensive commentary on her appearance based on videos and photographs of her talks. A couple of events have recorded her without first obtaining her consent; in one case, she spoke to the photographer afterwards and asked for the video not to be published.

See also the Wiscon troll incident.

What to do about it

Based on these stories, there are several concerns about recording conference talks that conference organisers should be thinking about when planning to record talks:

  1. Consent to recordings must be obtained from all speakers, in advance.
  2. Have an optional, opt-in, recording scheme for talks. As these stories demonstrate, people have had harassment experiences, some very creepy and cruel, related to being recorded, or have reason to fear them. People may well decide that they’d prefer not to be recorded for this, or other, reasons. If your conference has a “if you don’t want to be recorded, withdraw your talk” policy, you will exclude those people from speaking.
  3. It’s not feasible to get attendee consent, but in your conference handouts, warn attendees that their questions and possibly other conversation may be recorded during talks.

Possible alternatives to making recordings of speakers include publishing slides only, or making a slidecast of their slides and the audio of the talk. (Note that the latter can also be considerably more useful than visuals of the speaker.)

Separately, some women (in particular) intensely dislike the paparazzi atmosphere that some geek events have, in which everyone can be photographed at any time. In your event’s code of conduct, consider addressing the question of whether photographers should seek consent from individual subjects to either photography or to publication of photographs.

What’s your experience with event recording, especially video and photography? Can you think of any other ways in which recording is problematic, or other guidelines for event organisers to help with these problems?

Note to commenters: the “you should be flattered” discussion will not take place in this post. Thank you.

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Why we document

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

A comment over on the Geek Feminism wiki asked whether we aren’t damaging the community by documenting sexism. I don’t want to get too 101 on our fine blog, but I do want to talk about why I consider our pretty long list of sexist incidents in geekdom a success.

My first geek feminist forum, and still the one I participated longest in and therefore in many ways most influential on me, was LinuxChix. Things I learned over there included the reasons why having men dominate conversations can be anti-feminist, via the discussion around the document now available as behaviour in technical forums, which was originally a response by Valerie Aurora to a problem where the LinuxChix techtalk list was seeing fewer and fewer posts by women and was generally perceived as scary and hardcore.

We also had a long-standing problem articulating what it was that led to the extreme gender imbalance in Free Software development and many of its user communities. I can’t speak for the community, but what I remember feeling about those discussions was a major unease. There was sexism in computing and in Free Software… probably? Some women had stories, some women didn’t. There was social, peer and societal pressure on young women considering science and technical careers or even on developing those skills… probably? Again, some women had stories, some didn’t.

Had you asked me in 2003 for troublesome incidents in Free Software””are we doing anything wrong, or is this a problem we’ve inherited from other people who did things wrong, or is this just a thing about women, that they don’t like to be too nerdy in their spare time?””I don’t know that I would have been able to give you examples of anyone doing anything much wrong. A few unfortunate comments about cooking and babies at LUGs, perhaps. Things started to change my awareness slowly. Valerie’s 2002 HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux dug up some incidents at LUGs. In 2005 LinuxChix itself got some attention from (trigger warning) the troll Skud posted about. I was personally present at a sexualised presentation, the Acme::Playmate presentation at the Open Source Developers Conference in 2006. And in 2007, very soon after I had seen Kathy Sierra keynote linux.conf.au 2007, she was scared out of her work writing about technology by (trigger warning) online harrassment and for the first time, I personally saw the Internet explode over the issue of active, virulent sexism against women in technology.

I do not in fact find writing the wiki documentation of incidents in geekdom very satisfying. The comment linked at the beginning of the post compared the descriptions to a rope tying geekdom to the past. Sometimes being known as a wiki editor and pursued around IRC with endless links to yet another anonymous commenter or well-known developer advising women to shut up and take it and write some damned code anyway is like a rope tying me to the bottom of the ocean.

But what makes it worth it for me is that when people are scratching their heads over why women would avoid such a revolutionarily free environment like Free Software development, did maybe something bad actually happen, that women have answers. It’s not the only answer, there’s still all that social, peer and societal pressure, the shorter leisure hours, and so on, after all. And there’s no level of harrassment or cruelty that won’t find someone, plenty of someones, prepared to immediately argue that it’s really no big deal, what are you doing here, giving up? Letting them win? But now if when I’m asked about whether geek women have problems and why there aren’t more of us, I’m not left fumbling to explain it even to myself.

I don’t know what the Mary of 1999 (my watershed geek year wasn’t 1998, in fact) would have done if she’d come across that page in more or less the condition the wiki comment described, “the girl entering the community without any predispositions”, the woman vulnerable to being misled into thinking that geekdom is full of scoundrels (or, we might argue, not entirely misled). Maybe she would have run, I can’t say for sure that she wouldn’t have. But what woman is without baggage? In 1999 as a teenage girl with hair flowing down to my waist (I tell you what, short hair has cut my street harrassment down nearly as much as it cut my grooming routine down) I walked down the street to the steady beat of rape threats from passing vehicles. At least I would have found that geek women were talking about it and had got together and got each other’s back.

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“Girl stuff” in Free Software

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

This is an edited repost of a blog entry of mine from February 2009.

In January 2009 I gave a talk at the LinuxChix miniconf held as part of linux.conf.au 2009. It was titled ‘Starting Your Free Software Adventure’ and used women developers and community leaders as examples. The idea was to show people what the first steps look like. I conducted (extremely short) email interviews of several women involved in Free Software or Culture or their communities, including Kristen Carlson Accardi, Brenda Wallace and Terri Oda among others.

One thing stood out and kept coming up all week: Terri mentioning that she had resisted at times working on things perceived as ‘girl stuff’. In Free Software this includes but is not limited to documentation, usability research, community management and (somewhat unusually for wider society) sometimes management in general. The audience immediately hit on it, and it swirled around me all week.

This is a perennial problem for professional women: software development is by no means unique in having developed a hierarchy that goes from high status roles disproportionately occupied by and associated with men to somewhat lower status roles disproportionately occupied by and associated with women. (In the case of software, disproportionately occupied by women still means male dominated of course, at least in the English-speaking world.) It’s difficult to disentangle the extent to which women and/or their mentors and teachers self-select for the lower status roles (and I would hardly argue that the self-selection occurs in a vacuum either) versus the extent to which they are more or less barred from high status roles versus the extent to which the association is actually flipped and professions and jobs within them have become low status because women started doing them. Other well-known examples, are, for example, the concentration of women in biological sciences as opposed to, say, physics, the different specialisation choices of male and female medical doctors and surgeons, and so on. Sometimes, as in the war between sciences, the status of a field is somewhere between a joke and real, to the extent that those can be differentiated, but often it isn’t: there’s a correlation between the male to female ratio of a medical specialty and its pay.

In all of these cases, a woman who is conscious of this problem tends to face a choice. Do the ‘girl stuff’, or not? (Of course, ideally one rejects the dichotomy, but no individual woman is responsible for constructing it.) And some, although I don’t know what proportion, of women feel guilty about their choice, especially if they do choose to do girl stuff. Just go ahead and imagine your own scare quotes from now on, by the way.

It also gets messy in various other ways. There’s the extent to which a woman who doesn’t do girl stuff is invested in maintaining the status of her boy stuff role and also the aforementioned vicious cycle where if women are doing something, it will come to be seen as not particularly hard or noteworthy.

Most concretely, I usually see this tension bubble away underneath outreach programmes promoting computing careers (you know what, I have my own status issues and I still resist calling it IT) to women. There’s the people who want to go for yeah we all know coding is populated by weirdos, and male weirdos at that, luckily you don’t have to be a geek and you don’t have to code, phew! I tend to hear about that one only once my outreach friends have gotten involved and staged a coup, admittedly. There’s the there’s so many opportunities in computing, and yes, coding is one of them and its fulfilling and it’s something you can do, but dammit, coders get all the cred and attention and dammit can we talk about something else? Women who admin/write/test/manage rock! And there’s you know, women coders don’t exactly rule the world yet, and furthermore isn’t all this oh-yes-you-could-code-I-guess-and-that’s-a-fine-thing but look! something for folks with people skills! talk basically a soft version of ew coding that’s for boys, also, last I checked, math is hard?

I observe again that there’s no right answer here in the real world right now. Women doing girl stuff have good reasons to feel dissatisfied that their hard-won skills are underpaid and under-respected, women doing boy stuff (scare quotes! please insert!) want other women to know that there’s fun to be had over here, thank you.

One crucial point in my thoughts about this I stumbled on only after the conversation Brianna Laugher recounts, over Indian food on the Friday night (the location of all major conference breakthroughs worldwide). She said”Š”””Šparaphrased”Š”””Šthat she didn’t feel that she should have a problem or be criticised for doing what she is good at, or what’s so desperately needed in her communities, and have to be just another coder in order to be fully respected. And I said that while this was certainly true, women also need to have the opportunity, to give themselves the opportunity, to be selfish: if we want to code, or do something else we are currently either bad at or not notably good at, or for that matter which we are good at but in which we’d have competitors, we should consider doing that, rather than automatically looking for and filling the space that is most obviously empty. However women are justifiably reluctant to enter places where they aren’t obviously welcomed, and what better way to be welcomed than to do work that needs doing and not become just another person doing the coding free-for-all and delaying external validation for potentially quite a long time?

I have no answers. Just the perennial question of distinguishing what other people want, what other people claim they want, the genuine satisfaction of being of service to someone, and the genuine satisfaction of knowing you’ve done a good job of something hard. Where do you like to stand on that?

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Women and men, across the ocean, and the vessel runs aground

I’m occasionally asked what it’s like being a "woman in Linux". It’s not such an easy question for me to answer: what’s it like being a man doing the shopping? what’s it like being an elderly person drinking Scotch? You can say lots of things about the shopping and the Scotch, but not a lot about the maleness or agedness of the experience.

I suspect most of my "woman in Linux" (in the user sense, I’m not a developer) experiences are pretty subtle: some of my unease in combative situations is undoubtedly socialised, and some of that socialisation is probably related to being a woman. But which bits? How much? Who knows. Questions about being a woman in Linux always leave me floundering.

Raven, a "woman in security", has an answer though. For her, the "woman in X" question is all about being hit on. Relentlessly.

I don’t get hit on relentlessly. I get hit on about as much as most men seem to: hardly ever. If I was going to draw parallels with Raven’s experience, I would draw them not with experiences of fending off the horny masses, but of fending off the hordes of people who’ve never met a woman as tall as I am.

At 190cm, I’m willing to believe I’m one of, if not the, tallest woman most people have seen, or at least spoken to. (I have, in the course of my life, seen about four women who are taller than I am, and I keep an eye out, trust me.) And I hear about it a lot. I’ve heard all the jokes. I’ve heard all the compliments. And I’d like to think I’ve heard all the insults, but I have my doubts.

I’ve even well and truly had enough of the empathetic tongue-in-cheek responses ("I bet people say that all the time, hey?") but I try to take them in the spirit they were meant: more empathy is more better, as a general principle. I don’t want to discourage people from walking a mile in someone’s shoes, especially if they’re someone who stocks shoe stores and can order in size 11s for once.

But there are a number of parallels with being hit on, and one of them is that not everyone is a well-meaning bumbling fool with a propensity to innocently hit on women or call tall women "lanky bitches" if they run into them around a corner. (I have never heard the word lanky unattached to bitch. What quirk of humanity spawned that meme?) A number of people dealing out this stuff are out to hurt people. In fact, a solid majority of people commenting on my height are complete strangers commenting with the intention of hurting or embarrassing me.

One of the most common responses to "I get hit on all the time&quot rants, after "wow cool what the hell is wrong with you, whinger?" anyway, is "I can see how that’s a little annoying, but you know, they mean well. It’s a compliment. Whinger."

That’s crap. Sure, some of them mean well, in so far as wanting to have sex with someone is meaning well (I think it’s neither a virtue nor a vice in and of itself, but some of the people who want to gift Raven with the spawn of their geek genes prove that Stephen Pinker’s gentle "good for your genes isn’t the same thing as morally good" warnings could be hammered into his books with a chisel and they wouldn’t be clear enough). But the reason people who get hit on a lot find it creepy isn’t because they’re weirdly hostile to the compliment of someone’s flattering and harmless attraction, but because being hit on can be genuinely creepy. And is. A lot of the time, it is.

A lot of the sexual attention I get is decidedly negative: it’s more or less suggestions of sexual violence from passing strangers (usually driving past, but occasionally they’re brave enough to mutter threats as they pass me on foot). I didn’t count that in the "I don’t get hit on" count: if I counted people who yell "suck my cock, lanky bitch" out of cars, I get hit on any time I’m out walking after dark.

I won’t pretend to speak for all women here: some women do consider the vast majority (or possibly all) come-ons as a compliment. I try to take them as they come. But I’m sick of the ‘compliment’ defence in general, it’s as bad as the joke defence. Sexual attention is neutral: when you get it a lot like Raven does, it’s as annoying as being asked about your height all the time, and it also is sometimes used as a way to hurt people, making them scared, or embarrassed, or leaving them feeling like shit the rest of the day. Some other times, it’s a compliment, or mutual, or otherwise wonderful.

And you know, most people can tell the difference. The people on the receiving end know the difference, and the people dealing it out damn well know the difference too.

The height analogy glosses over the fact that being constantly reminded of your gender (not always by being hit on) destroys the "we’re all geeks/friends/partners/collegues here" feeling. I’m lucky to escape that, and if I was offered the trade of being constantly reminded that I’m female — and therefore different — in a group of men against being reminded that I’m really tall — to some people, unattractive — I’ll keep taking the latter.

But in either case I can’t stand the stupidity of the "it’s a compliment!" defense. Nothing’s automatically a compliment.

Some things are meant to be a compliment, or friendly, or whatever, and are taken badly because the recipient has had a bad day, doesn’t like the same things about themself that you like, or has heard your complimentary little joke fifteen times that morning, and fifty times yesterday, thanks. Some people are cranky (OK, I confess).

But some things are never meant to be a compliment in the first place. Come-ons regularly fall into one of those categories. If you want to compliment someone, see if you can figure out what makes them happy, rather than deciding on their behalf what should make them happy, doing it, and then giving them a lecture when they complain.

Comments

I, too, get hit on virtually never, and I wonder about the difference between Raven’s and my experiences on that issue. Is it a matter of the network security field being a whole lot worse than the embedded software development field I’m in? Mine is probably equally male-dominated, but I have the impression there’s a much lower percentage in my field of the jerks Raven describes. Or perhaps it’s that I’m not as immersed in my field as Raven is in hers. I feel like I’m still a fledgling in my field; my employer doesn’t pay for me to go to conferences (as I don’t have anything about which to speak there), for instance.

Posted by katie on March 19, 2004 01:13 AM

At LUV (linux users victoria), I’ve not seen anything adverse to the one or two women we have. Nothing on the mailing list either – or at least, the posts I have read.

But I did hear about that big SLUG stupidity. I think SLUG is a lot bigger than LUV, but no idea really.

I would certainly like to think that this wouldn’t happen in Linux – most people seem mature enough. Perhaps the security thing might have been from script-kiddies?

Astronomy is way too petty and political, so its hardly surprising that women would be treated bad, and consequently lose interest after honours (we’ve got 4 out of 30 – despite there being lots of female summer students coming through).

Nice article, BTW.

Posted by TimC on March 19, 2004 01:33 AM

Librarianship is a fairly non-grunchy profession, as these things go… of course, the way this works is that the entire bloody profession has been grunched—our pay reeks and our image is worse. Nonetheless. Librarianship is blessedly grunch-…

Trackback from Caveat Lector on March 19, 2004 01:10 PM.