 All right, hello, everybody. My name is Ginger Keuns. I'm one of the editors of LibraGraphics Magazine. My two long-suffering colleagues behind me are Anna Carvalho and Ricardo La Fuente. And I say long-suffering because about an hour ago I accidentally broke our website. So bear with us. Oh, it's fixed. Awesome. Thank you, Anna. So first of all, I know we're probably all too cool for this, but since it's the end of a very long session, if you feel like it, take a second and stand up, shake a little bit, because I'd actually like you all to be awake for my talk. It would be nice. So if you feel like it, thank you, John. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Good. All right, perfect. So the talk today, and we actually have another one later in the week, which will be led by Anna and Ricardo, so that I'm not the only one yacking up here. But today we're talking about beating the drums, why we made gender an issue. So Anna, this is the latest issue of Libra Graphics Magazine, which, for the uninformed, is a print publication devoted to showcasing and promoting good work done in artistic and design areas using Floss. So Floss software, Floss standards, Floss methods. And we do it entirely with Floss. We license it under a CC by SA license. We do a variety of things. That are Flossy. Let's put it that way. So this is issue 2.2, which came out in January and is our sixth issue in four years for a quarterly magazine. So apologies now to our long-suffering subscribers. But this issue was about gender. It's called gender and Floss. So first of all, the title of this talk is a little bit of a misnomer, because I say why we made gender an issue. Obviously, we did not need to make it an issue. It is an issue that is already present in our community, but I can't resist a pun. So this is it for those who didn't see it when Ricardo held it up. So we've got some good news this year. The good news is that in the 2013 Floss survey that was conducted last year, and the results of which had started to trickle out in the last month of 2067 respondents, 226 of them were female. So that is 11% of people who filled out this survey are women identified as women. 33% marked other, which is really impressive actually. Very few people are keen to tick the other box in our communities. 32% chose not to respond, which I think is also positive. This is up from 1.5% of Floss contributors in 2006 who filled out the Floss polls survey who identified as women. So we are up to, yes, thank you. Yes, that's huge growth. We're up to 11% from 1.5%. So we could say to ourselves, congratulations, let's have a round of applause, which we just did, but gender is still clearly an issue. This is not a fair complete. So it's a good thing, but gender inclusion and diversity aren't just about the fact that now we have 11% of Floss contributors in theory if we can actually extrapolate on the survey who are women. There are other problems. There are problems with, oh, let's see, representation. How do we talk about women in our communities? How do we view them? Do we think there's a woman, let's get her to do the graphics? I say as someone with a background in design, but do we do that? Do we say there's a woman? Maybe she's a lawyer. Maybe she can work on our licensing stuff. This is an experience that we often see, women pushed into marginalized roles. Now, other problems, inclusion, how do we treat the people who are women or who don't identify as a binary gender? Do we include them properly? Do we have daycare available since, frankly, most of the time, women are caregivers and families for a woman to come out to a conference. Are we making it possible for her? Or are we giving her another cost? Things like objectification. So I love you all. You are all wonderful, delightful people. But in many projects, when we start showing off demos of things, what do we put up as a picture? Sorry? Did someone? Lana, ponies. Ponies, yeah. Say it again? Lana. Does anyone know? Can I explain? Please, yeah. I mean, it's an image of an issue that was in the 1970s. That was handled by an engineer and that has become a viral image used as a reference for any of the images around. So it means that a gay girl is the reference, which is a bit of a problem. Absolutely. So I'm going, trust me, I'm there already. So Lana, as Femke just said, is an image from a 1970s Playboy magazine that was scanned in and is now used pretty universally as a reference image everywhere, right? And all the time, we use pictures of attractive women, giant-eyed anime women, whatever, right? Without thinking, gosh, will this damage our female developers and our female users? Will this bother someone? Will this stop someone from joining the community? Will a woman look at a scantily clad anime girl and say, maybe that's not a community I want to belong to? Power. Who's the maintainer, right? Who runs the software? Oh, sorry, who runs the project? Who runs the organization? There are huge power differentials. And as I alluded to previously, binaries, this idea that we're trying to include women now, right? And that's fine, as long as we recognize that it's not just women, right? It could be people who don't identify as either a man or a woman, people who find themselves somewhere else on the spectrum of gender, people who feel marginalized by assumptions about what a woman should be, which ties in, of course, two stereotypes. So I think for a moment of the infamous 2011 Grace Hopper Summit incident, where, so actually the Grace Hopper Summit is a gathering of women computer scientists, and the infamous incident from that year was nail polish in the loot bags, right? Because what do women developers want? They want nail polish. There's nothing wrong with painting your nails if you so desire, but to assume that female developers automatically want nail polish, that's a bit of a stereotyping problem. So we still have lots of these issues among many, many, many, many, many others with the way we look at gender, right? I often think that throwing a little bit of a gender studies 101 course for people in floss would be pretty beneficial, but you know, I won't because I don't want to bore you. Anyway, so what we wanted to do with this issue and which I think we did very nicely, considering how long it took us to do it, was to document the efforts being made to expand the boundaries of our community. That's to women, that's to other marginalized groups, that's to people who are genderqueer or trans or whatever. And so we included things from groups like hacker moms, which is a group in Los Angeles that is a hacker space for mothers because they felt marginalized as soon as they had children because suddenly extracurricular activities were not a thing for them, right? They lost their lives to parenthood. So groups like hacker moms have the goal of giving back the ability to hack. We included an interview with Kira, who is the founder of the Empowermentories Collective, which if you'll pardon my lapse into academic feminism talk for a second, it's a group for intersectionally marginalized people of color. So what that means is people who are people of color but are also women or transgendered or disabled or a variety of other things, thank you. So we ran an interview with Kira, which I think was pretty awesome and I don't say that just because I did that. And we ran some nice features on gendered craft. So in short, what I'm trying to say is that the goal of this issue, and we've had a lot of feedback saying that we actually met that goal, was to talk about where we are, where we're going and how we can become more inclusive and crucially more empowering because it's not just about trying to fit women and other marginalized groups into our existing structure. We may kind of need to change a little bit, which I know is kind of scary, right? To think, oh no, we can't always be what we want to be. But that is one of the things that happens when we become more diverse than we've historically been. So it's something to think on. We might even actually call the goal of this issue, beating the drums. And to explain my idiom for a moment, the Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms, which I'm very pleased to be able to cite here because I like a good idiom, is so if we say to beat or bang the drum for or of something, that is to be ostentatiously in support of it. Which in this case, we are ostentatiously in support of diversifying flaws communities, of actually getting people talking about issues that may be sort of bubbling under the surface and being worrying, and to actually get people believing that they can belong in flaws communities, and specifically in our case, in the Libra Graphics community, because that's what we're into. So there are lots and lots and lots of people out there who think that for whatever reason, because they're a woman, because they don't have time, because they've heard that flaws communities are hostile, we're interested in showing them that people like them are there, and that it's actually possible to do wonderful things here, because we all know that, but not everyone else on the outside knows that to put it in those terms. So in short, the purpose of this issue and the purpose of this talk is to say that we need to be beating more drums. We need to be more ostentatiously in support of things that matter, like inclusion, because at the moment, many of us are apathetic. Many of us say, yeah, it would be nice if there were more women, but we don't say what can I do to get women involved? What can I do to get whoever involved, right? It's not just women. We need to be ostentatiously in support of becoming a more inclusive community, and I will leave you there. And now we have lots of time for questions. Want questions? Oh, yes. Yes, I do. Oh, one thing. Microphone? Okay, so we'll be around with quite a few of these, actually 30. So be sure to come to us and get your copy. I'd call that only 30. I would call that only 30. Anyway, questions. Come on. Who wants to bang the drum first? I don't have a drumstick, but... Okay, that person. Yeah, I just had a question because, you know, you said we need to get more women involved and I think many of us would agree with that. And I've worked with women developers on projects where I work and it's been very good, very good partnerships. But how do you get more women involved? I mean, how do you make women more interested or, you know, the community could be very open and to having people come in, but how do you get them? Where do you find them? Right, so I mean, this is a question, I think actually the first question, conveniently, that everyone asks when you start talking about the issue of including more women, the problem of, so how do we get them then? If we're interested in having them, what do we do? Where do they hang out? Who are these mythical creatures? There are several things. I mean, I don't have the definitive answer, obviously, because every human is different and not just by being a woman, do I suddenly have knowledge of what every other woman wants? That would be crazy. But there are lots of things we can look out for. So one thing that you may or may not be aware of, there's this sort of phenomenon in social justice communities on the internet around making what are called privileged checklists. And so a really crucial thing, actually, is to read up on areas where other groups are marginalized that you may not recognize, right? So I mean, it may be that some women don't actually feel that their voices are recognized, right? This may be an area that we see on a privileged checklist. Your privilege may be that you believe that when you talk, people will accord you the courtesy of listening to you. So first, read up on your privileged checklists. They're very handy, right? What are your privileges as a male contributor to software? Second of all, there are loads of little things we can do to be more inclusive, right? We can look at things like, are there small contributions people can make if they don't have a lot of time? Because time is always one of the problems. And then a great one, and this I am cribbing from a woman named Marina, whose last name starts with a Zed and I can't pronounce it because it's all consonants. But she's at Red Hat and she is one of the founders of the FOSS OPW program, which is the FOSS Outreach Program for Women, which is like Google Summer of Code for Women. And the brilliant thing Marina said two weeks ago is a great way to include women is to not walk up to them at conferences when you see them and say, oh gosh, you're a woman. She knows that, right? And she knows that she's one of the few women in the room and it's not very helpful to treat her like she's a unicorn. So that would be my initial feedback, but there's so much more. Do we have questions? Comments? Yes? I saw Susan first. I just wanted to make a comment that one of the easiest things that can be done to encourage women to join the community, any community is if, and I know this is asking for a little more of your time in paying attention to who is posting to your forums or your user groups. But if you do get some sort of kind of exploratory question from a woman that's new to your group and they ask a little question, quite frequently these email, these forum posts don't get answered and that's just normal. But if we could be just a little more conscientious about answering posts from women, it helps them feel like, well, okay, I'm not out of my league here, all right? I could be welcomed here. Or my question was relevant. I mean, there's so much validity and just getting a hey, I have no idea what you asked this confusing question or I don't know, but I know someone who can answer that. Or you could look at this piece of documentation and find out the answer for yourself. Just little, just some tiny response, I think could really boost the numbers of women and other non, I guess, non-typical programmers into the community, just that one small thing. That is an excellent point and actually I would also bring up that, so that's a great strategy for encouraging all contributors to join anyone who's newer tentative. And there's a wonderful group called Open Hatch that has done a lot of work on encouraging new contributors and making them feel welcome. What do you think about women-centered sub-communities? Like there's a Ruby Rails community and there's Rails Girls, which is specific for teaching, maybe not only about most women Rails, what do you think about sub-communities like that? They have a valuable place. I think many people are a bit divided over their relevance because on the one hand, maybe we're ghetto-izing women and saying you can belong to this group, but on the other hand, it's really nice to be able to meet other people who maybe feel a bit differently than you do, not to be a gender-essentialist and say women are different than men. I think that's part of my language, total bullshit. You will probably be able to find two women who are more different from each other than some women and some men are. People are different. We can't just say women do X, men do Y. Not right, but at the same time, many women are comfortable and happy in groups where it's Ubuntu women, Fedora women, whatever, Debian women. So, non-committal answer, basically. So, first a little comment to the woman suggesting to be extra nice to women, newbies showing up in a thread, in a forum. I'm from Debian and I noticed that, especially in the recent times, I noticed this style of response, not only to women, this is not really about women, but when you see a question that doesn't belong in this forum or this mailing list, then the nice way to respond, as I noticed it, I'm not very good at doing it myself, but what I notice at being very nice responses, this is the short answer to your question and please beware that this other place is more suitable for this kind of question in the future, because you're both talking to this person and to everybody else who is maybe too shy to raise the question. So, instead of saying nothing and instead of saying this is the wrong place, go away, then actually answer the question shortly and then point to the better place. It's so much more helpful and welcoming. But a question myself, I have a difficulty myself what really to think about positive discrimination, I would call it. You mentioned yourself this outreach program for women and as I understand it, it's about raising money, throwing money at covering the costs of an investment for people who maybe cannot afford to maybe a job or something, so boosting the initial stages of getting involved by covering the costs. But it involves money in a way that is in other places in free software communities is distorting things as I see it. So as I see it, it's like these projects, these outreach programs is throwing money to a thing that others involved in the project will not get paid for the same amount of work. So what is your, do you have some angles to that that can help me wrap my brain around it? Absolutely and I mean you could level the exact same criticism at Google Summer of Code, right? It's an internship that is based on the idea that students and people who don't have full-time employment don't have the luxury maybe of being able to devote their spare time to floss. It's an opportunity to get them contributing, right? So anyone here who has benefited from the efforts of a Google Summer of Code student before is benefiting from the same thing that the FOSOPW does, except that the purpose of the FOSOPW is, well, I think it's partially founded on the idea that the vast majority of Google Summer of Code students are young men in computer science programs. So the FOSOPW is, you know, whether or not you like the paid internships for floss model, it's a way of getting people who were not already participating in those kinds of internships into those kinds of internships. So it's not for me to question that kind of funding model, but it is a case of people who would not otherwise have the incentive or the ability or the push, you know, the actual invitation to be involved, to get involved, and that's actually a crucial one, right? I mean, one of the bits of rationale that we often see for the disparity between women in floss and women in proprietary software is that this sort of active welcoming, this belief that you do belong, is something that we don't have in floss a lot of the time, whereas when you get a job somewhere, when you're a new COMPSA graduate and you get a job at Microsoft, they are telling you, we think you're good enough. A lot of the time in floss, the message is the opposite, right? A lot of the things we say imply to contributors that they're not good enough and there is no sense of validation, because we think of ourselves in meritocracy. So is a lot of the rest of the world, but a lot of the rest of the world is much better at saying, hey, actually, you are okay. But that's a wider endemic problem and we're out of time. Yes, so on Friday at 9.30, we will have a conduct session for LibraGraphic's meeting specifically. So anyone who has an opinion, who care about this issue and related issues, please join us. And with that, we are going to have a break.