LWN runs a story about “sexual harassment” in open source conferences.
Now, we all know using some OSS software amounts to sexual harassment, but apparently the problem is more widespread in OSS culture in general. And not only because someone made a pass to a woman at a conference, and another guy made a sexual joke at another (things that never, ever, happen outside OSS conferences). For some women it has been a truly frightening experience. This first person account, for example, reminds me of the time I have strayed into this Blue Oyster bar, in Castro:
She says of a conference in the mid-1980s: “Male attendees would walk up to you – even if you were in a group – and ask ‘How much for a (sex act)?’ You tried hard not get in an elevator in the convention center alone.”
Admittedly, staging that particular conference in a hostel in the middle of Amsterdam’s Red Light District probably gave some people the wrong signals. That, and naming it “touch”, from the GNU command line tool of the same name.
And, let’s not forget this horrible, horrible, incident:
Mackenzie Morgan says: “a presenter had a title slide followed by a slide of bikini-clad women holding laptops, which he said was just to get people to pay attention. I’m not sure if we were supposed to pay attention to the women or to what he was saying though”.
(Morgan probably never heard of the “bait-and-switch” technique).
Read the article, for more white people problems…