So I’m sitting in a F/OSS channel this morning and someone joins:
<nickChanged> hello dudes
Now it’s possible that this person just wanted to greet the men in the channel, so I asked:
<pleia2> What, no greeting for the ladies?
A quick exchange follows, in which the fellow apologizes and another fellow (who I know) pipes up and says “Well you’re not usually here!” …as if I’m the only female ever to enter that channel. In fact, however, one of the channel ops is female.
And then we get the fellow who pipes up and says: “No need to get into sexism”
I couldn’t resist.
<pleia2> sorry, I just feel left out when people join channels and say “hey dudes/gentlemen/fellas”
It’s the truth. The first F/OSS channel I was in regularly had this problem and I quickly became known as “that feminist who would always call people on it” – of course since I’m friendly with the main devs it was never something bad it was more of a “snicker, that guy just joined the channel and said ‘hello gentlemen’ – pleia2 is gonna get him!”
But I never much liked having that label, that’s what sticks even though I’ve made contributions to the project. But if I wasn’t going to pipe up and say something, who would? How else are we supposed to change this?
Of course I don’t think these men are intentionally saying “hey dudes/gentlemen/fellas” because they want women to feel excluded, they simply assume women aren’t in these channels. Indeed, many women who have survived in F/OSS IRC have doneso by taking gender-neutral nicks and not otherwise exposing their gender, and I don’t blame them, but this makes us much less visible.
I keep hoping that one of these days every tenth knucklehead joining a F/OSS channel won’t spew some masculine greeting, but until then I’ll still be “that feminist who calls people on it” from time to time.