So I’m sitting in a F\/OSS channel this morning and someone joins:<\/p>\n
<nickChanged> hello dudes<\/p>\n
Now it’s possible that this person just wanted to greet the men in the channel, so I asked:<\/p>\n
<pleia2> What, no greeting for the ladies?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And then we get the fellow who pipes up and says: “No need to get into sexism”<\/p>\n
I couldn’t resist.<\/p>\n
<pleia2> sorry, I just feel left out when people join channels and say “hey dudes\/gentlemen\/fellas”<\/p>\n
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<\/i> it was more of a “snicker, that guy just joined the channel and said ‘hello gentlemen’ – pleia2 is gonna get him!”<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}