There's a discussion going on about women and IT, starting with a post by Richard Jones: Why there's few women in IT. Phillip Eby responded in Is porn driving women away from the computer industry?, The Real Reasons There Are Few Women In IT -- And What YOU Can Do About It and Why (Most) Men Don't Get It -- and I personally find his analysis much more useful.

Richard's original post talks about a case where someone used porn in a presentation, and he's basically saying that is "why there's few women in IT". I don't buy it.

First: is anyone claiming that IT as a field is more discriminatory than other fields? I don't think that's the case, despite the fact that the gender balance is worse than many other fields. Therefore I don't think this particular anecdote points to a larger problem specific to the community, nor does it explain the gender imbalance in the field, nor does it point to solutions.

Second: we have to accept each other as whole people; with the greater transparency of the internet we have to adapt our expectations and recognize people have lives that are larger than just the one aspect we would normally see in professional settings. Using pornography in a presentation at a conference of course isn't appropriate, but something like Acme::Playmate is not inappropriate in any way. Phillip is right to call the nature of the response patronizing. What are people trying to say? That women do not realize that Playboy exists? Are we trying to create a world where you can be completely insulated from pornography? To try to create or enable such a worldview is unreasonable and insulting to everyone's intelligence. We do not need to eliminate all sexual expressions from our community.

Third: the Free/Open Source community is not a professional community. Many participants do not participate professionally, or participate both as professionals and as hobbyists. Someone wanted to be able to grab playmate metadata easily... for what reason I'm actually not sure; to graph changes in average measurements over time? It doesn't really matter; the author doesn't need to justify it, and CPAN doesn't need to justify why it lists it (in fact there's little reason for either -- it exists, therefore CPAN lists it).

We should generally be careful about creating hostile environments -- hostile towards anyone. This is something that needs to be constantly considered, but is best dealt with person-to-person, and in response to specific situations. If our communities are so fragile that we cannot deal with an occasional mistake, then we've already lost. Of course you still need to correct mistakes; the quality of the response should be the judge of a community, especially open communities like F/OSS communities.

We should try to protect our communities by limiting our expression to what is considered appropriate in a professional environment. We should not limit our expression to those things that are appropriate for female ears or eyes -- and of course the very phrase is discriminatory! But that's the sentiment underlying Richard's original post.

This post doesn't offer any constructive suggestions about what to do about the gender imbalance. That's a much harder question. I just don't think focusing on discrimination is the right line of thought. I think it's the easy line of thought -- that if we just stop discriminating and stop creating a hostile environments we'll see more women. Following that path will create a chilling effect on personal expression and will hurt our community. Of this I am confident, because I and everyone else here knows what professional communication styles are like -- they are dull and disingenuous -- and that is exactly what people are calling for by making general arguments based on this one ill-considered presentation.

(If you read through the comments on that post, and PJE's posts, you'll see a wider discussion than just this one issue -- but it's not fair to fold all those ideas together into one response)