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Comment by shangxiao | Hacker News Reader

White male shaming: Now moving on to grander things like selfless community pursuits such as contributing to open source (just an observation, not commentary)

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I'm a white male, very active on Stack Overflow, and working to become more active on Github. Still, I find acadien's observation very interesting. We should aim at trying to find the real causes of the situation, instead of being offended, just because someone pointed out something that clearly is a fact.

Suggesting that white males are more selfless is a bullshit answer. Maybe they (we) are the only ones who have the right combination of being educated and having enough free time? Maybe this has something to do with gender stereotypes? Or gender roles and woman usually having much more additional non work related responsibilities? I don't know. But it's worth asking.

It may be worth asking why, but I don't think it's an actual problem, and especially not a problem that needs action to make the distribution of races/genders more fair. White men aren't preventing people from getting into open source software. Just the opposite actually - a few white men have made it extremely easy for people to get into OSS.

Being a 19-year-old black software engineer, from a "current reality" POV, I can say that acadien's observation is definitely spot-on. However, I can also say that it seems things are getting much much better. Just a little under 3 years ago, I'd attend a conference with 300, 500, or even 500+ attendees, and would EASILY count the amount of black folks on a pair of hands (yes) and the ladies on 2-3 pair of hands. This isn't necessarily the case anymore (it's still kind of a problem though). Also, a majority of the "white men" programmers I know in the industry are very welcoming and helpful in this sense, so I wouldn't blame "white men" since that's just too general, and quite frankly, wrong, for the most part. Now that that's out of the way, THERE ARE those "white men" who are not so welcoming and aren't afraid to show it either. I couldn't even tell you the amount of times I've been offended by such folks. There's even one conference I went to where I was literally stopped on my way to grab lunch and randomly requested to go to security to be searched while EVERYONE ELSE was enjoying the sessions and meals. I was searched, I went to bathroom and cried for a while (yes, I admit it), and immediately headed home afterwards. Which conference ... well, I digress. The point I'm trying to make here is that we shouldn't be blaming folks in a general sense, but instead find those folks who do have such behavior and try to help them change.

great post. i think the main cause is economic / structural, but the underlying problem may well be exacerbated by bad behaviour of individuals. code4lib have an anti-harassment problem to deal with the behavioural problems (https://github.com/code4lib/antiharassment-policy) I've never been to their conferences so couldn't say how helpful it has been for them. as for dealing with the structural issues, that's a bigger problem without any clear answers that I'm aware of.

Hi Jonathan. I would love to know which conference this was.

> Suggesting that white males are more selfless is a bullshit answer.

I think parent was saying white male people shouldn't be shamed for participating in a "selfless" activity even if they're over-represented in that activity. I don't think parent was implying white-male people are over-represented in that activity because they're more selfless.

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