Since the private beta, I’ve been a member of the StackOverflow site. A perfect place for me to quench my thirst of knowledge by asking programming related questions and help others by answering theirs. One of its key objective is to be nice and keeping the site on topic, i.e. programming topics. Today however I was unfortunate to find out the hard way how it is to be on the wrong side of the fence in this particular collective of programmers. If something my experience has taught me, it is to not let wrongdoings go. Even one person has said it with his infinite wisdom in these matters:
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Together with my own curiosity I didn’t want to stay silent and for that I’ve been battered, tarred and feathered. I could’ve been beating my pillow at this point, but instead I’ve written this post about it. This is my story about how this ordeal happened. Earlier today I read a very interesting question:
Which female programmer do you admire most, and why?
Do you know any female programmers? I don’t know that many public figure female programmers so I was interested to know that myself. Unfortunately, the question was downvoted and closed. This was wrong, so I tried it writing the question myself and be more specific about it:
The programmer workforce is predominantly male. A fact I find to be ironic because the first programmer is known to be Ada Lovelace, who wrote for Babbage’s yet-to-be-built machine. Also in the days of the birth of the “modern” computer a lot of women were programming for von Neumann.
So in order to raise Stackoverflowians awareness of women in computing, have you met any women in programming and how was the experience?
Little did I know that I opened a can of worms… or what us boys refer to as “cooties”:
OMG COOTIES!
Maybe I asked it wrong, I don’t know, but the response I’ve got from fellow StackOverflowians hasn’t been a very positive one. If I was fresh conscript of Stack Overflow, it would all seem like these programmers do not like to have questions about women. It would seem as if these female specimen that I was speaking of were filled with an imaginary bacteria dangerous to the Stack Overflow community. I’ll address the criticism I had here… lets start out with the case of sexism.
It is hard to understand what this criticism was about since the critics didn’t bother to explain why it was so. They assumed that I wrote exclusively to be a sexistic troll:
I’d like to point out that this ‘question’ is sexist. PintSizedCat
But I have to disagree because I didn’t write anything in my question that was demeaning about either of the sexes. In fact some of the most influential people that I met and had huge impact to my own professional work are women. I just wanted to know more about women programmers because I wished to know more about them, but clearly nobody in the programming community wants to talk about it.
Fortunately I wasn’t the only one who thought there was bad logic behind the criticism and some SO users summed that up well such as Sara Chipps and this fellow:
The question mentions sex (as in male/female), but is in no way offensive or sexist. Have people forgotten men and women are different. This isn’t sexists… if it was, so is the olympics because women and men compete speparately.
Scott Langham
Here is the deal, if you close down a topic because it was about women you effectively send out a discriminating message that women are not welcome in this forum. That in itself is a male chauvinistic act. So who is the sexist now?
The other half of the criticism is that Stackoverflow is only for programmers doing programming things and thusly was off-topic:
[This question is] just completely off-topic for what most people think this site is for: mainly asking and answering questions directly related to programming. Not discussions/polls about programming culture.
p5ycho_p3nguin
Unfortunately this statement is complete hypocrisy because there are several questions in StackOverflow that have evolved into pure discussion threads. Don’t believe me? Here is a list of threads falling under discussions about programming culture.
- What is your favorite “programmer cartoon”?
- Which power drink do you recommend?
- What is the single most important programmer book?
- What is the one programming skill you have always wanted to master but haven’t had time?
- What was your first home computer?
…and the list goes on and on.
Think about it, what message do these SO members send to others? That it is okay to deny threads about women who program but accept threads about men who do the same? Do you know what that smells like? It smells like we, the Stack Overflow community, are just a bunch of chauvinistic hipocrites.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand by such an informal policy because what happened in this case is a dysfunctional behaviour. In this community I want all programming people, like me, to ask their honest questions and get clear answers. Start answering the questions instead of becoming evil by bantering the people behind the questions.
Be nice!
