Andreas Tille, Chris Lamb & Debian sexism, not listening to real female developers
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
There are many examples of sexism in the Debian environment. From time to time, we've seen some brilliant women come and take a brief look at Debian and then walk away.
We could see the sexist culture at its worst in 2018 when people spread rumors that one of my interns was a girlfriend. In fact, the woman got married in the middle of her Google Summer of Code internship.
In any organization that cares about women, the leader would have acted to stop rumors about my family and my interns. Debian's leader, Chris Lamb, did the opposite. Behind the scenes, Lamb and his lackies were creating gossip and encouraging people to spread it.
The whole incident shows that they viewed my intern as disposable. They didn't care what damage they did to her reputation because from Debian's perspective she is interchangable with any other woman. In Debian, women are perceived to be nothing more than a replaceable commodity.
Chris Lamb was doing that towards the end of his dictatorship. In 2024, Andreas Tille showed his sexist side even before he was elected. Here are the comments in the election discussion. Tille thinks we just need to break tasks into smaller pieces so that women can work on them. This is like breaking up food for babies to eat it.
In reality, women don't have a problem with the size of the tasks in Debian. Women have a problem with the Debian harassment culture. As long as people are spreading accusations against my family and I, women look at the whole Debian group as a toxic environment. People pretend there was a mysterious crime with a secret victim. The men in the Debian cabal think that women can be easily fooled by rumors like that. In fact, men spreading gossip like that only scare women away.
Tille's comments also suggest that he is learning about the needs of women by getting to know the women already present in Debian. There are actually very few women in Debian and most of them only seem to be there while they are in a relationship with a male developer. Therefore, listening to the opinions of the existing women in the group is not the same as listening to the needs of independent female developers who want to collaborate on technical tasks without having their love life entangled with Debian.
Subject: Environment friendlyness, diversity (Was: Candidates question: politics and Debian) Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2024 20:49:36 +0100 From: Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> To: debian-vote@lists.debian.org
Hi Paulo,
I'm changing the subject to match the content of your question.
Am Tue, Mar 19, 2024 at 04:01:12PM -0300 schrieb Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana:
[ ... snip ... ]
> > I hope my platform was clear enough that I'm in favour of increasing the > > diversity in Debian. > > I read you page yesterday but I would like to know what ideias do you have > to increase gender representation and geographic diversity? > > I'm sure everybody is in favor to increase diversity, but what can be done > in practice?
First of all I consider a kind and inviting environment important in any case. I tried to answer what else can be done in the paragraph "Tiny tasks". In my discussions with some women I know from DebConfs I learned that it might be helpful to define tasks that are requiring small slices of time. I referenced this in the paragraph "Lower barriers" with:
For instance, I've encountered the argument that in many cultures, women have less leisure time ...
You might check that I'm honest about this by verifying my DPL platform git inside the tools dir[3] where I'm currently developing some (not yet finished) scripts) to get-missing-tests and get-random-bug. Depending from the time my DPL tasks might leave me (which I really can't estimate) I would like to guide newcomers kindly to do some dedicated QA work inside Debian and by doing so have some look into "hidden corners". Its just an experiment where I'm personally keen to see what outcome this might have.
I'm continuously in close contact with some women in Debian (including Sruthi) who I met at several DebConfs . I highly evaluate their opinion and trust their insight. To come back to the traveling topic above: I would not have met those women without flying to DebConfs.
Any further ideas are highly appreciated.
Kind regards Andreas.
[1] https://debconf23.debconf.org/talks/80-face-to-face-debian-meetings-in-a-climate-crisis/ [2] https://fam-tille.de/baeume_pflanzen/ German only, but life translation will work. [3] https://salsa.debian.org/tille/dpl-platform/-/tree/master/tools?ref_type=heads
-- https://fam-tille.de
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved. █