On keynotes and apologies

“Here’s the story: Mark Shuttleworth gave a keynote at LinuxCon,
which I attended, in which he said lots of reasonable things and
one very unfortunate thing. Paraphrased, he said that if we did a
better job at considering our non-technical users and accepting
help from expert UI designers, we’d have an easier time “explaining
to girls what we actually do”. (By girls, he meant women, not
female children.) I’d like to be able to provide a direct
transcript when critiquing his words, but the LinuxCon organizers
don’t seem to be willing to make the video available for free, so I
can’t do that yet. I’ll link to it as soon as it’s available.

“Before I get started properly, I want to make it clear that I
like and respect Mark Shuttleworth. I regularly use and recommend
Ubuntu to other people, and am very glad that he’s doing what he’s
doing in the world. There’s no personal animosity or ill will
behind this post at all.

“…Well, I was at the keynote too, and was paying attention,
and it turns out that even with context applied, someone who talks
about “explaining to girls what we actually do” when talking about
free software really is saying something sexist, and buying into
the noxious stereotype that women can’t be developers or
tech-savvy; that they’ll never be a real part of our group, even if
a few of them are brave enough to try in the face of other people
dismissing their efforts (and Mark certainly isn’t the first to
have done that).”

Complete Story