The 101-Level Reader: Books to Help You Better Understand Your Biases and the Lived Experiences of People
Quite regularly I'm asked about books that would be good to read to learn more about topics I discuss regularly, including intersectionality, feminism, womanism, and social justice. Thanks to the help of twitter and my ever-growing GoodReads list, here is a list for you. Many of the books can easily fit into more than one category, so may appear under multiple headings.
The list is comprised of both 101-level and some more advanced books on these subjects. Much of this is from an American cultural perspective. I haven't personally read all of them, but most I haven't read are on my to read list. If I've missed something you think is fundamental, please let me know.
There are quite a few other topics I'd like to cover here, but I am going to consider this post a living document. I'm also trying to figure out the best way to distill this information into a more easily consumable list.
Note: Most links are through Amazon Affiliates, the funds from which help me buy books for research :)
Gender, Sex, and General Feminism, Womanism
- Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks
- Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano
- How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
- The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf
- Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men by Anne Fausto-Sterling
- Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity by Matt Bernstein-Sycamore
- Gender Outlaw and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation by Kate Bornstein
- Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis
- Cybersexism: Sex, Gender, and the Power of the Internet by Penny Red
- Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks
- Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins
- Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future by Jennifer Baumgardner
- No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women by Estelle Freedman
- Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine
- Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts
- Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism by Penny Red
- Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom by Wendy Kline
- The Socialist Feminist Project: A Contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics by Nancy Holmstrom
- The Big Feminist BUT by Shannon O'Leary
- Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks
- But Some Of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women's Studies
- Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations by Kimberly Springer
- Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio
- The Gender Book by Boston Bostian, Mel Reiff Hill, Jay Mays
- Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism By Trinh T. Minh-Ha
- I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism by Lee Maracle
- Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study by Paula Rothenberg
- The Ruptures Of American Capital: Women Of Color, Feminism, And The Culture Of Immigrant Labor by Grace Kyungwon Hong
- Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy by Grace Chang
- The Gender Knot by Allan Johnson
Masculinity
- Masculinities by R.W. Connell
- Refusing to Be a Man by John Stoltenberg
- The End of Manhood by John Stoltenberg
- The Will to Change by bell hooks
- We Real Cool by bell hooks
- Manhood in America by Michael Kimmel
- Men's Lives by Michael Kimmel and Michael Messner
- Men and Feminism by Shira Tarrant
- Macho Paradox by Jackson Katz
- Excluded by Julia Serano
- Boys Will Be Boys: Deconstructing Masculinity & Manhood by Michael Kimmel (video)
Race and Ethnicity
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander and Cornel West
- Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
- How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston
- The Mismeasure of a Man by Stephen Jay Gould
- Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum
- Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez by Richard Rodriguez
- Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom by Leslie Delpit
- Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis
- Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks
- Black Power : The Politics of Liberation by Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton
- Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism by Patricia Hill Collins
- Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins
- Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon
- Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts
- Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom by Wendy Kline
- Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks
- But Some Of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women's Studies
- Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations by Kimberly Springer
- Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism by Trinh T. Minh-Ha
- I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism by Lee Maracle
- Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study by Paula Rothenberg
- Black Labor, White Wealth : The Search for Power and Economic Justice by Claud Anderson
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
- The Ruptures Of American Capital: Women Of Color, Feminism, And The Culture Of Immigrant Labor by Grace Kyungwon Hong
- Basic Call To Consciousness by Akwasasne Notes
- Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy by Grace Chang
- Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement
Sexuality and Orientation
- Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity by Matt Bernstein-Sycamore
- Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism by Patricia Hill Collins
- Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts
- Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio
- Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study by Paula Rothenberg
Ability
- My Body Politic by Simi Linton
- Disability and Passing by Jeffrey A Brune and Daniel J Wilson
- Madness by Marya Hornbacher
- No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement by Joseph Shapiro
- The Disability Studies Reader by Lennard J Davis
- A Disability History of the United States by Kim Nielsen
Language Dominance
Class and Labor
- Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis
- Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks
- Punching Out & Other Writings by Martin Glaberman
- The Socialist Feminist Project: A Contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics by Nancy Holmstrom
- Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study by Paula Rothenberg
- Black Labor, White Wealth : The Search for Power and Economic Justice by Claud Anderson
- The Ruptures Of American Capital: Women Of Color, Feminism, And The Culture Of Immigrant Labor by Grace Kyungwon Hong
- Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy by Grace Chang
The Intersection of Difference and Technology
- Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do by Claude M. Steele
- Women, Technology, and the Myth of Progress by Eileen B Leonard
Domestic, Sexual, and Systemic Societal Violence, Rape Culture
- Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith Herman
- The Color of Violence by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
- Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide by Andrea Smith
- The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities by Ching-In Chen
American Exceptionalism, American Revisionist History
- The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz
- The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed
- Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon
- Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World by Eric Foner
Prison Industrial Complex
General Anti-Oppression and Social Justice
Additional Resources
We've All Got a List
On a terrifyingly regular basis, incidents of bad behavior surface in the open source community. This can range from dismissiveness toward someone in a marginalized group, to outright hostility at conferences, to harassment and intimidation in the workplace, to physical violence and sexual assault in our community spaces. The scary thing here is that we only hear about them when they either happen in public or when the affected person comes forward, not all of them knowing what will happen when they do.
If it does become public, I hear quite a few people say things like "I wish there were a list so I knew who to avoid/not hire/not allow at my events/etc".
What would a list accomplish?
The idea here being that a public blacklist would serve multiple purposes at once. Below are some of the reasons many people have told me they want something like this.
Note that these do not necessarily fall in line with my beliefs, but I am putting them all in one place because I hear them so frequently.
Consequences for Actions
Like many things on the internet, there are very few consequences for bad or threatening behavior. Part of this is due to the decentralization of a community caused by the internet - one feels more comfortable saying something to you online than to your face knowing that you can't immediately react and knowing that there would be little to no punishment for the behavior.
Another piece of the puzzle is the army of support someone who does this can gain from finding their way into the right parts of the internet - Hacker News, Reddit, 4chan, and other places where the idea of injustice has become perverted and festers in a village of people with access to all the right incendiary devices. In this way, the internet has actually been quite empowering for abusers.
And hey, before you think to yourself "we should de-anonymize the internet!", lemme tell you: it doesn't matter. I've received rape and death threats from people with their real names, their real faces, and even their work email addresses attached. The issue is less about anonymization and more about there being no consequences for online actions, especially in a community as large and globally widespread as ours.
A Warning to Other Possible Offenders
Having a public list would also fire a warning shot. "People who do these sorts of things are not welcome in our community and we will let people know." The logic goes that making a public example of someone means that others are less likely to do the same things, again, creating a sort of consequence to that behavior.
If we compare this to another set of rules we expect people to follow - laws - research shows this isn't the case. Harsher penalties don't deter crimes anymore than the law existing. Much of this comes the fact that so many crimes are never punished.
Research to date generally indicates that increases in the certainty of punishment, as opposed to the severity of punishment, are more likely to produce deterrent benefits.1
A rational analysis commonly puts the perceived benefits of a crime greater than its perceived costs, due to a variety of criminal justice realities such as low punishment rates.2
Sound familiar? No group of volunteers could possibly capture information on every offense, especially considering many are never publicly reported for reasons I've already written about.
In addition, the abused face a retaliatory effect: being themselves reported as abusers, which isn't unique to the internet. A recent example of this is the Twitter "Report Abuse" button, which allowed people to report specific tweets as abusive. One of the first victims of this was a twitter account that retweeted transphobic tweets to both raise awareness of how casual people are with their transphobic hate, but also to identify dangerous people to block or avoid. Those tweeting transphobic things turned around and reported the account, getting it suspended.
Meanwhile, the reports to Twitter about abuse by their users - including rape threats, death threats, doxxing, and other harassing behavior - are dismissed with alarmingly regularity, assumedly by either an automated system that isn't programmed well or a set of humans that aren't trained well enough on the intricacies of harassment. This, again, leaves all of the power in the hands of the abusers.
Keep Our Community Safe
Another reason to create such a list would be to protect the community. Running a conference or event, hiring, or adding someone new to your project invites a lot of risk. Bringing in the wrong person can damage not only what you're trying to do, but the reputation of the community it sits in. By removing past violators, the hope is that you are keeping them from repeating the same behavior and protecting the community.
The argument against this is that it doesn't allow people to redeem themselves (for the things that are redeemable, which I will not enumerate here). Some actions require only a sincere apology and not repeating the same behavior - a temporary tarnishment to their reputation. Others, due to the nature of the incident, require we weigh the safety of the community over the offender's want for redemption.
On a personal note, I personally block a lot of abusive and harassing people on twitter. The majority of the time that's the last I hear from them, but I have a few people that go out of their way to continue to harass me on twitter or in other mediums. In a couple cases, the people have come around and realized why what they were doing was wrong and sent me apologetic emails. If I feel they're sincere, I've unblocked them.
Provide Evidence of Occurrence
How do we get people to pay attention when this happens so they aren’t shocked when we say many don’t participate in OSS due to hostility?
— ashe dryden (@ashedryden) November 30, 2013
The Geek Feminism Timeline of Incidents exists for exactly this reason - in fact, you can read Why We Document on the Geek Feminism blog for a well-reasoned explanation.
It's important to note that the existence of this list is a huge source of anger for a lot of people. When people ask for evidence of the occurrence of these incidents and the ToL is provided, many react very poorly. I've heard it referred to as a "witch hunt", a "sex offenders registry", and arguments that it violates the "innocent until proven guilty" belief that many Americans hold. What they tend not to want to listen to is the frequency with which nothing is done about these incidents when they are reported to community members, conference organizers, business owners, and even law enforcement. The reality here is that not only are the majority of online harassment reports ignored (or even mocked), but so are in-person reports to people and organizations who have the power to create consequences for the offending individual.
We Have Lists: They're Just Not Public
Many that have faced this kind of behavior have a list. It's not necessarily written down and cataloged, but it exists.
When a friend is thinking about working for a company that allows homophobic slurs in the office, or going to a conference where they've done nothing after a report of abuse, or getting involved in a project where the lead is verbally abusive, we tell them.
We do what we can to protect each other through whispers and emails and private messages because the risk - legal, professional, financial, personal - is too great and the reward so small that doing so publicly isn't worth it.
The unfortunate side-effect of this taking place in private interactions is that only those that are connected and trusted will get this information. This leads a very large group of people vulnerable still because the network isn't large enough yet. We end up excluding the people who need this information the most - the people who have less power and reach, the ones that are most vulnerable to predatory behavior without any recourse of their own.
How Do We Fix This?
We allow this kind of behavior by not calling people out, by not having any real or lasting consequences for those actions, for not taking reports of abuse, harassment, and assault seriously. We don't believe the people who do report and in doing so further victimize them; on top of that, we outright abuse and harass the people who report. If anything, we've taught victims of this behavior to do nothing and say nothing, lest they encourage the wrath of the internet, forever associating their name - and not their abuser's - with something shitty or horrific that happened to them.
We don't take responsibility for our own actions, letting ourselves off the hook by comparing our behavior to someone that is degrees worse. We dismiss what seems to be a small push towards inclusivity (or even the bare minimal of civility) because there are "bigger battles to be fought".
So how does this get fixed? Truthfully, I don't know. The problem is so systemic in our communities. Fixing this is going to require buy-in from a vocal and powerful majority of people. It's going to have to mean people losing opportunities and their standing in our communities because of the things they do.
We cannot reprimand someone for their behavior while still allowing them to enjoy the privileges of their position without sending the message that we are somehow condoning their abusive actions.
1 Wright, Valerie (2010, November), Deterrence in Criminal Justice: Evaluating Certainty vs. Severity of Punishment
2 Robinson, Paul H. and Darley, John M. (2004), Does Criminal Law Deter?
The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community
Disclaimer: This post is critical of open source software in the context of unpaid labor and the hiring requirements we've set up around it. It is not a criticism of open source software itself or the people who participate in it, both of which I and anyone who uses software benefits from. This is work that I - and many of us who do software for a living - also financially benefit from.
tl;dr: I want to see all people fairly compensated for their labor without feeling forced into it; I do not want to see free and open source software stopped.
This is a conversation that we've had a few times over the course of the past few weeks through twitter, blog posts, and in person, so I figured it'd help to pull the conversation all into one place and provide additional context for how unpaid OSS work creates inequalities.
It started a few weeks ago when @mislav pointed me to this tweet:
Advice received on hiring software devs: reject anyone who doesn't have a @GitHub profile (the more active the better). Agree?
— Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) October 30, 2013
And continued this morning after @dhh posted a blog post:
Wow. @dhh absolutely nails it on Open Source and money: http://t.co/W85S0oaS8S (everyone should read Punished by Rewards)
— Alex Gaynor (@alex_gaynor) November 12, 2013
I'd definitely recommend reading both the tweets and some of the conversations around them, as well as DHH's blog post so you get a better idea of what I'm refuting here. This'll give you an idea of what the general sentiment of OSS as unpaid labor is in the community.
How can requiring OSS contribution be a bad thing?
The demographics of open source contributors
So that we're all on the same page, let's take a look at what the landscape of open source contribution looks like. Someone's made a handy gist of the most active GitHub users (from Nov 10, 2012 through Nov 10, 2013) (thanks to @jclermont for the link). A quick glance through the list shows that the overwhelming majority of these users are white men*.
We also know from research that approximately 1.5% of F/LOSS contributors are female as compared to 28% in proprietary software. I've so far been unable to locate similar research on statistics for other groups, including racial minorities.
Statistically, we expect that the demographic breakdown of people contributing to OSS would be about the same as the people who are participating in the OSS community, but we aren't seeing that. Ethnicity of computing and the US population breaks down what we would hope to see as far as ethnicity goes. As far as gender, women make up 24% of the industry, according to the same paper that gave us the 1.5% OSS contributor statistic.
A note on meritocracy
It's difficult to go much further without mentioning the undercurrent belief in meritocracy that is particularly pervasive in open source communities, especially around participation in GitHub.
Meritocracy is the belief that those with merit float to the top - that they should be given more opportunities and be paid higher.
We prize the idea of meritocracy and weigh merit on contribution to OSS. Those who contribute the most, goes the general belief, have the most merit and are deemed the most deserving. Those who contribute less or who don't at all contribute to OSS are judged to be without merit, regardless of the fact that they have less access to opportunity, time, and money to allow them to freely contribute.
As the people who exist within this supposed meritocracy don't exist within a vacuum, we also have to realize how our actions affect others. Meritocracy creates a hierarchy amongst the people within it. Some of those at the top or striving to at least be above other people have been guilty of using their power for bullying, harassment, and sexist/racist/*ist language that they use against others directly and indirectly. This creates an atmosphere where people who would otherwise be deemed meritorious within this system choose not to participate because of a hostile, unrewarding environment.
A lot of people hold the idea of meritocracy close. I believe they mean well, too, but they aren't necessarily seeing the whole picture. We all want a system where we feel we can be rewarded for what we contribute: that society's injustice toward certain groups of people - most specifically geeks, many of us who grew up feeling abused, persecuted, and ignored (blog post coming on this soon) - would be rendered irrelevant. In striving for that, our community has become a microcosm of society at large.
The idea of a meritocracy presumes that everyone starts off and continues through with the same level of access to opportunity, time, and money, which is unfortunately not the case. It's a romanticized ideal - a belief in which at best ignores and at worst outright dismisses the experiences of everyone outside the group with the most access to these things. A certain demographic of people have three or four steps above other people, so the playing field is not even.
Why do we see so little diversity here?
Time commitment, pay inequality, and lack of access to jobs that encourage OSS during business hours
OSS contribution takes time; I don't think anyone would contest that. Getting familiar with a project, finding out where you can fit into it, reading and responding to issues, testing and submitting patches, writing documentation. All of that requires a good deal of time.
Marginalized people in tech - women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others - have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity.
- Women are far more likely to be a primary caregiver of not only children, but other ailing and aging relatives. 59-75% of caregivers are women.1
- 52% of women caregivers with incomes at or below of the national median of $35k spend 20+ hours each week providing care. The largest racial demographics in this group are black and hispanic2.
- Women perform more unpaid labor (most visible in domestics and child care) than men. On childcare alone, mothers spend more than twice as much time per day as fathers do. On average, working fathers spend only 10min more per day on child care when they are not working, whereas working mothers spend nearly twice as much when not working3.
- Due to additional pay inequity contributing to less access to paid childcare, women of color perform far more child care than white women.
- Those with medical conditions requiring that they regularly visit medical facilities or perform other health-related activities such as getting additional sleep, regularly exercising, doing physical therapy, being away from backlit screens, not sitting in a chair for an extended period of time, resting their hands, etc are all affected by what becomes an extended workday.
- Those with a longer commute have less free time. Those who make less money can't afford the same housing costs as those that make more and are able to live in a city, so they are negatively impacted here again.
- Women earn 76-89% of men's wages. 6
- Women of color earn as little as 55% of white men's wages. 7
Thankfully, we have a significant number of companies within the OSS community that encourage their employees to contribute to OSS during business hours as part of their day jobs. This should work to alleviate some of the above, but unfortunately the vast majority of programmers working in these companies fall within the white, male demographic. I'd rather not point out any specific ones here, but think of 5 or 10 large companies in the OSS space (who should have the most access to highly qualified candidates, able to compensate them the best, and give them opportunities to learn and contribute to OSS) and check out their "about" pages.
Harassment of women and PoC contributing to OSS
I use IRC daily and this paper explains I don’t use a “feminine-sounding” name anymore | http://t.co/n37PgrKUXR
— Lindsey Bieda (@lindseybieda) November 12, 2013
I know many women that either don't contribute to OSS because they've been dismissed for being women - being too pretty, not pretty enough, being forced to prove their competence more than their male counterparts because they're women. I've talked to women who use gender-ambiguous GitHub names and don't post a picture of themselves as their avatar because of how quickly this happens. In addition, the sexual harassment, slurs, and other derogatory language that are used directly or indirectly at these groups of people causes many to not want to participate at all.
Additionally, there are very public instances of assuming someone is male.
Because it's too many to embed, read through some of the replies to this tweet about why some people don't contribute to OSS for safety reasons.
"No one is forcing anyone to contribute to open source."
While that on the surface is true, the imposition is there. Many jobs require open source contributions to even consider a candidate.
@ashedryden also isn’t it kind of weird to expect people to do work outside of work as a basic requirement?
— Jeffry van der Goot (@jvdgoot) October 30, 2013
Further, deciding that someone is a good programmer based solely on their publicly available code excludes far more than marginalized people. It also excludes anyone who can't release their code publicly because of licensing or security reasons. This also includes a large number of freelancers and contractors who are unable to publicly claim that they worked on a project for legal reasons (NDAs, for instance).
@ashedryden might be worth mentioning workplaces that require invention assignments that legally discourage innovation outside of work.
— David Frey (@davidfrey) November 14, 2013
In an industry where we are struggling to find enough talent, why are we artificially limiting the talent pool?
"OSS is a labor of love" and "OSS is a form of play"
1. Whether free-time activities are called "work" or "play," the existence of free time to do them in is a privilege.
— betsythemuffin (@betsythemuffin) November 12, 2013
2. When a time-consuming activity is used as a job selection criterion, it becomes work.
— betsythemuffin (@betsythemuffin) November 12, 2013
Let me be clear about that last point: "hiring decisions will be based on whether you have done this" creates a large extrinsic motivator.
— betsythemuffin (@betsythemuffin) November 12, 2013
A lot of people contribute to OSS in their free time and do it because they generally enjoy it. I certainly don't want to take that away from them - all of us benefit from these "labors of love". Ask any open source project maintainer, though, and they will tell you about the reality of the amount of work that goes into managing a project. You have clients. You are fixing issues for them. You are creating new features. This becomes a real demand on your time.
Paid or not, play or not, this is labor that is currently not being compensated.
Who benefits from unpaid and underpaid labor?
Take Ruby on Rails. More than 3,000 people have committed man-decades, maybe even man-centuries, of work for free. Buying all that effort at market rates would have been hundreds of millions of dollars. Who would have been able to afford funding that? - David Heinemeier Hansson, The Perils of Mixing Open Source and Money
All of us
I don't know that we can easily measure how much labor actually goes into creating the software that we use every day. Software that we not only benefit from by saving us time, but also makes us quite a lot of money. We work at startups, consultancies, and large enterprises that pay our salaries thanks to the financial benefit of OSS and the mostly unpaid labor of those contributing to it.
Business Owners and Stakeholders
I'd argue that the people who benefit the most from the unpaid labor of OSS as well as the underpaid labor of marginalized people in technology are business owners and stakeholders in these companies. Having to pay additional hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for this labor would mean smaller profit margins. Technology is one of the most profitable industries in the US and certainly could support at least pay equality, especially considering how low our current participation is from marginalized people.
People who are contributing their unpaid and underpaid labor are investing their time into companies that are profiting greatly and giving little back in terms of financial support.
We've somehow been culturally talked into accepting this arrangement, not realizing how businesses are using it to further extract value from us. Businesses are choosing candidates based on their open source contributions, knowing that they are getting more value for less money out of them. These are candidates that will continue to work on things in their free time because it's something they care about and are passionate about. This is akin to not paying someone for overtime.
Open source originally broke us free from the shackles of proprietary software which forced us to "pay to play" and gave us little in the way of choices for customization. Without realizing it, we've ended up in a similar scenario where we are now paying for the development of software that large companies financially benefit from with little cost to them.
We are being judged on how much we contribute to the bottom lines of companies we don't work for and what's worse, we are policing this amongst each other as well.
What can be done about this?
We hired competent programmers before the SourceForge's and GitHub's came about. We have a model for this that works that is less biased and will provide us with a wider variety of applicants to choose from. As business owners, we can only benefit from this.
Ask for code samples
Because not all programmers own the rights to their code or are able to state publicly that they worked on a project, not everyone is able to release the code they worked on through places like GitHub. Ask them to provide a sample of things they've written, ask them why they made certain decisions, how they would refactor things now that they have benefit of some time away from the project.
Pair as an interview
This one is gaining more popularity lately. As part of the interview, have one of your developers who is familiar with the project and is a good teacher pair with the candidate on an actual issue. See how they reason through problems, become familiar with new codebases, and what questions they ask.
Keep in mind that many people have never paired before, so this can be intimidating - especially if the candidate has impostor syndrome.
Hire them as a contractor
This is my favorite way to find out someone's abilities. It puts a potential employee on a more even playing field with an employer.
Remember, though: not everyone can leave a job before they've found a new one, so many people may need to work on projects outside of normal business hours. Ask how much time they could commit a week, as not everyone has the same amount of free time either, and set the deadline for the project from there.
Bonus Points
The labor pool available to us is smaller than we believe it is - we have a 1.7M cloud computing related job deficit as of 2012. This means many businesses are running super lean, forcing people to be overworked and burn out more quickly. The idea of work/life balance inside many of our companies is a dream outside of our grasp because we are lacking so many skilled programmers. Many of our new employees are being pulled from other businesses versus an unemployed workforce, so we're swapping around the same set of people.
The majority of the US workforce is created through an investment of an individual: education and other training being the most common examples. When we have such a huge deficit of labor that's negatively impacting our ability to do business at the level we want, it then behooves us to invest into the labor pool or be hindered further.
Provide apprenticeships and paid internships
Models for apprenticeships are available all over the internet as well as in numerous books, so I won't go deeply into the how.
Apprenticeships allow you to bring in promising individuals to train side-by-side your current staff. This provides a couple benefits:
- Individuals are trained to do things the way your company does them without a large amount of unlearning.
- You're more quickly able to recognize where knowledge gaps are so they can be filled, versus hiring someone with those same gaps and not learning about them until it's too late.
- Apprenticeships are a model of investing time, money, and education into your employees that can grow loyalty as well as create a healthier culture of question asking and knowledge transfer.
If you provide internships, ensure that they are paid. For one, the law in many states requires that businesses that are getting financial benefit from an intern versus just teaching an intern career skills require that they be compensated for their work. Also note that unpaid internships are far more likely to go to women - about 77% of all unpaid internships are held by women4. Women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities all have lower earning potentials than their male, white, straight and cisgender (as well as straight, cisgender passing), able counterparts and are therefore less able to afford unpaid internships5.
Not to mention that businesses highly benefit from internships: 89% of hired interns stay at their company after one year. An investment into an intern is a smart business decision.
Support programs that pay new people to contribute to open source
Gnome Outreach Program for Women
Sponsor OSS projects and contributors
@ashedryden What if companies contracted potential hires to work on open source that the company uses?
— Rein Henrichs (@ReinH) November 13, 2013
Gittip (based in the US) allows you to sponsor a project or individual anonymously on a weekly basis for as little as $.25 to $100USD/week as long as they have a GitHub, Bitbucket, or Twitter account.
Flattr (based in Europe) has you set a budget for a month, then divides that money between the individuals or projects you choose.
Some open source projects provide other donation/support frameworks from the GitHub page. Otherwise, contact them and ask how you can give.
Make OSS part of your culture: contribute
If your business couldn't succeed without OSS and you love the ethos of OSS, consider giving your employees time to contribute during business hours. This could mean encouraging them to submit patches to projects your regularly use, participate in irc, read mailing lists, write documentation - however they feel most comfortable contributing.
Additional Resources
Responses to this post
- James Coglan: Why GitHub is not Your CV
- Bradley Kuhn: The Trade-offs of Unpaid Free Software Labor
- nina de jesus: FOSS and the Sublimation of Commodity Fetishism
- 5by5 In Beta - Open Source and Money: Here Be Dragons
- John Resig: Project-Based Interviews
- MySociety: Checking Our Privilege: Changing our job ads in response to a good challenge
- Wired: Out in the Open: The Crusade to Bring More Women to Open Source
More on Meritocracy
- You Keep Using that Word
- Tara Hunt: Meritocracy is Almost as Real as This Unicorn
- Alice Marwick for Wired: Silicon Valley isn't a meritocracy - and it's dangerous to hero worship entrepreneurs
- Christopher Hayes: Twilight of the Elites
- Glen Gillen: On Meritocracy
- Lauren Bacon: Once and For All: Tech is not a meritocracy
Other Resources
- FLOSS on Geek Feminism Wiki
- Managing Against the Machine
- Surplus Labor
- Gender Bias in Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance of Women vs Men
* I hesitate to break down actual percentages because attempting to discern someone's race or gender identity from their photo and name is dodgy business. [back up]
1 Arno, P. S. (2002, February). The economic value of informal caregiving, U.S., 2000.
2 The Commonwealth Fund. (1999, May). Informal caregiving (Fact Sheet). New York: Author.
3 Veerle, Mirana (2011, September). Cooking, Caring, and Volunteering: Unpaid Work Around the World
4 Gardner, Phil (2009). The Debate Over Unpaid College Internships
5 Greenman and Xie (2006). Double Jeopardy or Compensating Disadvantage? The Interaction Effect of Gender and Race on Earnings in the US
6 Bureau of Labor Statistics, Median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers, by detailed occupation and sex, 2012 annual averages, http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom2012.pdf
7 The Gender Pay Gap by Race and Ethnicity, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/ext/2013/06/07/65727/the-gender-p...