Category Archives: Anti-harassment policy

Rebecca Watson of Skepchick: “Why would you want to hang out with those jerks anyway?”

Rebecca Watson with red hair on a black background

Rebecca Watson of Skepchick

Rebecca Watson is a well-known feminist and skeptic activist, as well as a sought-after public speaker. She leads a team of activists who write for the Skepchick network of blogs, which covers science, skepticism, feminism, atheism, secularism, and pseudoscience. You can watch videos of Watson speaking on YouTube, like this talk about pseudoscience about women, and follow her on Twitter at @rebeccawatson.

We asked Rebecca Watson about how she got started as a public speaker, why she only speaks at events with 35% women speakers and an anti-harassment policy, and what her dream speaking engagement would be.

Q. You are a popular speaker! Tell us a little about how you became a sought-after speaker and what sort of invitations you get.

That one continues to baffle me, actually. It’s not something I pursued – I would just deliver a talk whenever someone was nice enough to ask me, and I guess people liked them and invited me to give more. Having a popular blog and podcast helped, too. I enjoy speaking on a variety of topics, so I get invites from skeptic groups, science advocacy groups, atheist groups, and now feminist groups as well. Pretty much everywhere I go, I meet amazing people and have a blast. I’m a very lucky lady.

Q. Popular speakers usually have a list of requirements for speaking at an event (a.k.a. speaker rider). Yours includes two unusual requirements: an anti-harassment policy, and 35% women speakers. Why did you add these?

Anti-harassment policies just make sense. I’ve heard from many women who have told me they’d feel safer at a conference that has one; the only people I’ve heard who hate them are the people who harass me online, so it seemed like an easy call. I want to support conferences that are inclusive and welcoming to women and minorities, and that’s one very easy way they can do that.

I’ve also seen that the more women who speak on stage, the more women show up in the audience. People feel more at home when they see people like them in prominent positions. Because the conferences I attend are usually heavily male-dominated, having a minimum of 1/3 female speakers is another easy way that conference organizers can show they place a high value on diversity. 35% is actually ridiculously low considering women are 51% of the population, but then, I’ve always been pretty easy-going. Despite the rumors. Next year I may up it to 40% and add a “non-white” percentage for fun.

Q. What usually happens when the event inviting you doesn’t already have an anti-harassment policy or 35% women speakers?

So far, every conference organizer has leapt at the chance to institute these things. Often it’s something they were considering anyway, but maybe they needed a little push and a little help. I offer to help them (or find them someone more qualified to help them) if they need. I have a thick Rolodex (not actually a thing anymore) full of smart, funny, entertaining women who can sell tickets so it hasn’t been an issue.

Q. How has your speaking career changed since you added those riders? Do you think it has hurt or helped you professionally and/or personally?

It doesn’t appear to have changed at all, actually, except for that it’s a bit more satisfying to know for sure that I’m supporting the right organizations. Only one organization has not responded after I sent them my rider, and they ended up canceling their event, anyway. It’s possible I destroyed their event with my mind powers (but not likely).

I knew it was possible people would stop inviting me places because of it, but I figured then I’d have more time for video games.

Q. What is your dream speaking engagement?

I like speaking in pubs, because everyone is relaxed and there’s beer. So I suppose my dream speaking engagement would be on a panel with Hillary Clinton, Lucy Lawless, and Amy Poehler, in a pub full of sloths, and also we’re on a spaceship.

Q. What advice would you give to other pro-women folks who speak at events regularly?

If you’re speaking at the right events, then the organizers care about diversity and reaching out to new audiences. Don’t be shy about asking them to find a good representation of women and minorities, and offer to help if you can. If you’re a man, you could refuse to speak on a panel that doesn’t have a woman on it. The worst that can happen is that you get disinvited, at which point just imagine what your mom would say: “Why would you want to hang out with those jerks anyway?”

Like this interview? Read more of Rebecca Watson’s writing at the Skepchick blog.

Clarification on the Ada Initiative’s role in the cancellation of Violet Blue’s BSides SF talk

TRIGGER WARNING: Rape

We are writing this blog post to clear up some misunderstandings about the Ada Initiative’s role in the cancellation of Violet Blue’s BSides SF talk, “sex +/- drugs: known vulns and exploits.” We understand that people of good will may still disagree with our actions and opinions. We want to be sure that people agree or disagree with the actions we actually took and the opinions we actually have.

Background

A computer security conference, BSides SF, featured a talk with the title “sex +/- drugs: known vulns and exploits.” Translated from security jargon, this title can be interpreted as suggesting that the talk will cover having sex while on drugs, including sex without consent (i.e., rape). “Exploits” in security jargon is used almost exclusively in the sense of “to take advantage of (a person, situation, etc.), esp[ecially] unethically or unjustly for one’s own ends.” For a conference-goer unaware of Violet Blue’s work, it would be understandable to wonder if the talk would handle consent issues well. In addition, no advance notice had been given that would allow people to make an informed decision about attending the conference, the conference had no anti-harassment policy, and it occurred in a community in which a non-trivial minority publicly advocates for permitting harassment of women.

At the request of a BSides SF conference organizer, the Ada Initiative gave them information on the potential negative effect of this talk on some women attendees. After this, the BSides SF organizer spoke to Violet Blue about the subject of the talk and decided to cancel the talk. Afterward, several people criticized the Ada Initiative for advising that the talk be cancelled. You can read the detailed version of the event at our first blog post on the topic.

The BSides SF organizer, Ian Fung, posted an explanation of his decision here. Violet Blue, the speaker whose talk was cancelled, wrote a blog post about her conversation with Ian Fung in which she recounts what Ian told her that the Ada Initiative Executive Director, Valerie Aurora, said to him. You can read Violet Blue’s recollection of the conversation here. As a result, some people are criticizing the Ada Initiative for things we did not do and opinions we don’t advocate. We are posting this to clear up those misunderstandings so that people can agree or disagree with what we actually did and believe.

The short version is:

The BSides SF organizer requested the Ada Initiative’s advice on the talk.

The Ada Initiative did not threaten the conference with retribution.

The BSides SF organizer made the decision about the talk.

The Ada Initiative does support talks about sex, rape, drugs, pornography, and similar topics when they are relevant and organized in a way that is considerate of conference attendees’ differing levels of comfort with the topic. (See our guide on how to discuss porn and sex at conferences.)

What Valerie recalls

Valerie’s memory of her conversation with Ian Fung is as follows. We aren’t using double quotes because no one recorded the conversation and we can’t report the exact wording.

Valerie started out with an explanation to Ian of what role the Ada Initiative had taken in previous conference incidents, and reiterated what she said over email: that she was only giving this advice because Ian had requested the advice of the Ada Initiative. She explained that the Ada Initiative was not threatening the conference, but giving advice in response to their request.

Valerie explained to Ian why talks about sex are more likely to have a negative effect on women attendees, on average (details in our previous blog post here). Ian said that he considered sex to be an appropriate topic for the conference.

Valerie then explained that the title of the talk could be interpreted as a reference to rape. She did this by asking Ian what he called using drugs to exploit someone into having sex. He appeared to understand immediately that this is called rape and explained that he hadn’t realize the title of the talk could be interpreted as a reference to rape.

Valerie then explained that rape survivors can be triggered by public discussion of rape or sex. Because people often think of rape as something theoretical that happens to other people, not people you know, Valerie disclosed her status as a rape survivor to Ian, and told him she knew several other rape survivors who had been raped at technical conferences similar to BSides.

At this point, Ian told Valerie that he would cancel the talk if it included discussion of rape, but not otherwise. Valerie told him that her experience was that a talk on sex but not rape would still have a negative effect on many women. Valerie reiterated that the Ada Initiative was not making threats, that this was just sharing their knowledge and experience. Ian repeated his decision to cancel the talk if it included discussion of rape but not otherwise, and left to speak to the speaker, Violet Blue.

Ian returned a few minutes later and told Valerie that the talk did include discussion of rape, and that Violet Blue had agreed to cancel it.

Valerie was not consulted at any point about potential changes to the talk such as change of room, change of topic, etc. Her conversation with Ian was restricted to educating him about how the talk was likely to negatively affect some women. Ian takes full responsibility for making the decision to cancel the talk.

The big picture

The Ada Initiative does not oppose harm-reduction, sex education, talking about rape, or other vital parts of promoting women’s health, safety, and rights. To the contrary, we published a detailed guide on how to talk about sex, pornography, and similar topics at conferences about 5 months ago. Our own AdaCamp conferences specifically permit discussion of topics like harm-reduction and rape. This is because they are on-topic for AdaCamp, we make specific efforts to make AdaCamp a safer space to do so, and we take every precaution to make sure people are comfortable not participating in those discussions. As an example of an on-topic talk about sex at a technical conference that was quite well-handled, see Cindy Gallop’s talk on the Make Love Not Porn project for the Open Video Conference (tagline: “Pro-porn, pro-sex, and pro knowing the difference”).

We believe that both Ian Fung and Violet Blue acted in good faith, but that through a combination of stress, time pressure, misunderstanding, and imperfect memory, Violet Blue’s report of Ian Fung’s report of what Valerie said differs from Valerie’s recollection (think: the Telephone game). We’re glad to have an opportunity to share our recommendations on how sex-related topics can be discussed in open tech/culture in ways that are women-friendly.

We aren’t sure what we should have done differently to have a better outcome. Many people have expressed the opinion that we should not have given the BSides SF organizer our advice. However, it seems like giving advice when requested by people who want more women in open technology and culture is a core part of our mission. We are open to suggestions for what we could have done differently in order to better accomplish our core mission of increasing the participation and status of women in open technology and culture.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone working to make the world a better place for women, and open technology and culture in particular. We support different ways of achieving that goal and understand that feminism, feminists, and feminist activism varies widely. Our way isn’t the only way, it’s just the best way we know how to accomplish our mission. We are always looking for ways we can improve. You can help by speaking up about your opinions and being part of the discussion about the future of open technology and culture.

We apologize for not enabling comments on this post. We have received enough rape and death threats over the past few days that we don’t have the energy to moderate any more of them in comments. However, you can share your feedback with us in a blog post, a G+ post, or an email to feedback@adainitiative.org. (Update: if this email address bounced, please try again – we’re sorry for the inconvenience.) We can’t guarantee we will be able to read or respond to every piece of feedback if we continue to receive threats via these channels, but we will do our best.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

Keeping it on-topic: the problem with discussing sex at technical conferences

TRIGGER WARNING: Brief mentions of rape, discussion of PTSD induced by sexual assault

TL;DR

A computer security conference, BSides SF, featured a talk on a sexual topic. At the request of a BSides SF conference organizer, the Ada Initiative gave them information on the potential negative effect of this talk on women attendees. The BSides SF organizers wanted to encourage women to attend, and decided to cancel the talk in service of that goal. Afterward, several people criticized the Ada Initiative for being sexist and suppressing women’s speech by advising against the talk. They argued that because it was given by a woman, and described as sex education, sex-positive, and pro-women that advocating for its cancellation is sexist and silencing of women.

The Ada Initiative continues to advocate against all off-topic sexual material at technical conferences because of its tendency to disproportionately harm women attendees, regardless of how or by whom it is presented. Certain sexual topics can trigger PTSD in people who have been sexually assaulted, and can be perceived as encouragement to humiliate, objectify, and assault women, regardless of the intent of the speaker. The Ada Initiative explicitly supports discussion of sex when it is on-topic for the conference and done in a woman-positive way, and has published specific guidelines on how to achieve this.

Background

The computer security conference BSides SF (held in San Francisco on 24–25 February 2013) invited Violet Blue [note: sexual imagery at link] to give a talk, subject to be determined. The title of the talk was listed on the conference’s online schedule as “TBD” until a small number of hours before the talk, when it was updated to “sex +/- drugs: known vulns and exploits”

In computer security jargon “vuln[erabilitie]s and exploits” are respectively weaknesses in computing and related systems, and ways to take advantage of them in order to break into or “penetrate” the system. The precise meaning of the title is ambiguous, but to people familiar with the jargon, a reasonable interpretation of the title might include using drugs to exploit someone into having sex without consent (i.e., rape).

The abstract of the talk was not available until after the decision to cancel the talk, and does not reflect the same topic as the title of the talk suggests. The abstract of the talk is:

What drugs do to sexual performance, physiological reaction and pleasure is rarely discussed in – or out of – clinical or academic settings. Yet most people have sex under the influence of something (or many somethings) at some point in their lives.

In this underground talk, Violet Blue shares what sex-positive doctors, nurses, MFT’s, clinic workers and crisis counselors have learned and compiled about the interactions of drugs and sex from over three decades of unofficial curriculum for use in peer-to-peer (and emergency) counseling. Whether you’re curious about the effects of caffeine or street drugs on sex, or are the kind of person that keeps your fuzzy handcuffs next to a copy of The Pocket Pharmacopeia, this overview will help you engineer your sex life in our chemical soaked world. Or, it’ll at least give you great party conversation fodder.

Why off-topic sexual talks can harm women at technical conferences

The Ada Initiative has, since its founding, recommended strongly against including off-topic sexual content at technical conferences. This is because sexual content is likely to make the event off-putting, unwelcoming, and even unsafe for women attendees. Sexual content affects women disproportionately for several reasons. Here are a few:

Women are far more likely to be raped, sexually assaulted, pressured for sex, or otherwise have bad sexual experiences. Sexual content, particularly in unexpected situations like a technical conference, can bring up memories and associations of prior bad sexual experiences in ways that are frightening or sometimes disabling. Many women have PTSD triggered by certain sexual topics (this is why the concept of a “trigger warning” was created).

Discussing sex creates a “sexualized environment” which many people take as a signal to treat women as sexual objects rather than as fellow conference attendees, resulting in a higher incidence of harassment and assault of women. Too many women have been raped at technical conferences; we should do everything we can to prevent future rapes.

Sex in many societies is strongly tied to the objectification and humiliation of women. Many people are unable to separate “talking about sex” and “saying derogatory things about women,” and take the introduction of one for permission to do the other. While many pro-woman, sex-positive people and communities exist, most technical conferences are not safe spaces for discussion of sex.

Simply put, even the world’s most pro-woman, sex-positive, pro-consent talk about sex is likely to have negative effects on women at a technical conference.

At the same time, discussion of sexual topics is vitally important to women’s rights and well-being. We strongly support discussion of sex and related topics when it is on-topic and done in a woman-positive way.

What the Ada Initiative did

Ada Initiative Executive Director Valerie Aurora was attending the BSides SF conference, and saw this update to the title of the talk. By coincidence, the Ada Initiative happened to have been put in contact with a co-founder of the BSides conferences (not BSides SF) a few weeks previously, to discuss a potential anti-harassment policy that individual BSides conferences could choose to adopt. When the title of the talk was updated, Valerie emailed the BSides co-founder with the title of the talk and an explanation of why it would be unwelcoming to women, with the intention of giving an example of situations which having a policy in place would help. The co-founder replied to the email and cc’d a BSides SF organizer, Ian Fung, which resulted in Ian asking Valerie for more information.

Valerie complied with Ian’s request, and explained the potential effects of a talk about sex, drugs, and exploits in a community known for sexual harassment and assault of women. Ian made a decision on what path to take, executed that decision, and informed Valerie of the results afterwards. As announced by the organizers, Ian cancelled the talk after discussing it with the speaker.

Several people have suggested that the Ada Initiative threatened or coerced the BSides SF organizers into cancelling this talk. To the contrary, in their discussions Valerie emphasized repeatedly that the Ada Initiative would not retaliate against and was not threatening BSides SF. It is true that warning people of a potential bad effect of their actions is a common method of threatening people; that’s one reason why we wait for conference organizers to contact us first. If someone requests our opinion, as BSides SF did in this case, then it is more difficult to mistake sharing our expertise as threats.

Thank you to the BSides SF organizers

We thank the BSides SF organizers for having a strong desire to be welcoming to women. During the conference, women were visible contributors in many ways: giving talks, competing in contests, and serving as volunteers. We need more women in computer security, not fewer. The decisions the BSides SF organizers made were in the service of this goal.

Our recommendations to similar technical conferences

We recommend that technical conferences adopt a strong anti-harassment policy and avoid sexual content in their program. It causes strong, upsetting emotions to many attendees — disproportionately women — that probably aren’t relevant to the core activities of your technical conference. Moreover, unlike some highly charged other topics in the technical world, it is very unlikely that your audience has a uniformly, or even widely-held, negative opinion of harassment and assault. Therefore even if the content is pro-consent and constructive it may spark conversations (jokes, memes, etc.) among attendees that make people who are concerned about rape feel highly unsafe (and possibly even leave the conference).

However, obviously not all conferences are technical and at some events discussion of sexual culture and activities are on-topic or key to the event. In 2012, the Ada Initiative released an update to the example anti-harassment policy, addressing how a policy could work when sex and porn are on-topic at conferences, as they might be at our very own AdaCamps. Our own conferences have this wording in their policy:

Exception: Discussion or images related to sex, pornography, discriminatory language, or similar is welcome if it meets all of the following criteria: (a) the organizers have specifically granted permission in writing, (b) it is necessary to the topic of discussion and no alternative exists, (c) it is presented in a respectful manner, especially towards women and LGBTQ people, (d) attendees are warned in advance in the program and respectfully given ample warning and opportunity to leave beforehand. This exception specifically does not allow use of gratuitous sexual images as attention-getting devices or unnecessary examples.

We recommend that conferences that judge that they are open to including sexual content adopt similar clauses. This serves several purposes:

  • it gives people who do not want to attend a sexual talk sufficient warning to avoid that room, or even the event
  • it gives people who want to attend a sexual talk, but only on certain topics or from certain perspectives (eg, who wish to attend a talk only from a feminist perspective) time to review the talk and decide if it meets their needs
  • it gives the conference organizers ample time to consider issues like choice of room, and scheduling alternatives for people who don’t want to attend

What we recommend to speakers

If you are speaking at a conference without a clear policy about sexual content, we suggest that you review any sexual content in your talk in light of the above: is it necessary? Or are you using its shock value or people’s (perhaps very hurtful, personal and deeply felt) reactions to sexual content to make an unrelated point?

If you are giving a talk about sex or sexual culture, we recommend that you:

  • ask conference organisers if they wish to discuss the topic of your talk with you beforehand
  • flag sexual content in your abstract
  • open your talk with an additional brief verbal warning
  • following the warning, add a sincere statement that people may leave your presentation at any time for any reason, and a strong reminder to the rest of the audience that they should not obstruct anyone from leaving, criticize them for leaving, or even inquire afterwards why they left
  • unless absolutely necessary and again clearly warned for, keep depictions (either visual, verbal or written) of non-consensual activities in particular general and brief

If you are going to discuss rape, assault, harassment and similar, we recommend that your abstract is clear about the perspective you will be taking so that people can be reassured that your content is pro-consent. (It may seem obvious, but so much sexual content isn’t pro-consent!) And remember, no matter how pro-consent or woman-positive your material is, it can still trigger major distress in your audience. Be considerate and thoughtful.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

How you can help #banboothbabes at CES

This week saw the birth of the “#banboothbabes” campaign, kicked off by a news story calling for action on booth babes at CES, a large consumer electronics show (sign the petition here). The company behind CES, the Consumer Electronics Association, said they hadn’t received “a single formal complaint” about booth babes, apparently discounting the blizzard of press coverage on the subject every year.

Alicia Gibb, founder of the Open Source Hardware Association, decided to call CEA and register a formal complaint. She summarizes the results this way: “They don’t have a process to register formal complaints and don’t know who you should talk to.” (The company later set up an email address to collect complaints.)

What are booth babes and why ban them?

Ban booth babes
What exactly are “booth babes” and why would we want to ban them? In the words of the Geek Feminism wiki page on the subject, booth babes are “People, usually women, employed to staff booths at trade shows and use their sexual attractiveness to entice people to buy the products being advertised. Frequently they are dressed in demeaning outfits and pose for pictures with attendees.” A more accurate phrase might be “sexualized booth staff.” Booth babes are occasionally not women, but seldom in communities that already have a problem with sexism towards women.

What’s wrong with this picture? When companies employ booth babes, they are usually sending several messages:

  • Women aren’t customers, they are objects we use to sell to our customers
  • The only customer we care about is not only male, but also straight, sexually unfulfilled, and not very bright
  • Our customers make buying decisions based on feelings of lust, not features or price
  • Demeaning our women employees is part of doing business
  • Our marketing department and our management views our customers with contempt

Or, in a sentence: “Women are not people and men are fools.” (And if you’re neither male nor female, they really don’t care.)

Let’s be clear: the problem is not “women who are too sexy” – by which people usually mean women who look or act in a way that many straight men find strongly attractive. Some people argue that banning booth babes would require instituting a dress code for all female attendees because to them, attractive women and booth babes are impossible to distinguish.

There’s nothing wrong with being a good-looking, attractively dressed, well-groomed woman at a conference. The problem starts when women are turned into sexual objects, dehumanized, and used to sell products to or attract attention from men (or rather, a certain subset of men).

The Ada Initiative’s approach to ending booth babes

The Ada Initiative has opposed “booth babes” since our founding because they send a clear, obvious message that women are not welcome or valued. One of the first updates to the example conference anti-harassment policy added a clause covering sexualized booth staff:

Exhibitors in the expo hall, sponsor or vendor booths, or similar activities are also subject to the anti-harassment policy. In particular, exhibitors should not use sexualized images, activities, or other material. Booth staff (including volunteers) should not use sexualized clothing/uniforms/costumes, or otherwise create a sexualized environment.

We prefer this wording because it focuses on the real problem: turning women into objects to sell to straight men who make poor buying decisions. It’s little known reality that in some open tech/culture communities, sexualized booth babes are volunteers, so it’s important to include unpaid staff as well.

How you can help

For CES, you can make a difference right away:

For any event or conference, you can take any of the actions that help get an anti-harassment policy adopted (just be sure to include the booth babe clause): emailing the organizers, starting a petition, refusing to speak at conferences that allow booth babes, etc.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

In Arbeit: Das Ende von Sexismus in der Hackerkultur

This is a German translation of our recent blog post on sexism in hacker culture (click here for the English original). Translation courtesy of @fin, @bekassine und @michaelem.

[Übersetzung ins Deutsche von @fin, @bekassine und @michaelem]

Letzte Woche wurde wieder global über Sexismus in der Hackerkultur diskutiert. Auslöser dafür waren eine Reihe von sexistischen Vorfällen am 29ten Chaos Communication Congress, einer Veranstaltung die jährlich in der letzten Woche des Jahres in Deutschland abgehalten wird.

Die Vorfälle begannen damit, dass jemand aus den sogenannten “Creeper Move Cards” ein Bild eines nackten Frauenkörpers (Link führt nicht direkt zum Bild) an eine Wand klebte. Diese “Creeper Move Cards” waren gedruckt worden um auf das Thema Sexismus aufmerksam zu machen, was in diesem Fall auch gelungen war. Weiters wurde im Wiki der Konferenz eine Seite erstellt, die die TeilnehmerInnen im Rahmen eines Spiels dafür belohnte, anderen gegenüber sexistische Kommentare abzulassen oder unerwünschte sexuelle Annäherungsversuche zu unternehmen. Außerdem machte ein Moderator des beliebten Spiels “Hacker Jeopardy” im Rahmen der Show wiederholt sexistische Kommetare wie zB. “Jetzt müssen wir leider aus Gleichstellungsgründen eine Frau nehmen”, ohne dass die Organisatoren der Konferenz eingegriffen hätten.

Schnell reagierten sowohl KonferenzteilnehmerInnen, als auch die weltweite Community. TeilnehmerInnen erstellten eine Webseite, auf der sexistische Vorfälle am Congress dokumentiert wurden. Die Kritik verbreitete sich explosionsartig durch die sozialen Medien – “Ich behaupte, die Konferenz-Orga hat versagt und euer Team ist eine symbolische und sinnlose Geste” [übersetzt] – wiederum nicht nur auf der Konferenz, sondern auch in der weiteren Community.

Diese Vorfälle brachten für die bekannte Online-Aktivistin und Cryptoparty-Gründerin Asher Wolf das Fass zum Überlaufen und sie bloggte über die sexistische Diskriminierung und Belästigung, die sie in der Hacker-Community erfahren hatte. Wie zum Beweis ihrer Aussagen wurde kurz darauf ihre Website gehackt und persönliche Daten online gepostet.

Diese Vorfälle waren umso schlimmer, weil nur ein paar Tage zuvor eine offizielle Anti-Harassment-Policy (Anti-Belästigungs-Richtlinie) veröffentlicht wurde. Im Zuge dessen wurde auch eine Telefonnummer eingerichtet, an die diskriminierende Vorfälle gemeldet werden konnten und es stand ein Team zur Verfügung, das auf Meldungen reagieren sollte. Die Ada Initiative sah dies als ein Zeichen des Fortschritts, auch weil der 29c3 damit bereits als dritte Hackerkonferenz eine spezifische, durchsetzbare Policy hatte.

Kritik an der Reaktion der Organisatoren war unter KonferenzteilnehmerInnen weit verbreitet und dauert bis heute an. Wir sind selbst traurig und bestürzt, dass viele TeilnehmerInnen aller Geschlechter Belästigung erfahren hatten und von den Organisatoren im Stich gelassen wurden. Wundert es also, dass Viele öffentlich verzweifelten und fragten, ob Frauen jemals eine Hackerkonferenz besuchen könnten, ohne als Stück Fleisch gesehen zu werden?

So sieht Fortschritt aus

Unsere hoffnungsvolle Ansage: Genau so sieht Fortschritt aus. So schmerzhaft diese letzte Woche auch war, so sehr zeigen diese Ereignisse auch, dass sich die Hackerkultur in eine Zukunft bewegt, in der Frauen nicht aktiv entmutigt werden, Teil der Hackercommunity zu sein.

Als letzten August Sexismus bei der Hacker-Konferenz DEFCON Schlagzeilen machte, drehte sich die Diskussion innerhalb der Community darum, ob Sexismus überhaupt existierte, ob Grenzübertretungen und Beschimpfungen als Sexismus zählen, ob Frauen ein wertvoller Bestandteil der Hackerkultur sein können und ob sexuelle Übergriffe zentraler Bestandteil der Hackerkultur sind. Im August 2012 hatte keine Hacker-Konferenz eine öffentliche, konkret durchsetzbare Anti-Harassment Policy.

Letzte Woche hingegen drehte sich die Diskussion darum, wie die Hackercommunity auf Sexismus reagieren sollte, nicht ob er existiert oder ob Frauen einfach mit Übergriffen rechnen müssen. Nun haben drei Hackerkonferenzen öffentliche, spezifische und durchsetzbare (wenn auch vielleicht schlecht durchgesetzte) Anti-Harassment Policies. Als diese Policy am Congress schlecht durchgesetzt wurde, organisierten sich Anwesende spontan, diskutierten Verbesserungen für die nächste Konferenz und stellten eine Liste mit praktischen, sinnvollen Verbesserungsvorschlägen zusammen. Sexismus in der Hackercomunity hat schon immer existiert, allerdings sind sich jetzt mehr Leute denn je dessen bewusst und ergreifen Maßnahmen um diesen zu bekämpfen.

Der Kampf gegen Sexismus: ein laufender Prozess

Von hier an ist bestimmt nicht alles ein Zuckerschlecken: Um im Kampf gegen Sexismus erfolgreich zu sein, müssen wir weiter auf die Verantwortlichkeit mächtiger Menschen pochen, unabhängig davon ob das für sie unangenehm oder peinlich ist. Wir sind hier um zu diskutieren, wie dieser Prozess funktioniert.

Zuerst wollen wir ein Beispiel geben, wie dieser Prozess in ähnlichen internationalen, kreativen, peer-to-peer-organisierten Communities funktioniert. In den letzten zwei Jahren gab es messbaren Fortschritt für Frauen in Open Source Software, Wikipedia, und ähnlichen Communities. Die Ada Initiative sieht sich in einer Führungsrolle für diese Bewegung: Wir arbeiten direkt mit Konferenzen und Firmen zusammen, vernetzen Frauen in dem Bereich durch die AdaCamp Konferenzen und arbeiten an einer freien (CC-BY-SA lizenzierten) Wissensdatenbank über Feminismus im Geek-Kontext mit, damit nicht jede Community und jede Konferenz ganz von vorne anfangen muss.

Wir haben gelernt, dass gesellschaftlicher Wandel ein Prozess ist. Wir sehen diesen folgendermaßen:

  1. Sensibilisierung: Leuten beizubringen, dass das Problem existiert
  2. Lösungsfindung: Praktische Methoden zu finden, die Community zu ändern
  3. Maßnahmen ergreifen: Diese Methoden implementieren

Das Erstellen und Austeilen der “Creeper Move Cards” hat unübersehbar ein Bewusstsein dafür geschaffen, dass Sexismus auf Konferenzen existiert. Das Erstellen und Verbreiten von Anti-Harassment-Policies für Konferenzen hat einen Lösungsweg aufgezeigt. Dass Konferenzorganisatoren jetzt diese Policies durchsetzen ist eine Implementierung dieses Lösungswegs.

Damit dies funktioniert müssen wir diese Schritte immer und immer wieder gehen, wir müssen riskieren, Fehler zu machen und wir müssen lernen, es nächstes Mal besser zu machen. Ein Beispiel für eine erfolgreiche Umsetzung dieses Prozesses ist die Australische/Neuseeländische Opensource Konferenz linux.conf.au.

Beispielfall: eine Konferenz über Opensource Software

Linux.conf.au ist die bekannteste Opensource Konferenz in dieser Region und zieht hunderte von ReferentInnen und TeilnehmerInnen aus allen Teilen der Welt an. Heutzutage hat sie eine starke, gut durchgesetzte Anti-Harassment Policy, einen hohen Anteil von Frauen als Referentinnen und Teilnehmerinnen und einen Ruf als freundliche und einladende Konferenz für alle. Aber es war nicht immer so.

Vor einigen Jahren hatte die linux.conf.au Vorfälle, in denen Frauen ohne deren Zustimmung fotografiert, Teilnehmerinnen körperlich bedroht und Witze darüber gemacht wurden, dass Hans Reiser Teilnehmerinnen töten würde. Im Jahr 2010 hatte die Konferenz zum ersten Mal eine “Diskriminierungspolicy”, die belästigendes und diskriminierendes Verhalten verbot. Diese Policy war jedoch so vage formuliert, dass es Diskussionen darüber gab, ob beispielsweise sexistische Witze diskriminierend seien.

Als Ende 2010 eine in der Open Source Community bekannte Frau den Namen des Mannes nannte, der sie auf der ApacheCon begrapscht hatte, löste das eine weltweite Diskussion über sexuelle Belästigung und sexuelle Übergriffe in der Open Source Community aus. Dieser Diskurs führte schließlich (neben der Gründung der Ada Initiative) dazu, dass eine Vorlage für eine konkrete und vollziehbare Anti-Harassment Policy ausgearbeitet wurde, welche die linux.conf.au im Jahr 2011 übernahm.

Als ein Keynote-Sprecher 2011 diese Policy mehrfach verletzte (und zum Beispiel pornografische Bilder in seiner Präsentation verwendete), folgte eine Diskussion, die die Community mehrere Monate beschäftigte und zu weiteren sexistischen Vorfällen auf der Mailingliste der Konferenz führte. Schlussendlich entschuldigte sich der Referent und die Videoaufnahme des Vortrages wurde editiert um zu reflektieren, dass der Vortrag die Konferenzregeln und die Prinzipien der Organisatoren verletzte. Linux Australia, die Organisation, die hinter der Konferenz steht, bestätigte die Unterstützung ihrer Anti-Harassment-Policy und die Konferenz hatte 2012 keine signifikanten Vorfälle.

Einzelne Mitglieder der Community unterstützen weiterhin Sexismus und handeln weiterhin sexistisch, nur wissen sie jetzt, dass sie mit Sanktionen, Strafen und Abscheu von Seiten der Community rechnen müssen. Die Kulturnormen dieses Teils der Opensource Community haben sich sichtlich verändert.

Im Großen und Ganzen ist es mittlerweile in der Open Source Community die Norm, dass gegen Belästigung auf Konferenzen gekämpft wird.
Die meisten großen und auch kleinen Konferenzen haben Anti-Harassment-Policies und setzen sie auch durch. Die Python Software Foundation geht sogar weiter und verkündete vor Kurzem, dass sie keine Events ohne solchen Policies finanziell unterstützen würden, und uns wurde gesagt, dass viele Sponsoren der gleichen Meinung sind, dies aber nicht nach außen kommunizieren. Ermutigend ist besonders, dass Open Source Konferenzen nun ihre Aufmerksamkeit auf die Auswahl von ReferentInnen legen und sowohl auf Diversität bei der Auswahl der ReferentInnen achten, als auch Konferenzen darauf aufmerksam machen, wenn sie nur männliche und nur weiße ReferentInnen haben.

Hört auf, meine Konferenz zu ruinieren!

Wir werden immer wieder gefragt: Können wir all diese Unannehmlichkeiten nicht einfach überspringen und stattdessen nach dem Grundsatz “be excellent to each other” leben? Wir sind schließlich erwachsene Menschen, nicht wahr?

Gesellschaftliche Veränderung findet nicht statt, weil wir einfach darum bitten.

Veränderungen passieren durch Proteste, Hungerstreiks und öffentliche Aktionen. Veränderungen blockieren den Verkehr auf den Straßen großer Städte. Veränderungen passieren, wenn geheime Regierungsdokumente geleakt werden. Sie geschehen als Resultat von Unruhen, ausgebrannten Häusern und Tränengaskanistern auf die Nasen von Demonstranten. Wir können uns glücklich schätzen, dass Protest gegen Sexismus in der Hackerkultur hauptsächlich mit bösen Worten gekontert wird – besonders wenn wir gegen etwas Protestieren, das oft genug körperliche sexuelle Übergriffe auf Frauen beinhaltet. Wenn du noch keine Übergriffe oder Belästigung erlebt hast, mag diese unangenehme Diskussion wie ein Schritt zurück aussehen, aber für jene, die so etwas schon erlebt haben, ist die Diskussion eine klare Verbesserung!

Die Folgen dieser Art von Protesten sind unbequem und manchmal gefährlich für Leute die ihren Alltag leben. Jedoch sind diese Unannehmlichkeiten oft schon zuvor im Leben von Unterdrückten zu finden. Viele Frauen können schon nicht zu Hackerkonferenzen gehen, ohne mit Sexismus rechnen zu müssen. Wenn du diese Woche zum ersten Mal mit Sexismus konfrontiert wurdest, stell dir vor wie es ist, jedes Mal mit Sexismus konfrontiert zu werden, wenn du einen IRC-Channel betrittst, öffentlich bloggst oder zu einer Konferenz gehst. Das wäre ziemlich schrecklich, oder? Es könnte sogar dazu führen, dass du die Hackercommunity verlässt.

Die Antwort auf “hört auf meine Konferenz zu ruinieren” darf nicht “hört auf Sexismus aufzuzeigen” sein, sondern muss “hört auf sexistisch zu handeln” lauten. Beschuldige nicht die Opfer dafür, dass sie Sexismus aufzeigen, oder dass sie es auf eine für dich unangenehme Weise machen. Schlussendlich macht Sexismus sowohl Männer als auch Frauen mehr als leicht betroffen; Sexismus verletzt sie und vertreibt sie aus der Community. Wir forden den Chaos Communication Congress auf, hinter seiner Policy zu stehen, umfassende und funktionierende Prozeduren zu entwickeln und sich in Zukunft zu ihrer Durchsetzung zu bekennen

Wenn wir alle weiter zusammen arbeiten, laut bleiben und Maßnahmen gegen Diskriminierung ergreifen, wird sich Sexismus aus der Hackercommunity zurückziehen, wie es schon in anderen Communities passiert ist. Und das kannst du selbst tun:

Danke an alle, die letzte Woche über Sexismus und Belästigung diskutiert haben. Ihr macht gesellschaftliche Veränderung möglich. Kontaktiert uns gerne, wenn ihr Unterstützung braucht.

[Kommentare sind nur unter der englischen Version dieses Posts aktiv.]

Die Ada-Initiative ist eine gemeinnützige Organisation, die sich für die Steigerung der Partizipation und des Status von Frauen im Feld “Open Technology and Culture” einsetzt. Unsere Arbeit, welche diesen Blogpost, die Vorlage für eine Anti-Harassment Policy und viel der dazugehörigen Dokumentation beinhaltet, wird durch Spenden von Community Mitgliedern wie dir finanziert.

Donate now

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Ending sexism in hacker culture: A work in progress

CCC building at night by dschanoeh, on Flickr

CCC building at night by dschanoeh, on Flickr

Updated to add 2 January 2013: German translation available here courtesy @fin, @bekassine and @michaelem.]

Last week, sexism in hacker culture became a topic of worldwide dialogue again. The trigger was a series of sexist incidents at the 29th Chaos Communications Congress, held every year in Germany during the last week of the year.

The incidents started with a wall in the conference center, where a picture of a woman’s nude body (link does not show image directly) was created using “Creeper Move cards,” printed paper cards used to raise awareness of sexism. (They definitely raised awareness in this case.) The conference wiki was edited to create a game in which participants were rewarded for offending people by making sexist comments or unwanted sexual propositions. During the popular conference event “Hacker Jeopardy,” a moderator repeatedly made sexist comments like “For reasons of gender-equality, we’ll sadly have to pick a woman now,” unhindered by the conference organizers present.

The reaction was swift, both at the conference and around the world. Many of the incidents were chronicled on a web site set up to document sexist incidents at CCC (in German, English here). Social media exploded with criticism of the events – e.g., “I think the conference leadership (the ccc) has failed horribly and that your team is a token and meaningless gesture.” – which quickly spread to include not just people at the conference but also people around the world.

These incidents were the last straw for prominent online activist and Cryptoparty co-founder Asher Wolf, who blogged about the sexist discrimination and harassment she experiences from the hacker community. As if to prove her point, her web site was hacked and her personal details posted online shortly thereafter.

These incidents stung more than usual in part because just a few days earlier the CCC 29 publicized their official anti-harassment policy, including a special phone number and dedicated team for responding to reports. The Ada Initiative saw this as a hopeful sign for progress, since it was the third hacker conference to publicly adopt a specific, enforceable policy.

Yet criticism of the conference organizers’ actual response to harassment was widespread (EN) (DE) and continues through the time of this posting. We are personally sorry and upset that so many people, of all genders, suffered harassment and then were let down by the response from the conference. Is it any wonder many people publicly despaired over whether women can ever expect to go to a hacker conference and not be treated like a piece of meat?

This is what progress looks like

We have a message of hope: This is what progress looks like. As painful as the last week has been, it is a sign that hacker culture as a whole is slowly working its way towards a future in which women are not actively discouraged from being part of the hacker community in ways men are not.

When sexism at the DEFCON hacker conference became national news last August, the community discussion centered around whether sexism existed at all, if assault and insults counted as sexism, whether women were valuable to hacker culture, and whether assault and harassment of women was an integral, essential element of hacker culture. In August 2012, zero hacker conferences had a public, specific, enforceable anti-harassment policy.

Contrast this with last week, when the discussion centered around the right way for the hacker community should respond to sexism, not whether it exists or women deserved the basic right of not being assaulted in the hacker community. Now, three hacker conferences have public, specific, enforceable (if in some cases badly enforced) anti-harassment policies. When the anti-harassment policy was poorly enforced at CCC, attendees spontaneously organized to discuss how to improve the enforcement at the next conference and assembled a list of practical, sensible improvements (EN) (DE). Sexism in hacker culture has always existed, but now more people than ever before are aware of it, are agreeing that it’s wrong, and are taking steps to end it.

Fighting sexism: an on-going process

It’s not all roses from here on out: Success depends on continuing to push for accountability from powerful people, whether or not is uncomfortable or unpleasant for them to address. We’re here to talk about how that process works.

First, we want to share an example of how this process is moving forward in similar peer-to-peer, international, creative communities. The last two years have seen measurable progress for women in open source software, Wikipedia, and similar communities – what we call “open technology and culture” and which includes hacker and maker culture. The Ada Initiative is an active leader in this movement: working directly with conferences and corporations, bringing together women in open tech/culture at the AdaCamp conferences, and contributing to the Geek Feminism wiki, a freely available CC-BY-SA licensed knowledge base so every community and conference does not have to learn from scratch.

What we’ve learned is that social change is a process. One way to look at the process is as this series of steps:

  1. Raising awareness: Teaching people that the problem exists
  2. Creating solutions: Inventing practical ways to change the community
  3. Taking action: Implementing the solutions

For example, creating and handing out the “Creeper Move cards” (EN) (DE) raised awareness of the problem of sexism at conferences in a way that made it impossible to ignore. Writing and promoting conference anti-harassment policies created a solution. Conference organizers enforcing an anti-harassment policy is implementing that solution.

To make this work, we have to take these steps over and over, we have to risk making mistakes, and we have to learn how to do better next time. One example of this process working in the open source software community is the Australian/New Zealand open source conference, linux.conf.au.

Case study: An open source software conference

Linux.conf.au is the most popular open source conference in the Australia/New Zealand region, and attracts hundreds of speakers and attendees from all over the world. Today, it has strong, well-enforced anti-harassment policy, a high percentage of women speakers and attendees, and a reputation as a friendly and welcoming conference for all. But it wasn’t always that way.

In previous years, linux.conf.au had incidents of non-consensual photography of women, jokes about Hans Reiser killing women attendees, and physical intimidation of women. In early 2010, for the first time the conference had a “Discrimination” policy forbidding discriminatory or harassing behavior, but was vague enough that people argued over whether, e.g., sexist jokes were “discriminatory.”

In late 2010, a prominent woman in the open source community named the man who had groped her at ApacheCon and kicked off a worldwide discussion about sexual harassment and assault in the open source community. This discussion led to the creation of a specific, enforceable example anti-harassment policy (and the founding of the Ada Initiative). linux.conf.au adopted the new specific and enforceable policy for the 2011 conference.

Despite this policy, one of the keynote speakers at the 2011 conference violated the policy in several ways (including showing a variety of pornographic images). The ensuing discussion engulfed the community for months afterward and triggered more incidents of sexism on the conference related mailing lists. In the end, though, the speaker apologized, the video of the talk was edited to add a notice that it violated the conference policies and principles of the organizers, the backing organization, Linux Australia, publicly confirmed its commitment anti-harassment policy. The 2012 conference had no major reported incidents.

Individual community members continue to support sexism and do sexist things, but now they know they face sanctions, penalties, and disgust from the rest of the community. The cultural norms of this part of the open source community have visibly changed.

Overall, opposition to conference harassment has become the default in the open source community: Most major and many minor conferences have and enforce an anti-harassment policy. Going even further, the Python Software Foundation recently announced publicly that it would not sponsor any events without a policy and we are told many other sponsors have the same policy but don’t advertise it. Even more encouraging, open source conferences are now paying attention to speaker line-ups, both working hard to increase diversity in speakers and calling out conferences with all-male or all-white speakers.

Stop ruining my conference!

But, people ask, can’t we skip all the unpleasantness, just “be excellent to each other” and be done with it? We’re all adults, right?

Social change does not happen because people ask nicely.

It happens through protests, hunger strikes, and publicity stunts. It blocks traffic on the streets of big cities. It illegally leaks classified government documents. It riots and burns down buildings and takes tear gas canisters in the face. We can count ourselves lucky that protesting sexism in hacker culture mainly results in angry words – especially when we consider that the current reality that we are protesting already includes physical sexual assault of women. If you haven’t experienced assault or harassment yourself, the upsetting discussion may seem like step backward, but for those of us who have experienced assault, it’s a clear improvement.

The effects of protests like this are uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous for people going about their daily lives, but that’s nothing compared to what life is like for the people already oppressed. Many women already can’t go to a hacker conference without having sexism pushed in their faces. If this week is the first time you’ve been made uncomfortable by sexism, imagine what it’s like to experience sexism when you join an IRC channel, blog in public, or go to a conference. That would suck pretty bad, right? You might even stop participating in the hacker community.

The answer to “Stop ruining my conference” is not “Stop pointing out the sexism,” it’s “Stop being sexist.” Don’t blame the victim for pointing out that sexism is happening, or for doing it in a way that makes you uncomfortable – after all, sexism is already making men and women more than just uncomfortable, it’s harming them and driving them out of the community. We call upon Chaos Communications Congress to stand behind their anti-harassment policy, develop a comprehensive response procedure that works, and to commit to enforcement in future years.

If people of good will continue working together, speaking up, and taking action, sexism will retreat from the hacker community as it has from so many other communities in the past. Here’s what you can personally do about it:

Thank you to everyone who spoke up about sexism and harassment last week. You are what makes change possible. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if we can help!

Comments are enabled but heavily moderated and must be approved. Comments may take up to a day to approve. Comments will be closed in 3 days. Comments are now closed.

The Ada Initiative is non-profit dedicated to increasing the participation and status of women in open technology and culture. Our work, includes this blog post, the example anti-harassment policy, and much of the associated documentation. We can only do this work because of the support and actions of the open tech/culture community as a whole. Thank you!

Donate now

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Re-post: Why conference harassment matters

This is a repost of one of our most popular articles of 2012, originally published August 1, 2012. It has been updated to include announcements of anti-harassment policies by three hacker conferences, BruCON, DeepSec, and CCC 29.

This weekend was DEFCON 20, the largest and most famous hacker[1] conference in the world. I didn’t go to DEFCON because I’m a woman, and I don’t like it when strangers grab my crotch.

Let’s back up a little bit. DEFCON is a stellar computer security conference, attended by famous computer security experts, shadowy government “spooks,” creative hackers of all sorts, and the journalists who write about them. I first attended DEFCON in 1995 as a gawky 17-year-old. DEFCON 3 was just a few hundred computer security experts wearing black leather jackets and milling around in a ballroom at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas.

DEFCON 3 badge

The author’s first DEFCON badge

That weekend I learned about Kevin Mitnick getting hunted down by the FBI, war-dialing for modems, and the existence of the Internet. I met a guy with long red hair named Dan Farmer who had written a program called something like EVIL, or SATAN, I wasn’t sure which.

I was so inspired by the fascinating, brilliant, frequently leather-clad people I met at DEFCON 3 that I became a computer programmer. I still have my first DEFCON badge, a cheesy purple and white laminated number with only my first name – at age 17, I wasn’t about to to give my full name to a conference full of hackers!

DEFCON today

Fast forward 17 years to DEFCON 20. Every time I read about something cool happening at DEFCON, I wanted to jump on the next flight to Las Vegas. But I didn’t, because of my own bad experiences at DEFCON, and those of people like KC, a journalist and student in San Francisco who wrote about attending DEFCON 19:

Nothing could have prepared me for the onslaught of bad behavior I experienced. Like the man who drunkenly tried to lick my shoulder tattoo. Like the man who grabbed my hips while I was waiting for a drink at the EFF party. Like the man who tried to get me to show him my tits so he could punch a hole in a card that, when filled, would net him a favor from one of the official security staff.

Or the experience of one of my friends, who prefers to remain anonymous. At a recent DEFCON, while leaning over to get her drink at the bar, someone slid his hand up all the way between her legs and grabbed her crotch. When she turned around, the perpetrator had already disappeared into the crowd.

My own stories from DEFCON seem tame compared to what these women went through, but I couldn’t take the constant barrage of sexual insults and walked out halfway through DEFCON 16, swearing not to return if I was going to be harassed like that again.

Unfortunately, DEFCON isn’t unusual among hacker conferences. Similar stories about Black Hat, HOPE, CCC, and others are also common. Sexual harassment at other computer conferences often appears unintentional, but at hacker conferences it’s often clear that the perp is doing it on purpose, and enjoying the hell out of it. As a woman, it’s hard to justify attending a hacker conference when I can go to an academic computer conference and get treated like a human being most of the time.

Why harassment matters

At this point, some of you are thinking, “Well, if DEFCON is so bad for women, women just shouldn’t go. Who cares?”

As KC puts it, “Defcon is also many wonderful things. It is a fantastic environment to learn, network, and connect with friends old and new.” There’s a reason that I attended DEFCON five times before I quit. DEFCON and other hacker conferences are popular for all the reasons that conferences exist at all: learning new things, meeting people in your field, improving your reputation, finding jobs, and making new friends.

I’ll start with the most obvious benefit of attending DEFCON: jobs. Did you know that Twitter is recruiting computer security experts at DEFCON? So are Zynga and the NSA:

@netik: Twitter is hiring security people. If you are at defcon and need work, @ reply me and let's meet up.

Happy Recruiting! NSA top spy going to #Defcon 2012 http://exm.nr/NKEIOM via @examinercom #infosec #cybersecurity

I am recruiting for AppSec, SecEng, and SecIR positions at @Zynga this week at BsidesLV, Defcon, and Blackhat. Lets talk.

Twitter, Zynga, and the NSA are only a few of the companies and government agencies that consider DEFCON prime recruiting ground for experts in all sorts of areas: network security, operating systems, robotics, surveillance, electrical engineering, intrusion detection, and anything that communicates via electromagnetic waves. When companies recruit at DEFCON, and women aren’t at DEFCON, both the companies and the women miss out.

But how do you become qualified for a computer security job in the first place? Computer security isn’t very well documented, or taught in any depth in most universities. After my first DEFCON, I knew to sign up for the DEFCON mailing list, read the 2600 magazine, and check out a copy of the UNIX Systems Administration Handbook from the computer center library. When I got a computer account at my university, I logged into the UNIX workstations instead of the Windows machines because I knew UNIX was what hackers used. I poked around UNIX until I found files I couldn’t read and commands I couldn’t run, and then I started reading manuals to understand why. I eventually became a worldwide UNIX file systems expert – all because I went to this obscure little conference in Las Vegas in 1995.

For those women who work or want to work in a computer security related field, conferences like DEFCON are the best chance to meet influential people in the field. Take Bruce Schneier, a professional speaker and the author of “Applied Cryptography” (known outside computer security for coining the term “security theater” to describe TSA security measures). I met Schneier at DEFCON 6, when I made a joke that he reused in his talk a few minutes later. The DEFCON speaker list is a who’s who of modern digital glitterati – and in a strange twist of fate, now includes the Director of the NSA.

Giving the right talk at DEFCON can make your entire career and net you dozens of offers for jobs, contracts, and book deals. DEFCON is good for hands-on learning too: For example, every year teams of security experts compete in contests like “Capture the Flag” to show off their skills and learn from each other.

Finally, everyone at DEFCON benefits from more women attending. Women “hackers” – in the creative technologist sense – are everywhere, and many of them are brilliant, interesting, and just plain good company (think Limor Fried, Jeri Ellsworth, and Angela Byron). Companies recruiting for talent get access to the full range of qualified applicants, not just the ones who can put up with a brogrammer atmosphere. We get more and better talks on a wider range of subjects. Conversations are more fun. Conferences and everyone at them loses when amazing women don’t attend.

When you say, “Women shouldn’t go to DEFCON if they don’t like it,” you are saying that women shouldn’t have all of the opportunities that come with attending DEFCON: jobs, education, networking, book contracts, speaking opportunities – or else should be willing to undergo sexual harassment and assault to get access to them. Is that really what you believe?

Is change coming to hacker conferences?

Back to KC:

I know Im not alone in being frustrated with the climate at Defcon. Last year at Deepsec in Vienna, I met a fantastically intelligent woman developer who flat out refused to attend Defcon because of interactions like those listed above. I can think of countless other women I know in the tech industry who are regular Defcon participants and speakers who are just as fed up with this crap as me. I wonder why we’ve all been so polite about such an unhealthy atmosphere.

Red/yellow (and green) cardsRed/yellow (and green) cardsKC stopped being polite, and started doing something about the sexist atmosphere at DEFCON: she created the Red/Yellow Card Project. She got the idea from a joke a rugby-obsessed friend made after she complained about sexism at DEFCON, suggesting that she hand out red and yellow penalty cards to people making sexist comments. She designed and printed the cards and distributed them at this year’s DEFCON, with mixed reception. Some people vehemently objected, but others loved it. DEFCON founder Jeff Moss offered to pay for the printing costs of the cards.

How the Ada Initiative is changing conferences

The cards are a hilarious way to raise awareness of the problem of brutal sexual harassment at DEFCON and similar conferences. Unfortunately, it will take more than raising awareness to make hacker conferences safe for women. That’s one reason why I quit my cushy computer programmer job and co-founded the Ada Initiative, a non-profit supporting women in open technology and culture. Our scope includes open source software, open hardware, and open data – all of which are major parts of hacker conferences like DEFCON.

The Ada Initiative’s first project: an example written policy that bans harassment at conferences, sexual or otherwise, of people of all genders. Organizers for literally hundreds of conferences have adopted some form of this policy, including open source software conferences from Linux to Python to Git, the world’s largest Wikipedia conference, Wikimania, and a plethora of others including gaming cons, open video conferences, science fiction conventions, and even skeptic/atheist meetups.

The policies aren’t just empty words; several conferences have enforced their policies successfully. Many conference organizers have told us that they had record women’s attendance after they adopted a policy aimed at reducing harassment (and often higher overall attendance as well). One conference organizer said that the first year they worked hard to invite 30% women, everyone enjoyed the conference so much more that they’ve done it every year since. When women feel welcome at a conference, everyone enjoys the conference more.

A call to action and a challenge

We’re waiting to hear about the first[2] hacker conference to adopt a specific, enforceable, well-planned policy protecting women from harassment – and then we’re going to promote the hell out of it. Will it be HOPE? CCC? DEFCON? Whichever hacker conference is first will get dozens or hundreds of new attendees, women and everyone else, too. If you want this to be your conference, and you want help designing and implementing a policy, email us at contact@adainitiative.org.

Updated to add on December 28, 2012: The first[3] three hacker conferences to adopt and publicize an anti-harassment policy are BruCON, DeepSec, a hacker conference in Vienna, and Chaos Communications Congress, a hacker conference in Germany. You can read more in an interview with the BruCON organizers, a report from the first BruCON with a policy, and an interview with the DeepSec organizers. CCC is on-going at the time of this post; see here for more information on how to report harassment to the organizers. See below for more on our criteria for listing conferences for this challenge.

If you’re not a conference organizer, you can help too! We’ve created a list of actions to take to support policies preventing harassment at conferences, all field-tested for effectiveness. To name just a few, you can publicly request a policy by blogging or tweeting, organize a community petition asking for a policy, and when speaking, make your appearance contingent on a policy.

Finally, if you like the work that the Ada Initiative is doing, you can support us by joining our announcement mailing list or donating to support our work for women in open technology and culture (we’re a tax-exempt non-profit charitable organization supported by donations and we do this for a living).

Donate now

[1] The precise meaning of the word “hacker” has been the subject of furious debate for at least 30 years. Suffice to say that in this post it does not mean exclusively “person who breaks into computers” and it includes people who experiment with computers and hardware for curiosity’s sake.

[2] Updated on December 28, 2012: The title of “first” hacker conference to have a “specific, enforceable, well-planned policy protecting women from harassment” is in dispute. Kiwicon is a hacker conference that has a (hilarious) Code of Conduct:

Kiwicon attempts to be a relatively informal conference where all members of the hacking community can come together over one weekend. Individuals intent on sprinkling fetid douchenuggets over the ice-cream sundae of anyone else’s enjoyment may incur penalties, reprisals or sanctions at the discretion of the Crue. In other words, the Crue reserve the right to kick you out, own your boxen and publicly shame you if you’re being an idiot.

CCC 27 and 28 previously had a FAQ entry banning harassment but did not publicize the change or enforcement widely. Other hacker conferences have contacted us to say they have secret anti-harassment policies.

None of these meet our criteria of a “specific, enforceable, well-planned policy protecting women from harassment.” In particular, we have observed that an anti-harassment policy is ineffective unless it is both specific and widely publicized and publicly enforced (see this guide we contributed to for documentation on how to do so). Half the purpose of an anti-harassment policy is to educate the attendees about specific actions that are harassing, which can only be done if the policy lists specific actions and if the attendees read it. As a result, we consider BruCON to be the first hacker conference to adopt (and by all accounts, successfully enforce) an anti-harassment policy.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Chaos Communications Congress 29 becomes third hacker conference to ban harassment

Drum roll, please! The third major “hacker” conference to publicly adopt an anti-harassment policy is Chaos Communications Congress 29! CCC is a conference about technology, society, and creativity, and is one of the most popular conferences in the field. Thousands of people travel from all over the world to Germany during the last week of December each year to attend CCC.

CCC joins BruCON and DeepSec as the first three hacker conferences to publicly pledge that they do not condone and will respond to harassment based on age, gender, sexual orientation, race, physical appearance or disability. CCC 29 has set up a special team available 24 hours a day to respond to harassment, with a phone number, email address, and even Twitter account! (We note that the German translation of KC Crowell‘s “Creeper Move” cards was also recently announced.)

Updated to add Fri Dec 28 07:30 UTC:Tips on reporting harassment, responding to reports of harassment, and related resources are available on the Geek Feminism wiki. Writing these kinds of documents are part of what the Ada Initiative does.

We at the Ada Initiative are astonished and amazed to close out 2012 with so much progress in the area of harassment of women at conferences – and it goes way beyond conferences. Each time conference organizers make a public pledge like this, it kicks off a conversation that reveals people’s opinions and beliefs about the role of women in their community – and often changes them for the better. What we find out is often not pretty, but it is also the reality that women in our communities experience. Becoming aware of the problem is the first step in fixing it and becoming the kind of community we believe we truly are.

Bravo and congratulations to the organizers of CCC, BruCON, DeepSec, and everyone else who worked in 2012 to make open technology and culture more welcoming to people of all genders!

Note to conference organizers: The title is still open for the first non-European hacker conference to adopt a public, specific, and enforceable policy against harassment. The honor could be yours!

The Ada Initiative in October 2012: building friendlier events and communities for women with your help!

Help the Ada Initiative!

Thank you to our generous donors and sponsors, who are helping with the Ada Initiative’s work every day! Make a difference for women in open tech and culture: support us by making a donation or becoming a sponsor today!

Launched: conference booklet template designed to welcome women

Organizing a conference is a lot of work, and one of the least pleasant tasks is writing the program booklet. The Ada Initiative wrote the best program booklet we knew how for AdaCamp DC, with lots of help from the Geek Feminism Wiki, and in October we released it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, making it into a reusable template including all the information you’ll need for your conference. You are welcome to reuse it for your conference!

Anti-harassment: why starting with conferences makes sense

We at the Ada Initiative know that the abysmal numbers of women in open technology and culture (2% of open source software, 9% in Wikipedia) are not caused by harassment of women at conferences alone. Women are staying out of open technology and culture for hundreds of reasons, some more obvious than others.

So why have we spent so much time working with the community to make conferences friendlier to women? It’s simple: Working for the end of assault and harassment of women at conferences is both the right thing to do in itself, and also a good way to kick off serious discussion (and change) about how women are treated in open tech/culture communities. Valerie Aurora explains why this makes sense as a first step: How stopping conference harassment changes open/tech communities at all levels.

Find out what BruCON, the first security conference to accept our challenge to adopt an anti-harassment policy, feels about the effect on their conference culture: “Having a policy didn’t change the overall atmosphere of the conference AT ALL! If anything, I would say that it helped to create awareness of the issue and allowed everybody to discuss it.”

What do you do when there’s a harassment report at your conference?

Unfortunately, having an anti-harassment policy does not mean harassment won’t occur at your event! The Ada Initiative has helped several conferences respond to harassment reports at their event, and we’ve drawn our experiences together into a wiki page: Responding to harassment reports. Our tips include ways to collect reports, respond quickly, and communicate effectively with your community afterwards, increasing the safety of everyone at your event. Leading open source conference PyCon US has already adopted response guidelines based on our work.

In addition, find out why you should have a public anti-harassment policy rather than a secret one: people use a published policy to judge whether to attend a conference, whether to report harassment, whether to engage in harassing behavior themselves, and whether they can safely challenge harassing behavior. For conference organizers, a published policy is a tool to improve their conferences’ image, increase attendance, reduce the chance of harassment, and increase the likelihood they will hear about harassment.

Rape discussion in open source communities

Valerie Aurora documented minimising of rape statistics in the Linux community, suggesting how to react to community leaders who perpetrate community atmospheres that are hostile to women:

  • Reply publicly online and disagree with the person’s opinions
  • Publicly advocate adopting specific, enforceable codes of conduct in your community’s online spaces
  • Send email to organizers of conferences expressing your discomfort with being in the same physical location as someone who condones assault
  • As event organizers, do not invite the person to speak or attend your event
  • As administrators of mailing lists, IRC servers, and blog aggregators, design and adopt policies governing behavior

Courtney Stanton: how to get more women in your technical speaker line-up

Courtney Stanton, tireless activist to increase women’s participation in the computer gaming industry and audience, organized a 2011 game conference No Show, which had 50% women speakers. She wrote up her techniques for attracting qualified women speakers to conferences, which were recently successfully reused by a programming conference, JS Conf EU to get 25% women speakers. The Ada Initiative interviewed Courtney in October:

Courtney: Assuming that [conference organizers are] actually doing it to add value to the industry/community/etc, then I think on some level they know [speaker diversity is] necessary work. Otherwise, you end up with a narrower and narrower slice on stage (and in the audience) of who your community really is, and that way is death.

Successful Ada’s Angels campaign

Our generous donors in September and October helped make our vision — a world in which women are equal and welcome participants in open source software, open data, and open culture — a reality. Thanks to you, there will be more women writing free software, more women editing Wikipedia, more women Internet infrastructure and more women shaping the future of global society.

Donation progress bar: donate now

If you were unable to give in this drive, the Ada Initiative still needs your support to advocate for women in open technology and culture and we welcome your crucial donations year-round!

Ada Lovelace Day, October 16

Ada Lovelace Day is a project launched by Suw Charman-Anderson in 2009, to combat women’s invisibility by highlighting heroines in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Ada Lovelace Day is independent of the Ada Initiative, but both are named for Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace and the world’s first computer programmer, and our missions are complementary.

This year the Ada Initiative held an Ada Lovelace Day party in San Francisco for Ada Lovelace Day participants and our supporters, jointly hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Thank you for joining us!

Individual staff and advisors also took part, with Valerie Aurora writing a profile of Ada Lovelace herself, and observing how minimisation of her work is typical of representations of women’s work in men’s fields; Mary Gardiner writing profiles of Australian women Else Shepherd, leading electrical engineer and Marita Cheng, Robogals founder; and Danielle Madeley profiling her colleague, physicist Elaine Miles. Danni was herself featured on the Australian Bureau of Meterology’s Facebook page for the day.

Upcoming events for women in open technology and culture

See our calendar for a full listing, and submit any additional events to share@adainitiative.org.

New sponsors in October

Many new sponsors joined us in our mission to support women in open technology and culture as part of the Ada’s Angels donation campaign! We’d especially like to welcome our first individual donors who have become Bronze sponsors, Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson, who contributed a $10,000 matching donation to the Ada’s Angel campaign!

Other new sponsors generously supporting us in October were:

  1. new Venture Philanthropist sponsor the Linux Foundation;
  2. Microsoft‘s employee gift-matching program, which reached Venture Philanthropist sponsorship status by matching Microsoft employees dollar for dollar;
  3. VirtuStream, an enterprise cloud provider, a new Contributing sponsor;
  4. the Red Hat employee gift matching program, which reached Contributing sponsor status by matching employee donations; and
  5. PalominoDB, a woman-owned database consulting company, also joining us as a Contributing sponsor.

Sponsorship opportunities

Instant sponsorship of the Ada Initiative is available through our Venture Philanthropist sponsorship program for sponsorship amounts between $2000 and $9999 (USD) with a minimum of hassle. Other donations of $500 or more are eligible for Supporting Sponsor recognition.

Contact sponsors@adainitiative.org for larger sponsorship packages.

Open source software: Open to all?

Today yet another story broke about a U.S. politician making comments downplaying rape. This time, it was a candidate for U.S. Senate Richard Mourdock describing pregnancies from rape as “a gift from God.” Before him were Roger Rivard, a U.S. State representative, with “some girls rape easy,” and U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin’s with “legitimate rape” never resulting in pregnancy. As a result of these stories, many Americans are now familiar with the effects of powerful people dismissing and redefining rape: at best, it is horribly insensitive and blames the victim, at worst it condones a serious crime.

That’s why I was shocked and horrified when a prominent leader in the Linux open source software community – our equivalent of politicians – made comments that also downplayed the seriousness of all rape. (If you’re not familiar with open source software or the free Linux operating system, they are the technology behind everything from Google searches to Facebook updates to Android phones.)

Here’s what happened: In February 2011, on a public open source software mailing list, prominent open source software leader Theodore Y. Ts’o wrote that rape was impossible if both people were drunk enough, and that including several common kinds of rape in rape statistics could be “hyperbolic and misleading.” I won’t go into detail here because it’s pretty offensive, but the full text of two of his emails on the subject are archived here.

What matters for the open source community is that, just as many politicians immediately withdrew their endorsements of Mourdock, Rivard, and Akin, the open source community should also withdraw their support of leaders who make statements like this. Ts’o continues to hold many leadership positions in the Linux open source community after making these comments, from maintainer of the widely used Linux ext4 file system to chair of the most important Linux conference, the Linux Kernel Developers’ Summit.

Refusing to condone statements like these is especially important in open source software because it already has a major gender gap: women make up less than 2% of the open source community. That’s worse than Fortune 500 CEOs, currently at 4% women! We can’t afford to look the other way when leaders in open source make what are, at best, horribly insensitive comments about the sexual assault of women.

Valerie Aurora speaking at AdaCamp DC

Valerie Aurora, Executive Director of the Ada Initiative

The Ada Initiative sparked a community-wide movement to stop assault and harassment of women at open source conferences, which included groping and pornography in talks. The Ada Initiative is a non-profit dedicated to supporting women in open technology and culture, founded in 2011. Working together with the community, we’ve made amazing progress in less than 2 years, with over 100 open source conferences adopting policies banning harassment – and enforcing them, too. This grassroots movement has been so successful in part because many open source community leaders publicly stood up for women’s right to attend conferences safely.

But harassment doesn’t end when the conference ends. It also happens online: in mailing lists, in IRC channels (a kind of online chat room) and in blogs. How effective is a policy banning groping if a speaker at the conference says women who get groped were “asking for it?” What if a person on the organizing committee routinely makes sexual comments on the project’s official IRC channel? How can we expect women to feel safe at conference receptions when other people at the party believe rape is impossible if they get drunk enough?

We have to act together as a community to send the message that actions like these don’t reflect the values of the majority of the open source movement. We can do this in many ways. Here are just a few:

  • Reply publicly online and disagree with the person’s opinions
  • Publicly advocate adopting specific, enforceable codes of conduct in your community’s online spaces
  • Send email to organizers of conferences expressing your discomfort with being in the same physical location as someone who condones assault
  • As event organizers, do not invite the person to speak or attend your event
  • As administrators of mailing lists, IRC servers, and blog aggregators, design and adopt policies governing behavior

Some people argue that the principle of free speech requires us to allow people to say whatever they want in online communities, even if it is threatening, hateful, or discriminates against women and minorities. But as many have pointed out, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of what you say. People are free to say whatever they want – and you are free to react in any (legal) way. Neither do you have any obligation to publish someone else’s free speech. You and your community can support free speech while refusing to condone speech you find abhorrent by publishing it yourself, or supporting the person who said it.

The Ada Initiative has already had many successes in making open source software conferences welcoming spaces for women. We want to work together with open tech/culture communities to keep this culture change moving forward. Let’s increase civility and respect for women in our online spaces in ways that strengthen our communities and our work.

If you would like the women you know and love to feel comfortable in your open tech/culture community, you can do something about it: Donate to support women in open tech/culture today.

Donation progress bar: donate now

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.