On 2016-09-17 at 09:05:00 +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
correct. one of the things that i love about free software is that most people are completely anonymous behind a wall of plain text. we don't give a fuck about people's gender, or race, or age, or size, or any other fuckwit politically bullshit-orientated delusionary attitudes.
this, sadly, it not true, except maybe for a few very specific cases.
Humans are extremely good at getting hints that help put people in specific bins, and they can often do so even from just written texts: the most obvious think is finding out people's gender from their name (and these days working from a pseudonim that is not connected to your legal name is much rarer than it used to be), but you can also get hints about nationality (or at least native language, for people for whom english is a second language) and ethnicity from the errors (in the former case) and the non-standard usages (in the latter), and of course people of different generations do use different expressions.
Of course these hints have an even bigger failure rate than the ones available in-person, but they still work in enough cases that they keep being reinforced.
One big problem with this is that it mostly happens at an instinctive level, so people may *honestly* believe that they aren't doing any discrimination, and that they are giving everybody the same chances.
if you have the self belief to step forward onto a public mailing list and can speak with a rational and clear voice,
and this already requires a higher effort from about half of humanity who for centuries has been trained from a very young age that stepping forward in public is something that they are not supposed to do.
Note that I don't believe that a free software community can do anything to solve *this* problem, it's just something that I believe it's worth remembering.