Please drop by and say hello to them if you're in our San Francisco office. Or say hello to them in #releng - their irc nicknames are ianconnolly, ffledgling and zeller respectively.
We all interpret life through the lens of our previous experiences. It's difficult to understand what each day is like for someone who has had a life fundamentally different from your own because you simply haven't had those experiences. I don't understand what it's like to transition from male to female while involved in an open source community. I don't know the steps taken to become an astrophysicist. To embark to a new country as an immigrant. I haven't lived struggled to survive on the streets as homeless person. Or a person who has been battered by domestic abuse. To understand the experiences of others, all we can do is listen and learn from others, with empathy.
There have been many news stories recently about women or other underrepresented groups in technology. I won't repeat them because frankly, they're quite depressing. They go something like this:
1. Incident of harassment/sexism either online/at a company/in a community/at a conference
2. People call out this behaviour online and ask the organization to apologize and take steps to prevent this in the future.
3. People from underrepresented groups who speak up about behaviour are told that their feelings are not valid or they are overreacting. Even worse, they are harassed online with hateful statements telling them they don't belong in tech or are threatened with sexual assault or other acts of violence.
4. Company/community/conference apologizes and issue written statement. Or not.
5. Goto 1
I watched an extraordinary talk the other day that really provided a vivid perspective about the challenges that women in technology face and what people can do to help. Brianna Wu is head of development at Giant Spacekat, a game development company. She gave the talk "Nine ways to stop hurting and start helping women in tech" at AltConf last week. She is brutally honest with the problems that exist in our companies and communities, and the steps forward to make it better.
She talks about how she is threatened and harassed online. She also discusses how random people threatening you on the internet is not a just theoretical, but really frightening because she knows it could result in actual physical violence. The same thing applies to street harassment.
Here's the thing about being a woman. I'm a physically strong person. I can run. But I'm keenly aware that men are almost always bigger than me, and by basic tenets of physiology, stronger than me. So if a man tried to physically attack me, chances are I'd lose that fight. So when someone threatens you, online or not, it is profoundly frightening because you fear for your physical safety. And to have that happen over and over again, like many women in our industry experience, apart from being terrifying, is exhausting and has a huge emotional toll.
I was going to summarize the points she brings up in her talk but she speaks so powerfully that all I can do is encourage you to watch the talk.
One of her final points really drives home the need for change in our industry when she says to the audience "This is not a problem that women can solve on their own....If you talk to your male friends out there, you guys have a tremendous amount of power as peers. To talk to them and say, look dude this isn't okay. You can't do this, you can't talk this way. You need to think about this behaviour. You guys need to make a difference in a way that I can't." Because when she talks about this behaviour to men, it often goes in one ear and out the next. To be a ally in any sense of the word, you need to speak up.
Here's May's monthly analysis of the pushes to our Mozilla development trees. You can load the data as an HTML page or as a json file
Trends This was a record breaking month where we overcame our previous record of 8100+ pushes with a record of 11000+ pushes this month. Gaia-try, just created in April has become a popular branch with 29% of pushes.
Highlights
11711 pushes
New record
378 pushes/day (average)
New record
Highest number of pushes/day: 613 pushes on May 29, 2014
New record
22 pushes/hour (average)
New record
General Remarks
The introduction of Gaia-try in April has been very popular and comprised around 29% of pushes in May. The Try branch itself consisted of around 38% of pushes.
The three integration repositories (fx-team, mozilla-inbound and b2g-inbound) account around 22% of all the pushes, compared to 30% in the previous month.
Records May 2014 was the month with most pushes (11711 pushes) May 2014 has the highest pushes/day average with 378 pushes/day May 2014 has the highest average of "pushes-per-hour" is 22 pushes/hour May 29th, 2014 had the highest number of pushes in one day with 613 pushes
May 2014 is a record setting month, 11711 pushes!
Note that Gaia-try was added in April and has quickly become a high volume branch
I changed the format of this pie chart this month. It seemed to be previously based on several months data, but not all data from the previous year. So I changed it to be only based on the data from the current month which seemed more logical.
