Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/06/23/proprietary-software-sexism-too.html

I generally try to
avoid schadenfreude,
but I couldn’t resist here, because I think it proves a point that the
problem of sexism in the software industry isn’t confined to the Free
Software community.

With my colleague Karen Sandler I’ve
talked on our Free as in Freedom
audcast. a
few different
shows about problems of sexism in the Free Software community. I’ve
long maintained
and written
in a blog post that the sexism problem is computer-industry-wide,
not just in Free Software.

In catching up on the weeks’ tech news this morning (I’m often too busy
during the week to stay on top of things), I read a
few stories
about
Microsoft’s
party
presentation
at
the
Norwegian
Developers’
Conference,
and watched the video.

It’s tempting to link this issue to Microsoft’s proprietary nature.
Fact is, I’ve seen sexist things happen as part of formal presentations
at a dozen different Open Source and Free Software events over the last
ten years. I link to all this not to single out Microsoft, but to point
out the entire computing industry — not just the Free Software
community — have serious problems of embedded sexism in our
communities that needs active attention.