To be a visible female in open source you need a "hide of a rhino or the constitution of a psychopath".. you learn cultivate these in ourself over time to survive.

Why?

The rhino hide is need to to just ignore the mysoginist dribble that turns up around you from time to time, as a mailing list thread goes on or an irc session, or some joke bug report -- the communications channels vary. Many women just ignore it, it's the "stick and stones.. but names will never hurt me" rhyme reapplied into "ignore it and it'll go away", for a while. Comments i've ignored include a running joke that I must be using linux becuase I want to have Linus' love child, and threats that if i don't stop using ext3 then Reiser will kill more women.

Some women cope by always focusing on the positive aspects, and always ignoring the negative. It's a method that works for many women. I tried it, but i can't do it. It works for some people, but not for me.

The problem is, if you ignore it at the basic level, sometimes it excalates into something much worse -- you then get blamed for not saying "stop it" when the idiot first started.

The constitution of a psycho path is the ability to ignore (or be oblivious to) the effect that incidents have on other people. To say "but i wasn't offended" or "it's not offensive", when there are very clear reports from many people that they were offended. It's a state of mind where other people's emotions don't exist, don't matter, or at least you don't ever think on how they affect the person or the project. It's supressing any empathy within yourself for those that can't ignore it. People are expected to see photos of women clad only in a gstring on display during a tech conference and if you yourself don't have a problem with it, then it's not a problem. You will hear leaders like Richard Stallman use "women who are virgins... you have a duty to remove their virginity from them" as a metaphor for the experience of using emacs for the first time - and it's all fine because you yourself are not experiencing negative emotions from such things. The emotions of others don't matter.

Other survival techniques include changing project - I know of women who contribute actively to one distro, then change, then change again - in the hopes of finding a place where they can contribute their skills without frequent grunching. Yesterday's "linux is hard to explain to girls" comment by Mark Shuttleworth is an example of The Grunch, and I know it's caused more than one ubuntu contributor to start looking for another project. It's the (prominent) straw tha broke the camel's back. On it's own the Mark comment is incredibly minor, but it's just one of so so so many that remind women they're not considered part of the group by yet another of our leaders.

And it all ties up into the "Harming the Community" speech - that by reporting any incident, then you, the reportee, are doing harm to open source. I'm expecting some comments here along that line. I don't agree with you, but could you please spend half as much energy helping ensure these incident don't happen again as you spend telling the reportee how wrong she is to report it. Thanks.