About: Harming the community

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An Entity of Type : owl:Thing, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

Women who complain about sexism in the geek community are sometimes accused of harming the community in various ways and are thus silenced. Examples of claimed harm include discouraging other women from joining, focusing on the actions of a minority of participants, or giving the mainstream media an opportunity to criticise the community. Women will be told that there are more productive ways to change the geek culture. Variants of this argument include:

Attributes	Values
rdfs:label	Harming the community
rdfs:comment	Women who complain about sexism in the geek community are sometimes accused of harming the community in various ways and are thus silenced. Examples of claimed harm include discouraging other women from joining, focusing on the actions of a minority of participants, or giving the mainstream media an opportunity to criticise the community. Women will be told that there are more productive ways to change the geek culture. Variants of this argument include:
dcterms:subject	Silencing tactics Derailment tactics
abstract	Women who complain about sexism in the geek community are sometimes accused of harming the community in various ways and are thus silenced. Examples of claimed harm include discouraging other women from joining, focusing on the actions of a minority of participants, or giving the mainstream media an opportunity to criticise the community. Women will be told that there are more productive ways to change the geek culture. This silencing is particularly prevalent in Open Source Software, some of whose members view themselves as taking part in building a better world. Criticism of the community is therefore regarded as an attempt to damage the good work of the community. Variants of this argument include: * you shouldn't discuss sexism in geek communities * you shouldn't discuss sexism in geek communities publicly; it should be taken up with individual offenders only, because anything else is "airing dirty laundry" * you shouldn't discuss sexism in geek communities unless you have a certain level of standing in the community * you shouldn't discuss sexism in geek communities unless you have made a certain number of 'positive' contributions unrelated to criticising sexism * you shouldn't discuss sexism in geek communities unless you simultaneously and at great length note that the geek community is a wonderful place to be and you are simply criticising the actions of an extremely small minority The modified 'unless' arguments are sometimes used disingenuously, but even when not so, women will generally find that no matter how high their standing or how enormous their non-feminist contributions, there is another critic who thinks her standing needs to be yet higher or her contributions yet greater to be allowed to be critical. The cumulative effect of having this argued every time sexism is brought up is to make all the arguments equivalent to "you shouldn't discuss sexism in geek communities". In addition, many of the silencers perceive themselves as brave sole defenders of the geek reputation, and frame their arguments in terms of "I know everyone else thinks you are doing a great thing but..." The effect of this framing is to make the woman feel like she is following the herd and behaving thoughtlessly.

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