This is another discussion about culture stemming from the ongoing dissatisfaction in the open source community at large over the bad culture that exists in the computer industry (and far beyond it).
I’ve been lucky enough to more-or-less avoid direct contact with the dominant culture in Western technology. But I can understand that culture’s existence in the wider culture. It’s not about women, but about dominance. And it will continue until an alternative culture supplants it. Outlawing it, banning it, these do not suffocate it.
Cultures develop very rapidly. Culture is basically an instantiation of an expectation. If you visit your grandmother, and she answers the door wearing a leather jacket, jeans, and combat boots, then that particular instantiation of the grandmother-grandchild culture probably just took a weird turn. But it could be that your grandmother is a biker, in which case her answering the door in slacks and a blouse would get you diving in the hedges and calling the invasion of the body snatchers hotline.
One of the key problems in changing the culture is that many members of the dominant culture that you interact with aren’t alone in their daily lives. So even if you get them to see the light, by sheer inertia of returning to their regularly scheduled programming, they will readopt the bad culture.
Indeed, many will have initially adopted the persona of a member of that group in the presence of others of that group, in order to fit in. But once you’re expected to think of jokes of a certain type, your brain rewires itself a bit. And you’re supposed to get them out there fast, before the other guy, to show your own dominance within the group. So now you’re losing your natural tendency to analyze your speech before expressing it.
The company you keep ends up keeping you. Everyone becomes a copy of a copy of a copy. The first rule about the culture is that you do not talk about the culture.
The code of silence in the book Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk isn’t to prevent the spread of the fight clubs. It’s to prevent the members from openly discussing what they are engaged in. They can tell non-members about it in the sense of spreading the culture, but never have a metatalk about it.
And I think that’s key. If an infection is deep enough, the best that the body can do is to build around it, wall it in. To truly remove it requires opening it to the air and light and pulling it out completely.
So talking about it from the outside helps a bit. But ultimately the discussions have to happen on the inside. The purveyors the various cultures must themselves come to understand their own culture, instead of ignoring that it is controlling them without them having any real say in it.
It’s a difficult thing to do. If you try to raise the issue from within the culture, the same defense mechanisms that are harmful to outsiders will be turned on the rule breaker. It will be a light attack at first, and persisting will only make the threat more real.
It’s probably best to go for one-on-one discussions of the culture with the purveyors for that reason. Less feeling that they have to enforce the culture in that setting, and one-on-one cultures of their own develop rapidly.