Written by: Audrey Tang.

During the first half of the 20th century people working for women’s rights achieved many legal victories, bringing equality in voting rights, of education, of individual economy, and of marriage and divorce to many people around the world.

However, this equality in law does not readily translate to equality in practice. As Simone de Beauvoir observed in 1949, many societies make women feel inferior not by law, but through the act of Othering in languages and in actions. Men are presumed as the default subject, and women are constantly reminded that they are the collective Other by the way they are treated; as a group they are different from the default.

In the 1970s, social workers and thinkers applied Simone de Beauvoir’s thoughts and observed various socially-constructed expectations known as gender roles.

For example, a particular society may confine women into one of two primary roles: either as a Girl — an adorable object of desire, harmless, and of inferior status; or as a Mother — a caretaker, provider of emotional support, and a reproductive agent.


We can fix this problem by adopting the vision:

Biology should not determine Destiny.

In practical terms, it is helpful to re-introduce the concepts of scripts and programs, this time from the field of social studies.

Larry Wall said this in his 2007 talk on scripting languages:

Suppose you went back to Ada Lovelace and asked her the difference between a script and a program. She’d probably look at you funny, then say something like: “Well, a script is what you give the actors, but a program is what you give the audience.” That Ada was one sharp lady…

Here we see socialscripts are actions expected of people to act according to their roles. In contrast, a social program informs participants what to expect from the norm, but does not dictate people’s behavior the way scripts do.

As a concrete example, when I began my IT career as the webmaster of a small publishing house “The Informationist” in 1994, I worked both online via a BBS and in the office. Many of our staff were openly LGBTQ and LGBTQ-supporting; it was a safe space to explore my gender expressions.

The press turned into a software company in 1995, when I became its Chief Technology Officer, and started participating in the global Free Software community.



In 1998, the Open Source movement started and I helped run a few startups in Silicon Valley, China, and Taiwan. As I started attending conferences and giving talks, I couldn’t help but notice the lack of variety in gender expressions and in ethnic distribution.

For example, I heard the question “are you here with your boyfriend?” asked many times in these conferences, but not once “are you here with your girlfriend?” or “are you here with your partner?”— it was clearly a social script to make the recipient feel identified as an other — an outsider instead of a participant in the space.


When we started organizing our own conferences in 2003, I also made efforts to invite only the most socially compassionate speakers from abroad, who helped establish a more relaxed atmosphere where people can enjoy a safe space.

However, as Open Source gained commercial popularity, sexualized practices of IT industry trade shows started to affect our conferences as well. One of these practices is hiring promotional models to generate interest at a vendor’s booth; another is offensive imagery in conference content, including from prominent speakers in both Free Software and Open Source communities.

In 2009, Skud, a long-time fellow hacker in the Perl community, started to speak widely at conferences on this subject. She created Geek Feminism, a wiki-and-blog platform to list the issues and work together to improve them.

After a year’s work, participants in the wiki created a Code of Conduct template, a socialprogram that sets the expected norms. Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner, two Geek Feminism contributors from the Linux community, formed the Ada Initiative in 2011 to support women in open technology and culture.

Between 2011 and 2015, with help from many contributors, the Ada Initiative worked with over 100 conference organizers to adopt the code of conduct program. I’m very glad to see the upcoming Rails Girls Summer of Code event among the list of adopters.

There are three main elements of such a program:

  1. Specific descriptions of common but unacceptable behavior
  2. Instructions on reporting, with contact information
  3. Information about how such policies are enforced

Together, they ensure a space where people can be aware of their own social scripts and their effects on each other — and refactor them into a more sustainable community with openness and variety as a coherent vision.


When we create a safe space for a community’s participants, to observe and decide our own social scripts, we can collectively program a social norm that is both rigorous and creative — just like the best formulas, poems, and programs.

In conclusion, I’d like to share two poetic fragments of mine with you:

I would like to know you
 not by your types,
 classes or roles — 
 — but by your values.


Saying “Life is what we make it to be”,
 is like saying “Language is what we make it to be” — 
 True, but not at once;
 — just one bit at a time.

Audrey Tang is the Digital Minister in Taiwan. She joined the Executive Yuan as a minister without portfolio in 2016. Image Credit: Flickr/ Dimitar D.  This article is an excerpt of the transcript of her speech delivered at for TedxTaipei 2017 (See: Full transcript).


  1. The code of conduct program created by the Ada initiative got me a bit confused and wondering. The first main element of this program is said to provide “Specific descriptions of common but unacceptable behaviour”.

    1. Why must it be a list of ‘Don’t do this’? Wouldn’t a list of ‘Do this and enjoy these benefits’ be much more productive? Does good behaviour arise if bad behaviour is suppressed? Not necessarily. The consequence might rather be a lot of lame and bland behaviour. That’s not the stuff that fosters inspiration and joy.

    Following the link in the article to the Ada initiative, I found an example ‘Conference anti-harassment/Policy’ but no code of conduct.

    2. Is an anti-harassment policy all there is to a code of conduct? Is harassment the most prevalent bad conduct or even the only bad conduct? Not in my experience. There is a lot of behaviour in this world that lacks respect, graciousness or the most basic forms of politeness towards other persons, irrespective of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, or any other label someone might stick on them.

    Along that sample anti-harassment policy, a few examples of actual harassment cases are given.

    3. Is the expression “We’ll have less trouble explaining to girls what we actually do” harassing when used in a Linux keynote address because some hearers imply that the term “girls” is used as a substitute for “women”, such treating women in a condescending and infantilising way?

    a) Is what is heard by some always what is meant by the speaker? If that were so, no misunderstandings could happen. So, does a speaker have to erase all utterances from his/her speech that might be felt to be harassing in any way by anyone? If that were so, who would still dare to speak in front of a crowd?

    b) Sure, it is annoying when a speaker inserts a limp phrase in a talk just to endear him/herself with the audience. But could it be that he meant “girls” when he said “girls”, not under-age females but women who conduct themselves in a way that makes them appear infantile, weak, helpless and clueless? Perhaps, the speaker believed that the majority in his audience (male geeks) is longingly dreaming of impressing such “girls” and assumed that none of the women in the audience (mostly female geeks) would see herself as such a “girl”, would rather be amused to see their male peers treated as simpletons in their relations with women.

    c) In recent years I noticed with wonderment a growing trend. Mature women refer to themselves as girls while expressing themselves in a girlish manner. Why would they do this? Are they trying to appear less threatening to the growing number of socially insecure men who, as one of my female friends in Taiwan suggested, “cannot handle smart, independent women”? If that is so then enforced speech control surely will not stop this unfortunate development.

    4. Is it harassment when in the course of a short joke session at a technical conference “a single still photo of a Playboy model” is shown twice? Such a photo is not art probably. But is it pornography? The Playboy magazine is freely available, may be displayed at public places and its photos are part of popular culture.

    And here the enforcement clause: “Participants asked to stop any harassing behaviour are expected to comply immediately”.

    5. Who defines what behaviour constitutes harassment? The LGBTQ community and geek feminists as here deduced from the content of this article? Who judges the validity of a complaint? A representative of the conference organiser who is untrained in the matter or some dedicated behaviour police? Is censorship the most effective form to change behaviour?

    Let me suggest a list of “Do this” that everyone can follow on their own volition without the need of an arbitrator and an enforcer on-site, such avoiding all the problems hinted at above.

    1. If a behaviour, a verbal expression or a depiction irks you, try to tone down your sensibilities and exert some tolerance.
    2. If you still cannot put up with the discomfort, retreat into a space that is save for you.
    3. If you find that the issue is severe and needs to be addressed, try to engage the offending party in a constructive debate.
    4. However, if you experience illegal harassment, report it to the police.

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