Women in Free Software, by Fernanda G. Weiden (Groklaw)

Posted Sep 12, 2005 20:27 UTC (Mon) by thomask (guest, #17985) [Link]

"a community in which more than 50% of the total world population doesn't participate"

Honestly. About 99% of the world population doesn't participate in the OSS "arena". Or rather about 1% does.

Maybe this isn't correct: remember that "participation" isn't limited to development. People who use the stuff are mostly doing us a favour, especially if they submit bug-reports. Who says women aren't _using_ free software? While I agree that chaps should be welcoming to female developers, I'd always thought that software development was something that men did much more of than women; whether proprietary or free. It's one of those old social phenomena, in the same way that we don't get loads of female politicians. Can anyone here imagine either the political arena or the OSS arena being dominated by the fairer sex?

They're welcome to it though.

Posted Sep 13, 2005 3:13 UTC (Tue) by landley (subscriber, #6789) [Link]

I've noticed that men tend to get excited about interacting with tools and
women tend to get excited about interacting with other people.

Yeah, this is all just a matter of degree. But when you get four or five
sigmas from the norm, a matter of degree becomes pretty important. Open
source development is self-selected, and the core developers are the
fraction of 1% of the population with borderline autism. We're the people
who would spend six months building a scale model of the eiffel tower out
of popsicle sticks in our garage. Alone.

Hacking is not a particularly social activity. Our mailing lists
coordinate our work but the _work_ is what's important. "Shut up and show
me the code." Our social interaction tends to be fairly brutal (as Al
Viro and Christoph Hellwig demonstrate). Better code wins, and a
maintainer who picks code because he likes the person who submitted it is
doing a disservice to the project.

I've known plenty of women who like to program, but not a lot willing to
lock themselves in their room for 18 months straight focusing on it to the
exclusion of all else. And this is not a deficiency in them, it
highlights the fact that those of us who do (and who take it for granted
that this is the only real way to get good at it) are _abnormal_.

Open source programmers are driven to obsess over tools in a way that
makes Tim Allen look like an amateur rather than a stereotype. Previous
generations rebuilt old carbeurators, we program computers. Anybody can
look at "Text Mode Quake" or "Doom as a system adminsitration
tool" (google for it) and say "that's sick but cool!". But we could
actually see ourselves personally spending months implementing something
totally useless like that, just because it is cool.

So if it's maybe four sigmas from the norm for men to be this obsessively
interested in digital tools, and more like six sigmas for women to act
like this... (And this is before any "boys' club" pressures come up.)

One thing to do is find groups obsessively interested in _other_people_,
and see what the gender balance looks like there. What are all the social
butterflies doing? (I'm, unfortunately, the last person to ask...)