My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 23:14 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338)
In reply to: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet) by tzafrir
Parent article: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

About the 28%, I've unfortunately never worked in the proprietary software world, so I don't have anecdotes; I have to fall back on data.

As for job security, I have no idea what you're talking about. My experience was, play around with free software some in high school, somewhat more in college, and then when I got my first job -- aged 20-21, with no degree or even relevant classes -- that record let me start at $60k/year, working from home and with no imposed schedule. I'm not the only one to have noticed that free software hacking pays off pretty good.

But I don't have real data here, unfortunately -- of course, neither do you. (Is there even reason to believe that purported job security is a major factor in attracting FOSS hackers, male *or* female?) That's the real point, isn't it? Your post isn't about job security; that's just an excuse you made up so you could stop thinking about whether women are being discriminated against, and go back to the comfortable status quo.

(Note I haven't claimed that women actually *are* discriminated against; but I would like to know one way or the other. You just seem to want to make the question go away. That so many people are popping up in these threads with this goal only makes me more inclined to believe that the discrimination is real.)

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My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 27, 2007 0:35 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Unfortunetly I am unable to find that specific data point of 28% women in the proprietary software industry. I do find some general data regarding the employment "Mathematical and Computer Scientists". I suspect that those also include people in the Academia.

And if you don't have real data, then where is thi data point of 1.5 % from?

It is from a different research.

I just don't assume in advance that there is something that needs correcting. Is there something that needs correcting? please demonstrate.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 27, 2007 19:14 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

>Unfortunetly I am unable to find that specific data point of 28% women in the proprietary software industry. I do find some general data regarding the employment "Mathematical and Computer Scientists".

Yes, it seems to be from table H-1 on page 177, "Computer and mathematical occupations". Page 180 puts female participation in "Engineering occupations" at 10.9%, lower but still dramatically higher than in FOSS.

>I suspect that those also include people in the Academia.

page 181: "Science and engineering occupations do not include postsecondary teachers." Not that it matters; the same report also states in table H-23, page 247, that the US has only 1030 female PhDs working at universities as "computer and information scientists", as compared to the >400,000 in the 28% number. (Also, why the heck do you care if it includes people in academia, presumably people in academia would be good candidates for FOSS participation too?)

It may include occupations other than computer programmer per se; it's possible the FLOSSPOLs people were a little hasty in calling that 28% the same as programmers per se, and I can't immediately find any way to get a more accurate number other than downloading the full US Census datasets and crunching them myself. However, note that page 180 puts female participation in "Engineering occupations" at 10.9% -- these are non-computer engineers, who I doubt have substantially *more* female participation than computer engineers (and this certainly does not include anything like graphic designers or what-have-you). Note that while lower than 28%, it is still dramatically larger than any numbers anyone gets for FOSS.

>And if you don't have real data, then where is thi data point of 1.5 % from?

I said I didn't have real data on job security. The 1.5% comes from... real data.

>It is from a different research.

Yes -- research performed in the EU, also replicated at Stanford (Stanford found 1.6%): http://www.stanford.edu/group/floss-us/report/FLOSS-US-Re...

If one is worried about bias from surveys (maybe women hate responding to them or something, not that there's any reason to think that), we can also look at the demographics of existing well-defined groups of FOSS developers.

Gentoo developers: "Less than 1% are female" (http://project.repogirl.net/doku.php) (IIRC they have 3, one of whom is transgendered and was male at the time he became a developer?)

Ubuntu seems to be ahead of the game with 2.4% (i.e., 7 total): http://www.eskar.dk/andreas/output/PersonalProfile.HTM

The Google Summer of Code mentors meeting for 2006 had approximately 100 attendees, of which 2 were female.

I'll also note that as far as I know, there are exactly zero women working on any of the FOSS projects I work on, out of some dozens of participants.

The 1-2% finding seems to be very robust.

>I just don't assume in advance that there is something that needs correcting. Is there something that needs correcting? please demonstrate.

Some of us find it pretty obvious without any numbers -- we find the blatant sexism displayed by many of the posters in this forum, for instance, to be a problem all by itself (or if you want numbers, note the in FLOSSPOLS ~75% of women respondents have observed discrimination against women -- though only ~20% of the men have, presumably because there were no women around for them to see being discriminated against). The implicit sexism in the posters who continually find new excuses each time their previous one is knocked down is also rather grating. But I've shown a whole pile of numbers now too, and every piece of data I can find gives percentages that are a factor of 10 lower than any comparable groups I can think of.