Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really?? [LWN.net]

Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really??

Posted Aug 27, 2009 16:10 UTC (Thu) by pyellman (guest, #4997)
In reply to: Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really?? by mjg59
Parent article: FSF to host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software

If you'll allow me, Bruce, let me see if I can help simplify your position for the sake of Matt and others:

Men are more inclined to be "tinkerers" than women. Period. "Where's Dad?" "Oh, he's down in the basement fiddling with the broken volume control." Interest in free software development, progress, etc., is a classic tinkerer's refuge. In fact, the same phenomenon could be observed about the MS Windows enthusiast community, especially in its heyday in the 90's.

I'm absolutely, 100% positive that even if you removed most or all the "barriers" you and others see to women's participation in this activity and community, their participation rate will NEVER come close to their representation in the general population, or even in various other technical fields -- unless, of course, you and others are talking about fundamentally recasting the nature of free software development and community into something that does not appeal to the tinkerer, in which case your success would of course be self-defeating.

This is in no way intended to suggest that I think people in free software, or people anywhere for that matter, shouldn't make efforts to be more polite and welcoming.

Peter Yellman

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Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really??

Posted Aug 28, 2009 4:44 UTC (Fri) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

> I'm absolutely, 100% positive that even if you removed most or all the "barriers" you and others see to women's participation in this activity and community, their participation rate will NEVER come close to their representation in the general population, or even in various other technical fields

That may or may not be true. Given that in the mean time those barriers (I am not sure why you felt the need to use scare quotes there?) have been exhaustingly described, demonstrated, and clearly *are* driving many people away, I don't see how relevant the possibility is. The only way to find out whether it's true or not is to fix the stuff we need to fix anyway.

I also don't see how you can possibly be so sure -- to be that certain about such a complicated issue, you must either have information that the rest of us are missing, or be basing your judgement on something other than empirical reality.

But here's a more specific question: science is more or less distilled tinkering. If women are so incurious, then why are the technical sciences so comparatively full of women, including computer science?

> This is in no way intended to suggest that I think people in free software, or people anywhere for that matter, shouldn't make efforts to be more polite and welcoming.

Good to hear.

Women don't have the same passion for open source men do? Really??

Posted Aug 28, 2009 13:19 UTC (Fri) by Skud (guest, #59840) [Link]

Your "NEVER" statement is demonstrably true.

Dreamwidth (http://dreamwidth.org/) is a fork of Livejournal's code, which differs from LJ as an open source project primarily in the fact that it values diversity and welcomes and supports anyone who wants to develop for it.

The percentage of women working on the LJ code is unknown, but is certainly small (I would guess under 10%, probably under 5%); the percentage of women working on the DW code is 75% of its 40-something developers.