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25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women

25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women

Posted Feb 5, 2013 15:15 UTC (Tue) by duffy (guest, #31787)
In reply to: 25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women by shmget
Parent article: 25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women

> "You may have convinced yourself of this quite well, but my personal
> experience as well as the experience of many of my female colleagues begs > to differ. Do you think we're lying?"

> Are you saying that Open Source Communities discriminate _more_ than the
> general population against women ?

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. The male:female ratio in the industry is much better than in open source. The male:female ratio in my computer science program and many others is much better than in open source.


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25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women

Posted Feb 5, 2013 15:44 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Seconded. When I worked in the proprietary software industry, about 40% of my fellow developers were women. Find a free software company with similar figures...

25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women

Posted Feb 5, 2013 17:06 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I was at a Perl conference last year and one of the training companies had a short presentation on this very thing, with similar numbers. Their training classes for Perl were around 40/60 like you've seen in industry but attendance to conferences and participation upstream was more like 5/95. They were trying to advertise and get more people so that conference participation more closely reflected the reality of the community.

I don't think that many people understand how much of an outsider, how uncomfortable and awkward it is to be the one who is obviously different (gender, race, etc.), how that discourages participation and how encouraging people to be role models can make an environment friendlier and encourage participation.

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