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

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 5:02 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338)
In reply to: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet) by djabsolut
Parent article: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

>Furthermore, nowhere did I state that "1% should be the natural number". I sincerely doubt that the current participation of women is that low.

It's starkly accurate, actually -- all the measurements I've seen have been in the 0.5% to 2% range. For instance, the EU-funded FLOSSPOLS project calculated 1.5% -- as compared to 28% of proprietary software developers. Basically, it's about as near zero as we could get it if we tried. Their results also accord with numbers from various large FOSS projects that have official "maintainer" statuses, my personal experience, etc.

>my argument: a large proportion of women are not interested in computing or engineering due to the nature of the work.

This argument, alas, is completely untenable when the percentage for FOSS is more than *ten times* lower than for otherwise similar proprietary programming jobs.

It would be nice if the percentage were higher, and explainable by the kinds of factors you cite -- such a world would not demand we ask ourselves uncomfortable questions and face difficult facts. But it is not the world we live in.

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My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 9:45 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (3 responses)

28% in the proprietary software industry is a bit conter to my experince. But it is also influenced by the higher job security. Being a free software developer is not a very promising career.

So the natre of the work is indeed rather different.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 23:14 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (2 responses)

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.)

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 27, 2007 0:35 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

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.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 21:35 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (3 responses)

I wonder how did they got that 28% number - in my experience it's around 10%, maybe 15%. Did they count the secretaries (I mean assistants) too? Actually the male:female ratio was around 10% at the university too, so I can't imagine how it would be any better in the industry.

Bye,NAR

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 23:36 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (2 responses)

The 28% number is from the US National Science Foundation; the report is freely available, if you want to track down details of how they counted: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf0...

The same report has many details on diplomas at various level of university, as well; as far as I can tell, in all cases women are far above 10%. Maybe your numbers are just wrong, maybe you are in a place that is more backwards than the USA (are there such places?); no idea.

Also, though I know saying this is futile: the sexist crack about secretaries was unnecessary and vile.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 27, 2007 7:16 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

Yeah well. I work in a professional software-development company. We're in Norway, where in general female participation in IT is quite a bit higher than in the USA.

We're currently 22 people. 5 are female. Which makes 23%, more or less in the ballpark for professional software-development.

But those 4 women are 2 graphic designers, 1 assistant (manning the telephone, and doing simple menial work, no formal education) 1 woman doing cleaning and 1 programmer.

Which mean that among our *programmers* less than 10% are female.

Our graphic designers are very competent, do excellent work, have a solid education to back them and do a job that would be severly needed in free software too. But it's not a job that would lead them to post on the kernel mailing-list very often, even if they where doing it, which they don't.

When it comes to free software, I see no large difference between the sexes. 3 of our males are heavily into free software as users and have minor contributions, 2 additional have some experience with it. Among the females the percentage is similar, 1 of them knows free software well (though as a user, not a contributor), and 1 other has some experience with it.

A single example doesn't show anything. Just saying, from my POV I *do* see the problem that females are severly under-represented in technical work. But I *DONT* see any evidence whatsoever that free software is worse than proprietary software in this respect.

If anything, the female participation in the LUGs both here in Stavanger and in Bergen is *higher* than that. Not high, but higher than among the technical staff at my worksplace. Perhaps in the LUGs on the order of 20-25%.

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 27, 2007 8:18 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Maybe your numbers are just wrong, maybe you are in a place that is more backwards than the USA (are there such places?); no idea.

I've worked in three different countries, visited workplaces at other three countries, even in Scandinavia which supposed to be very emancipated, still I haven't noticed that 28% percent women. I had three female bosses so far, that's more than the amount of female software developers in the current project I'm working in (~20 developers, 1 female).

Also, though I know saying this is futile: the sexist crack about secretaries was unnecessary and vile.

Unfortunately political correctness sometimes leads to decreasing sense of humour. Anyway, when I was 10 years old and we had a kind of computer class in the school (completely voluntary, at afternoons), I don't seem to remember many girls attending. I don't seem to remember that there were any girls at all, even though the teacher was a female math teacher. I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with the impoliteness of some developers: if it's not biology, then it's a socialization issue at a quite young age.

One more note: I know a couple of people personally, who work in financial jobs. Auditors, controllers, etc. All of them are female. I don't know much about that environment, but I think it's harsher than software development, after all, they work with hard money.

Bye,NAR