Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ? [LWN.net]

Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:08 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
In reply to: Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ? by nix
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

I can't find any decent statistics right now, but I suspect that you'll find striking similarities to the rate of males/females which have graduated computer sciense with honors.

I also suspect that this applies to some minorities as well.

(At least this was rather true when I graduated almost 10 years ago).

And this is before one extra factor comes into play: "devoting extra time to the family". Like it or not, women are more likely than men to reduce the work load in order to raise the kids. Unless you claim that much of the free software is developed by "students" and thus this factor is not as strong.

(You can like it or not. You can think of ways for changing that. But those are outside the scope of the current discussion)

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Ok. If the issue is "problems faced by women in FOSS" then where is the list ?

Posted Oct 2, 2007 2:45 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

>I can't find any decent statistics right now, but I suspect that you'll find striking similarities to the rate of males/females which have graduated computer sciense with honors.

I don't have statistics on graduation with honors, in particular, either. It's not a well-defined term between institutions, even. So here are some other statistics for the US, from the same report that we discussed a few days ago in the other thread: http://lwn.net/Articles/251569/

Bachelor's awarded, CS: between 28% and 37% female over the last two decades.
Enrolled graduate students, CS: between 20% and 30% female over the last few decades
Master's awarded, CS: between 25% and 34% female over the last few decades
PhD's awarded, CS: between 15% and 19% female over the last few decades.

All of these numbers are wildly larger than the percentage of females in FOSS coding, which is in the 1-2% range.

>And this is before one extra factor comes into play: "devoting extra time to the family".

This is like the 5th "extra factor" you've made up as previous ones have been shot down, but anyway. This one, for a change, is almost certainly real, but I still dispute its significance.

Suppose that the "natural rate" for women in FOSS would be 15%, because that's the smallest of the numbers mentioned above, i.e. we can be pretty sure it's a low estimate. (In fact, having children is a reasonably common reason for women to drop out of PhD programs, so it already includes some of the effect that you are claiming accounts for the difference.)

Suppose that the "actual rate" for women in FOSS is 2%, because that's on the high side of the statistics I've seen. With those assumptions and if I didn't screw up the arithmetic somewhere, that then means that your "extra factor" needs to explain the loss of *87%* of potential female contributors -- probably more in reality.

Here I also don't have statistics (anyone want to chime in?), but I'm pretty sure that far fewer than 87% of techie women even have kids, never mind having a sufficiently disproportionate share of raising them to keep them from being hobby programmers. I base this intuition on my intuition that way fewer than 87% of the male FOSS contributors have kids, and presumably kid-having is equally distributed between the male and female portions of the population.

...so, uh, do you have a 6th try at explaining why it is like totally not the men's fault not even the ones who like to harass women for fun?