As I see it

That's not the case. There's no reason to believe that the majority of people in the open source community are sexist. The concern is that there's a minority who engage in sexist behaviour and a larger body (perhaps a majority) who either don't recognise this behaviour or who aren't concerned about it. To deny that this behaviour exists is unrealistic. Anecdotes don't provide statistics, but when they're describing verifiable events they do prove whether or not something has occured. So really, what you're disagreeing with is the scale of the problem. And that's fine. I don't have hard statistical data to back my belief that it's fairly significant. You don't have hard statistical data to back up your belief that it isn't.

That's disappointing to some extent, but it makes little difference. The changes in behaviour that would help here are simple things like not using sexually loaded language, not making off-colour jokes in a technical environment, not turning a conference into a sexualised environment by hiring women in short skirts purely to hand out flyers. These things cost approximately nothing, but doing them removes a great deal of the perceived sexist environment and means that anyone engaging in more flagrantly sexist behaviour is more obvious.

Will that magically get the number of women involved in free software up to 20%? No, of course not. But if there is a barrier to reaching that figure, then the onus should be on the people who want to maintain that barrier to justify it.

But let's get back to where this thread started. "Women and men don't enjoy the same things" would explain these ratios only if *almost no* women enjoyed software development, followed by a discussion of whether people do things for love or money. That's not the point. Let's say that 10% of men involved in the software industry enjoy it enough to get involved in free software in their spare time. If the same figure were true of women then we'd have the same 20%/80% split (approx) that we see in the commercial world. Given that the actual figure is more like 2%/98%, if differing levels of innate interest are the reason then the figure for women has to be around 0.8%. Or, to put it another way, women have to be over ten times less interested in engaging in free software development than men. This seems an awfully large figure to assign to nature. Of course, if 10% is an overestimate (which it is) then the 0.8% figure drops in the same way. At which point it becomes pretty obvious that "Women and men don't enjoy the same things" would explain these ratios only if *almost no* women enjoyed software development is true.

So "Men and women are just interested in different things" doesn't seem to hold. You're being accused of derailing because you've managed to turn a discussion of sexism in free software into an argument about whether or not people write software because they're paid to do it or not. That might well be an interesting discussion to have, but there's no realistic way that it's relevant to this issue. And by changing the topic you imply that the original topic isn't the important thing here. Which isn't a great way to reassure people that their concerns are being taken seriously, which in turn isn't a great way to convince them that they'll be able to fit in. Which is where we came in.