LFCS: The Outreach Program for Women [LWN.net]

LFCS: The Outreach Program for Women

Posted May 3, 2013 10:32 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106)
Parent article: LFCS: The Outreach Program for Women

I applaud the success, and I don't want to start another flame war on this topic, but there's something about this report that bothers me: what does it have to do with women?

It seems like the report here could be summarized "Outreach program results in more participation." I'm sure it helps that the OPW is run in a deliberately non-sexist way, but otherwise, and based purely on this summary here, it seems as if the program has no gender-specific features.

I would have liked to hear about that point of differentiation between this and any other projects attempting to increase participation in free software projects, and also what if any conclusions had been drawn about why women are under-represented to begin with and what avenues were effective in overcoming this problem other than outreach in general, which (hopefully) always has measurable success.

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LFCS: The Outreach Program for Women

Posted May 3, 2013 23:41 UTC (Fri) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link]

I'd recommend that you watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5lGKcDQCCs .... It's not that the work that the participants do is in any way different, it's that the program specifically reaches out to women interns, and they tailor the marketing accordingly, based on figuring out what research indicates does not draw female applicants to the existing, more general internship programs (like GSoC). In other words, it's the outreach part of OPW that is more specific; one would assume that similar results could be had by tailoring other outreach programs to other populations that are not well-represented in FOSS projects. Figuring out how the tailoring should differ is the tricky part (well, that plus getting good mentors for the participants, of course). It would be interesting to hear more specifics about how the program managers adjusted messaging and things in the relaunch, but that would probably require a much longer session.

But outreach is always hard, and there are certainly lessons to be learned for every outreach program about the benefits of being specific and asking participants what does and doesn't work.

Nate

LFCS: The Outreach Program for Women

Posted May 3, 2013 23:59 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

and also what if any conclusions had been drawn about why women are under-represented to begin with

According to the article, they deliberately avoided doing that, and that distinguished their effort from typical efforts in this area.

IIUC, they imagined a bunch of potential barriers to women and tried to remove each without assuming that it was the actual reason for underrepresentation. It seems like a suboptimal use of limited resources to me, but at least it probably avoided a lot of arguing.