An Open Letter to the Open Source Community

[Tristan Wibberley]

On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 15:59 -0400, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> On 22/05/07, Andy <stude.list at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > This may offend some people, but then so does pretty much everything
> > nowadays.
> 
> Sometimes the offence offered up is worthwhile, other times it is not!
> 
> > I am not at all surprised that there is a low number of women in Open
> > Source/Free Software/GNU/Linux/Ubuntu (covering everything here ;)).
> > The problem with Linux and to a certain extent Free software in
> > general is it needs a higher level of skill and knowledge to use. Yes
> > many of you will now yell those immortal words "Linux is user
> > friendly" and I agree to an extent. But installing ANY OS is not a
> > simple task to some people.
> >
> > Many people do not know what OS they run let alone how to change it.
> > Neither do many of them know about open source.
> >
> > So what has this to do with the number of women in Linux/FLOSS. Well
> > in my experience women tend to be less well educated in the field. Go
> > and have a look around some Universities Computing departments, look
> > at many of the CS courses. Notice something? The ratio of Men to Women
> > isn't anywhere near 1:1.
> 
> Intuitively such thinking makes sense, however, there's a flaw in the
> logic if the ratios Melissa's reported for proprietary and OSS
> development hold true (28% and 1.5%, respectively).

I think they hold true for proprietary software "companies" versus open
source "development teams" but not for proprietary development teams
versus open source development teams.  I think about 2.7% women is
realistic in proprietary environments. The difference between
open-source and proprietary is that open source is a social environment
where gender proportion differences can make it unpleasant for women
while the workplace is a non-social environment where normal interaction
is naturally put on hold.


> Yes, in the past (and, perhaps even now -- don't know) there were a
> disproportionate number of men being trained in computer science
> departments, and, that would result in fewer women entering the field.

You normally enter this field before/during early puberty and are
trained in it only some years later. If you want more women doing
software engineering/computer science you need to interest them at that
early age.

Same as getting men into midwifery, not many of us do it because we're
not interested in it when we're forming our idea's about what sort of
person we are.

-- 
Tristan Wibberley

This is my own opinion and not derived from any opinion of my employer.