An Open Letter to the Open Source Community

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 10:56:18AM +0100, Andy wrote:

> 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.

Ok, so the argument that men are more fundamentally interested in open 
source development than women is a common one. Unfortunately, it's not 
one that's terribly well supported by the facts. As one of the most 
obvious examples, look at last year's applicant ratio for the Gnome 
summer of code projects - it was something like 150:0. When they instead 
advertised an extra project aimed purely at women, they had no trouble 
finding 6 to take up the projects.

While it's difficult to draw absolute conclusions from this, it's very 
suggestive. The strongest suggestion it makes is that women are 
potentially interested in what we're doing, but we're failing to attract 
them to it. Perhaps this is because we're not advertising opportunities 
well, or perhaps it's because our community doesn't seem attractive to 
women. I suspect it's partly both, but the second is certainly a real 
effect and it *does* discourage women.

The big problem is that it's not always easy to notice that you're 
saying something offensive. With hindsight suggesting that a 
configuration file being rewritten is as bad as rape is quite clearly 
going to be interpreted as implying that rape isn't a big deal, but that 
doesn't mean that someone who posts that on planet is consciously 
discriminating against women. And it's not just women - there are many 
different cultures that we can accidently discourage. Jokes about the 
holocaust would probably be considered to be similarly poor taste.

Perhaps removing any social issues that discourage women won't result in 
1:1 parity. However, if it results in us having more contributors then 
it's worthwhile regardless. There's no advantage in discouraging them.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org