[UbuntuWomen] article in the Dutch Linux Magazine

[Akkana Peck]

akke hoekstra writes:
> I m busy reading and happy to say I allready have the Flosspoll on my
> computer. Roughly said there's about 25% female workers in closed source and
> something like 1-2 % in open source. I don t enjoy numbers like that too
> much. Hope they re not true but didn t find any better research on this
> subject.

Where is that in the FLOSSPOLS study?
I just downloaded the only study I see on FLOSSPOLS (the 2006
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf)
and I don't see where they're studying numbers of women participants
at all. What I see is that on page 4, they say:

  ... an earlier study (Ghosh et all 2002, 2004) revealed a
  significant discrepancy in the proportion of men to women. It
  showed that just about 1.5% of F/LOSS community members were
  female at that time, compared with 28% in proprietary software
  (NSF 2004). We set out to find reasons behind this ...

In other words, the FLOSSPOLS study isn't about numbers at all,
it's about reasons and motivations. The number they're quoting for
F/LOSS women comes from Ghosh, 2002; the number they're quoting for
women in proprietary software comes from a *completely different*
study, NSF 2004.  If you look up those studies and compare them,
they're using completely different methodology to come up with
their numbers (Ghosh is at
http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/FLOSS_Final4.pdf
and I don't have the the NSF study handy, but I seem to remember it
was based on a survey of members of some professional association).

I don't buy it, even a little bit. You can't take numbers from two
different polls, offered at different times to a different audience
of vastly different sizes with different incentives for participating
and compare them straight across. And even aside from comparing the
two numbers, I'm not sure I buy the Ghosh number -- there are all
sorts of reasons why women might have been underrepresented in a
voluntary online survey, and I'm not convinced that this result that
everyone quotes like it's gospel has any relation to the real
numbers of women involved with open source.

	...Akkana