Women in FOSS
I had hoped my next blog post would be about IcedTea6 1.3… soon enough, with some kick a** features. Promise.
I had lunch with an old professor yesterday, and he informed us that the number of female students entering the CS program is on the steady decline . I was surprised, because no one can really pinpoint why. He sent me this link on 10 ways to attract women to your free software project.
I can’t say I agree with all the 10 ways listed in the article, but I am biased since I already work with FOSS. I can’t see why moving from mailing-lists to forums, wikis instead of version controlled archives, high-level programming languages etc would help. Seems like a lot of hand-holding, and I wish it weren’t the case. Maybe we are more visual creatures and forums as opposed to mailing-lists would help, maybe less women are interested in working outside of the 9-5 chunk of the day (FOSS is sometimes a 24 hour/7 days a week thing, and you will find yourself dreaming about your project more often than not)… who knows the reason. Maybe these “10 ways” are all plausible, but I think the best we can do is make sure it is a genderless environment, and everyone is treated equally.
The comparison to how women learning sewing was really quite… something. o_O
As a woman who has been involved in FOSS for a while now, I’d be offended or turned off by most of the measures they describe. Some of the things that I like about FOSS are the non-hand-holding environment and the fact that there’s no expectation that you’ll personally praise people for every little thing they do.
I believe that most FOSS communities (certainly the ones I’ve been involved in) do not engage in old-fashioned sexism (discounting women as incapable, focusing on a woman’s appearance) but instead treat women as human beings. So I have difficulty believing research that finds that the “community’s process is exceedingly male-centric and hostile to anyone who doesn’t fit that mold—a problem confirmed by the few pioneering women who do participate” because it runs completely contrary to my own experiences. In fact, the only places where I saw myself in that list is my preference for Perl and my desire for the underlying system to ‘just work’ so I can get on with coding. I don’t fit most of the stereotypes used to describe women (prefer working cooperatively, etc). I feel as if my experiences and preferences are constantly being discounted by people who have a fixed idea of what women want and like.
What if: different jobs, projects, and methods of organization appeal to different sorts of people, and personality traits are not equally distributed by gender…is it then wrong to create something which appeals to some people and not others, even if that results in some lack of gender balance? Remember, if you restructure in order to appeal to another group, you risk losing the interest of the people who were initially attracted to it, because it is impossible to find something which appeals to everyone.
I guess I just don’t agree with the premise of the article that it’s a good thing to get more women involved in FOSS. I believe that it’s a good thing to get more people involved in FOSS, and if people are feeling unwelcome because of their gender (or race, or sexuality, or religion), that’s a real problem. If people aren’t interested because of their personality traits, it’s a non-issue for me.
Whoa, I didn’t know Greg was old
I agree with you that some of these things seem a bit contrived to me, but of course I’m a guy, so maybe women would perceive it differently.
I agree with you though, that it seems to me that the most important factor is just not having “jerks” on the project, who make sexist or demeaning remarks and make everyone feel awkward.
That’s depressing news to hear. I’m always disappointed by how few female students take CS here at Sheffield, either at undergraduate or postgraduate level. This male dominance leads to an abnormal working environment and one which can lead to things becoming very male-oriented. The female students we do have generally tend to be more sociable, and usually they’ll be the ones willing to ask for help in lab sessions and such.
I love to think there was a step-by-step guide to solving this kind of issue, but I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s an interesting read though, and the general gist seems to be to make things more inviting and welcoming for people generally. Being more sociable and genial towards our fellow developers is something positive we need to strive towards anyway. I tend to think Classpath already does better than some in this regard, but we could do better.
As for forums and such, I’m not really sure. I’ve never used them that much, but for me I think we’d need some kind of aggregate to replace mailing lists, in the same way that our mailbox performs this function. With mailing lists, a good mail client could go a long way to provide a forum-like interface to them; most of what is mentioned in the article could be added by a clever client that associates important metadata (past posts, trust of others, etc.) with the mail address of the sender.
All great points.
I think an interesting point that my old/ex professor, Greg Wilson, made was that there is a need to attract young girls to the industry well before they start thinking about university. While these organizations formed for women in IT are great, they are only attracting those already involved. What can we do to get high schools making it more of an option? I attended an all-girls high school, and came across an interesting statistic that said the chances are higher for a person from a single-sex school to get involved in a program which is dominated by the opposite sex. Are girls in the younger grades too intimidated by computers and boys? probably. Now we need to fix that.
I meant to mention in my last comment that if there’s anything I could do to help with 1.3, let me know. I’m keen to get a matching 1.8 release of the 7 tree out after that.
Reading Anne’s comments, I can’t help thinking I must have read the article without proscribing myself to any of the two gender roles. If I had, I think I’d have been quite offended at being stereotyped as anti-social and uncooperative. Instead, reading it without these stereotypical undertones, it provides some interesting thoughts on ways we can make FOSS more sociable for all.
Another thing about the forums; I don’t see how they’d work offline. All the ones I’ve seen have been centralised on some server, whereas we already have ways of picking up mail and browsing it leisurely offline, which is useful for limited connections. Also, I don’t think it’s any less prone to flame wars and such than mailing lists. With both, it’s really the community around it that decides this, not the means.
Just saw Lillian’s post now…
‘Are girls in the younger grades too intimidated by computers and boys?’
Thinking back to when I was at school (mixed), it was certainly the case that you’d get some of the boys giving the impression that they knew more about computers than they did. I don’t know whether this is what put the girls off or not, but the non-compulsory computer activities, like after-school sessions, were certainly dominated by the boys.