Women in Open Source

In response to a Google Summer of Code blog post which celebrated:

Consistently between 2005 and 2007, approximately 4% of SoCers are women. While we'd like to see that number increase over time, we're still quite happy that it is double the usual percentage of women reported in the overall open source developer population.

I wrote:

There's nothing I can think of about coding that males, by any stereotype you choose, would be better at than females.

It's worth noting that women are already graduating colleg at higher rates than men.

There's no way to look at these numbers but to conclude something, somewhere is wrong with what we're doing, as open source communities.

Four percent is not good-- we are new people to open source coding, our group should be at least half female to start eroding the imbalance.

The Drupal projects have I think just one woman out of twenty– which technically means we're raising the average, but that's no comfort.

I'm normally more concerned about class inequality than sex inequality, which after all isn't compounded across generations the same way. And I still think there needs to be Google Summer of Code type outreach to people who in particular *don't* go to college. Open source provides degree-free opportunities to make a living and contribute to society like few things I can think of. (It may similarly help close the gender pay gap.)

We need outreach, and perhaps a more encouraging culture for those who do get involved. (Drupal does do well at this, with women coders among the leaders -- add1sun and webchick to name some names.)

The importance of broadening involvement of disadvantaged groups and women isn't just for their sake– it's important to open source: to have more people; to have people with different needs in a system that develops software useful to communities in part by meeting ones own needs; and to reinforce the best parts of a sharing-based ecology from groups historically better at sharing.

(Where I was trying to go with that is that we need a general "Yes, you can" approach to involving people in open source -- there are significant and strange psychological barriers to programming for anyone, for instance I don't even imagine doing desktop applications even though I'm sure I could -- with a particular attempt to contact women and poor and any group we're not reaching.)

(Google did note a particular outreach program to women with GNOME, and asked for ideas, which I guess I wasn't much help with.)