Politics of Open Source Conference
http://politicsofopensource.jitp.net/program
"Women in Free/Open Source Software Development" - Hanna Wallach
Women in software: 28% in closed source vs. 2% in open source
number came out of FLOSSPOLS, EU Study,
Qual/Quan study (online survey 1,541 participants)
Results: active (but unconscious) exclusion: "jokes" about women, women used as nontechnical 'typical' user - i.e. Aunt Tilly used as strawman
Beard distinguishes you as a 'hacker'
Typical tasks:
Men: Technical tasks (code writing, testing, bug reports, etc.)
Women: Social tasks (documentation, org events, translation, etc.)
Grassroots projects:
Debian GNU/Linux, 4 out of 900 Debian developers are women, 8 in the entire history of Debian.
Was the distinction on tasks based on the closed-source world? If so, it explains why few women are in OSS, because FLOSS doesn't hire people to write documentation - we generate it on-the-fly via mailing lists and questions - if there's documentation at all.
Posted by: D Robert | May 06, 2010 at 12:33
one reason was that companies value and hires a diverse workforce. FLOSS communities are too male driven
Posted by: john | May 06, 2010 at 13:33