Open Source and women: “Women in open source mini-conference”

The Southern California Linux Exposition yesterday guested a mini-conference on women in the free/open source software community.

Stormy Peters, formerly founder and manager of the Open Source Program Office at HP, co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation, and now working at OpenLogic, said that women are less than 2% of open source software developers, explained that:

while indeed a minority of information technology workers were women (roughly 20%), an even more staggering minority — to the tune of 1.5% — of free software contributors were women. The reasons given for this disparity were many and mostly related to cultural roles and expectations for women in the western world. “Alpha dog” behavior, posturing, backbiting, and mysogyny were listed as common and unfortunate social habits among free software programmers, and throughout the day the issue of how to deal with this behavior was approached from several different angles.

Jean T. Anderson, an IBM employee and an Apache Derby project comitter and the Apache DB Project PMC Chair, stated that Apache is not about code, but about community. She outlined the most significant barriers to female free/open source software participation:

  • Women frequently don’t know how to get started with a project.
    .
  • They are afraid of looking stupid.
    .
  • They don’t want to be flamed on the public mailing lists or IRC.
    .
  • The feel that they do not speak English well enough to participate.
    .
  • They are uncomfortable with publicly accessible and archived email lists.
    .
  • They are not comfortable “selling” their ideas to the group.
    .
  • Sexist jokes and demeaning comments create a negative atmosphere for women.

The agenda wasn’t fully formed one month ago, but  it’s clear that this mini-conference was a success, and I invite you to read more about it.

Related Posts