Will the Women in Open Source Please Raise Their Hands: Part One
Matt Arnold and I were recently discussing the low numbers of women in the Python, Rails, and Linux communities, an issue that I've been puzzling over for quite some time. I go to a lot of Python conferences in particular, and I've noticed that the ratio of women to men is approximately 1 woman to every 40-50 guys -- and at least a handful of
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The OpenSource community has a lot more virtual dick wars, or at least appears to from the very biased view of, well, me. I expect that there are lots of valid psychological reasons why, starting with "if you don't put a price tag on the worth of the finished software, then how do you measure 'success' for the people responsible for bringing the software together?"
My own programming skills are pretty weak, but I have had occasion to search for answers to particular problems, and pretty much every time I went near an OSS forum/blog/whatever, I had to dig through a lot of smug "I am better than [you|everyone|this one particular programmer/community working on a similar product]" bullshit to get to the answer.
Where exactly that turns from "scare off newbies" to "scare off more women than men" I am not sure, but I know that nowadays, I tend to scroll through Google search results looking for forums for paid software instead of open-source software. Perhaps it is that women have a lower tolerance for it. Perhaps it is that more women are newbies, or likely to seek help on problems earlier in their programming career than men. Perhaps it is a coincidence and not causal at all. Perhaps I am an anomaly and most women don't notice or don't care.
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