[clug] Open Source Software's Dirty Little Secret

[Jacinta Richardson]

There's one really big factor that seems to always get ignored in reasonable
responses like your email:

	SOME OF THE WOMEN THAT WE DO HAVE IN FOSS ARE LEAVING FOSS

If you were in an online Warhammer 40k community that had say 2% women
participation and over time you got to know many of those awesome women and
appreciated playing against them, and then you found that many of them were
leaving without being replaced; some noisily pointing at pervasive sexism others
just disappearing... would you not want to discuss why?  Perhaps re-evaluate
behaviour you thought was normal and reasonable?

Women are leaving FOSS in droves.  At many of the user group meetings I go to,
I'm often the only girl, or one of two if I'm lucky, but where there used to be
more.  At several of the conferences I go to, numbers are declining or at best
staying static.  On the very female-friendly mailing lists I'm on I see women
saying goodbye as they leave the field of IT altogether for something better,
where they don't feel they're always having to prove themselves in endless
pissing matches.  On the other mailing lists I see discussions that go around
and around about whether sexism is actually a problem.

There were women who thought Kirrily Robert's talk at OSCON this year
(http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon-keynote/)
was a note of defeat rather than a call of triumph.  It was an awesome talk, but
 it's an awesome talk on a topic than many of the women in FOSS have been trying
to fix for up to 20 years now, and some of the responses to the talk show that
the efforts of those 20 years might as well have been wasted:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/oscon-standing-out-in-the-crow.html


Although it's not perfect, we can draw *some* comparison between interest in
paid word and interest in a hobby.  Using the numbers from the article, if 28%
of proprietary software participants are female then 72% are male (ignoring
non-binary gender issues completely for the sake of simplicity).

If men and women had the same conversion rate to interest in doing FOSS for a
hobby then we'd expect FOSS contributors to be about 28% women, even though *a
lot of people are willing to do jobs that they aren't passionate about*.  It
might be that only 20%[1] of all people who work on software as a job also work
on FOSS, but it seems really weird to me that would turn out to be 19% of men
and 1% of women, rather than something approaching 15% of men and 5% of women.

[1] - figure completely made up and just used only for demonstrative purposes.

If the numbers in industry vs the numbers in FOSS were more similar I'd agree
that lack of interest might be at fault.  Alternately if we had no other
information to make judgements on then I might agree.  But the numbers aren't
the same, and we do have a lot more information.