Discussing the Balance
August 30th, 2009
I accumulated a few links this summer about gender equity in computing, particularly in open source. The two that bear re-reading are:
- Robert Kaye reports on Kirrily Robert’s OSCON keynote “Standing Out in the Crowd“. Five years after Michelle Levesque and I looked at gender ratios in open source, the average is still only 1.5% female (though some projects, like Drupal, have reached the same 15-20% as the industry as a whole). Most of the talk was upbeat, though, as some people are working hard to address the problem.
- Maggie Fox’s “Oi! Are we invisible or something?” makes some of the same points, and offers a checklist of things conference organizers can do to help.
Just a factual correction: there are no “mainstream” open source projects that have reached the 15-20% female representation point. Drupal runs around 10% based on total community members, and is the best I know of; that number includes people who do not contribute code, however, so it doesn’t compare directly to the 1.5% from FLOSSPOLS.
There are two new projects which have > 75% female participation based on code contribution: Dreamwidth and AO3. Both are discussed in my talk.
Hey, thanks for the link and continuing the discussion!