Perpetuating Imbalance?
On March 24, a post appeared on the Code Anthem blog titled “Don’t Judge a Developer by Open Source“. Since it starts by saying that the authors are big fans of 37Signals, I skipped over it (I’m not), but when links to it started appearing elsewhere, I went back to have a read. The post’s thesis is that judging developers by looking at their open source contributions is a bad idea. I’ve been doing that for several years (and telling my students that they should contribute to open projects in order to get noticed), so I expected to disagree with the post, but that’s proving hard. In order, the author’s points are:
- It’s an arbitrary distinction.
- There are smarter ways to spend your time.
- Requiring open source contributions is sexist.
The first is moot, and the second is arguable, but the third hits home. Open source is overwhelmingly male: depending on how you count, only 1-2% of OS developers are women, compared to 12-15% in the industry as a whole [1]. That means that if OS is your selection pool, in the long run you’re going to drive the proportion of women in programming down.
My “solution” is to address the underlying imbalance by evening up gender ratios in open source, but (a) that’s going to take a long time (particularly because so many men in open source still refuse to acknowledge that there’s even a problem to address) and (b) even the way I’ve phrased it is a sign that I’m reluctant to admit the problem too. As another poster says elsewhere:
If you insist on a lot of experience in a particular male-dominated sub-culture as a prerequisite for a job, that reads as “we prefer [a subset of] men, basically, or at least people willing to work hard to minimise all the ways in which they aren’t [part of the subset of] men” even if you didn’t intend it to and even if you didn’t want it to.
I hope that course projects like those in UCOSP will prove to be a workable middle ground, i.e., a place where young programmers can build their portfolios and reputations without having to worry that some crank is going to be allowed to sneer, bully, or troll without being held accountable. We hope to know soon whether we’ll be able to run the program again this fall…
[1] The article’s 28% is much higher than any number I’ve ever seen quoted elsewhere, and the source the article cites doesn’t cite an original source itself.
I agree that it would be a problem to judge developers by participation in an activity that women largely don’t participate in. But as a thought experiment, imagine for some strange reason you were hiring a developer who had to be male. Would it then be OK to require participation in open source projects?
We don’t know why women choose not to work on open source projects, but what of men who share their (unknown) reasons? Are these men less justified in their choice? Is it OK, for example, for a woman to say “I just want to get paid for the code I write” but not for a man to say the same thing?
@John Actually, we know a lot about why women choose not to participate in open source: it ranges from not being willing to put up with “if you can’t stand being flamed, get out of the kitchen” immaturity [1] to being hit on if you have a female handle on IRC. Margolis and Fisher’s work at CMU showed that the former also drives men away, but as in other contexts (e.g., racial), these forces act more strongly on sub-groups than on the majority. This is why, for example, we see higher drop-out rates among female students in university CS programs than among male students, even when adjusted for GPA.
[1] I personally believe that some people work in open source because it’s the only place they’ve found where they can get paid and not be held accountable for their language or behavior.
Re: “The post’s thesis is that judging developers by looking at their open source contributions is a bad idea.”
I disagree. The posts thesis is that one shouldn’t hire people *solely* from specific open source communities (i.e. require new hires to have contributed to a particular OS project). This doesn’t mean OS contributions are a bad idea and the article doesn’t say so.
Personally, I think claiming that a company which hires only people with OS history is sexist is a stretch, too. There are a gazillion other reasons – other than the named three – why one might decide to hire people with a OS record.
Nevertheless, I agree that the gender ratio of FLOSS communities is way off. I’d like to see more/real evidence of how female unfriendly FLOSS communities are, though.
Here’s another short article regarding the gender issue:
http://news.techworld.com/applications/4182/geeks-want-women/
Another implication of this: talented people who, for whatever reason, aren’t visible contributors to open source projects are going to be under-recruited. Good opportunity for hiring managers or recruiters who are willing to do a little more work than just go to GitHub and poach the most visible people.