Jump ahead to the fall of 2010. I had (literally) bumped into a computer science instructor at the University of Toronto who happens to be unsighted, and I mentioned the videos I’d been posting on the Software Carpentry site. He was teaching an introductory programming class; maybe the material would be useful to his students? He hemmed and hawed for a moment, then admitted that he’d actually visited the site, but hadn’t been able to follow the lectures. Yes, there were full-text transcripts of what I was saying, but (and here he actually sounded apologetic) he wasn’t deaf: he was blind. Whenever I referred to a diagram or mentioned “the highlighted bit of code”, he lost the thread. Those diagrams and highlights only existed as pixels, not as some kind of markup that a screen reader or other tool could “render” for him.

Now, take a moment and go pretty much any online education site, like the Khan Academy or MIT’s OpenCourseWare. Close your eyes, and see how much of the lecture you can follow. Some aren’t bad—Prof. Wyn Kelley’s American Literature course, for example, works almost as well on an iPod as it does with video. But every time an instructor actually relies on a diagram to explain something, everyone student who’s visually impaired loses a couple of marks, either because they can’t follow at all, or because the extra time it take sthem to figure it out is time their sighted peers are spending mastering the next topic. Things like the in-browser “code and sketch” tool that John Resig is building for the Khan Academy may look very cool, but what happens to people who can’t look? It’s no good saying, “Let us figure out how to teach online, then we’ll worry about special needs,” because experience shows that adding accessibility after the fact works just about as well as adding security after the fact (i.e., it doesn’t).

Ed-tech’s advocates keep saying that they want to make the best teaching accessible to everyone. Respectfully, they’re not doing that, and as schools rush to get students online in order to save money, people who are already disadvantaged will be left even further behind. I don’t have any answers—I don’t think there are any easy ones—but those of us who can see shouldn’t lose sight of the needs of those who can’t.

Proponents of free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) often describe their campaign as a struggle for civil rights. They portray FLOSS as a great equalizer: Not only is it freely available to everyone, but anyone who wants to help shape it can do so, regardless of race, nationality, faith, politics or sexual preference.

But for a movement that claims to be open to all, very few women are involved. Take a look at the roster of speakers at O’Reilly’s annual Open Source Conference, or at the names of core developers on any of the thousands of successful FLOSS projects. While the gender ratio in the industry as a whole is roughly five to one, the ratio in FLOSS appears to be several hundred to one.

Our aim is not to complain yet again about gender imbalance in computing. Instead, we believe that the gender skew in FLOSS is the most visible symptom of a fundamental unfriendliness in that community. We also believe that if this unfriendliness is not addressed, it will limit FLOSS’s growth and success more than misconceived lawsuits or FUD from would-be monopolists.

Things have improved a little since then: by my count, 32 of the 327 people listed as speakers at this year’s OSCON are women (i.e., just a hair under 10%), and female participation in open source seems to have risen to roughly 2% (which is still 7-8 times worse than the gender ratio in computing as a whole). The biggest change, though, is the number of people who acknowledge that this is a problem, and are trying to do something about it, despite the sneers or embarrassed silence of their peers.  I’d therefore like to salute my personal OSCON’11 hall of famers—those speakers who have made a point of stepping up where O’Reilly has once again chosen not to:

• Donna Benjamin
• Selena Deckelmann
• Audrey Eschright
• Matthew Garrett
• Gareth Greenaway
• Peter Krenesky
• Clinton R. Nixon
• Jacinta Richardson
• James Turnbull

So what about it, Tim: will we be able to add your name to this list next year?

Later: O’Reilly has announced an Anti-Harassment Code of Conduct. Yay, and thank you to everyone who helped make it happen.

Ouch—I was very pleased that MS and AOSA 1 weren’t as bad as BC, but right now, AOSA 2 isn’t where I’d like it to. Its contributors also almost all speak English as a first language, which isn’t representative of all the great open source work being done elsewhere. We’d welcome help addressing both problems…

1. It’s an arbitrary distinction.
2. There are smarter ways to spend your time.
3. 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.

Moving the Needle: How the San Francisco Ruby Community got to 18%

In January 2009, the monthly San Francisco Ruby meetings averaged 2% women. In January 2010, they averaged 18%. What happened in a year to make such a big difference?

Over the last year, Sarah Allen and I have been spending all our nights and weekends working on a series of workshops for women who want to learn Ruby. When we got started, to be honest, I wasn’t very optimistic. I’ve lived through quite a few gender diversity efforts in quite a few technical communities, and most of them failed to make any noticeable dent.

But to my amazement, we were incredibly successful. In this talk, I’ll take you through the factors that were critical to our success, and I’ll explore the great things our community has gotten from the effort – some expected, some wonderfully unexpected. I believe that any local OSS community can adapt these techniques and end up with an outreach effort that makes an immediate, visible, and lasting difference.

Speaker: Sarah Mei

Her slides are here, and Josh Wehner has asked how we can achieve the same improvements in Toronto. (Thanks to Andrew Louis for the pointer.)