Oh boy! Bruce Byfield has mounted his steed and is white knighting for all the female programmers in the FOSS community. Apparently geeks are sexist too. Some interesting tidbits.
True, women continue to be under-represented in computing science and high-tech business in general, not just FOSS. According to Angela Byron’s keynote at the Open Web Vancouver conference earlier this year, women compose 28% of those involved in proprietary software, slightly more than half what you would expect from a random distribution.
So what? I would expect women to be around 28% assuming that most programmers have minimum IQs of 125 or more. Bruce’s statement makes the basic assumption that there are no differences between the sexes.
Asked to guess what percentage of FOSS developers are women, mostly people guess a number between 30-45%. A few, either more observant or anticipating a trick question after hearing the proprietary figure, guess 12-16%. The exact figure, though, is even lower: 1.5%
The low number in an of itself is not evidence of sexism. But that appears to be Bruces assertion. He continues,
Look at the boards of prominent FOSS projects. No women sit on the Free Software Foundation’s board of directors, nor the Linux Foundation’s board. KDE e.V’s board has one woman, and GNOME’s board one. If anything, the number of female maintainers in Debian is probably lower than 1.5%. The figures don’t change much, no matter which FOSS organization you look at.
Still lots of data, no proof. Does it get any better?
Or, if you prefer, listen to the horror stories female developers tell about sexist remarks or being asked out for dates. Look at the constant trolls on the mailing lists for female developers.
Oh the horror. Remember, if you’re beta, sexist remarks and being asked out for dates are sexual harassment. While there is quite probably truth to some of what Bruce is saying, there is also the reality of HBD that explains much of the dearth of females in the field.
