Where are the women in Open Source?

[oej]

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/where-are-women-open-source

"Study after study has proven that women are underrepresented in virtually all sectors of ICT. Women make up a quarter of all persons working in the tech industry, according to PwC’s Women in Tech report (2017). Open source communities are even more male-dominated - women never make up more than 10% of their contributors and participants."

What can we do to make FOSS more inviting and women friendly? Do we understand the problem to fix?

[oej]

Like your comment in #33 that we need some guests to balance the group of white grumpy men...

[e8johan]

Some input. Two great talks by Patricia.

https://patricia.no/2019/02/04/keynote_deconstructing_privilege.html
https://patricia.no/2019/09/12/survival_tips_for_women_in_tech.html

The first one establishes that there is such a thing as privilege, the other one perspective of privilege.

If you want, I can cast around for potential (female) guests in my network.

[hesa]

@svtfrida I am not sure but I think we're seeing more women (than before) in non-hacker/developer/engineering roles but when it comes to the more techie roles (again hacker/developer/engineering) I suspect it is only somewhat better. I do not have any data behind this so I am basing this on my work experience at misc companies and projects. Do you think it makes more/most sense to invite a female techie?

@hesa I agreee, this is the development I have seen for the past 10-15 years I think. Maybe it would be good to have women from different roles? The ideal would probably be to talk to someone who has tried and given up, to avoid survivor's bias...but on the other hand many of us have been pretty close to that point on several occasions but still ended up staying in tech (and open source). If I have to choose just one, I would suggest a techie :)

[bagder]

I think having two guests for this would be better than one, if nothing else to help make sure that we get more than "just one person's view", and to better counter-balance the (male) hosts.

[hesa]

@svtfrida and @bagder, more than one sounds great.

@svtfrida ... When I started working in IT (late 90s) things were even worse. .... getting better, but too slowly

[oej]

It's getting better in the workplace, but very few female engineers stay close to coding, they tend to escalate to project managers or other roles quicker than the rest. And in open source teams, they are still very very rare. What can we do better? Do we need mentorships?

[yabellini]

This can be good material for this chat: https://theconversation.com/the-retention-problem-women-are-going-into-tech-but-are-also-being-driven-out-200625

[yabellini]

This is another researcher interesting for this topic: What is Open Source for Social Good and Why People Contribute?. Denae Ford. https://blog.denaeford.me/2022/10/25/what-is-open-source-for-social-good-and-why-people-contribute/

@yabellini That was a very good summarizing article!

As is the case in many other fields, there is actually tons of data and research about what upholds the current situation. I would personally be more interested to hear / talk about what we can actually change in order to improve the situation, than iterate on the problem description.

[cybette]

Found my way here via this toot. Hi @e8johan!

I've been in the industry for 20+ years. Started off as an engineer, experienced the usual harassment/discrimination etc., wasn't moving up the career ladder, wanted to quit the industry but love tech too much. Nowadays doing community management (for open source projects), I think things have been improving but not fast enough.

[yabellini]

For sure! But if you don't define the problem well, it is hard to try to find a solution, right?
And we don't even start talking about intersectionality. We only focus on the gender dimension here. :-)

Here is another one that gives some tips in the direction of what we can do (but focus only on one aspect of the problem, the newcomers, not about retention for example): Ten simple rules for helping newcomers become contributors to open projects https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007296

As you can see, I'm citing a lot to Denae Ford, who works at Microsoft on this topic. Perhaps an interesting potential participant. :-)