[Linux-aus] How can we address gender imbalance in LA/AU-FLOSS? (Was: An Open Letter to the Open Source Community)

[Tim Ansell]

> We are a community that prides itself on being a meritocracy; that  
> avails itself of communication mediums that should allow us to avoid  
> even unconscious discrimination.  Yet we have this situation where  
> women are almost unrepresented in FOSS.  It is important that we ask  
> ourselves why?

The article Melissa posted also brought up an interesting point which
needs to be taken into consideration. This point has also been bought up
in a number of other studies.

>         However, women consistently tend to underrate their skills,
>         both in F/LOSS and elsewhere (Wilson 2003, Margolis and Fisher
>         2002, Tierney 1995).

The "2.1. Women are less confident" section in
 http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/x106.html#AEN127 
also suggests similar idea.

> For example, while 53% of the male computer science freshman rated
> themselves as highly prepared for their CS courses, 0% of the female
> CS freshman rated themselves similarly. But at the end of the year, 6
> out the 7 female students interviewed had either an A or B average.
> Objective ratings (such as grade point averages or quality and speed
> of programming) don't agree with most women's self-estimation.

Without a strong sense of confidence in your own work it is very hard to
contribute to FOSS. As the EU report also points out the high amount of
criticism and exposure your work gets (specially in larger projects) can
be extremely tough.

This is definitely something that I can identify with. Although I had a
pretty strong self estimate, gaining enough confidence to contribute
code to a FOSS project took me a very long time to build up. I had lots
of ideas but it took me 3 years idling on IRC, being a sysadmin and
maintaining a newsletter before I started contributing code. 

To make this more acute, the FOSS community attracts some of the best
minds in the world. As well, it's very intimidating to work with people
who have been coding FOSS for years, often since before you where born!

In a community where your standing is often attached to your ability to
produce quality code, offering up code which could make people think
less of you is a daunting task.

I definitely think it that this is not unique to women  (but possibly
exacerbated in their case) - I'm definitely not one and I can easily see
parallels in my own experience. The FOSS community has often been
claimed to be elitist and I think this is very much related. 

Things like responding with RTFM and JFGI can be very detrimental. Take
example the Linux Kernel mailing list, a classic example of this hostile
environment. (I'm not on the list - so all this is second hand.) The
list is almost famous for flame wars and behaviour such as responding to
a new patch or feature request with a single NACK. This means that only
people with a thick skin or extremely high level of skill are able to
contribute easily.

There are plenty of things we can do to help make this less of an issue
- and these won't just help women! Here are some of my suggestions,

   - Mentoring Programs. This can be a good way to get feedback without
having 100 people say "look you made this horrible mistake right".

   - Responding positively to any attempt - no matter how small. I
always try to do this on my project.

   - Programs (kind of like Google SoC) which target people not because
of what they currently know - but for there willingness to learn. A
Summer of Starters, or something which is specifically targeted at
people with NO knowledge might be a good idea.

   - Building newbie friendly documentation, and writing HOWTO. The
Ubuntu people are starting to do really cool things here.

   - Making LUGs, and other face-to-face meets newbie friendly. Meeting
a person generally takes an edge off when trying to work things out.

What are some other ideas? Thanks for your time.


Tim Ansell
---
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