[Linux-aus] The Ada Initiative - Should Linux Australia support it?

[Kevin Maciunas]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 16:14:42 +1100
Neill Cox <neill at ingenious.com.au> wrote:
> 
> I'm keenly aware of the gender imbalance in ICT and F/OSS in
> particular.  I would like links to studies/reports/statistics on the
> topic so that the next time it comes up elsewhere I have a better
> reply than - "man[0], have you seriously not noticed how few females
> turn up at {OSS_event}!"  For me it's been CLUG, LCA, PyConAU and
> SFD, but I'll bet it's a similar story elsewhere.
> 
> Please, if anyone has some, either post them to the list or just send
> them to me directly.
> 

Not either of those, but the data we keep (University of Adelaide) on
female participation is absolutely depressing.  The 2010 crop of
graduates in CS had 5% females (domestic undergraduate).  If I look
wider at just our International students - the figure is 25%...  Which
screams out secondary educational challenges that aren't being met here
but are in (essentially) South Eastern Asia from whence our
International cohort mostly comes.

You need to remember that this is essentially the pipe-line feedstock
coming into the generic IT sector.  So it is no surprise to see so few
females around the traps.

I don't know if the University sector as a whole aggregates similar
statistics, but I'd be surprised if the numbers differed by much.  Our
median average is 5-10% (from /dev/memory..) it does bounce around a
bit, but never gets much past that.  One year, and only *one* year that
I can recall we had just shy of 40% of the final year classes stocked
with female students.  But that was a **LONG** time ago - 1993.

Cheers
/Kevin