[NBLUG/talk] SVLUG: Women in FLOSS

[Stephen Cilley]

I just got back from my first SVLUG meeting, and I
thought their topic of discussion was very
interesting.  It was an overview of a study done by
the European Union into the gender differential in the
FLOSS community and why it exists.  Why do you all
think that while women make up about 30% of commercial
software developers they make up little of 1% of FLOSS
developers?
One of the overarching issues was arrogance. 
Apparently we as a community are arrogant (I don't
know what that's all about, after all I've never made
a mistake and I've never been informed of anything I
didn't already know for sure!)  And it's really
off-putting to women, whereas men take it better.  The
presenter also talked about how originally hardware
was a male field and the first programmers were women,
and about how women could even be experiencing some
forms of sexual intimidation (there are some very
revealing stats about male FLOSS community members
making advances on female members.)
I wanted to hear what you all thought of the issue,
and whether or not you think there is a problem in the
community, and how we might fix it.

Stephen Cilley

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