[NBLUG/talk] SVLUG: Women in FLOSS

matt matt at cfxnetworks.com
Thu Jun 8 13:33:09 PDT 2006


On Thursday 08 June 2006 00:47, Stephen Cilley wrote:
> 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.)

Well, with only 1% of women for the 99% of men, you'd think there would be a 
supply-and-demand issue. That may explain the intimidation and "advances" 
being made =).
-- 
Valê,
Matt
matt at cfxnetworks.com



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