Data Suggests CoC + Outreachy Hasn't Helped Increase Female Participation In Debian

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Data Suggests CoC + Outreachy Hasn't Helped Increase Female Participation In Debian

An informal case study suggests that since Debian enacted its Code of Conduct and began participating in the Outreachy internship program hasn't helped in increasing female participation within the open-source project but is actually trending lower compared to the early years of this original GNU/Linux distribution...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-Participation-Study-21

[ms178]

It is definetly not the first diversity program that fails to live up to expectations, and it won't be the last. Just look at the programs to increase the level of females in technical subjects at universities. With much effort, the results are simply not there. When do people with a leftist agenda realize that their logic behind these programs is flawed to begin with?!

[White Wolf]

LOL

Anyone is surprised? I love socialist utopia about everyone equal etc. Had been living in communist regime and what I'm 100% sure that kind of programs like this funny Code of Conduct are worthless. Females generally are less interested in IT, my wife sure listens about my dev work but for her it's boooooring. Men like it more, to dig with technical things. But on the opposite side women are stronger in other areas and they are major workers there. I won't even comment this trans women thing... leftist ideology on road in IT is very very bad for industry.

[Alexmitter]

Wow, no one expected that woman actually do what they like to do at the end of the day no matter how much they are supported or privileged by that system, and that is sadly still not IT stuff and that is a issue only woman themself can solve.

[Mangix]

Sounds like people don't understand equality of opportunity vs equality of outcomes.

[keikun007]

Funny thing I was reading about this subject yesterday. James Damore was fired from Google for saying the obvious which people are now realizing. Briefly after he was fired Sundar Pichai and Youtube CEO said the same thing but of course, they being the CEO nothing happened. This identity politics the way it's being done is a joke. I highly recommend watching this video on it:

[rene]

LOL

Anyone is surprised? I love socialist utopia about everyone equal etc. Had been living in communist regime and what I'm 100% sure that kind of programs like this funny Code of Conduct are worthless. Females generally are less interested in IT, my wife sure listens about my dev work but for her it's boooooring. Men like it more, to dig with technical things. But on the opposite side women are stronger in other areas and they are major workers there. I won't even comment this trans women thing... leftist ideology on road in IT is very very bad for industry.

Well you would be surprised how many females were in IT decades ago before annoying nerd men alienated them away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

[rene]

Maybe women are simply too clever, and prefer not to waste their personal free time contributing to some project for free?

[anarki2]

So you're telling me women aren't missing from STEM because society tells them so, but because they're simply not interested? Shock horror.

[niner]

Reading the article and the comments here I wonder why I had to put so much work into my master thesis. Apparently all I had to do was just dig out some numbers and jump directly into conclusions. No need to spent copious amounts of time and effort into statistical analysis and trying to filter out hidden causal connections. Hell, I there's not even a need for gathering any measure of statistical mass at all. A single sample is enough to extrapolate to the entire world.

But, but, but, it's fewer women now! From the blog post: "The figures are absolute number of women, they are not weighted by the overall number of developers"
So do we even know whether the population of Debian developers as a whole grew or shrank in the same time frame? Nope. That alone could easily explain fewer women. Fewer people -> fewer women. End of story.

There could also be other factors, that weren't looked at. Did any cultural changes occur in the same time frame? Maybe Debian has become a worse place for women despite the efforts of CoC and Outreachy? Maybe adopting a CoC and spending money on diversity programs actually triggered an adverse reaction in the male developer community because e.g. they envy paid female developers?

The numbers tell practially nothing. We don't know if the percentage of female developers changed at all. And if that did indeed shrink (which we cannot presume) we would still not know if the CoC or Outreachy had any influence. It would be possible that the percentage did shrink but it would have shrunk even more without a CoC. Who knows? We don't. As the blog post says "This is not a rigorous study and I make no claim that these figures are statistically significant." One cannot conclude anything from that.