What GNOME's Women Outreach Program Is Paying For This Summer

[DMJC]

Why there are fewer women in tech.

Can someone please explain to me what's stopping women from contributing to FOSS projects?

Nothing. Now if you want to rephrase the question to what's stopping women from getting into tech in general, I think I have the answer. See FOSS developers are maybe 1% of the tech industry. They are the elite. People who know what they are doing, the people who take the time to learn new skills and love tinkering. This makes up a pretty small percentage of technology workers already. How many of you guys have built or installed something for the challenge of it? Bored with Linux, installed Amiga, or some old computer or console emulator to see what it was like etc. That's a pretty elite skillset. Now back to my main point. So you have a pretty elite group, in a group of people that's already a majority male dominated area. Is it really that surprising? Assuming that 1 in 10 tech people pick up FOSS. and one in 100 tech workers is female. that means that 1 in 100 x 1 in 10 = ~1 in 1000 tech workers is a female who picks up FOSS. The odds could be even worse than that as far as I know. Now as for why there's 10x the number of men in tech over women, I think the answer to that is also pretty simple.

Growing up, I hated sport. My dad and my sister however both liked sport. Dad spent time with my sister, a lot of time, involved in her sports activities etc. Whereas I had to figure out computing all on my own, with the assistance of male friends and extended family who were interested in tech. I think girls need a lot more interaction with their dads encouraging them, to go into tech. I suspect you'd find that the bulk of women who are in tech had very strong encouragement from their dads who already worked in tech, or who had a hobbyist enthusiasm for tech or gaming, and shared it with their daughters.

I think because women traditionally haven't had the same backgrounding in tech that men have had, that they don't pass those skillsets onto their daughters. Whereas if a boy's father hasn't got the interest in tech, it's highly likely that one of his male friend's dad's will have the background in tech, and from growing up with his friends, he'll pickup those skillsets from his mates.

It's sort of a reinforcing cycle. The answer to it, I think is more involvement from dad's with their daughters, to get them more interested into tech. Quite often if the battle hasn't been won in childhood, it doesn't get won in adulthood. How many of you guys got into tech as adults vs as teens/children?

[RahulSundaram]

Examples please. I didn't ever met with so called gender based discrimination.

And? If you have read through the thread, I have already pointed out a reference and you could have easily search and found many more. I will do it one more time since there are more people still in denial that this is a widespread problem.

https://lwn.net/Articles/417952/

[TheBlackCat]

Can someone please explain to me what's stopping women from contributing to FOSS projects?

The attitudes of many people in those projects.

[89c51]

When people are attacked and discriminated against and your response shows no empathy nor any suggestions to address the problem and you actively rail up against any effort to help, you are contributing to the problem. OPW on the other hand *is* dealing with it.

WOP doesn't solve any problem since it doesn't change the behavior of people. It just puts money to the pockets of some people (in exchange of contributions).

[DMJC]

Why there are fewer women in tech.

I think the discrimination starts in childhood, with fathers preferring to engage more with their sons, leaving their wives to engage with their daughters, or when they do engage with their daughters, not engaging with them in technology related hobbies. I suspect that most women working in tech, would have fathers working in tech already, who grew their interest in the field when they were young. I'm sure a lot of us had to learn our tech skills without our dads, but most of us would have known a local male with the skill set, or had mates with the skill set when we were growing up.

That's not to say that there isn't discrimination within the industry. I've seen some real pig men make stupid comments. But I don't think that those attitudes are what's stopping women getting into tech. I think it's more the attitude that a man's daughter isn't worth teaching technology to at home. That is far more damaging to women's ability to enter the tech industry.

[gens]

I think the discrimination starts in childhood, with fathers preferring to engage more with their sons, leaving their wives to engage with their daughters, or when they do engage with their daughters, not engaging with them in technology related hobbies. I suspect that most women working in tech, would have fathers working in tech already, who grew their interest in the field when they were young. I'm sure a lot of us had to learn our tech skills without our dads, but most of us would have known a local male with the skill set, or had mates with the skill set when we were growing up.

That's not to say that there isn't discrimination within the industry. I've seen some real pig men make stupid comments. But I don't think that those attitudes are what's stopping women getting into tech. I think it's more the attitude that a man's daughter isn't worth teaching technology to at home. That is far more damaging to women's ability to enter the tech industry.

mothers are way more influential to children

and no, its got nothing to do with technology/science
there's plenty women in biology, chemistry, health, physics etc. etc.
guess "women" don't like to be geeks that much

this whole topic is socio-politics, that seems to be popular with some GNOME people

[liam]

I haven't seen any studies indicating one way or the other the participation level of minority groups in open source but we do know that women participate much less in open source projects (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/FLOSS) compared to women participating in the I.T industry in general (which itself is lower than men but there are other factors involved there) and while it is related, it is a different topic from gender discrimination. If one feels strongly about racial discrimination and has evidence that it is worse in open source than the I.T industry overall, pool in some money and address the problem. Crowd funding is an option as well.

It's too bad they don't seem interested in seeking out equality for all, but I guess we all care about what affects us.

[RahulSundaram]

WOP doesn't solve any problem since it doesn't change the behavior of people. It just puts money to the pockets of some people (in exchange of contributions).

You are wrong about that assumption. Several of the people who do such internships or Google SoC continue to work on the projects after that time period and several of them have even been hired by major I.T firms including Linux distributions. So, the programs are already working very well and getting better investments as well.

[balouba]

i think there's a load of bullshit as usual with this subject.
people fantasize on this instead of solving real problems specially in IT.

Don't forget, males and females are NOT biologically the same, no matter how you put it - what matters is that everyone is free to do whatever they want as long as i doesn't infringes someone else's freedom. That's the only ethic that always works.

[wizard69]

This thread reminds me of during my college years the people from a gender studies program protested outside our math building demanding more female students. A professor walked outside and invited them to audit his class and none of them did.

Sad isn't it! Most of these people are just looking for a free ride through life. Such attitudes must be a huge embarrassment to the women that actually do the work.