FLOSS is an acronym standing for Free/Libre and Open Source Software -- a collection of terms encompassing various software movements and licensing styles that encourage the modification and redistribution of software source code. The term Free software refers to software that guarantees all of the four freedoms, while the term Open Source software refers to software that satisfies all 10 criteria of the Open Source definition. "Open Source" was coined by Christine Peterson as a corporate-friendly, freedom-agnostic synonym for "Free Software", and except for very minor deviations (there are only one or two minor licenses upon which there is disagreement), the two terms refer to the same set of software.
Contents
Overview
Historically, women formed a small part of the FLOSS community. A 2002 survey of open source communities found that approximately 1.1% of contributors were women. The GitHub survey in 2017 found 3% women contributors. The percentage of participants who are women varies widely between communities, with more women participating in the communities that make outreach efforts.
Sources for statistics on women in FLOSS include:
- GitHub 2017 survey found that 3% of FLOSS contributors are women
- FLOSS Project survey (2002) showed 1.1% of FLOSS contributors were women (the FLOSSPOLS survey in 2006 built on this research); FLOSS Survey 2013 had 11% women respondents, but was heavily promoted to women's communities (research based on it offers a comparative analysis of participation in FLOSS of men and women)
- A census of the Ubuntu community[1] (2006) showed 2.4% women, while counting up the Ubuntu Members in Nov 2009 showed 4.4% women
- Women in Debian 2013 showed 1.8% women developers
- The Perl Survey (2007), a survey of both Perl contributors and users of the language, showed 3%
- Before 2010, counts of attendees at major open source conferences tended to be in the 3-5% range
- Women in Drupal - Geek Feminism page, Group page
- 2008 - Community: 7% women
- 2014 - Community: 17% women
- 10-15% of attendees at http://linux.conf.au are women
- GNOME Foundation members
- November 2012: 31 women among 378 members - 8.2%
- January 2014: 35 women among 340 members - 10.3%
- July 2014: 28 women among 317 members - 8.8%
- November 2015: 22 women among 272 members - 8.1%
- GUADEC, GNOME's annual conference (sources 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
- 2009 - Attendees: 8 women - 5%; Speakers: 0 women (out of 58 speakers) - 0%
- 2012 - Attendees: 41 women - 17%; Speakers: 4 women - 7%
- 2013 - Attendees: 41 women - 18%; Speakers: 10 women - 21%
- 2014 - Attendees: 23 women - 12%; Speakers: 4 women - 11%
- 2015 - Attendees: 12 women - 8%; Speakers: 2 women - 8%
- Survey of newcomers who joined 12 open source communities between January 2010 and June 2012 and stayed involved in them had 50% female respondents for GNOME (22 women) and 6% female respondents for all other communities, with 15% being the next highest concentration (20 women total, 0-3 women per community) (source)
- PyCon, Python's annual conference (statistics on speakers)
- Google Summer of Code participation
- In 2015, Breanden Beneschott found that for 15,374 GitHub profiles for which Genderize.io could confidently determine the user gender, of the random 20,000 profiles he surveyd, 6% belonged to women and, when a cutoff of having more than 10 contributions was applied to these profiles, 5.4% of such profiles belonged to women.
- Bitergia gender-diversity analysis (uses Genderize.io and some validation to guess gender of contributors)
- OpenStack gender diversity reports, sponsored by Intel, from November 2017 and July 2017
- OpenStack
- 2010 - April 2015: 10.5% women among Git contributors, 6.8% Git commits by women
- In the year leading up to April 2015: 11% women among Git contributors, 9% Git commits by women
- Linux kernel
- 2005- October 2016: 8% women among Git contributors, 5.2% Git commits by women
- In the year leading up to October 2016: 9.9% women among Git contributors, 6.8% Git commits by women
Some people dispute these figures, claiming that there are more women who are simply invisible in the community, due to Gender neutral names or Anonymity, or that the small percentages represent only a subset of open source community members (usually, programmers who submit patches to open source projects), discounting women who do other work such as documentation, QA, or community work. However, some of the surveys listed above explicitly include contributors in non-programming roles, or include users as well as contributors.
Issues
Invisibility
Main article: Invisibility
Women form a small proportion of the FLOSS community. However, people often speak or act as if women don't exist at all. Examples include:
- Describing a dichotomy of "geeks" and "women" in such a way that the idea of "women geeks" is impossible, as in this comment "Women hate us geeks".
- Writing, speaking, or acting in such a way as to appeal to men (and presumably straight men at that).
- Not noticing women's contributions to FLOSS (e.g., Richard Stallman stating he didn't think any women volunteered to work on GCC or Emacs )
- Wildly underestimating the number of women in FLOSS (eg Bruce Perens' initial estimate here; cf Skud's pointer here)
- Making statements about women as if there were none present, when a woman is right there.
Exceptionalism and Condescension
Main articles: Exceptionalism and Condescension
When women are noticed in the FLOSS community, that notice is often problematic. Often, women are treated as rare and special creatures, put on a pedestal, and treated as exceptional merely for showing up. (The informal shorthand for this is "OMG a girl!") This can be very awkward and disconcerting for the woman who is treated this way.
Examples:
On other occasions, women new to a FLOSS community (or being addressed by someone who is himself new and is unaware of the woman's standing in the community) are treated with condescension. For instance, men may treat any small degree of technical skill or knowledge as cause for excessive praise and wonder.
Examples:
- You're the smartest woman, I've ever met.
- You're working in Perl? That's a good language to learn on.
When women create FLOSS projects, their projects are often treated with condescension. Either the code is perceived as beginner-quality, or the project is not taken seriously as a real project.
Examples:
- A man who maintains a tiny FLOSS project with few users asking a woman who maintains a large, thriving FLOSS project with many users to merge her project into his.
- Mean comments about how ugly and disgusting a woman's FLOSS code is, often behind her back
Gender essentialism and social expectations
Main articles: Essentialism, Social expectations
Many people express the opinion that women are just "naturally" better or worse at certain tasks, or have innately different interests. This is generally attributed to differences in brain function, hormones, or the like; the field of Evolutionary psychology claims that women evolved to have these skills/interests (or lack thereof) many thousands of years ago.
The problem is that it is very hard to study biological differences between men and women when our environment and culture have such a strong influence. Studies are generally unable to completely exclude environmental factors. Even those studies which are well conducted generally show far less variation between men and women, than between individuals of either gender.
In the FLOSS community, this often plays out as an excuse for why the proportion of women in the field is so low: "They're just not interested" or variations on that theme. The implication is that any inequality is biologically ordained, and that there is nothing that the community could/should do about it.
Along with biological essentialism, there are also strains of argument that recognise that women are culturally conditioned to like certain things, or are trained to be good at them, and which expect women to conform to those societal roles. Examples include being good at "people" stuff, communication, visual design, etc. Women in FLOSS projects are often pressured into these activities even if they do not feel much personal interest in them, or may simply find that it is easier to conform to expectations and take on documentation, UI work, etc, than to buck the status quo.
The effect of essentialism and social expectations is to exclude women from FLOSS projects, or to include them only in certain parts of the project. It is no surprise that the majority of women in Open Source do documentation, community management, and the like, nor that the documentation, community work, etc is mostly done by women.
Sexualized environment
Main article: Sexualized environment
Perhaps because of the paucity of women in FLOSS, the community often behaves as if it were an all-male environment. Sexually oriented graphics, text, and speech, including eg. desktop wallpapers, advertisements, and conference presentations are common.
Examples:
A sexualized environment is uncomfortable for many women, not because they are prudes or dislike sex, but because they generally want to engage with the community on the subject of computers and software, and constantly being reminded that the rest of the community sees women primarily as sexual objects is distracting.
Sexually oriented material also reinforces the Invisibility of women in the FLOSS community, by assuming that the audience is male (and presumably straight).
Finally, women who have experienced sexual assault or harassment (as a large proportion of women have) may find that being subjected to sexually oriented material without their consent in a majority-male space triggers them, and makes it extremely difficult or impossible for them to work in that community.
See also: Sexist advertising, Sexualized presentation, Booth babes, etc.
Discussion of issues
- If you thought physics was misogynistic, try open source software (Rob Knop, 2007)
How to encourage women in FLOSS
Many people have written about how to get more women involved in FLOSS or support those who are involved. For example:
- HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux
- What works: getting more women involved in open source
- To Sir With Love: how to get more women involved in open source (O'Reilly Network)
- Forum discussion of the above article (see comment thread)
- Ten easy ways to attract women to your free software project (note that this article contains a lot of un-examined gender essentialism)
- Standing out in the crowd (Skud)
Many strategies have been suggested. Below are some of the common ones, broken down by category:
General
- It may help to take a survey (formal or informal) of your community's gender breakdown to get an idea of where you started, so you can tell whether things are improving over time.
- Consider creating a Diversity statement or Code of conduct
- See also: Recruiting women (tips on how to recruit women to your project/whatever - non-FLOSS specific)
Women-only or women-centric groups/events/etc
Groups such as LinuxChix and events such as the LinuxChix miniconf support and encourage women in several ways:
- Combatting Invisibility
- Providing mutual support and an understanding environment to discuss issues
- Assisting women with gaining advanced positions within projects (eg. Debian Women and Ubuntu Women both assist women towards official membership in their respective projects)
If your FLOSS project does not have such a group, you might consider starting one. See Statement of purpose: women-only communities or Statement of purpose: communities including men for sample documents to get you started.
User group meetings, conferences, etc
The following steps can be taken to make user group meetings, conferences, and other real-life gatherings more welcoming:
- Explicitly invite Women speakers
- See also: List of women keynote presenters at technical conferences for ideas on who to invite
- Discourage Sexualized presentations
- Publish Event Guidelines dealing with
- Ensure that your event is Accessible and safe
- Consider providing Childcare
See also: Women-friendly events
Mailing lists and other online forums
- Don't allow Sexist humor, Online harrassment, or other behaviours that discourage women
- It has been suggested that web forums, with their better moderation tools, maybe friendlier for women.
Development tools and techniques
- Providing hosted development environments, as Dreamwidth does, can help encourage women to participate by making it easier (and less time consuming) to get started
- Make a list of easy bugs/tasks in your bug tracking system to encourage new developers
- Wikis and other such collaborative documentation/resources can make the barriers to entry lower for new developers
Note that efforts to lower barriers to entry can encourage all kinds of new developers, not just women.
Paid open source work
- Want more women in open source? try paying them. Terri Oda suggests that seeding open source projects with paid developers who happen to be women would help show a commitment to diversity and encourage more women to join.
Incidents
The FLOSS field is rife with incidents of sexism, harrassment, and the like.
Discussions
In 2009, several incidents and discussion thereof fed into 2009 women in FLOSS discussions
Harrassment incidents
Main article: Online harrassment
Inappropriately sexual conference presentations
Main article: Sexualized presentations
Sexist advertising
See also: Sexist advertising, Booth babes
Other/uncategorized
- Valerie Aurora (then contributing as "Val Henson") thought to be a man -- see this parody homepage
- Ubuntu Code of Conduct incident
- Open Source Boob Project
- SLUG committee 2009 nomination dispute
- Planet Fedora up-skirting photo
- Perl is my bitch
Resources
Conference presentations/panels about women in FLOSS
(Most recent first.)
- Standing Out in the Crowd by Skud at OSCON 2009
- Women in Open Source keynote by Angela Byron at Open Web Vancouver 2009 -- Video/slides here
- Attracting Women to Open Source BoF at Linux Symposium in 2009.
- The Blonde and the Scruffy Coder by Olivier Cleynen at CLT2009
- Heroes: Women in FOSS by Pia Waugh at OSCON 2008
- Form an Orderly Queue Ladies by Emma Jane Hogbin at OSCON 2008
- Why Women -- even non-programmers -- benefit from participating in Open Source projects at BlogHer '08
Groups for women in FLOSS
- Arch Women
- Women in Drupal - formerly DrupalChix
- Debian Women
- Fedora Women
- GnomeWomen
- KDE Women
- LinuxChix
- PHPWomen
- Ubuntu Women
- Women & Mozilla (WoMoz)
Conferences/events about women in FLOSS
- LinuxChix miniconf (annually since ???)
- SCALE WIOS sessions (annually since ???)
- Ohio LinuxFest Diversity in Open Source Workshop (annually since 2009)
- FSF mini-summit on Women in Free Software (2009)
Finding women in FLOSS
- List of women in FLOSS
- List of women-dominated projects in FLOSS
- Outreach to women in open source for your events, programs, scholarships and similar.
