They take to it later, but when women FLOSS, they mean it Despite an extreme gender gap in the free/Libre and open-source software community - even more extreme than in general IT - women who work full time in FLOSS stick with it longer than men, according to a recent report. The gap between men and women in the IT industry is well known. The report, "Women in Free/Libre/Open Source …
There doesn't seem to be a link to the report mentioned, so it's difficult to read the source to learn things. :(
Closest I've found is the mention of it here:
12th International Conference on Open Source Systems
Weirdly for an OSS organisation, the papers doesn't seem accessible. Hopefully that's a temporary thing, or I'm just not looking hard enough. ;)
Weirdly for an OSS organisation, the papers doesn't seem accessible.
Whilst I agree about the absence of papers from previous conferences, there is nothing weird about this paper not being available as it is due to be presented at the 31 May to 1 Jun 2016 conference.
http://oss2016.cs.tut.fi/deadlines
Is this just a case tiny sample size?
Lets say your sample size was 100,000 3% female would be 3,000, lets say you've got 10% unknown at 10,000 and then the other 87,000 are identified as male.
As opposed to trivia, I think this is probably the far more interesting part
"The report also uncovered some trivia, such as the fact that both genders were unlikely to have children; over 65 per cent of male FLOSS workers do not have children, though the figure jumps to over 80 per cent for female FLOSSers."
Sample size is the least of their problems. Wouldn't be a problem at all if it were properly sampled.
But an online poll with self-selecting sample can never lead to meaningful results. Unless the study is all about bogus sampling methods.
I think most of us who've been doing open source for a while have also answered enough of those surveys for one lifetime, and just bin the requests to do yet another. Perhaps the results tell us that women have more patience with the d*** things and a higher boredom threshold, no doubt endowed on them by biology to deal with the endless repetition involved in caring for very small children.
Explains a lot about a lot of things. Look at the age of the participants in a major war - colonels in the early 20s. Look at the age range of English kings until the Georges came along - mostly brutish and short. I remember an anthropologist suggesting that civilisation requires grandparents. Perhaps so does FLOSS.
FLOSS has older people, some of them grandparents.
But we didn't start as young as today's generations. We didn't have computers, let alone incentives like Google's Summer of Code. When RMS started in the 80s you had to be pretty well-off (or a kid with rich parents) to go anywhere near it. Even much later, getting online could be something of an adventure.
(Peak age 21 is plausible, as a direct effect of GSoC).
Can't say I'm surprised - time heavy activities are the first thing to disappear once offspring arrive, and the age isn't shocking either, as responsibilities, friends, relationships, and exercise impinge on your free time even if children aren't around.
another interesting thing is that us women tend not to have these competitions between whats "best", you know the Windows or Linux thing.
Granted, we are less likely to be drinking our bitter from a dimple mug at the end of the day, and the bitter is more likely to be wine (because it is essentially a fruit juice), but we do have things to say about IT as well as just work in the industry.
Well, the beer is basically breakfast cereal
The "Breakfast Stout"[1] is becoming very popular these days. It's brewed with oatmeal. so it takes the harsh edge of the stout, making it far more palatable to those who aren't normally stout drinkers...
Vic.
[1] I think Founders did the first one[2], but there are a few doing the rounds now.
[2] And it is very pleasant indeed...
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