Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) May 03, 2016
- 2461 views
And just look at how many women are admin on this site, or ongoing contributing programmers.
We have zero admins on this site who are women, AFAIK. Zero moderators as well.
I'm even not aware of any dev team members who are women.
I've been thinking about this for a while.
I suppose it's possible that we have some unconcious, implicit bias that is causing the skew, as described in http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/19/racism-and-meritocracy/
I admit I'd be surprised if that were the case though - to become a dev all one really has to do is ask. No one who has applied has ever been refused.
This could be a factor of our community size though - FOSS in general has a huge diversity problem. http://readwrite.com/2013/12/11/open-source-diversity/
I don't think we have even 50 individuals who are active on the forums right now.
With mattlewis MIA, we have only three primary admins now: myself, euphoric, and _tom.
We have ghaberek and ChrisB as moderators.
SDPringle is the only actual active dev it seems, though rywilly has been doing a lot of work outside with Redy. (And ghaberek has done a lot of coding with the new IUP library.)
I would agree that having a virtually all-male community here is a problem. I'm not sure yet what to do about it, but we should at least get the conversation going.
Another hiccup, but possibly a good one, is that we may not be able to reliably census our community. For example, we don't know this member's actual name, and it's not clear just from the user id if GreenEuphorian ( http://openeuphoria.org/user/profile/GreenEuphorian.wc ) is a man or a woman. So it could be the case that we have more female members than we realize.
