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FLOSS

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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 terms Open Source software and Free software redirect to this page.

Contents

[edit] Overview

Women form a very small part of the FLOSS community. Estimates range from 1%-5% depending on the survey. Many people say they want to encourage more women in FLOSS, but don't know how to go about this.

Sources for statistics on women in FLOSS include:

  • FLOSS Project survey (2002) showed 1.5% of FLOSS contributors were women (the FLOSSPOLS survey in 2006 built on this research)
  • Ubuntu survey (2006) showed 2.8% women
  • The Perl Survey (2007), a survey of both Perl contributors and users of the language, showed 4%
  • Counts of attendees at major open source conferences tend to be in the 3-5% range
  • DrupalChix state 10% of the Drupal community is women, based on attendance at major Drupal conferences.

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.

[edit] Issues

[edit] Invisibility

Main article: Invisibility

Women form a small proportion of the FLOSS community. However, people often speak or act as if we 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 (TODO: link to RMS' false claim that no women have contributed to GCC)
  • 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.

[edit] 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:

  •  ???

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 presentations, Booth babes, etc.

[edit] Discussion of issues

[edit] 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:

Many strategies have been suggested. Below are some of the common ones, broken down by category:

[edit] 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

[edit] User group meetings, conferences, etc

The following steps can be taken to make user group meetings, conferences, and other real-life gatherings more welcoming:

[edit] Mailing lists and other online forums

  • Don't allow Sexist humor, Online harrassment, or other behaviours that discourage women
  • Someone (need link!) suggested that web forums, with their better moderation tools, maybe friendlier for women. (Not sure I agree with this though -- Skud 00:56, 9 July 2009 (UTC))

[edit] Development tools and techniques

  • Providing hosted development environments, as Dreamwidth does, can help encourage women to participate
  • Wikis and other such resources can make the barriers to entry lower for new developers (including but not limited to women)

[edit] Paid open source work

[edit] Incidents

The FLOSS field is rife with incidents of sexism, harrassment, and the like.

[edit] Discussions

In 2009, several incidents and discussion thereof fed into 2009 women in FLOSS discussions

[edit] Harrassment incidents

Main article: Online harrassment

[edit] Inappropriately sexual conference presentations

Main article: Sexualized presentations

[edit] Sexist advertising

See also: Sexist advertising, Booth babes

[edit] Other/uncategorized

[edit] Resources

[edit] Conference presentations/panels about women in FLOSS

(Most recent first.)

[edit] Groups for women in FLOSS

[edit] Conferences/events about women in FLOSS

[edit] Finding women in FLOSS

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