[hackerspaces] Data on women in technology, a 10 question census.

[Yves Quemener]

On 03/29/2011 03:32 PM, Far McKon wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Greg McGuire<greg at nesit.net>  wrote:
>> I'm just curious, where's the topic been bouncing around?
> I've had a bunch of individual discussion on it. I guess I was
> assuming other folks have or had too. Bad assumption maybe.

Same here.

> Participation of women in open/source and hacker culture is at a lower
> rate (8-10%) than in commercial and professional software (10-15%) If
> anyone wants the hard stats, let me know and I can dig up the paper (I
> don't have it handy).

I had the same numbers in mind (actually a bit less for open source and 
a bit more for commercial) The feeling/explanations that I gathered from 
my discussion was that both open source and commercial software have low 
participation of women but that the ratio was raising in both of these. 
Both come from a very low ratio and the open source/hacker community has 
a lag of about 5-10 years that is mainly due to the fact that people in 
this community tend to have a long professional experience (5 to 10 
years) and therefore the OSS community has the gender ratio that the 
commerical software community had 5-10 years ago.

It smells a bit like political correctness but also matches my personal 
experience. I wonder if this hypothesis has been studied/confirmed/infirmed.

Iv