[blueflow]

> and the reason that it has so few women involved

It is repeated and repeated again that because there aren't as many women as men in IT, there must be some kind of badness going on.

I offer a more charitable explanation: Women don't want to, the same way Men don't want to go to yoga courses. No badness involved, just people making their decisions.

[yvdriess]

The problem with that explanation is that in the past, there were a lot more women in computing. First as operators and programmer/mathematicians, later the gender mix was following the same upward trend as other sciences.

I've seen two explanations for the dearth of women in computing: engineering culture becoming dominant in the '60s (where it was more the domain of mathematics before) and the rise of personal computers that were advertised and marketed to young boys in the '80s. The latter is very noticeable in CS enrollment numbers.

[blueflow]

Back when people bought their punched tapes to the computers, being that computers operator was a social job, comparable to a secretary.

Look at jobs like optician, where the reverse happened: It used to be a crafts job when glasses were hand-manufactured. Today glasses are produced automatically, so the consultation and sales part has taken over and it changed from a men-dominated domain into a women-dominated domain.

No badness involved, either.

[stjohnswarts]

It was also much easier to "get into" it without a degree, unlike now when they want 5 years experience in CS as soon as you leave college.

[red_admiral]

The interpretation in the book "Programmed Inequality", albeit specific to the UK, is that in the early days programming and adjacent tasks involved a lot of manual labor (punching cards, moving tapes around), for which companies employed women to do it as cheaply as possible.

When tech jobs switched to requiring fewer humans, but ones with much more responsibilities and the ability to make operational/strategic decisions and to contribute to the design of the systems as part of implementing them, then companies moved to hiring men.

[pgeorgi]

> in computing: engineering culture becoming dominant in the '60s (where it was more the domain of mathematics before)

That would suggest that countries in which that transition didn't happen (such as Germany: Informatik was and is a math-oriented field, the engineering side mostly ended up with electrical engineering) should see different trends. At least for Germany: no.

[CJefferson]

Have you spoken to women who have joined open source groups (I’m thinking GNU / FSF led projects, not just programs that happen to be open source)? I have, and without exception the ones I know well personally have had awful experiences, and the ones who complained were just told “Oh, that’s just how person X is”. (There is not a single X here I am hiding, it’s a pattern).

[pgeorgi]

Have you spoken to men who have joined yoga courses? Same thing there: it's uncomfortable when you're the odd one out, and assholes who are going to asshole are most egregious towards those who are "other."

The underlying reason for the disparity can still be "group A people are somewhat less interested in that thing than group B people" and not "group B people actively drive out group A people." Everything else just follows because humans suck.

[blueflow]

Show that this is a gender-specific issue because i have the exact same reasoning. I love the coding and bug hunting, but i don't want to arrange myself with certain people.

[CJefferson]

How could I do that? I can say the comments and issues were gendered, but I can’t think how to prove what you are asking.

[blueflow]

You are right, that bar to prove it is too high. Apparently that doesn't stop people from claiming it nevertheless.

[globular-toast]

I develop free/open source software and I've never joined an open source group. I'd say that goes for the majority of contributors.

[red_admiral]

I disagree. If the proportion of women in FSF was the same as "tech" in general, then your interpetation would be "colorable" [1].

However, the accusation is more specifically that the proportion of women in the FSF and FOSS in general is (or at least was under Stallman) significantly lower than that of women in programming jobs in general, which suggests that there is something more going on.

Following a 2009 FSF women's mini-summit in Boston, Bruce Perens acknowledged this difference, even offering an explanation: "... there are more women who hold technical jobs than there are women who so love the technology that they will work on it whether they get paid or not. That seems to be an especially male thing."

However, that was very much not the conclusion of discussions among women in tech at the time, who were more likely to cite the sexist behaviour of some prominent men as reasons they kept out of parts or all of FOSS/FSF. RMS' name certainly came up a lot.

Rachel Kroll also wrote a post back in 2018 with the title "Choosing to stay out of the community", talking about similar issues.

[1] A legal term that means more or less "plausible so far, but we'd need a full trial to get a definite answer".

[2] http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/09/moat/

[blueflow]

Take note that Rachel's post is not making any reference to sex, gender, sexism or discrimination. Its about a toxic community and not about gender issues. Its not backing up your point.