[red_admiral]

> Citation needed

FLOSSPOLS 2004-05 found that "proprietary software" was around 28% female, whereas "free software" was around 1.5% female. A presentatation of the results can be found at [1].

I agree with you that FOSS is much larger than GNU/FSF, and that many places are actively welcoming to women - the linked slides reference Debian's efforts; the python community also seems to be fairly good at this.

[1] https://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/flosspols.pdf

[globular-toast]

Do you really think all those women in proprietary software jobs aren't doing free software because of one man? They probably haven't even heard of him.

There are many more obvious reasons for the disparity that don't involve anything malicious let alone singling out one person and attaching the blame.

Anybody can make meaningful contributions to free software. Nobody has to interact with RMS or anybody else. I've made many anonymous and pseudonymous contributions just fine.

Given that there are essentially no barriers to entry to developing free software but there are significant barriers to being paid for it, I wonder why proprietary software is only 72% male when free software is 98.5% male. Are there any other fields that exhibit this disparity? Are there more/less paid male/female car mechanics versus car enthusiasts/hobbyists, for example?