EU Funds New FLOSS Survey on Skills, Employment

rishab writes "The EU-funded FLOSSPOLS project is carrying out a survey of developers worldwide. This is a follow-up to the original FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) survey in 2002, which was one of the first and most comprehensive surveys of developers - who they are, how they work and why they do it. The new survey aims to provide an update, include new developers, and answer some of the questions that were raised by the first one. In particular, how do developer communities help in learning skills and generating employment, and why is the level of participation by women so low?"

Comments

The Lack of Women

[Jameth]

The lack of women in the computer programming field really is one of those oddities. The 2002 survey says 1.1% of FLOSS developers are female. That's less than the portion of women in construction. The construction field definitely has discrimination against women and extremely commonly has a hostile work environment.

By contrast, there's no clear reason why women shouldn't be in CS. The most likely possibility is still that it's a cultural norm, but that doesn't exactly explain why more women would be involved in construction than in CS. It might be a hostile climate, but I would be surprised if the male coders are more aggressive and sexually biased than the average guys on a construction crew. It's really quite a strange situation.

- http://www.theallineed.com/women/05031804.htm
"Currently, women workers make up nearly 10 percent of the construction industry or more than 900,000 nationally"

Re:Women

[Col. Bloodnok]

Plus, is the fact that there aren't many female OSS developers, or female developers in general, really anything like a problem?

I mean, I don't stay awake at night worrying why men aren't better represented in advertising, nursing, admin, HR, child care, midwifery, marketing and all the other careers which are (mainly) dominated by women.

Also consider the following: A women applies for a programming job and a man applies for a pre-school child care job. Which application is treated with the most prejudice and suspicion? And Why?

Why is this an issue??

[psykocrime]

I don't see any studies coming out asking "Why is the percentage of women so low amongst asphalt pouring crews" or anything like that. I also don't see any studies asking whey more men aren't going into nursing.

Why do we seem to have this societal obsession with getting more women into computer science / engineering, etc? Maybe, just maybe, it's the case that most women just don't *want* to be computer scientists or engineers. I mean, do we have hoardes of women protesting that they tried to get into this field and were discriminated against on a sexual basis (hint: no)?

The opportunities are there for women who *do* want to do this kind of stuff. So tell me again why this "issue" keeps coming up time and time again??