Getting More Women Coders Into Open Source

Nerval's Lobster writes: Diversity remains an issue in tech firms across the nation, with executives and project managers publicly upset over a lack of women in engineering and programming roles. While all that's happening on the corporate side, a handful of people and groups are trying to get more women involved in the open source community, like Women of OpenStack, Outreachy (which is geared toward people from underrepresented groups in free software), and others. How much effort should be expended to facilitate diversity among programmers? Can anything be done to shift the demographics, considering the issues that even large, coordinated companies have with altering the collective mix of their employees?

Comments

Re:How about more offensive public mailing lists?

[Anonymous Coward]

here's the problem. all of silicon valley has a ginormous brogrammer culture

Linux isn't developed in Silicon Valley. Redhat is based in North Carolina, Linus himself is based in Portland, Oregon, SuSE is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and IBM is based in Rochester, NY, and has programmers all over the world.

Whether a brogrammer culture exists or not in Silicon Valley is hardly relevant since all the pillars of the open source community aren't in Silicon Valley.