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

Daughters

[irrational_design]

I keep trying to convince my teenage daughters that they should get into coding since they are absolutely guaranteed to get a great job after college, even if they are just mediocre developers, purely because of their gender! But no... they would rather study things like journalism and anthropology. My mind boggles. I am a professional coder who also teaches a college level web development course on the side. I have the resources and experience to train them, but my offers fall on deaf ears. Sigh. Even after being married to a woman and having four daughters I just don't get girls.