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?

[Noah Haders]

No one gives a crap about the gender of the person that wrote the code. When I submit a patch to an open source project, no one asks me about my gender. It is irrelevant, and often unknown.

here's the problem. all of silicon valley has a ginormous brogrammer culture, and if you don't fit in with this culture you're not going to succeed, regardless of code merit. it might be true that the culture is equally accepting of both male and female brogrammers. but restricting merit to brogrammers excludes a lot of talented people, the majority of which are likely women.

so the question is not how to include more women, it's how to overcome the brogrammer culture so that all good coders could be accepted, whether or not they are brogrammers?