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:Step One: get out of the way

[narcc]

Did you miss the earlier discussion? Toxic communities drive people away, regardless of their ability or the quality of their contributions. Ridiculous posturing, grunting, and dick-waving get old really quick. The worst of it? It takes away from actually working on the project. The adolescent behavior you're defending does nothing to help the project.

Further, it should be obvious to everyone by now that development doesn't happen in some purely objective and impossibly rational context. The code does not stand on its own -- not in any community. There are politics, power struggles, bullies, and victims. Contributions are rarely, if ever, judged solely on their own merits. The person submitting a change, their reputation, and relationships to other members plays a far greater roll. It always has.

You've mistaken your ideals for reality. The world is not what you believe it ought to be.