Why Women Devs Are Hard To Recruit and Even Harder To Keep (windowsitpro.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The results of a recent survey conducted by GitHub sheds light on the issue of why women developers are hard to recruit and keep in the business of tech. Windows IT Pro reports: "The 2017 Open Source Survey 'collected responses from 5,500 randomly sampled respondents sourced from over 3,800 open source repositories on GitHub.com, and over 500 responses from a non-random sample of communities that work on other platforms.' Although the survey focused on open source and asked 50 questions on a wide range of topics that were in no way focused on gender issues alone, some of the data collected offers insight into why the developer industry as a whole has trouble recruiting and keeping female devs. Indeed, the severity of the gender gap in open source is substantial. In the survey, 95 percent of respondents were men, with the response rate from women at only 3 percent -- a degree of under-representation that's not seen elsewhere in this study. Other groups show numbers that are more proportionate to their numbers in the general population, with 'ethnic or national minorities' representing 16 percent of the respondents, immigrants at 26 percent, and 'lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, or another minority sexual orientation' at 7 percent. The problems that women in tech face are pretty much what you might expect. Twenty-five percent of the women surveyed report 'encountering language or content that makes them feel unwelcome,' compared with 15 percent of men. Women are six times more likely to encounter stereotyping than men (12 versus 2 percent), and twice as likely to be subjected to unsolicited sexual advances (6 vs 3 percent)."

Comments

how 25 versus 15 percent is six times more likely

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never heard anyone concerning male nurse and babysitters.

Re:Biggest difference

[Ash-Fox]

I have a couple of very active female contributor accounts with female pictures etc. on Github despite being male in real life. Yet, I don't experience any new problems, same with Twitter, Steam etc.

Yet, I never really get anything particularly sexist that happens to me when I participate online under those accounts... At best, people on Call of Duty call me a "bitch" instead of "fag" and I don't get really anything negative etc. in other games and so on. But, on stuff like Bitbucket, Github, FOSS mailing lists? Nothing, no difference at all.

I get the impression there is a reason why these articles never tell you to just create a female account and see for yourself and it isn't because people will become traumatized by creating a female alias.