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

As if it's a bad thing

[jez9999]

and twice as likely to be subjected to unsolicited sexual advances (6 vs 3 percent).

FFS just get over it. Men are expected to initiate relationships. It's called life. It's not a problem. If you don't like it you might as well kill yourself now.

Re:Claims and facts

[cryptizard]

The fact that you are calling women developers, as a group, liars is exactly the problem. This is a fact.

Re:how 25 versus 15 percent is six times more like

[AmiMoJo]

Which is demonstrably untrue, as that guy who keeps suing venues offering women-only benefits (free crap, free entry etc.) proves.

Of course there is some discrimination against men in general, e.g. unequal parental leave rights. Don't distract from the genuine issues with hyperbole.