Gender and free software

June 18th, 2006

I received the following message from Anne Oestergaard from the Master-Libre lists server (incidentally if any of you are interested in establishing masters courses in Free / Open Source Software this server list is an excellent resource).
I have to confess I haven’t had time to follow up the references. But the issues Anne raises seem to me important so I am posting it on.
Anne says: “It seems that the Free- and Open Source Software community is debating this serious “male mono culture issue” after this report has been
published:
“The report states that there is 1½ % women active in the FLOSS community.
That about 80 % of the women have felt discrimination - but on the other hand, some 80 % of the guys claim that they have not been discriminating women.
The report also found that women are being (unconsciously) excluded!”
The full report can be found here and the recommendations here.
Anne is making a presentation on Wome in Free Software at GUADEC this month. In her abstract she asks: “Are women in FLOSS considered as bugs, groupies, or equal partners in their field of skills?”
She goes on to say “most discrimination of all kinds is utterly unintentional, and that kind of discrimination is harder to tackle because there is no evil intent and no-one to directly blame. It still needs tackling and that is in part about making people understand when their culture and actions put off or exclude others.”
Anne says: “A lively debate is on going on this list: foundation-list@gnome.org at
the moment: Key words “Code of conduct” and “Women in GNOME”

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