I awoke this morning to see a tweet asking for opinion on the Women in open Source movement and realised my thoughts don't condense down to 140 characters and may as well go somewhere vaguely public for future reference. So full disclosure; I'm a straight middle-class white guy. I'm a FreeBSD ports maintainer (when I first read up on UNIX stuff BSD seemed more logical than SysV did so I loitered and discovered that politically I'm far more BSD license than I am GPL). I've contributed patches to a number of open source projects. I've written and released a few very small open source tools. I'm involved in a couple of IT projects which, whilst not open source, are community oriented.
Acceptance in IT
Something I find somewhat fascinating about the drive for women in IT in general is that in my experience IT is one of the most welcoming and accepting communities around, maybe less so in the more corportate environments but certainly in Open Source I think most things go. I think The Nudist on the Late Shift and Other Tales of Silicon Valley is a great collection of anecdotes about the laid back work style of Silicon Valley, and my group of friends in IT include a whole range of lifestyles, polygamy seems very common, skirts are popular attire for men (both in an Eddie Izzard "I wear it 'cause I like it" sense and the more stereotypical "I want to dress like a woman" way), I know a number of transgender individuals, there seems no eyebrows raised at someone being openly gay (or more commonly bi in my social groups). Being female seems fairly mundane in the Open Source community to me. Certainly I can't recall witnessing any real sexism, if anything I've witnessed and heard of far more racist incidents.
Sexism!
Yes, I just said I don't recall seeing any real sexism which implies I have seen some. And it's true, but I don't think much of it is a particular attack on women as it is an attack on someone threatening the Alpha Male (and yes, I know that is a sexist term but I think I'm using it quite validly). There are some people who are simply intimidated by others, and will lash out like children, aiming for the easiest target they can find. Sometimes that's race, sometimes it's sex, other times it's less controversial things like hair colour, social status, or even a preferred sports team. I've seen most things attacked, especially on the Internet, so I don't really believe most of the sexism I've seen is Anti-Women, simply Anti-That-Woman. Now I'm not saying we should tolerate these bullies, I'm somewhat amazed they can exist in our community of all places, but I think this is where as an outsider I may see things differently.
Often when these bullies go as far as to resort to an *ism the rest of the community will jump up and scream in defence, but for the person who was just targetted the damage is often already done. As much as logically we know why someone has said something, the fact that they said it still hurts and bothers us. I'm lucky, as I said I'm a straight white middle-class guy, sure I get abused but it's easier for me to shrug off being called a random insult than it would be to shrug of a *ist comment. And when you are a minority in your community I fully understand the impact is even greater than if someone found a way to insult my somewhat significant demographic.
And this is the thing, sexism in IT, and especially Open Source, seems to be a few "but you're a woman" comments and the odd idiotic bully who gets given a keynote where they let their own dellusions of grandeur go to their heads and they hire strippers to do little rimshots every time the speech includes one of their incredibly hilarious jokes straight from 1950 because they think it's sign of how cool and powerful they are. The inevitable ensuing controversy is often the first (and last) time I ever hear of half these people, so they get their 15 minutes of fame after all.
Women in IT
Now as a further thought a significant number of my friends would describe themselves as geeks. Quite a few of the others would say they aren't geeks purely because whilst they are geeks they want to define themselves as something larger. Shockingly, a number of my friends are also female. Between my two longest relationships I've even spent over 10 years dating "geek girls" (yes, I even got one the Perl CD Bookshelf for Valentine's once, apparently the best gift I ever got her). The majority of these women work in IT.
Something I find interesting is that many are fairly quickly to move from hands on IT into things like project management and documentation, some have even expressed a feeling of disappointment in themselves as if they are conforming to a stereotype of women in IT. However, superficially at least, I think none felt pushed into such roles. It's possible they took those routes more by default as their male colleagues stubbornly stayed in coding or admin roles, but I would certainly say in all the many discussions of feminism, sexism, and general workplace politics I don't recall any saying anything along the lines of being pushed into those fields due to their sex. Now I've no doubt that some women have been pushed like that. And I have no doubt that like in every other job market, there is sexism in IT. As I say, I suspect that outside the more corporate jobs I would expect sexism to be lower than many industries, but I have no proof of that so I accept I may be wrong.
Over Equal
What I find slightly more interesting is what I am coming to regard as a disconnect. One ex got involved in a Women at IBM type group, it had many goals but one was to try and increase IBM's female graduate intake. Now I don't have the figure but if 15% of CompSci students are female then 15% of IBM's graduate intake is 15% just now. In fact it may even be slightly higher, I don't recall. But IBM seem to believe their recruitment system is flawed because they should have something like 50% female graduates. That's silly! IBM isn't the problem, if they are hiring the same percentage of female graduates as there are in the country it suggests quite strongly that they have no sexism in their recruitment process. They do lots to tell women that IBM is an equal opportunity employer in fact. And this is the disconnect, IBM don't need to hire more female graduates, they need more female students to enroll in CompSci courses.
Now much as I can respect the point of Women in Open Source/IT groups I wonder if they do more harm than good. Here in the UK we make our first choices of qualifications at around 13 years old. Now if I was a 13 year old girl who was interested in computing, I wonder would I be put off by the fact that I keep hearing about all these groups fighting for sexual equality in the industry? I strongly suspect I would, and I think a majority of teenagers considering their careers would find it unsettling at least. But 13 is a bit harsh, although that sets the tone for our education most will still have the option of picking the IT career path at 17 when appliying for universities. Again, I must confess I would probably think twice about entering a career where I believed I would have to fight for my rights. I'm sure most are smart enough to realise there is sexism in accountancy also, but I think many would find the lack of Women's Movement groups a sign that it wasn't as bad as in IT.
I'm not saying these groups shouldn't exist, I just think they should be more careful of their public position. Worry less about the stupid bullies and do more to make young girls feel like they can have a career in IT without having to deal with that stuff. We've let incidents that very few people have even witnessed become big stories and it must sour the opinion of some. Basically I feel we're attacking the problem from the wrong angle. We don't need more women in Open Source, or working for IBM, we need more women in IT. Once women feel confident of the industry in general they'll filter out into the other areas. I think for a while women will feel more comfortable at places like IBM where there is a more mature culture, and while Open Source is still regarded as a wildcard by many it's regarded as a riskier career path and historically men have been more likely to take such jobs than women, but those things will actually be what increase the percentage of women in Open Source.
All of which has probably wandered off on a tangent beyond hope now, but that's me. I think it's better to look at the positive than the negative, and my mind drifts further than seaweed in a storm.