Re: Debian, lists and discrimination
On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> As to the barriers to involvement in Debian by women, it's pretty obvious
> that our gender participation ratio is decidedly different to that of the IT
> industry in general, let alone the general population. I believe (although
> I'd find it harder to back up with real numbers) that our female / male
> participation ratio is also lower than participation in the wider OSS world.
>
"The IT industry" is awfully vague. I question if you can make useful
conclusions based upon it. I recently taught a perl class for working
professionals in which 60% of the students were female. What does that
say about the IT industry? The Perl community? Nothing that's what.
A more apt comparison would be with other free operating system projects.
Let's see: FreeBSD has approximately 330 people with CVS commit
privileges. [1] I counted 5 identifiably female names. That's 1.5 %.
Gentoo has approximately 250 developers [2] I counted 4 identifiably
female names. That's 1.6%. In contrast, the last time this subject came
up, I looked and Debian developers comprised approximately 1%. (But
because, we are a bigger project, that's more actual women, 8 or 9 iirc.)
So we are slightly behind but by a statistically neglible amount.
[1] http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/staff-committers.html
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/roll-call/userinfo.xml
--
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>
La Salle Debain - http://www.braincells.com/debian/
Reply to: