Re: Women's participation chart
Hi,
On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 03:24:00PM +0200, Jeremiah Foster wrote:
>
> On Sep 9, 2010, at 22:55, Francesca Ciceri wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Thu, Sep 09, 2010 at 03:07:24PM -0400, David Raleigh Arnold wrote:
> >> The x-axis says that women have reached 40. What? 40 women or
> >> 40 pct of something? Regards, daveA
> >
> > 40 is not a percentage of something, 40 is the actual number of women who did
> > a First Upload between 1996 and 2010.
> > Roughly speaking, we can say that *in percentage* the Debian Project is in
> > line with the general FLOSS trend in which the presence of women is in the
> > order of 1,2-1,5%.
> > As a sidenote, I can add that a recent study made some noise because pointed
> > out that women represent 28% of proprietary software developers against 1,5 to
> > 2% in Open Source Software.
> >
> > It's important to compare the number of First Upload (40) with the (little)
> > number of women become DD (15) or DM (2):is it a good rate? We can't answer,
> > cause there's not similar statistics for male contributors (and we
> > (Debian-Women) are on the
> > way for making it) and, if it's not a good rate: where's the bottleneck?
> >
> > So, stay tuned: we're working on this stastistic_stuff. And hints are welcome!
>
> Really great stuff! Thanks for doing this. Is there more information?
There's not a specific web or wiki page on it - the job on male contributors' statistics isn't
started, yet - but I can speak about it and give you some ref.
As you know, Margarita Manterola has created some statistics about female
presence in Debian. The first goal in making that it was trying to understand
if the DW Mentoring Program was successful in the previous years and what we
can do as group in the interest of female users/developers in Debian.
We had some discussion [1] [2] on those statistics on debian-women ML.
Marga's statistics was the first step, but we're not able to try conclusions
from them without some general data about the expected number of
women in a FLOSS project (to see if there's a specific lack of women in
Debian). Or maybe with data about numbers of male
contributors (to see if the classic imbalance between male and female
contributors is on expected values or not).
I think the second choice could be the best, because if we try to compare our
data about female contributors with general FLOSS data on female contributors,
we need to consider the research method and other general condition (like
sample,etc.) of the other study (in order to make a
correct comparison).
We need some others data to make a comparative analysis.
So, last week we had a IRC meeting [3] in which we decided to proceed in this
direction: we will form a specific group (formed by me and Anne Ghisla) to
compile some statistics on male contributors in Debian. We will start on this
work soon.
First of all, we need to evaluate the pratical side of the job: Marga promised
to give us some hints :). We (me and Anna) haven't any official role in
Debian (i.e. we're not DD or DM) so I don't think we can have access to db to
parse data about contributors: this can be a problem. :)
So the goals would be:
1. improve Debian statistics about contributors
1.1 create statistics on male contributors
1.2 improve statistics on female contributors to track non DD/DM
A great problem, IMHO, is tracking non DD/DM contributors: they are completely
invisible because they often use a sponsor to upload or commit (not in l10n teams, for example: I'm not a DD/DM but I commit by myself on Debian website).
Maybe we can parse alioth groups and wiki db.
2. comparative analysis between
- Debian male and female contributors
- Debian female contributors and $other_distro female contributors
- Debian female contributors and FLOSS in general female numbers
I've searched a little about other distros' statistics: it seems they haven't
numbers on female contributors. I've only found an Ubuntu Census Survey [2]
that's not gender-related and not very interesting cause the sample is build
not only from developers but also from users (it's mainly based on devel ML
but also on users' forums). In this survey the women percentage is 2.4%.
More interesting, I think, are the FLOSS-POLS studies. [3]
Ok, this is a general idea about the statistics_stuff. Not implemented yet,
we've discussed on it and we are on the way to start it.
So, if someone else want join the Statistic Strike Force...:)
Cheers,
Francesca
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2010/08/msg00022.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2010/08/msg00038.html
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2010/09/msg00029.html
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCensusSurvey
[3] http://www.flosspols.org/index.php
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