Taking a break while digging a ditch

When you have a community, and you notice that there’s an imperfect distribution in participation, what do you do?

How do you increase participation of a particular minority group? What should your goal be?

For example, if you have an open source project, and you need more programmers to contribute — what do you do? What I’ve observed is that the project advertises explicitly – they say, “Hey, we’d like more developers – interested?”

The leaders of the project call up their good friends, and ask those people to help out. Then they present at conferences, saying “Hey, look at our cool project. Want to join us?” They talk to individuals, they talk to groups. They say the same thing, “We’d really like you to join us. So, why don’t you download our code, ask me some questions, and contribute!”

Bottom line: they network, and they find the people that they are looking for.

So, I think this model works equally well for getting more women involved in open source projects. You say to your group of friends, “Hey, I’d like more women contributing to my open source project. Do you know any?” You go to conferences, and you say explicitly, “Hey you – would you like to participate in my project? What are you interested in? Can I help you find a project that is of interest to you?” You go to user groups, and you talk to the women who show up and find ways to keep them engaged in the group, and in the code.

All the hand-wringing over this problem that starts with “I don’t know what to do” can be solved by simply asking people to be involved. Politely, insistently and like you’re bringing them the best party you’ve thrown all year.

Invite them explicitly, rather than falling back on a “if we build it, they will come” mind-set. Sure, a laid-back approach works when you have a popular project, or the choice to contribute is easy. But otherwise, we need to ask for greater participation.

Take a moment, ask yourself — how many women do you know that write code? How many women do you know that contribute to open source in other ways? What can you do to expand your open source circle so that you invite at least one woman into our community? More than one? Maybe half a dozen?

Change yourself, and the whole community will change with you.

Fact is, open source software contribution is still kind of difficult. There are so many barriers to entry that community managers from huge corporations and extremely large open source projects are willing to meet with a group of five people at a 2000-person conference to explain the culture, the potential pitfalls, and the tremendous benefits of getting involved. And those same people are so convinced of the importance of this one-at-a-time contact, that they tell potential contributors, “If you have any questions, email me directly, and I will help you.”

We love our communities and the ideas that drive free and open source software so much that we want to talk to anyone who is interested. We think that it is worth it to convince people, one at a time, to contribute.

The same logic applies to getting women involved. The change won’t happen in a day. We convince people, one at a time, that what we work on – what we believe so much in – is worth contributing to.

And then, one person at a time, we will make it so that women are 50% of open source community.

(image courtesy of diamondmountain via Creative Commons license)

Heard of geekspeakr.com? Brenda Wallace is created a place to store the names and interesting details of women speakers for conferences.

I took a snapshot of the tag cloud so far:

Yay for PostgreSQL being the only database represented! So far!

[ I was working on a blog post about the Women In Open Source roundtable I ran, and then Brenda Wallace tweeted: "it seems reasonably easy 2 get women involved in opensource documentation, ui design, and even management. Why is it hard 2 get women coding?" Here's my longer response, mostly with ideas I got from the roundtable. ]

I ran a panel discussion about Women in Open Source at the PostgreSQL Conference East (last weekend). I talked about all the conference events that I’d seen in the last 1-2 years specific to women, and a pair of researchers talked about communication patterns among women on the KDE women’s list. Then we had a 2 hour discussion with the 10 people in attendance.

Three issues that stuck with me from the discussion were:

* Mentoring: Women do not often receive the same type of mentorship that men receive. This has two important consequences: women don’t feel as connected to the community (don’t learn cultural norms, don’t receive favors, don’t get as much praise or reward for work), and women don’t see clear pathways to greater responsibility or prestige (roles are not obvious unless you’re “in the know”, few role models).

* Self-efficacy: Women consistently rate themselves as far less capable than they prove themselves to be. Example: survey of Computer Science undergrads showed that women rated their preparedness at an average of 0%, while men rated their knowledge and prep around 60-70% — even though GRADES proved that the women had just as much ability/knowledge (these 0% folks were getting As and Bs in courses). The UMD researchers said that self-efficacy has been strongly correlated with success in achieving goals.

* Quality of Life: some coding jobs are low prestige, require superhuman hours and aren’t friendly to women (or men) with children. We didn’t have any research to back this up, but there was a lot of speculation that women 25-45 would not be excited to come back to programming after having children because of the life/work balance problems.

Some or all of these issues can probably be linked to the experience of other minority groups.

As far as “what we can do” — I think we need to work environments more humane and accepting of people who have children. There’s a bit of anti-child culture in some high tech circles, and my personal feeling is that this will continue to turn women away.

I also think we need more mentorship! Women need to mentor women, and men need to mentor women. I think training a group of men on how to mentor women would be greatly beneficial — especially if those men-mentors got some kind of seal of approval at the end of their mentorship bootcamp.

There’s always a tension when men mentor women, and maybe if it was a little more organized and some rules were set — like no using the mentorship program as a personal dating service — it might work better than the ad hoc mentorship stuff we have right now.

Less formal than GSOC, but more formal than just contacting people on a mailing list.