Neil

Authored Comments

>> increase the number of women on open source projects makes it more enjoyable for those of us who are already contributing.

A change in the gender ratio won't change the way I feel about my job or work environment either way, so please don't presume to act as if your point that women necessarily make any environment more enjoyable is somehow self-evident or that you are obviously speaking for all of us. I think more women should choose to enter software development but I'd rather just be surrounded by a group that happened to be all guys than a group that included women with some feminist agenda.

>>Solving the problem also means that when I am looking for people to hire, and go find their public code samples, I can find code samples drawn from a distribution of contributors that is representative of the overall percentage of people in software development, and not just representative of the oddly skewed percentage of men... having a distribution that reflects a missing chunk of the overall available developer population leads me to believe that I might be overlooking great candidates.

What does it even mean to say you are a developer "in the available developer population" if you never actually develop any software? The percentage isn't oddly skewed at all. It exactly reflects the make up of the actual contributors. There is no gender-specific barrier to getting into opensource. If there isn't much code developed by women around, then that just clearly indicates that the majority of women simply don't want to do it for whatever reason. i.e. by their own choice. There is no "problem" to be "fixed" here.

Your own words strongly indicate you are basically looking for excuses to hire developers just because they are female, even when they have little or no actual work to show, whereas to consider a male developer, it would be only because of proven ability. Do you not see that your own gender-bias as a hiring manager actually makes you the stereotypical "sexist manager" many people possibly including you already complain about? Why don't you simply do the right thing and just hire devs on their actual ability, regardless of their gender? Just because your discrimination is pro-female doesn't make your gender-biassed hiring behaviour any more right or acceptable. Remember there is no such thing as "positive discrimination". Discrimination is always against someone.

That said I do agree with your observation that encouraging more devs (of any kind) to contribute in opensource is always a good thing.