
By Welcoming Women, Python’s Founder Overcomes Closed Minds in Open Source - happy-go-lucky
https://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2018/11/20/by-welcoming-women-pythons-founder-overcomes-closed-minds-in-open-source/
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0db532a0
The article says that Guido thinks that taking specific action to encourage
more women to participate in open source projects, and the Python project in
particular is a good thing. I will assume that Guido as a public figure isn’t
just overtly signalling his subscription to the diversity zeitgeist, but also
has some sort of quantifiable reason for thinking this.

There are two broad categories of questions which can be asked about diversity
in open source projects: one is about the effect of diversity on the project
and the other is how the project members’ behaviour effects diversity. I would
like to ask a couple of questions inside these categories which should be easy
to answer in terms of hard data:

1\. Can anyone name an open source project which has taken measures to
increase diversity of gender and has had a measurable effect on diversity of
gender?

2\. For any such project, can anyone point to a measurable increase in quality
e.g. commits, lines of code, increase in market share, which has resulted from
increased diversity in gender?

3\. What portion of female developers have experienced frustration with the
behaviour they have seen from the members of open source projects and have
decided to use their time on other things?

4\. Of those female developers, what sort of behaviour has caused this
frustration, and what portion of male developers have been pushed away by this
same behaviour?

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ebg13
1, 3, and 4 are great questions. I'm going to focus on 2.

> _can anyone point to a measurable increase in quality e.g. commits, lines of
> code, increase in market share, which has resulted from increased diversity
> in gender?_

Did you perhaps mean "measurable increase in engagement" rather than
"measurable increase in quality"? If you only focus on the product, it's very
easy to lose sight of the fact that the fundamental point since FLOSS's
inception has always been caring about other fellow humans, _not_ increasing
market share, on the premise that the metric that really matters is how much
you choose to not shit on people. This is why talking about free software
instead of open source is so important to many of us, why inclusivity is so
important to many of us, and why codes of conduct are so important to many of
us, toxic rockstar coders be damned.

( I'm not a woman, but based on conversations among women in FLOSS that I've
been privy to, my best answer for #3 is close to 100% of the ones I know. )

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0db532a0
People mostly create software with the objective that it be useful to humans.
FLOSS has its own ideas about how software should be written and shared, but
the objective remains the same.

Market share doesn’t necessarily mean how much cash software makes. Firefox
for instance was once a big, very useful open source contender in the browser
market.

I agree that there is a large number of arseholes in the open source software
market and that it would be better for everyone if that problem were solved.
There’s also a huge number of great people who I at least can thank for
introducing me to the world of programming and open source as a kid. I’m also
not completely white and western, and I never remember my weird-sounding name
being a problem in these communities.

I find that the focus on diversity for its own sake misses the point, and I
haven’t yet seen any evidence that its encouragement matters to open source
projects’ success.

Why not just try and just make a nice environment and let the diversity come
naturally if it wants to?

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commandlinefan
Wait, how were women unwelcome before? How did anybody even know?

