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?
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. )
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?
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?