Re: Code Of Conduct

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 17:31 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Davyd Madeley wrote:
> > Also of interest, a (female) colleague asked where we're getting our
> > 1% contribution statistic from. It sounds believable, but is it
> > people with CVS accounts, or does it include translators who send
> > translations to their i18n team leader. Did someone just look
> > through a list of names and guess the genders? Similarly for
> > "asianness" (sic). Are we just using the domain names on their
> > email addresses?
> 
> The 1% comes from the FLOSS-POLS report on women in free software, among
> others. Hanna Wallach's presented a 1.5% figure from that result before:
> http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/11/22/debian-women/
> 
> That's 1.5% in free software compared to 28% in proprietary software.

I'd be interested in seeing the raw numbers.  My experience
in the proprietary software industry is that there tends to
be a reasonably high percentage of women in technical jobs
that aren't necessarily programming (though they may involve
some programming), such as project management, tech writing,
graphic design, and quality assurance.

All of these positions tend to be under-represented in the
free software world, at least among volunteer efforts.  I'm
not trying to say that we need more of these positions just
to inflate our gender numbers (though I will say we need
more of these positions for other reasons).  All I'm saying
is that the free and proprietary numbers might be measuring
slightly different things, and that the proprietary software
industry might not be as well integrated as indicated.

--
Shaun