Only about 2% of the thousands of developers working on open-source software projects are women, a number that women already involved in the open-source movement want to see increased.
That issue was the topic of a panel discussion here on Friday, the last day of the seventh annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention, as the panel discussed ways to reverse that pattern. The 2% figure was gleaned from several university and private studies, according to panel members, and is much smaller than in the proprietary software industry, where some 25% of all developers are women.
I knew that women were underrepresented in open-source software projects, but I didn’t know how bad the situation was until I did a little google search on it. 2%! That’s practically zero. Although I enjoy working with men, I want to work with women too and I would not willingly consign myself to being one woman in 50 in a working environment.
I had a very pleasant back-and-forth discussion with Michael Bernstein, an information architect and Python proponent, on Shelley Powers’ Burningbird blog on just this topic. I’ve been thinking about using Python but it seems very male to me, perhaps because it’s an open source language.
I’m going to take a stereotypically female approach to explaining this here, which is to explain it through my own experience. As I told Michael in our comment exchange, as I moved from less proprietary (i.e., more open source) to more proprietary in the software world, I worked with more women. As I mentioned before, all things being equal, I prefer to work with men and women, not just men. The lack of women in open source may perpetuate itself if women aren’t interested in working in such extremely male environments.
More importantly though, I can’t imagine building some software just to make some other software better. I want to have an impact in the world, and I think software or webware is a great way to do it–if it reaches beyond computing to effect social change. For example, one of my pet topics is the issue of women in computing. I’d be very excited to produce a web application that promoted the visibility of women online and in computing. This potential explanation for the lack of women in open source projects–that women see programming as more utilitarian than as a fun thing in itself–has been brought up before. It fits with my experience. That’s not to say I don’t find programming fun. I do. I love programming. I spent time this afternoon ignoring my children while I played around with the Python interpreter. Fun, fun, fun. But I’m not going to spend a lot of time on tech stuff if it doesn’t achieve what to me represents a higher purpose. For other people, better quality tools and software may be that higher purpose. But that’s just not enough motivation for me to neglect my children and create havoc in my household while I sit at the computer for hours on end.
If female programmers don’t want to participate in the development or even the use of open-source technologies to the same extent that men do, should we worry? Yes, indeed. Because there is an idea in the programming world that use of open-source, employer-spurned languages like Python indicates technical prowess. I’ll leave the reader to ponder the implications. I don’t have answers or conclusions right now, but I do think this is an important topic.
6 Comments
Anne, I’ve subscribed, and I’ll try to keep track of this topic on your blog.
I’d still like to know which languages you consider ‘less male’, assuming this isn’t simply synonymous with ‘more proprietary’.
Also, let me know if you would like to be referred to other women who use Python.
Hi Michael,
I’ve started using Python and it’s such a pleasure–I don’t get why people have a problem with the syntactic whitespace. The code is clean and easy to understand. I indent my code anyway, so brackets seem unnecessary.
I think my feeling about more male vs. less male programming languages probably comes down to the simple matter of who I came into contact with when I used various languages, not anything to do with the languages themselves.
I did see a Python book at the bookstore that was co-written by a woman… that was heartening.
By the way, is there a particular Python reference you like? I’m working through online tutorials but want something more comprehensive for when I’m doing my own project.
For now I’m not ready to network with other Python programmers but I may be at some point. I have a fairly large project in mind that I might want to expand beyond my own efforts at some point in the future.
I’m glad you were hanging around on burningbird to help me get beyond my initial reaction to Python. Thanks for continuing the conversation.
For dead-tree references, consider both ‘Python Essential Reference’ from New Riders/SAMS, and/or ‘Python in a Nutshell’ from O’Reilly. After that, consider ‘Python Cookbook’ and/or ‘Python Standard Library’ (both from O’Reilly).
Depending on your specific needs and learning style, you may find some of the following useful: ‘Learning Python’, ‘Programming Python’, ‘Python Programming on Win32′ (all from O’Reilly), ‘Dive Into Python’ from Apress, ‘Core Python Programming’ from Prentice Hall, ‘Text Processing in Python’ from Addison-Wesley, or ‘Python Web Programming’ from New Riders.
Because people differ so much in their preferences regarding books, I do *not* recommend getting any books without at least perusing them to see if they work for you.
As an aside, if your bookstore does not carry a particular title, ask if you can have it ordered. Depending on the store’s policy, books that their distributor carries in their warehouse may not obligate you to actually purchase the book after you’ve had a chance to look it over. The store may distinguish in this way between an ‘order’ and a ’special order’.
Michael, thanks for the book suggestions. I saw the New Riders Python Essential Reference at the bookstore and considered buying it but wasn’t ready to commit yet. The O’Reilly Cookbook also caught my eye.
I need a good reference book for sure… I spent about fifteen minutes today puzzling over the use of triple double quotes (”"”) for a multi-line string. I thought “”" was only for comments so was confused to see a constant string defined with that.
Keep in mind that docstrings are not comments, per se. In particular, you may find doctests interesting.
Also, Python has been evolving at a somewhat faster pace these past few years, so make sure that you’re aware of whether a newer edition of a book exists or is in the works, and of the version of Python covered by any particular book (including the ones I recommended), you may also want to at least scan through the ‘what’s new in python’ sections of the online docs for subsequent versions.
Feel free to cherry pick when reading, though. Backward incompatibility between versions is pretty rare.