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 _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
