And sadly, gender inequality in open source communities is widely acknowledged to be even worse than in the proprietary software world. Figures are hard to come by, but a 2009 keynote at OSCON Alex Bayley cited a 2006 EU survey that found only 1.5 per cent of contributors to open source are women.
A survey for a study published in Journal of Information Technology Management, Volume XXI, Number 4, 2010 on open source found that half of the women who participated had experienced online or offline harassment.
However, there are people who are fighting to change the status quo and build an industry that is not just less misogynist, but also more welcoming for queer, transgender and gender diverse people, and under-represented groups generally.
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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