Perspectives on women in Drupal and open source in general

Posted by amybrate on March 10, 2009 at 4:50am

Hi Chix-

I'm working on my next post for the Girls in Tech (http://girlsintech.net) blog, and, inspired by last week's DrupalCon, conversations there (and the intro paragraph for this group!), I wanted to write something on the experiences of women in Drupal and/or open source in general.

Of course, this is the best place to look for material!

My questions for you...

Does anyone know what % we were for this DrupalCon?
Anyone come across any good research or commentary on this topic?
Would anyone like to comment on their own experiences? How has your experience in the Drupal community compared with that in other environments? Have you observed any trends over the last few years?

If you prefer to be anonymous, just email me through my contact form and I'll keep your identity private. If you'd like to get your name out there, feel free to give me a snippet and/or URL about yourself to include in the post.

Thanks to anyone who can help!

Amy

PS - If you're in the NYC area, we're about to have our chapter "relaunch launch party"...details will be posted to the Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=44604690767

Comments

Percentages.

Posted by exmotional on March 10, 2009 at 5:22pm

Last year we were {{theoretically}} 8% of the total pop. {{0.08 of 800 = 65ish}}
i only counted about 25-30 women at the drupalchix meetup though.
This year i was told there were about 250 women listed as attending. {{250/1400 = 15-20%ish?}}
i could pull up a calculator, but...

hope this is of some help!

--<3charlotte--

Neat!

Posted by webchick on March 10, 2009 at 8:42pm

I asked (and begged, and pleaded ;)) at Drupalcon DC, but was told the organizers didn't collect that information in the registration process so the data was lost. :( 250 sounds like it could be right, though. I definitely know there were more women than I've ever seen at a tech event before (BlogHer is pretty much in a category of its own ;)). But it was also a larger Drupalcon than ever before, so I'm not sure where we ultimately fell in terms of percentages.

In terms of the questions Amy asked... my experience in Drupal has been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, on the odd occasion where someone has said something the slightest bit off-colour in #drupal there's typically a mob of rabid, blood-thirsty operators kicking said person from the channel faster than I can even read what was said. :) But I do know from talking to other women in the larger technology space that this is not always the case in other open source projects.

One of the things that makes a big difference I think is that the Drupal community has a huge focus on valuing all contributions, not just code. While there are many kick-ass women developers in the Drupal community, there are also a lot of designers, themers, documentation writers, business managers, marketers, etc., or women developers who start with one of these roles before they muster the courage to show off their coding chops.

There is also a strong emphasis on mentorship. The attitude most of us "seasoned veterans" take is that each new face in the community is a potential contributor, and should thus be treated with respect and gently nudged toward the proper channels for making the changes they'd like to see. While you'll definitely see the token "RTFM" and "Google It" and such (and heck, I have my days too when my patience is not what it should be), I'd like to hope that that is by far the exception rather than the rule regarding community interaction.

For research/commentary on percentages of women and such, I'm not really aware of anything, apart from the old FLOSSpols study. It'd be neat to take another open source spectrum-wide sampling now that we're several years later and see if and how things have changed. (Or maybe there already is something; I am not generally aware of much outside of Drupal these days. ;))

I definitely think there

Posted by misselizabeth on March 10, 2009 at 10:21pm

I definitely think there were about 15% of women this go round. I was shocked at the increasing numbers from last year when I really had to look for other women at Drupalcon... and this year I didn't have to look hard at all. I would have attended the drupalchix meeting at lunch that day but didn't know about it until later. Somehow I still snuck into the photo :)

-=Liz=-

Non-official %

Posted by uberchic on March 26, 2009 at 8:31pm

I coerced Bonnie into letting me at the registration list at drupalcon DC briefly on Thursday. I ran some statistical sampling and came up with 16% females, as a low estimate.

For sample data: three pages had 15%, one 14%, one 18%, three 17%. Some additional caveats--the registration pages were alphabetical by first name, and I was guessing stereotypically on first names, and would guess male if I was unsure of the traditional gender for a name. These are by no means official records, merely a statistical guess. To further reduce bias, the sample was concluded by 3 individuals--myself, another female volunteer, and a male volunteer.

Do with this info what you will, but 16% is a statistcal sample and my conservative estimate. The other two volunteers came up with 18% and 19% respectively.

I hope that Paris includes gender info in their statistics and that we definitively break through 20%, if not in Paris, then by the next NorthAmerican DrupalCon.

Paix,
Jes

Thank you!!

Posted by amybrate on March 11, 2009 at 12:22am

Thanks for the great info! Too bad they didn't track gender, would be interesting to track it through the years.

Angie, may I quote you directly for my post?

Anyone else have thoughts before I start writing?

Amy

Amy C. Cham
Tech/Marketing Convergence Manager
Tree House Agency
Twitter: amycham

it was my first drupalcon,

Posted by shellyroche on March 11, 2009 at 1:05am

it was my first drupalcon, and i was really impressed by a) the number of other women there; and b) the way i was treated. i went in not knowing anyone, having largely been a lurker on the drupal site. despite this, everyone i talked to made me feel very welcome, and now that i've had an opportunity to get to know people and learn more about how awesome drupal is, i'll definitely be contributing.

i think i fell a little bit in love with the drupal community because of my experience at drupalcon :)

-shelly roche

If you're interested...

Posted by amybrate on March 13, 2009 at 3:48am

Hi all-

First off, thanks for the contributed comments. They will be very useful!

I say "will," because when I started writing my post I found at a) it was running WAY longer than intended, and b) it's kind of hard to find succinct, current information about women in non-Drupal open source. So I'm turning it into a series of posts in order to do some more research and avoid writing fluff.

The first post is up, if you'd like to see: http://girlsintech.net/new-york/women-in-open-source-where-are-we-pt-i/

The next post will be about open source in general, and the post after than (4 weeks from now!) will finally get to what's special about the Drupal community...so if there are any more thoughts, whether about your current experiences in Drupal or prior work on other open source projects, I would love to have them for research or quoting. As before, if you want to contribute something but prefer to be anonymous, just email me or DM me on Twitter and I'll keep your identity confidential.

Thanks for your help! I'm hoping this can turn into something significant and useful! May put up a survey this weekend...if there's no good data, maybe I'll just produce it myself!

Amy