Brainstorming on Increasing the Ranks of Women in Drupal

I've been part of the low percentage stats for a long long time -- I was a physics major in college, then a physics grad student, then worked in the derivatives industry on Wall Street, then worked as a software developer, then as a freelance software developer -- Drupal is only the latest step for me in a rather winding career path, but at no time have there ever been more than a small percentage of women that I worked with in my field/job.

Obviously, I managed to survive all of that, so I may not be the best person to address the question of what the barriers are. But I've certainly participated in enough "Women in Physics", "Women in Software", "Women in Drupal" discussions over the years about how to attract and retain more women; I wouldn't say any of them really reached valuable conclusions or made big changes...

Some themes I've heard over and over:
- More women as role models and mentors
- Get girls started early (middle school, high school) with mentors and role models and learning about how much fun our nerdy techy careers are [this is more about getting women into tech in general than applicable to Drupal in particular]
- Having a critical mass of women

Regarding that last one (critical mass)... I chose where to go to grad school at least partly because of the critical mass issue: Princeton had 1 other woman grad student in physics, and Cornell had a lot (well, like 10%) ==> I went to Cornell because at least I wouldn't be a completely "different" person there. I also kept my last regular job at a software company a long time because that particular company had quite a few other women developers, and again, not being the odd one out is a good thing.

Also, when there's a critical mass of women present, especially prominent women, and they stand up and say "This is happening, and it's not OK", the whole community atmosphere can change, and even if those things don't completely stop, it becomes unacceptable to everyone, and the men also get behind the issue, and at least think about what's happening and how to make it better. I've seen some of that happen in the Drupal community -- at least it seems like it to me -- over the past 7+ years I've been involved.

The other question is: Do we actually have a problem at all that we can address in the Drupal community to make things better?

By this I mean: Let's say (as an example) that we're counting the % of the patches to Drupal core that are made by women, and (I have no idea what the actual number is) let's say it's 15%. This would seem to indicate a problem, because the % of women in humanity is 50%. But I think this is not the right number to compare with: to contribute most patches to Drupal core, you have to already be a PHP programmer, so probably rather than comparing 15% to 50% and thinking it's horrible, we should be comparing 15% to the % of all PHP programmers who are women, or if we couldn't get that stat, the % of all programmers in general who are women. Or, we could compare to our peers: the % of patches at other open source projects that are contributed by women.

So... I guess what I'm saying is, before trying to solve the "not enough women in Drupal" problem, let's first check the stats and identify whether the problem is in the Drupal community (as compared to the pool of people the Drupal community draws from, or as compared with our peer organizations), or is a problem in society as a whole.

And also let's check the stats for different aspects of the Drupal community, such as % of accounts on Drupal.org held by women, % of project maintainers (themes, modules), % of patch authors, % of documentation edits, % of forum posts/comments, etc. Another thing to look at would be the retention rate, which I think we could measure as the % of people who create an account on drupal.org but don't log in again after a certain amount of time, or who haven't logged in recently -- we could, for instance, look at how that is different (if it is) between men and women who make accounts.

Anyway... I'm not saying that I think we do or that we don't have a problem, just that I'd like to see the numbers, in context, before deciding.

As a research nerd, I like what you are suggesting regarding determining what the stats actually are. The whole reason I mentioned the Silicon Valley study is that it actually documented the extent to which women were being left behind at SV companies . . . without that data, discussions devolved into whether it was really all that bad.

Regarding what we should compare women in drupal numbers to. In the ideal world to which I aspire -- I'd say go for the 50% percentage. I'd use that as the "frame" . . . Everyone understands we make up half the population. Consequently, logic holds that ultimately that we should make up half the population in tech and in Drupal. While it isn't immediately realistic -- not in my lifetime -- that should be the gold standard.

In diversity circles, you'd compare women in drupal numbers to similar populations. So what other talent pools in tech would be similar? DIversity numbers and percentages are closely held. That said, you can sometimes piece it together from percentages and numbers that are reported in some places. You put the two together and you've got data you can use.

As an aside, I came across unitive.org that appears to be involved in boosting diversity numbers in tech. I'm touching bases with its co-founder Laura Mather who also co-founded Silver Tail Systems, part of RSA.

Regarding the Drupal.org stats you mention -- Is gender recorded on user accounts so that we could calculate stats in the Drupal community. If not, can we add the field and then message everyone to self-identify? Failing that, one can do best-guess based on names. However, that is a one-profile-a-a-time brute force exercise . . .so what might be the easiest way to get this done? Thoughts?

Last, in addition to measuring the problem, is there something we can do collectively as a group of smart drupal women to demonstrate our collective awesomeness to attract interest and gain critical mass? Perhaps measuring the numbers is a good way to begin (!)

I look forward to your thoughts . . .

Krista

PS Jennifer great to e-meet you. I just downloaded your book a week ago (!) When I checked your profile here and discovered you are the author, it made me smile. Kudos.

Hello Greg,

Thank you for the pointer on the public profile field. So where, exactly, is said info "public". Interestingly, I had to dive out of the community into Drupal.org to look at the settings in my own public profile.

Also, how does one get at gender or other public profile data to tabulate current numbers? When I look at the Member Directory, it only allows search by name . . .

My apologies in advance if I'm missing something screamingly obvious . . .

Regards,
Krista

Great questions, @jhodgdon.

I also think that the new API could prove useful when the public profile fields are included. This is a work in progress, but here is the link https://www.drupal.org/about-drupalorg/api with more to come.

I'm checking on this now to see what research has already been done and have asked @danigrrl to say some things based on her research.

For quick data munging purposes, I usually just compare the pager count at https://www.drupal.org/profile/profile_gender/female and https://www.drupal.org/profile/profile_gender/male. What that tells you is, of the Drupal.org users who elected to fill out the gender field, there are approximately 11,800 women (20 users per page x 590 pages) and 73,460 men (20 users x 3673 pages). That's 85,260 in total (Mixologic is correct that that's less than 10% of the 1,099,603 users on Drupal.org... more like 7%), of which women make up ~13% (11800/85260*100). The number peaked at 17% sometime in 2010-2012 and has been declining since. Not exactly sure the reason for that, but most of this group moving to Facebook I'm sure has not helped. :(

So, I realize I'm a bit late to this conversation, because you know, grad school and toddler and things.

As Lizz mentioned, I've actually been able to run some stats on who we are as a community, based on what information is in the profile field. I'm also working on improving the Drupal.org User Profile in general to better highlight the diversity of contributions that people actually make in the Drupal community, women inclusive.

To back up @webchick's point, my own experience as a woman in this community has been positive, and that the Drupal community in general has been more welcoming to women and people of color than many other communities (although, as with most communities, we can always do better).

To give you the numbers, as of March 2014 (when I actually was able to run the numbers, we had 3,863 of 10,140 (~38%) active users elect to fill in something in the gender field. Of these, 324 (~8.5%) identified as female, while 3529 (~91.5%) identified as male. Contrary to the assertion that a significant number choose transgender or other, only 10 had that designation. The majority just don't put anything.

Now, to put this in the broader context, these are only people with active profiles on Drupal.org, and do not reflect contributors. We do have some of those stats, but none would be very useful, as there are many contributions to Drupal, e.g. running events, mentoring others, etc. that aren't tracked very well (we're working on that). If we factor in contributors, we may find very different results.

To estimate some contributor numbers, we may be able to look to the 2013 FLOSS Survey, which surveyed over 2050 contributors from a variety of OSS projects. In that survey, females made up 11% of the total responses.

In a survey of Drupal contributors I'm currently conducting as part of my thesis research (which can be taken here), 159 of 274 responses included a gender identification; of those, 49 (~31%) identified as female. This is likely not completely reflective of the overall community, based on the fact that I distributed the survey partially through the Women in Drupal Facebook group, but it does back up my own observations that a significant percentage of people involved in various aspects of Drupal contrib, including working at sprints, running events, and other forms of contributing to the project, are female.

Hope the numbers help!