Women in the Free Software Movement
I work for the Free Software Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to advancing the cause of computer user freedom. Free Software is software that you can run for any purpose, where you have the freedom to change and improve the underlying source code, and where you have the freedom to make copies of the software and give copies to your friends or the entire world.
We live in an era where most of our correspondence, retrieval of political information and much of our purchasing and media consumption happens through our computers. Consider what it would mean for society if proprietary software corporations or governments had unfettered control over these activities. Individual liberty would be curtailed and the health of our democracy would suffer. Maybe you can begin to see why this work would attract someone like me.
My background is in political organizing. I've agitated for free speech, worked to protect civil liberties and to increase transparency and access to the political process. To protect civil liberties any freedom movement must work hard to attract a diverse and gender-balanced community.
The free software community hasn't gotten there yet. According to FLOSS POLS, (http://www.flosspols.org/) women comprise less than 2% of the overall community of activists and developers working towards freedom for all computer users. Online you can find the opinion that "women just aren't into computers" as a response to these kinds of statistics. The "lack of interest" argument quickly dissolves when you look at the higher numbers of women in proprietary software or the handful of free software projects that have "magically" attracted higher numbers of women. Ruby and Tor are amongst the projects that are doing a much better than average job of recruiting, mentoring and retaining women to write code, work on documentation and other aspects. Dreamwidth notably boasts 75% women developers, effectively laying waste to the idea that women aren't interested in free software or coding. Clearly, there is work to be done.
That's why we started the Women in Free Software group, a coalition of men and women who are specifically interested increasing the number of women involved in free software, as coders, documenters, designers and activists. What's been successful in encouraging women's participation will come as no surprise to anyone who's familiar with political organizing tactics. Projects that specifically recruit women have more women applicants. Mentoring plus an environment where it is clear that is OK to screw up every so often go a long way. Encouraging women-only or women-focused training has been very successful. Continued follow-up with new users and new coders is critical. We need more initiatives to increase women's participation if we are going to see the kind of gender parity that is needed.
This weekend, the Free Software Foundation is hosting a day-long caucus. We'll be bringing community members together to examine concrete ways that we can do a better job recruiting, mentoring and retaining more women in free software. Our freedom as computer users -- with a variety of voices -- depends on it. Please join us on Sunday at the Harvard Science Center,http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Category:LibrePlanet2010_WFS/.
