Making our communities more welcoming

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[edit] Making our communities more inclusive!

Etherpad doc: http://etherpad.com/WLdWJD10cW

[edit] Problem statement

GSoC:

  • 10 women participants last year
  • More this year!

Premises:

  • Not enough women/minorities involved
  • We want more

Make sure that you have the doors open wide for new comers!

Statement of part of the problem:

  • 20% are generally involved in computer science industry
  • 2% are FLOSS contributors (from an EU report)
  • It's a bummer that we don't have more women and minorities. World domination is difficult if we are only utilizing a tiny portion of our overall available community.

NEW PROJECT IDEA: Can we get female contributors to other projects to help make that environment welcoming for females in OTHER projects? Inviting women developers from other projects to help out in getting women.

[edit] Things that we can do to attract new people

1. Building a reputation of being inclusive

  • simple direct media layer (low level game development)

2. Appreciate and recognize non-code contributions

3. Be nice to newbies!

4. START YOUNG. Start going to middle schools and teaching computer classes

  • See Nat Torkington's talk on this from OSCON 2008
  • Can be difficult to get involved in schools, but if you talk to your local park and rec department to get kids out into the parks

5. Do targetted outreach to the community you are interested in attracting.

6. Tell about what open source does for the social good.

7. Don't be invisible! Advertise what women are doing.

8. Personal contact with an individual.

  • Recruit, hire and then help them find a job

9. Have pictures! Pictures of women and minorities in organizations.


[edit] INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCES

  • "If the fish stinks, it starts at the head." If there's an issue, be sure to start talking to the leadership of the group.
  • Invite men to the women's groups.
  • Female-specific user groups for your organization can get more women involved.
  • Self-image -- wear the clothes of your profession.

POINT: There's more to work on than just code. HOWEVER: Only encouraging women to do non-code things, doesn't work.

Can we please avoid discussing *WHY* fewer women are involved? Because this could take FOREVER and we have limited time

[edit] Basic questions about why women aren't involved

  1. Why is it true that women go into professions equally unfriendly - Law and Medicine - but in computer science they are going down?
  2. why do people feel intimidated?
  3. How many female users do you have?
  4. How do I figure out if there are women *using* my software?
  5. Are the problems the same for women as a whole in open source or from GSoC?
  6. What are we doing to keep women and minorities out?
  7. What is the motivation of the contributors?
  8. Why do you like this project?

[edit] Misc discussion

Western culture issue: Men are raised to argue for fun, women are raised to not argue at all.

Access to non-traditional students is difficult

  • Instructors have hard to getting into the classrooms -- how do we do that?
  • OPINION - Women go into "more compassionate" industries; Women can be more interested in organizations that have more social good.

You know what you are doing to make the world a better place

From Pinar: There are so few role models in Computing Women need to attend more conferences, be more public "Invisibility shield for women in tech" -- also a problem in GeoScience :)

  • We need PEERs not just rolemodels

"Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide", by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever -- Book to read about the differences in communication between men and women

http://women.acm.org

Ask women what made them stay? Trying to replicate that situation. Teach young women how to beat their brothers on games.

Personality trait:

  • Encountering assholes? Do they think that the person who they encountered is just an isolated case, or do they leave the field?

Anectdotes?

1000 parsec --> why doesn't this project have more women involved.

"I don't need data to know that i don't have enough women."

Entrenched culture -- hard to see how it looks when you're on the inside. Be careful about getting touchy when someone gets offensive. No point arguing the minutia of the comment - if someone has a different view, or maybe outside the culture, and just say sorry.

Assume that people are stupid and not mean. (except for in pidgin :D)

Some women developers remain anonymous for harassment prevention.

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