One of the comments to the article reads

Subject: An average male nerds take on this. “Hmmm…could it be that the low numbers of women in software in general is that most women, not persons, but women, happen to be not interested in this particular field?”

And I’m so freaking tired of “women aren’t in X profession because they are not interested,” horsesh*t. Eerily similar to this which “explains” why women didn’t need the vote.

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours. Grover Cleveland, 1905

Women ARE interested in open source development. Really. Women wouldn’t be so frustrated with, in its best light, the overall lack of gender diversity in the open source community if we weren’t interested in open source. Really. Women, and some men, continue to talk about the sexism that exists in FLOSS because sexism poses a barrier to participation by women in open source. Really.

In the U.S., the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was created under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to enforce Federal anti-discrimination laws. The EEOC defines sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination. Per the EEOC definitions of sexual harassment can include:

• The harasser can be the victim’s supervisor, an agent of the employer, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or a non-employee.
• The victim does not have to be the person harassed but could be anyone affected by the offensive conduct.
• Unlawful sexual harassment may occur without economic injury to or discharge of the victim.

What does this have to do with women’s participation, or lack thereof, in Open Source software? Can you imagine this post by a Debian developer being distributed via a company’s email system to his coworkers? I suspect not. And why? Because it could be used to establish a pattern of sexual harassment and thus fall under EEOC guidelines of sex discrimination.

Businesses, including (most) proprietary software companies, work to prevent and eliminate workplace discrimination, including discrimination based on sex, and generally have policies and procedures in place to deal with allegations of sexual harassment. EEOC guidelines for sexual harassment policy include:

Prevention is the best tool to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace. Employers are encouraged to take steps necessary to prevent sexual harassment from occurring. They should clearly communicate to employees that sexual harassment will not be tolerated. They can do so by providing sexual harassment training to their employees and by establishing an effective complaint or grievance process and taking immediate and appropriate action when an employee complains.

Now, the ummmmmmmmmmmm part. Remember, proprietary software has 25% woman developers and Open Source software has less then 2% of woman contributors.Think there’s a link?

P.S.
Kudos go out to the Ubuntu development community for establishing a Code of Conduct by which contributors are expected to adhere.