Today I found an excellent small website about the gender imbalance in Free software. There’s been a lot about the topic on the linux/free software news sites too.

Large parts of the free software community are rather hostile towards women, as unfortunately is usual in communities with a huge male majority. Which then prevents the community from becoming balanced because it will be unattractive to women.

I think it is odd the proprietary software industry is closer to gender balance. Aren’t people who care a lot about freedom supposed to be more friendly to others who are different from them in any way?

Perhaps the difference is caused by the strong connection between hobby computing and Free software. Not everyone who has an IT job also likes to tinker with computers in their spare time, although probably the majority does have that hobby. For some reason it is a typical male hobby… I don’t really understand why. So with more spare time programmers involved, it makes sense there are less women involved in Free software.

Another possible cause for the difference is the image of the Free software community being a resistance movement (against microsoft), which is of course nonsense, but half the community thinks it’s true and so does almost everyone outside it. Resistance movements are more attractive to young men than they are to young women. Why? I’ve noticed most women just won’t get as angry about microsoft as men will, but I wouldn’t know if this has to do with testosterone or with those women being less informed because of not being part of the Free software community. Anyway I still think being angry at microsoft is a very poor reason for joining the community.

So what are we going to do about this gender imbalance? Labeling projects as friendly to women (or any other group) isn’t going to help, because it will imply all the unlabeled projects are NOT friendly. Live in the ghetto or fear being discriminated… not a great choice, is it?

I think we need to make more clear to everyone what Free software really is about. It’s not a bunch of geeks who have trying to kill some company by giving away an imitation product for free. It’s a community of nice people who want to get things done, who will write their own software if needed, and who don’t want to be prevented from helping each other. Maybe that will help, and if it doesn’t, it will still be an improvement in other ways.