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> Based on my own experience of github and open source, however, the only times I have ever seen women contribute to open source, they were always being paid to

by ashark 11y ago

> Based on my own experience of github and open source, however, the only times I have ever seen women contribute to open source, they were always being paid to do so. I cannot recall a single time that I came across a pull request or even just a regular patch from a hobbyist woman. Not sure why that is, but it has been a constant throughout my career - men do hobby programming and women don't. Possibly related anecdata: from my not insignificant, but still far from comprehensive experience nearly all the women who are developers in my area (not SF—I know nothing about that market aside from what I read) are with bigger companies (not necessarily software companies), and in fact there are quite a few women working as developers with those companies. OTOH, startups and small software businesses around here do hire lots of women—but mostly as graphic designers, or in sales/marketing, or as project managers. Very, very few women even interview for startup software development jobs here (for whatever reason—I don't claim to have an explanation).

mike_hearn 11y ago
Presumably something risk related? Men take more risks, it's documented, testosterone related. Working for a startup is risky. At Google there was (when I worked there) perhaps about 20-30% female engineering staff. Or maybe it was a bit lower, I don't recall, but it was pretty high. Yet as far as I recall, the new projects were typically started by men, I mean the bottoms-up ones. I never noticed it at the time, but thinking back, I'm struggling to think of cases where a woman started a new project with her 20% time (or even took it, actually). That might be just lack of data points of course. Projects created by employees weren't at all rare there, but it still wasn't something that happened every day. Many women in software, by my experience, are from slightly poorer parts of the world: eastern Europe, Russia, China, India. I suspect to them programming is just a job; a way to earn good money. But it's not something they're especially passionate about in the single minded obsessively focussed way that men can be (and I'm guilty of that).
- rebeccaskinner 11y ago
  Clearly larger companies are likely to attract more risk averse candidates but they also typically offer better health benefits, better work/life balance, and are more likely to have an hr department that can maybe mitigate some of the worst sexism that crops up in our industry. There's also probably a bit of a gravity affect happening. My entire career I've never been on a team with even a single other woman and it would certainly be a nice thing to go somewhere where that wasn't the case, so maybe it's just easier for companies that employee women to hire more women.

by ashark 11y ago

mike_hearn 11y ago

Presumably something risk related? Men take more risks, it's documented, testosterone related. Working for a startup is risky. At Google there was (when I worked there) perhaps about 20-30% female engineering staff. Or maybe it was a bit lower, I don't recall, but it was pretty high. Yet as far as I recall, the new projects were typically started by men, I mean the bottoms-up ones. I never noticed it at the time, but thinking back, I'm struggling to think of cases where a woman started a new project with her 20% time (or even took it, actually). That might be just lack of data points of course. Projects created by employees weren't at all rare there, but it still wasn't something that happened every day. Many women in software, by my experience, are from slightly poorer parts of the world: eastern Europe, Russia, China, India. I suspect to them programming is just a job; a way to earn good money. But it's not something they're especially passionate about in the single minded obsessively focussed way that men can be (and I'm guilty of that).

rebeccaskinner 11y ago
Clearly larger companies are likely to attract more risk averse candidates but they also typically offer better health benefits, better work/life balance, and are more likely to have an hr department that can maybe mitigate some of the worst sexism that crops up in our industry. There's also probably a bit of a gravity affect happening. My entire career I've never been on a team with even a single other woman and it would certainly be a nice thing to go somewhere where that wasn't the case, so maybe it's just easier for companies that employee women to hire more women.