Girls In Tech

The 2009 DrupalCon Drupalchix BoF

Photo credit: by domesticat

Last week, over a 1000 Drupallers converged on Washington, DC, for the 2009 US DrupalCon (another will be held this September in Paris).  This year I was very happy to join the DrupalChix–a loosely organized group of women in the Drupal community–for their Birds of a Feather during lunch on the first day.  We were all very excited with the apparent growth in the number of women in the Drupal community.

While official numbers are unavailable, estimates of female attendance at Drupal events are on the upswing. Anecdotally, it’s just getting easier to meet up with other women at Drupal events, and our ladies’ cut t-shirts ran out well before the conference ended.  As far as real numbers, the estimates are that last spring’s DrupalCon in Boston was roughly 8% female, the summer conference in Szeged was around 10%, and this year’s event in DC pulled a roughly 15% female attendance.

In the context of open source, where women have become accustomed to being one of a few women, if not the only woman, in the room, that’s a phenomenal number.  Recent statistics are hard to find, though a frequently cited FLOSS-POLS report from 2006 suggested that only 1.5% of open source contributors were women.  Ouch.

Vanessa Haakenson of Vworld New Media, an 8-year veteran of open source  says:

I don’t have any stats on the number of women in general but over the years I’ve only seen a handful actively participating in projects I’ve been involved with. From my personal experience over the past 7 yrs I can say I’ve seen less than 10 women in what I’ve been involved with but hope to see more women in the future.

As a web developer and technical undergrad student, I got used to being the only girl in the room…sometimes quite literally.  It was not at all unusual to sit down in a new Java class and realize I was The Only One.  In the workplace, there might be another female dev and a couple women on the business side, but again, the web industry was clearly overwhelmingly male.

Despite the numbers, though, I never felt there was any hostility.  There were times I thought some colleagues were “playing nicer” with me than with each other, being less blunt in criticism or arguments, and certainly all the tech stereotypes skewed to a male persona; however, I did not feel that my skills were dismissed.  Nobody ever tried to keep me from tackling the tough code on a project, and once I demonstrated my ability, they were perfectly willing to come to me for help when they ran into trouble on my core technologies.

I always wondered why there were so few women in web development–my experience showed me about 10% on the tech side.  The real shock, however, came the first time I saw the FLOSS number.  As much as we were the minority in web development, it appeared that we were practically invisible in open source projects.

WHY?  Was it a lack of interest?  Skills?  Confidence?  Or…?  And why is it that the Drupal project seems to buck the trend?

Up Next: Being a “she” in open source today.

This post is running much longer than I expected, and quite frankly I’d like to do more research and make this something really substantial.  Let’s leave this off for today, and continue with my next post in two weeks, looking at the experiences of women in open source today.

So what do you think?

Why are women so underrepresented in open source?  Are you an open source gal with experience and insights to share?  What can we do to increase our numbers?  What deters women from contributing to open source projects…or do you think it’s just a matter of personal preference?  Is Drupal actually different, and if so, why?

If you have thoughts to contribute anonymously for the next post, you can email me at amy@girlsintech.net, and note that you prefer to not be identified.

PS – We’ll be making our big relaunch event announcement in the next few days, but you can get in early now! Click here to see the details and RSVP!