On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> As to the barriers to involvement in Debian by women, it's pretty obvious > that our gender participation ratio is decidedly different to that of the IT > industry in general, let alone the general population. I believe (although > I'd find it harder to back up with real numbers) that our female / male > participation ratio is also lower than participation in the wider OSS world. > "The IT industry" is awfully vague. I question if you can make useful conclusions based upon it. I recently taught a perl class for working professionals in which 60% of the students were female. What does that say about the IT industry? The Perl community? Nothing that's what. A more apt comparison would be with other free operating system projects. Let's see: FreeBSD has approximately 330 people with CVS commit privileges. [1] I counted 5 identifiably female names. That's 1.5 %. Gentoo has approximately 250 developers [2] I counted 4 identifiably female names. That's 1.6%. In contrast, the last time this subject came up, I looked and Debian developers comprised approximately 1%. (But because, we are a bigger project, that's more actual women, 8 or 9 iirc.) So we are slightly behind but by a statistically neglible amount. [1] http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/staff-committers.html [2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/roll-call/userinfo.xml -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> La Salle Debain - http://www.braincells.com/debian/