On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 10:10 PM, Stack <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 8:37 PM, Daniel Vimont <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> With regard to recruiting new contributors, I'll just toss out a question >> which I hope does not give offense: What can be done to encourage more >> gender-diversity in this project (and projects like it)? >> >> > Thank you for raising this 'awkward' question up here on the dev list. > > Our ratio is awful. I'm ashamed to cite numbers. > > I don't know what we can do to encourage participation. I'd be interested > in any ideas others might have and would be up for acting them to try and > make redress. >
Yes, thank you Daniel. This is an issue that weighs on me. The ASF in general has a demographic problem, and our particular corner of it seems particularly homogenous. I'm a firm believer in "can't fix what you don't measure." Stack do you have numbers from somewhere? I was looking at ways we could run an opt-in poll to get an idea of how our community looks outside of what I can already see in the committer and PMC ranks from meetups. I don't think there are any fast answers to this issue, but I think there are some things we could try doing that would help the project generally: 1) We could use better student outreach. Presuming we come up with some materials for trying to get students involved overall, we should get a few folks go out of our way to present those materials to student groups that try to provide space for folks who aren't in our dominant demographic. 2) Similar to #1, there are meetups (at least in my area) that try to make things accessible and comfortable for e.g. women. We could make a habit of presenting to these meetups in addition to our normal "big data" themed groups. 3) I've noticed that none of the meetups or conferences where I see HBase stuff have child care options. This doesn't only impact women, but it disproportionately impacts them due to societal expectations. We the community could start pushing folks to have something and we the PMC could perhaps push this a little harder, like we do the need for a Code of Conduct.
