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\title{Women in Debian and Free Software}

\author{Magni Onsøien}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\section{Introduction}

The first part of this paper is a short overview of some relevant
literature. The list is by no means complete and a lot of relevant
literature has been deliberately skipped. Then there are some statistics of
men's and women's participation in different mailing lists, compared to
numbers from bigger surveys among developers of free and open source
software, before the paper concludes with some remarks about why women are
an important part of the developer force.


\section{Literature}
Quite a few articles have been written about Open Source development and
developers in general (see
e.g. \cite{dempsey2002,raymond1998,hannemyr1999,scacchi2004}. They are
about development methods, developers, philosophy, technology, specific
software, and many other issues connected to free and open source
software. Rather few has dealt with gender and open source development.


Some studies that has given important statistics about women and software
development are the Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) Reports from
Europe \cite{floss2002}, USA \cite{floss-us2003} and Asia
\cite{floss-asia2004} (accompanied by \cite{shimizu2004}), and a study
from TU-Berlin \cite{widi2001}. These studies were conducted as surveys
among Open Source developers, and among the participants there were only
1.5\% female developers.

Numbers on female developers in the Industry are hard to come up with,
mainly because the term ``developer'' is not very well defined for
statistical purposes, especially not for comparison between different
surveys. Some surveys and statistics show there is between 20 and 35\%
women in the industry (e.g.\cite{hafkin2003,ict-baltic2003}.

There has however been quite a few surveys and studies on girls and women
in technology and ICT. Many of them have been internal studies for the
admissions department of universities, but some are more extended and
serve a general purpose, e.g. \cite{margolis-fisher2002}. Even though they
deal with students in schools and universities they are interesting for
our purposes because there are probably similar problems and challenges
also in the Open Source community.

\section{The numbers}

\subsection{Background}
As part of my master thesis work, I have analysed open source project
developers' mailing lists with regard to gender of the participants. The
analysis is done by hand, since there are no good tools for a more
automatic way of doing it: had the lists had participants from only one
country (or language) it would have been much easier to do an automatic
cathegorization. This is however not the case with most open source
projects: many names bear no gendered references to me, while others
belong to different genders according to what country or language they are
used in.

I plan to make a database with all the names I have collected and
cathegorized so far, to assist the cathegorization, but this is not yet
done. Overall I managed to analyse about 70\% of the names.

\subsection{Analysis}
I chose to analyse a few developers' mailing lists during three
months. The raw data is divided in male, female, unknown (uncertainty
about the gender of a person), and uncathegorized (not enough data to
decided gender, e.g. only email address, nick, or initials). In
\textit{this} table only the distribution of gender and the total number
of participants during the period is included. See table
\ref{tab:dev-general}.

Debian has 965 developers\footnote{As of 2005-06-15, according to
http://www.debian.org/vote/2005/vote\_001}. Of those only 3 are women - or
0.31\% female developers. Gentoo Linux has 3 female developers among
ca. 375 in total, which yields 0.80\% women. The Gnome Foundation, which
in some ways is comparable to Debian Developers, has 18 female
members\footnote{As of 2005-05-03}, which is about 4\% of the members. See
table \ref{tab:dev-formal}.

Much of the difference between the Gnome Foundation, and Debian and Gentoo
may be due to the higher emphasise on translation and documentation as a
base for membership in the Foundation. In Debian translation is a typical
example of an activity being done much by people who are not DDs.

During the period between November 2004 and January 2005 only 7 of 844
authors - 0.82\% - on the debian-devel list were women. At the moment 9
women are in the New Maintainer queue. If all those are getting through
the process (and the number of male candidates doesn't increase equally),
there may be around 1\% female DDs - which is still not a very high
number.

For other large free software projects - KDE, Gnome, Gentoo, Apache, the
Linux kernel - the numbers are comparable to the mail Debian developer
list: between 0.1\% and 1.6\% women.

It should not come as much of a surprise that the female participation on
the debian-women mailing list is significantly higher than on the other
lists, albeit men are in majority also there. 



\begin{table}
\begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
  \begin{tabular}{|l|r|r||r|} \hline
    & Female & Male & Total \\ \hline
    debian-devel & 0.83\% & 73.82\% & 844 \\
    debian-women & 40.78\% & 51.46\% & 103\footnote{March -- May 2005}\\
    debian-vote & 2.32\% & 90.69\% & 129\footnote{March -- May 2005}\\
    httpd-dev & 1.32\% & 69.73\% & 152 \\
    gentoo-devel & 0.63\% & 77.99\% & 318 \\
    gnome-desktop & 0.74\% & 75.30\% & 270 \\
    gnome-devel & 1.61\% & 75.81\% & 62\\
    kde-core-devel & 1.26\%  & 79.08\% & 239 \\
    kde-devel & 0.52\% & 70.80\% & 387 \\
    linux-kernel & 0.13\% & 68.88\% & 797\\ \hline
  \end{tabular}
  \caption{Gender in mailing lists (percentage analysed)}
  \label{tab:dev-general}
\end{minipage}
\end{table}


\begin{table}
\begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
  \begin{tabular}{|l|r|r||r|}\hline
    & Female & Male & Total \\ \hline
    Debian & 0.31\% & 99.69\% & 965 \\
    Gnome Foundation & 4.04\% & 91.03\% & 446 \\
    Gentoo & 0.80\% & 99.20\% & 375 \\ \hline
  \end{tabular}
  \caption{Gender in developers teams}
  \label{tab:dev-formal}
\end{minipage}
\end{table}



According to the FLOSS studies, the percentage of female free software
developers is about 1.5\%. The participation in most of the bigger samples
I have looked at is below this, while in some of the smaller samples, like
httpd-dev, kde-core-devel, and gnome-devel, the participation of women is
arund the expected average.


\subsection{Other surveys}

According to several international studies
\cite{floss-us2003,widi2001,floss2002,floss-asia2004} there are 1.1 --
1.6\% female free/libre software developers, and I consider this to be an
accurate number. Compared to the number of women entering Computer Science
studies (about 20\%, but varies a lot between universities and countries),
this is a very low number, especially since education is probably one of
the most important entry-points into free software development. In the
``IT industry'' there are about 20 and 35\% female workers
\cite{hafkin2003,ict-baltic2003}, depending on what jobs are
counted.\footnote{Numbers are hard to collect and compare, since there is
no international statistical definition for the kind of IT workers -
programmers and developers - that we are talking about here.}

These numbers may be inaccurate. Different research include different
groups in ``computer technology'' so it is not easy to compare them
accurately and their results will differ quite much. A qualified guess is
that about 20\% of programmers and developers in the \emph{industry} are
female. The number of \emph{free software} developers come from a few
surveys where the participants defined themselves as developers. There may
have been a tendency to over- or under-definition of oneself as a
developer, but the numbers seem steady in all the three surveys and are
probably rather accurate. It is commonly believed that men tend to
overrate themselves and women tend to underrate themselves. In this
context it means that a woman is more likely to not consider herself a
developer, even when she is, and vice versa for men. Since females are
probably more likely to underestimate their own value and activities, and
may also be more reluctant to participate in a survey of a rather male
dominated field, the proportion of female developers may be a bit too low.

The overall number of developers in a project is also usually small enough
that even small changes in the absolute numbers gives huge changes in the
relative ones in most projects.  Debian, with about 1000 developers, is an
exception to this. The project is big enough that small changes are hardly
detectable, while a trend can be observed.

\section{Why women?}

Do women matter? A mixed environment has influence on the behaviour of
other people. Research is done on this, e.g. the influence of women in
Antarctica many years ago, when women were allowed in the research
bases, and violence and drinking went considerably down and male
workers started to ``behave''.\cite[s. 17]{taylor1987}

Sometimes the open source community may seem like Antarctica: a
hostile environment, full of brave warriors there to fight against the
forces. On the other hand you have the penguins, and the community, a
tight community of people who share survival and adventures, who
depends on themselves and each other.

In 1914 Ernest Shackleton was looking for men for his Antarctica
expedition: \textit{Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wage, bitter
cold, long months of complete darkness, constant [...] Safe return
doubtful [...] and recognition in case of success.} He got 5000
applications for 56 jobs. \cite[p. 17]{taylor1987}

Maybe is the modern open and free software developer a bit like the
adventurer more than 90 years ago: into it for the adventure, not too
concerned about dangers and uncertainty coming up, and happy with
glorification after success.

Modern research has, however, shown that a diverse range of personalities
should be represented in a group going on an Antarctic expedition. By
having all kinds of people represented, the team gets stronger than the
sum of all individual strengths. A parallel can be drawn to open source
software: by having diverse teams, the best software is made. It's not
only the programmer who should be satisfied - it's an often diverse mass
of users standing there. Recognising this could be a key to success in the
future \cite{levesque2004}.




\section{Conclusions}

Both debian-level and the Debian Developers have about only half the
expected amount of women if compared to these studies and other comparable
projects. There may be many reasons for this, but it is interesting to see
that so many more women are participating in the debian-women
project. This shows that there are in deed women interested in Debian, and
it is possible to find them. In fact, they are already here.

\section*{About the author}

Magni Onsøien is writing her M.Sc. thesis on female developers in Free
Software at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She has been
using different Linux distributions for the past 10 years, and is now
considering entering the New Maintainer process.


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