Gender Balance of Dreamwidth Developers

[purplecat]

I know this is a little off-topic, but as part of a last-minute crisis (long story) I need to put together a 15 minute presentation on the history of women in computing for a group of 6-10 year olds by wednesday.

I was just wondering if there were any stats for the proportion of female developers working on dreamwidth code? My intuition is that a good proportion of the developers are female. I'm hoping the talk won't be a series of "lone hero" women working in male dominated environments and so I'm emphasising the way that up until the 1970s there were a lot of women working as computers and programmers. It would be nice to also have some more recent examples of computing projects and workplaces which involve a lot of women.

Come to think of it, it doesn't have to be dreamwidth, if anyone has examples of places where, I guess, at least 25% of the programmers are female that would be awesome. It's only for a bullet point on the final slide so I don't need lots of detail.

Comments

[jjhunter]

I'd start with damned_colonial's 2009 OSCON keynote about women in open source (transcript | link to video). denise's Teaching People to Fish has some good followup points.

Anyone have more recent stats?

[purplecat]

That keynote transcript is pure gold! Thanks so much, and there's even a picture of all the DW developers in 2009 as an added bonus.

[denise]

last time i counted, it was 70% women, 65% people new-to-programming

[purplecat]

Thanks!

[kaberett]

I think you've also got an unusually high proportion of people who are out as genderqueer :-)

[zooey_glass]

It's been a little while since we pulled the stats, but the Archive of Our Own is a female-majority project. There is some information on gender balances and previous experience in our Ada Lovelace Day 2010 post and 2011 post.

[purplecat]

Thanks! I thought AO3 was probably similar, but was less clear where I might ask.

[chalcopyrite]

Growstuff (http://dev.growstuff.org) is a project led by skud; at least half the regular coders are women*. It's still in development (as the url suggests), but it's chugging along.

*Based on a rough estimate from who I see in the email list, that is.

[purplecat]

Thanks!! It will be good to be able to say there are several projects like this.

[msilverstar]

There's great presentation by Etsy about changing their recruiting to pro-actively find female programmers. Don't remember the URL at the mo, but it's easy to find.

[purplecat]

I'll definitely check that out, thanks! There's an outside chance this age group may have heard of Etsy.