>>I disagree with making "diversity" a goal. If the developers in a specific free software project do not include demographic D, I don't think that the lack of them as a problem that requires action; there is no need to scramble desperately to recruit some Ds. >Rather, the problem is that if we make demographic D feel unwelcome, we lose out on possible contributors. And very likely also others that are not in demographic D.
Just as long as we're clear that demographic D being underrepresented relative to the general population is not evidence that we make demographic D feel unwelcome. Representation relative to the population of graduated CS majors or working programmers is better, but still not necessarily the right comparison. Representation relative to, say, the population of programmers who are experts in your implementation language, or who are users of the project, or the intersection of the above, might be better. Even then, that's not direct evidence that making D "unwelcome" is the specific reason.
Direct evidence would probably be something like, take some online exchanges and show them to a bunch of {working programmers or some other decent approximation to the population your volunteers might come from}, and ask them a few questions about how they would react to these exchanges, how much it would discourage them from volunteering, whether things like it have discouraged them from volunteering in the past, etc., and then show that demographic D has a much worse response.
By the way, has anyone done studies that showed that women respond much more negatively to harsh online exchanges than men? I have a feeling they would be called sexist if they were published, but... The closest one I can think of is Pew's online harassment study[1], which said, among other things, "Women were more likely than men to find their most recent experience with online harassment extremely or very upsetting—38% of harassed women said so of their most recent experience, compared with 17% of harassed men."
I wonder if the skew towards men in software starting in the 80’s corresponded with the rise of the “meritocratic” software community because that movement made people on the autism spectrum (including aspies) more comfortable in software development (judged based on their contributions alone) —- which may have helped to create the impression/generalization that people in software are “geeks” and socially challenged—-and thus others (including women, among whom autism occurs less frequently) felt less inclined toward that community.
Sorry - quickly tapped out. Hope that makes sense.
Such a study would be extremely difficult to interpret, given societal pressure on men to "close off" their emotions, and societal pressure on women teaching them that they are "emotional creatures."
I guess if it was treated like an anthropological analysis of Western culture, sure, but as a psychological or physiological one dealing with actual brain chemistry, no way.
Well, at least for purposes of determining whether e.g. a culture of harsh criticism in a particular open-source project is turning away more women than men, it only matters whether it affects women more strongly than men, not why. The questions can be investigated separately.
For the latter question, cross-cultural studies would help, as would experimenting with sex hormones, looking at people of one sex with conditions that give them a hormonal balance more matching the other sex, possibly studying transgender people, etc.
> By the way, has anyone done studies that showed that women respond much more negatively to harsh online exchanges than men? I have a feeling they would be called sexist if they were published, but...
On an unrelated note, this is one of the main problems resulting from too politically-correct culture: we can't even study differences to learn about them and see how we can help each other, as even the notion that such differences may exist is unwelcome (practically speaking, in a very concrete way - in terms of grants, academic career development etc.) As if admitting that we differ in some ways was a kind of sin rather than something to acknowledge, learn from and use.
Just as long as we're clear that demographic D being underrepresented relative to the general population is not evidence that we make demographic D feel unwelcome. Representation relative to the population of graduated CS majors or working programmers is better, but still not necessarily the right comparison. Representation relative to, say, the population of programmers who are experts in your implementation language, or who are users of the project, or the intersection of the above, might be better. Even then, that's not direct evidence that making D "unwelcome" is the specific reason.
Direct evidence would probably be something like, take some online exchanges and show them to a bunch of {working programmers or some other decent approximation to the population your volunteers might come from}, and ask them a few questions about how they would react to these exchanges, how much it would discourage them from volunteering, whether things like it have discouraged them from volunteering in the past, etc., and then show that demographic D has a much worse response.
By the way, has anyone done studies that showed that women respond much more negatively to harsh online exchanges than men? I have a feeling they would be called sexist if they were published, but... The closest one I can think of is Pew's online harassment study[1], which said, among other things, "Women were more likely than men to find their most recent experience with online harassment extremely or very upsetting—38% of harassed women said so of their most recent experience, compared with 17% of harassed men."
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/