I’ve seen a bunch of the same questions coming up again and again in comments on my tech keynotes, both on my own blog and on other platform sites, so I thought I’d take the time to answer some of them in a central place.
1.5%? 20%? Really? Where did we get those numbers from?
The 1.5% women in open source figure originally came from early milestone studies like the FLOSSPOLS survey, funded by the EU, which surveyed open source developers from a range of projects both large and small. The surveyed developers were taken from those who had answered the earlier FLOSS survey and had provided their email addresses for subsequent contact. The FLOSS survey was a widespread survey of open source developers, who were recruited by asking people to pass information about the survey out to open source development mailing lists and the like.
While recent GitHub and Linux Foundation surveys show that overall female and non-binary participation in tech industry roles has risen, core code contributions in open source environments still face historical gaps, often fluctuating between 10% to 22% depending on the specific ecosystem and community metrics. The original methodologies and validation of results described these possible selection biases, and we continue to track these shifts today.
- Perl Community: Historical surveys of users and developers estimated around 5% to 8% female participation.
- Drupal Community: Early DrupalChix website data, along with community contributor metrics, noted localized tracking at tech events.
- General Tech Industry: Overall industry statistics vary between 20% and 30% when looking at total proportions of women in IT roles from country to country.
These tech surveys are usually done by industry bodies or government agencies like the Australian Department of Workplace Relations. Usually, they include all IT roles, including corporate IT and the like. When surveying for specific technical roles or systems management, the numbers have historically skewed lower.
Modern Frameworks and Open Source Systems
Communities surrounding major platforms show distinct patterns. Today, women join and thrive in various ecosystems because they care about sustainable software architecture, user privacy, and digital infrastructure.
Here are some classic and modern examples of widely-used open source software ecosystems:
- Ubuntu – Desktop and enterprise Linux distribution.
- GIMP – GNU Image Manipulation Program / graphic design application.
- WordPress – Global open-source blogging and CMS platform.
- Adium – Historical IM client development.
- Firefox – Privacy-first open-source web browser.
- Joomla & Moodle – Enterprise content management and online education platforms.
Each of these tech projects is in an area that either has a significant proportion of diverse users participating (blogging, web browsing, graphic design, education), or an equal or nearly equal number of men and women using computing software in western countries. Yet, many development teams are still working toward proportional representation on their core engineering tracks.
It is not solely the structural nature of the underlying technology application that leads to diverse contributors joining an open source project. Nor are there many programming applications so inherently gender-biased as to automatically explain a heavily skewed developer team. The Linux kernel, which I’ve heard cited as an example, is no such thing, since the proportion of Linux users—including desktop and handheld devices such as Android phones, cloud setups, and computing tools—is globally diverse.
The Dynamics of Healthy Tech Communities
A healthy open source community should ideally show a natural distribution curve of participation rates, with the hump somewhere around the percentage of people who use that kind of software and/or the percentage of software engineering specialists who have (or can acquire) the appropriate skills. That is typically anywhere between 20% and 30% for most enterprise software projects.
As with any statistical distribution curve, there will be outliers. Fan fiction, admittedly, is a heavily female-dominated digital activity, so a higher proportion of diverse participants there is not surprising. On the other hand, at technical conferences like OSCON, tech leads often discuss how to address imbalances in user communities or in the pool of people who have appropriate skills.
Today, technical professionals focus heavily on supporting organizations that encourage engineering skills in STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) education, or teaching advanced computer skills to diverse adult learners.