A year ago, Jen Mylo attended AdaCamp and Open Source Bridge back-to-back, and found herself really frustrated with a statistic that kept showing up in presentations. It declared that only 1.5% of open source contributors were women, and a lot of the presentations were quoting this stat as if it were a current fact.
The problem with that stat is that it’s based on a 10-year old study with limited geographical scope, so while it’s an interesting snapshot from that point in time and place, it doesn’t really reflect the international community of open source contributors today.
She wrote a post about this afterward on her blog, and that led to Jessica McKellar from the Python Software Foundation rounding up a few women she thought would be interested, including Jen Davidson from OSU and ChickTech, and now it’s happening.
We’re putting together an annual survey on community engagement and demography among open source contributors that will be conducted as a collaboration between open source projects and an academic institution so we can bring together the reach of our community with the rigor of academia.