Comment by mbrubeck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbrubeck | Hacker News Reader

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Sadly, this isn't even unusual. Open source developers as a whole are 90% male or more; some older surveys found the number higher than 98%. http://readwrite.com/2013/12/11/open-source-diversity

As a long-time member of the Rust community I am seeing this changing over time, but much more slowly than I'd like. Rust is a very friendly community; we have an actively-enforced code of conduct (which has been in place since the project started >5 years ago); and some people in the community have recently put resources into things like sponsoring women and minorities to go to the first http://rustcamp.com/ conference. The RustCamp CFP had a blind review process to help avoid bias. The Servo team is currently sponsoring an Outreachy intern. And we are definitely looking for more ways to be as welcoming as possible to everyone.

I think this is just a reflection of the proportion of the female contributors in overall open source communities. There's really no reason for the Rust project to do anything "anti-female". Actually I think it is a bit too concerned with diversity.

Then the problem now becomes why there aren't that many female contributors out there. This is just a theory, but I think it is because males' nature make them do free labor to obtain fame. I admit this is purely my experience, but females are more likely to refrain from such labor that does not pay off.

As a long time member of the Rust community (since the beginning of 2013), I don't see much improvement, if at all. I wonder why we have different perception of the issue.

I definitely know more women involved in Rust than I did a year ago [EDIT: in percentage terms, as well as absolute numbers], but this might just reflect my own awareness rather than any greater trend. I don't have any non-anecdotal evidence. Actual surveys of Rust developers/users would be useful.

Also, most of the people I know in the Rust community now are now "users" of the language, rather than people working on the compiler/platform itself. (This wasn't true for me a couple of years ago.) My impression is that the Rust community as a whole is growing and changing much faster than the compiler/internal developer population.

Oh, I agree there are more women involved, but I attribute that to greater popularity of Rust. What I don't see is change in relative number, not absolute number.

curious: do you see change in other OSS communities?

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