Let’s create a diverse open source community together!

[#1]

This is going to be a bit of advocacy. So, fair warning 😛

Today, about 6-10% of all contributions to open source, OSS, are from women in tech. This range depends on the data source but even at the higher end, the percentage is still really low. Recently, in 2021, a blog from Joinup.ec.europa shared the following data:

• All surveys and research on open source contributors show that the percentage of women is far lower than men. In the most recent survey of the Linux Foundation, less than 7% of respondents were women.
• Similarly in the yet unpublished study on the impact of open source for the European Commission, women represent around 5% of contributors to the Apache Software Foundation, 9% of the Linux kernel and 10% of OpenStack contributors; only around 9% of Github users. In a 2006 research report, it was found that only 1.5% of OSS contributors were women, compared to 28% in proprietary software.

Why is this a problem?

We know that building thoughtful, inclusive and innovative solutions that address customer need requires diverse teams. There are multiple studies that support this and in 2016, Harvard Business Review published an article that found “companies with more women were more likely to introduce radical new innovations into the market over a two-year period” and “that businesses run by culturally diverse leadership teams were more likely to develop new products than those with homogenous leadership.” You may argue that open source isn’t the same as software that is developed by internal teams but rather, it’s contributed to, extended, and maintained by the OSS community.

Although it is different, open source (OSS) has great impact on software development practices. In US and Canada, 99% of commercial software include at least 1 open source component. 90% of businesses run open source software internally and 65% of businesses contribute to open source projects. Since open source is so deeply interwoven with the services and products we all use, there needs to be a more diverse, innovative and creative community behind it.

Another reason why this is a problem and important to address is that there is a huge global shift in women’s role – both as consumer and as decision maker over household finances. In the US alone, women control 85% of consumer spending.

In addition, since 2009, the data shows that women continue to control a majority of consumer spending. In an article titled “The Female Economy” by Michael Silverstein and Kate Sayre, the data showed that “women control about $20 trillion in annual consumer spending, and that figure climbed as high as $28 trillion in . In aggregate, women represent a growth market bigger than China and India combined.” More recently, a study by Catalyst.org’s research in 2020, stated that women now control $31.8 trillion in consumer spending.  

In the US, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics, not only have women’s salaries outpaced that of men’s (since 2018) but women are also the primary decision maker in their household finances (with 21% of US household sharing financial decisions).

So, if women make up the majority of global consumers and they are a primary financial decision maker in their home, software solutions require that teams think about and embrace the needs of all of their customers. In addition, because open source has a great impact on how software is developed today, we can no longer ignore the importance of being inclusive and supportive of diverse thought and diverse contribution in open source.  The time for change is now.

What can we, the global, women-in-tech community, do? 

The journey starts with being open to contributing to open source. Contributing may seem daunting at first so I suggest that you start with small contributions and as you gain experience (and confidence), consider making bigger contributions or even launching your own open source project.

Here’s a set of next steps.

• First, think about what you are interested in or passionate about. This will help you find a project in which you would want to contribute.
• If you don’t have a GitHub account, please create one by going to GitHub. You will need an account to contribute to these projects as you submit issues and pull requests (PR).
• Next, find a project that interests you and read through its documentation.
• Then, read and sign the CLA, contributor license agreement, before you commit content to any project (Many open source projects have CLA and you’ll want to make sure you review the agreement first.)
• When you are ready, submit your pull request.

As you take the steps to get started in contributing to open source, there are many different types of contribution you can consider and not everything requires .

• You can fix a bug
• You can update a comment
• You can translate README.md to another language
• If you have some visual design chops, many open source maintainers would love a logo for their project. Consider providing a logo, an identity for their open source project
• You can always help by editing and fixing documentation
• Finally, consider getting involved in working groups within organizations such as ASWF, Academy Software Foundation. At ASWF, there are several working groups such as Diversity & Inclusion, Continuous Integration, USD, Review & Approval, and RUST.

The screenshot below is a view into the open source project called Truffle-Shuffle which was launched and maintained by Katie Levy, software engineer at Amazon Fashion (and previously at Intuit). Here, Katie’s project has been translated to several languages including Spanish, Hindi, Arabic and French. By doing so, she and the contributors to Truffle-Shuffle have made contributing to the project even more accessible and even more inclusive.

Image provided by opensource.intuit.com 

As an ally, we’d love your help in this movement  A couple of things you can do to support women in tech, who are new to open source, include...

• Consider mentoring and guiding those who are new contributing to open source – you can pair program together or help by reviewing code and documentation
• Consider being a thought partner in brainstorming the types of contribution one can make
• If you are a manager/people leader, support your engineers by giving them the time to contribute to open source.

I hope this article inspires more women in tech and allies to consider contributing to open source and encouraging many more diverse voices to join and evolve the open source community.

Ready to check out some open source projects? Here’s Autodesk’s open source site: opensource.autodesk.com

Aliza Carpio is Director, Tech Evangelist at Autodesk and is the main author of this article. Connect with her at https://www.linkedin.com/in/alizacarpio/

Alexis O'Banion and Arunima Kumar are contributors to this article.