This research project examines participation in free software development, with a special focus on advocacy to increase the diversity of participants. While historically participation in free software has been overwhelmingly dominated by men, there has been a recent explosion of advocacy championing gender diversity in free software development. Animated by this contemporary surge of activism, this project asks: Why has such a vibrant politics around gender emerged now? What are advocacy and activist groups doing to address gender and diversity imbalances? How have software developers and other participants reacted to their efforts? The project will present data and theory that will help researchers and participants alike articulate how participation in technical projects broadens gender identities as well as how gender changes technical practice. This will enhance understanding of women's participation in science and engineering more generally. To conduct the study, the researchers will combine in-person participant-observation and in-depth interviews with analysis of online interactions and products such as user forums, list-servs, etc. Through these multiple methods, the researchers will uncover and analyze practices of gender representation and inclusion in contemporary activism around media and information technologies.
A robust understanding of women's pleasures and motivations in making free software has implications for women's participation not only in free software but in related endeavors including proprietary software production, academic computer science, entrepreneurial activities, and other forms of engineering practice and technical culture. In particular, the project's analysis of advocates' efforts to recruit and retain women in free software may provide models, lessons, or cautionary tales for wider recruitment, mentoring, and retention efforts in other scientific arenas. The knowledge this project will produce about gender and software has strong potential to help policymakers and academics make better decisions about how to attract and retain women in computer science.
PI: Enid Gabriella Coleman, Christina Dunbar-Hester Awardee: New York University Award Number: 1026818 This project looks at the recent proliferation of initiatives to "increase diversity" (largely though not exclusively construed to be about gender) in Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) communities and related "techie" formations such as hackerspaces. The project's main goal is to map the range of initiatives and responses to them, using a combination of traditional and "virtual" ethnographic methods, and to provide an analysis of this diversity activism. We studied 300+ websites, 1000+ emails (predominantly listserv traffic), conducted 30+ semi-structured and informal interviews, and participant observation at 2 major developer conferences and 5 smaller workshops over the course of two years. We show that the project of "diversity" is a moving target within the F/OSS practitioner community, illustrating that at least three strands of advocacy are occurring, across the political spectrum. The first is politically moderate and aligned with market-based understandings of the desirability of diversity as a best practice for business and maximization of market potential. This strand is largely consonant with government initiatives to promote women’s participation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields. The second emanates from technical projects with a broad politics of technological emancipation, whose practitioners often engage in self-critique upon the realization that their participant bases are relatively homogeneous, contradicting their view that technological "freedoms" should be available to all. Lastly, some initiatives view their engagement with software, hardware, and "diversity" to be constitutive of a more radicalized project to enroll relationships with technology into an explicit challenge of the gender binary. Given the history of computer work, we additionally speculate that (some) men's resistance to diversity initiatives in free software communities is an issue of labor that intersects with gender (i.e. "boys' club" atmosphere of computer work has functioned as incentive for men to participate in both play with and work on open technology, but the entry of women is perceived as threat to professional security, as well as to the project spaces' "clubhouse" environments). We also noted the absence of consideration of class and ethnicity in many efforts to "change the ratio" in technical communities, with the effect of marginalizing issues of race and class, even while gender issues are unpacked and confronted. While our findings do not directly address "how to get more women into STEM", we are poised to contribute critical insight into the construction of gender and technical identities, structural barriers and enablers, and general production of technical culture; these issues surround the topic of "opening up" participation in technical domains. At the time we proposed this project, there were far fewer women in F/OSS than in proprietary software production; in addition, the base pool of women participants in computer science had actually declined since the early 1990s. Women’s present participation in F/OSS matters doubly, then: it both reflects the status of women in computer science (albeit with features unique to F/OSS), and reflects a site where reflection on gender (not to mention recruitment and mentoring efforts) may have some effect on wider participation. This project’s exploration of the potentialities, limits, and possibilities of gender dynamics within the specific domain of F/OSS may provide evidence relevant to the broader topic of women’s participation in computer science. The issue of how participants conceive of and confront issues of "difference" or "diversity" in technical fields such as free and open source software and hackerspaces has enormous import for society at large. Geek cultures matter because they are often where norms for other end-users of technology become established, and so the patterns of ethnic, class, and gender inclusion or exclusion that form around technology for everyday users often have precedents in the habits of technical communities, or geeks. How technical communities evaluate and attempt to change--successfully or unsuccessfully--the association of computers with elite men and boys is thus an important topic for consideration. Our findings show that gender cannot be considered in isolation from other aspects of social identity including politics, race/ethnicity/class, and technical identification. We also point to how structural factors such as the conditions of employment may play a role in the framing and acceptance of or resistance to "diversity" in the ranks of open source and hackerspace cultures.
