This is a response to Murray’s article. I think he misses the obvious problem, I think a lot of people do. I’m going to base these comments on my experience in the realm of physics, but I suspect the same thing happens in any male-dominated field. The problem as I see it is that when you have an endeavour dominated by males it takes on male cultural values and makes it harder for women to identify with it.
I’m not talking about outright sexism, I’m talking about something far more subtle and very subconcious. Men and women aren’t identical in any culture, and most people don’t feel entirely comfortable in a section of culture that has taken on gender-specific values. (Worse still there is a positive feedback where endeavours that gain masculine traits get perceived as being masculine and vice-versa). There is as much stopping women doing open source/physics/whatever as there is stopping guys doing knitting. i.e. lots. (Not that it stops some people, I’ve knitted my own jersey before.)
This hit me full-on about two years ago. At that time the Bose-Einstein Condensation experiment at Otago was being run by two women with no other researchers working in the lab. One morning I walked in to discover the remains of what had been an all-nighter. The “personal space” of the lab was littered with chocolate wrappers and woman’s magazines. It felt like a female space, not a male one. When I saw the contrast it made sense. The experiment was the same as I would have left it, all the “technical stuff” was the same, but their personal imprint was different.
The solution – again, as I see it – is to get a critical mass of women in one place, then things get done on female terms not male terms. In an open-source situation this might take the form of an all-female project. It also means that the male members of the open-source community might be better off not helping so much. Sure, answer questions, help out, but give them breathing space, let them be women.