[OSGeo-Discuss] Diversity in FOSS4G

[Jonathan Moules]

 > This is a common mistake. If you aim for the already declining 
percentage of women, you will not get far. You have to aim for the 
percentage of population. The fact that only 37% of our industry is 
female is itself a problem we have to address.

...

 > But going back to the topic of this thread, until we have half of the 
developers/speakers/users being woman, we have a problem.


I agree it's a common mistake, but I suspect I'm referring to a 
different mistake. Equality is about equal /opportunity/. It's not about 
forcing equal statistically representative numbers of people of various 
diversity types into all industries equally. Everyone should have the 
opportunity to do whatever they want.

But rather than assertions, lets look at what science says on the matter.
Which set of countries has more gender equality in STEM (Science, 
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) - GIS falls under the T and 
some of the S:
Finland, Norway (Countries that address most of the issues in your 
linked US-focused Forbes article)
or
Tunisia, United Arab Emirates?

Chances are you picked wrong. It turns out that in countries with poor 
human/women's rights records (UAE, Tunisia) there are *more* females in 
STEM, and in countries where there is more gender equality (i.e. the 
Scandinavians), the women choose /not /to go into STEM.

For discussion see: 
https://researchtheheadlines.org/2018/04/20/the-stem-gender-equality-paradox-from-fallacies-to-facts/ 
- and the actual paper: 
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719

It's great that you chose GIS, but given the choice, the research 
indicates that most women chose something other than STEM if they live 
in a progressive country, most likely psychology, education, and 
healthcare, all of which are generally dominated by women. Given this, 
to me at least, trying to force a perfect 50/50 gender balance would 
thus seem to be doing a dis-service to people of both genders; it's not 
equality of opportunity even if it does achieve perfect diversity.


On 2018-08-11 14:29, María Arias de Reyna wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 11, 2018 at 2:43 PM, Jonathan Moules
> <jonathan-lists at lightpear.com> wrote:
>>>   Once we have a 50% of speakers that are women (even 40%), we can start
>>> saying that having a full keynoter line of women speakers is no diversity.
>> At the risk of asking a question that I know isn't meant to be asked - why
>> 50%? Or "even 40%"? Surely the % should be around the same as the percentage
>> of the workforce that engage in the field? This survey indicates it's about
>> 37% globally so 40% would be reasonable -
>> https://www.gislounge.com/gender-gis-workforce/
>> (Why the rate is 37% globally is an entirely different kettle of fish).
>>
> This is a common mistake. If you aim for the already declining
> percentage of women, you will not get far. You have to aim for the
> percentage of population. The fact that only 37% of our industry is
> female is itself a problem we have to address.
>
> The lack of role models (speakers? women in the mailing lists? women
> in developer leading roles?) and specially the lack of a friendly
> environment for women at work is a problem in most tech related
> industries:
> https://code.likeagirl.io/women-are-leaving-tech-and-management-is-responsible-a6187a4d5d81
> https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/02/28/why-women-leave-the-tech-industry-at-a-45-higher-rate-than-men/
>
> Not my best talk (blame jet lag), but this can give you more
> perspective: https://vimeo.com/241597584
>
> And this also applies to racial diversity. If the global foss4g is
> mostly white... we have a problem.
>
> But going back to the topic of this thread, until we have half of the
> developers/speakers/users being woman, we have a problem. And the
> longer we ignore it, the worse it gets.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20180811/15bce4c4/attachment.html>