> In effect, you're saying "If we could get twice as many people, then we would have twice as many people".
Sorry, I must have not been clear: my point is that if we have twice as many people, then we get twice as much work done, move twice as quickly, etc. Django has about 30 committers, and among us we seem to be able to commit about 10-15 times per day. If we had 60 committers, I'd guess we'd be able to commit about 30 things per day. That's more bugs fixed, more features added, faster velocity between releases, etc. These are things I want.
> In reality, there is some reason why women don't want to be programmers.
I agree. I suggest that it's because women are systematically being discouraged from joining our communities. I think they's plenty of data to back this up.
BTW, it's not programming as a whole; the problem's even worse in open source communities. Women make up roughly 20% of the workforce in technical professions, but only about 2% of open source developers. Even if you believe there's something in that second X chromosome that disinclines women from tech — and for the record I certainly don't buy that argument — that can't explain why the problems ten times worse in open source.
> you would be much better served to use your limited capital to attract men who are already predisposed to your project but unaware of it rather than women who are both unaware of it and predisposed against it.
How about people who are aware and are predisposed, but have historically been discouraged or outright prevented from getting involved?
And look, this isn't a zero-sum game. I can do this and other things too! A lot of the resistance to diversity seems to imply that these efforts somehow detract from other forms of community outreach, but this just isn't true. We are in fact capable of doing multiple things at once.
I am guessing, but could the part time nature of most of open source jobs be a reason for this as well? More conservative/sexist societies generally assign the role of managing home to the female in a family, even if she is a working woman. So while the males have the time and freedom to go for hobby/low-returns open source projects, the females might be left with the responsibility of taking care of the children. I am from an eastern culture and this is definitely something I could see happening here, I am curious if similar conditions exists in western cultures.
Sorry, I must have not been clear: my point is that if we have twice as many people, then we get twice as much work done, move twice as quickly, etc. Django has about 30 committers, and among us we seem to be able to commit about 10-15 times per day. If we had 60 committers, I'd guess we'd be able to commit about 30 things per day. That's more bugs fixed, more features added, faster velocity between releases, etc. These are things I want.
> In reality, there is some reason why women don't want to be programmers.
I agree. I suggest that it's because women are systematically being discouraged from joining our communities. I think they's plenty of data to back this up.
BTW, it's not programming as a whole; the problem's even worse in open source communities. Women make up roughly 20% of the workforce in technical professions, but only about 2% of open source developers. Even if you believe there's something in that second X chromosome that disinclines women from tech — and for the record I certainly don't buy that argument — that can't explain why the problems ten times worse in open source.
> you would be much better served to use your limited capital to attract men who are already predisposed to your project but unaware of it rather than women who are both unaware of it and predisposed against it.
How about people who are aware and are predisposed, but have historically been discouraged or outright prevented from getting involved?
And look, this isn't a zero-sum game. I can do this and other things too! A lot of the resistance to diversity seems to imply that these efforts somehow detract from other forms of community outreach, but this just isn't true. We are in fact capable of doing multiple things at once.