Diversity in Debian
Former Debian Project Leader (DPL) Jonathan Carter has written about DebConf26, which took place in Santa Fe, Argentina. He also shared a group photo, which shows the otherwise-invisible current DPL and, as usual, it's very male-dominated. With enough certainly we can only identify 3 women in the photo:
I, as a Debian user (both server and desktop), am not surprised by this. It's hardly a new issue, it goes back to the 1990s. Although the "Deb" in Debian is for a woman's name (the partner of Ian at the time), there remains a diversity issue and Debian now focuses on slop, not diversity - a 9-letter word it mostly throws around while throwing under the bus anybody who asks "hard questions" about Debian diversity. In Debian's circles, bringing up the topic is the real problem, diversity itself is a taboo subject. To quote: "In 2021, David Arroyo Menéndez, a researcher from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and author of the Damegender software posted statistics about diversity on the debian-women mailing list. Steve McIntyre, a former Debian Project Leader, sent a public reply threatening to censor Arroyo Menéndez if he published any more statistics. In defiance, Pocock published a blog suggesting that the statistics could be analyzed using a Regression discontinuity design to see if the rate at which women joined Debian was increasing or decreasing after the Code of Conduct was introduced. Pocock’s initial summary of the data showed that fewer women were actually joining Debian after the Code of Conduct and Outreachy mentoring programs were introduced."
Most of the world's living people are women (due to wars, life expectants/longevity, and other factors). In STEM, like in journalism, there is bias against women. It's not too hard to see why. Moreover, when the world's best known "IT people" are sick perverts in pursuit of "young meat" (yes, Bill Epsteingate), the field is hardly inviting women, sometimes is "traffics" them. █
