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My father worked for thirty years in a wire making factory in Sheffield. He worked on the shop floor doing the most brutal and demanding physical work. After he'd retired I visited the factory on a tour and was horrified at how noisy, dirty and downright dangerous it was. "Yes, it got a lot better towards the end" was his comment when I told him what it was like now.
I work sitting at home in my office in Silicon Valley, typing this on one of the many computers scattered about. There's no physically demanding tasks in my job other than carrying my daily cups of coffee around the house. In almost every way they can be our jobs are different, except one important way in which they are identical. There were no women working with my father in his workplace, and there are no women working with me on the Open Source/Free Software I create.
Why is this ? In the Sheffield wire making factory it was considered a job "not suitable for a woman". The amazing thing in the twenty-first century is that some people seem to have the same feeling about writing software. It's true that there are few women in software in general, but if you compare the presence of women in Open Source/Free Software with the number of women working in proprietary software I think you'll find that there were fewer working in the Open Source/Free Software community on coding tasks than in the proprietary world. I've worked with some amazingly talented women programmers when I was working in proprietary software (my mis-spent youth), but with none in the Open Source/Free Software world.
I have a theory as to why this is so, I call it my "men are animals" theory. Quite simply, we as a programming community are incredibly unfriendly to any women that might want to contribute their valuable time and effort in writing code for an Open Source/Free Software project. Women are much more represented in the artistic (for a GUI-based system), documentation and testing parts of a project than in the coding.
My observation is that "alpha male geeks" working on the code of a software project are extremely arrogant (or we can be polite and call it assertive), unpleasant and confrontational with each other. Most women find this kind of childishness so unpleasant that they leave us in our playpen rather than have to deal with it as part of their daily work. It doesn't help that most Open Source/Free Software code discussions are done over email. Unfortunately email is a medium that lends itself to anonymous hostility (after all you don't have to see the face of the person you're attempting to humiliate) and the male-dominated programmer community takes ample advantage of this. Just look at the way some of the primary Linux kernel maintainers address people on the Linux kernel mailing list to see examples of this behavior. Such people are admired in our community. This behavior is not merely tolerated, it's almost encouraged as a badge of showing you're somebody, that you can get away with it.
So why is this more endemic to the Open Source/Free Software communities than proprietary software projects ? I have an answer to that too, it's fairly simple. Human Resources departments (at least here in the USA, in the UK they used to be called "Personnel Departments" which to my mind sounds much better, less like a Soylent-Green style warehouse). To be brutally honest, if people behaved in proprietary software environments to others the way they behave in Open Source/Free Software mailing lists they would be fired, terminated (to use the Americanism) with extreme prejudice by the HR department of the company. People tell jokes about "political correctness" and how "sensitive" such rules are, but they work. I think the USA is ahead of the UK in this area. I recall meeting a recent transferee from the UK who was blustering and appalled at being threatened with termination for what he termed "extreme political correctness". His crime ? He had been audibly rating his female colleagues on a one to ten scale at a company party. How dumb do you have to be to think this is acceptable ? Yet look at the follow-up comments on Slashdot (considered a "friendly" web site in the Open Source/Free Software communities) when a rare openly female poster makes a comment. Ratings out of ten are the least of her worries.
Because our mailing lists are open to all, usually unmoderated, and the people running them are rightly concerned about censorship it's really difficult to be as strict about such things in the Open Source/Free Software world as it is in the proprietary business world. But it's worth a try in my opinion. For people who pride themselves on our own intelligence we seem to be awfully comfortable in excluding fifty percent of our potential colleagues and collaborators. If you want to be calculating about it, this is millions of lines of potential code we're throwing away here guys !
It's interesting to note that once a critical mass of women are in an area, they seem to have a civilizing effect on the men, and the mailing lists I'm on with more female participants on them than the Open Source/Free Software ones have a decidedly different tone. We need the same thing to happen in our community. It can be done. In my world travels I've been to conferences where the numbers of women attendees approach the male, most notably in Malaysia where IT is seen as a much more female friendly occupation than in the USA or UK.
So how can we get to where we need to be ? I'm not normally a fan of segregation, but until they can get to that unknown critical mass it's much more comfortable for women to work together with women. In the Science community there is the AWIS (Association of Women in Science) group: http://www.awis.org. I was introduced to them by a female Math researcher, they were her lifeline in a community just as hostile to women as the Open Source/Free Software one. We have LinuxChix (http://www.linuxchix.org) which attempts to do something similar for our field. I just hope that within my career lifetime these groups can become part of our mainstream, and our community can look forward to everyone who wants to joining in fully. After all, programming is fun. Why shouldn't everyone have a chance to do it !