This past October, I blogged about sexism in Open Source and there was mixed reactions to the post.  It was triggered by comments from some influential members of the community.  

One of the journalists which I referenced in my post, Bruce Byfield, was a presenter on the topic recently at Cossfest 2010 here in Calgary.  I approached him regarding an interview for the podcast and he welcomed the opportunity to share his perspective.

I may be committing blasphemy by stating the following but.....I find in the FLOSS community there is such bias against those who are not 'developers'  My feeling is that you can code all you want, but at the end of the day, if no one knows how to use your software because of lack of documentation or instructions on how to use it, who cares what you made.

I tend to agree with the NY Times article that some woman tend to migrate to the human side of IT.  Not that we are here to be the mothers/nurturers of the team, but I chose to work with the end users of OSS instead of developing code.  I get more satisfaction from that, and does it make me less of a contributing member of the FOSS community?

About 1.5% of FOSS community members are female, compared with 28% in proprietary software. The Ubuntu Census Survey (June 2006) also reflects a similar female ratio with 2.4% women actively volunteering in the Ubuntu community. (source: Women in Ubuntu)

To close, I enjoyed my discussion with Bruce, and he raised some interesting points that I had not considered previously, as well shared some great examples of women who are rocking open source.

Here are some links that may be of interest

Ubuntu Women  - http://ubuntu-women.org/

Women Who Tech -  http://www.womenwhotech.com/

Podcast about women in open source  Play

Out of the loop in Silicon Valley - NY Times

Interview with Bruce Byfield  - Play