Thank you for very good suggestions. I updated the post.

Alexander van Loon:

Women might have less spare time because they have more responsibilities or they spend their spare time differently. The idea is to either make more women see that open source is a worthwhile hobby or to make more paid opportunities for women to participate. I list the reasons why we want to have more women involved in the post.

I was listing all the roles people can play in the open source community, and have now updated the post to reflect that.

Very few women apply for the Google Summer of Code and the goal of the outreach program would be to encourage women to apply and to get involved in the open source community, not to exclude men. Many of the improvements that we can make to encourage more women to participate will in fact attract more new contributors in general. The idea is that women are more likely to assume that the open source community is not for them, so they need that extra encouragement.

Mirsal Ennaime:

Thanks for sharing your story! I actually found that there are very few arrogant assholes on IRC (maybe they are on different channels, like #arrogant-assholes ?) and definitely never had any arrogance or the kind of attention you describe about how I need to be treated drawn around me. So I don’t think it’s that bad in general and female newcomers would generally be helped and encouraged (possibly, even more than male ones). They just need to decide to sign in and get involved first.

Tibo:

You are right, these are not women specific. Though proportionally, it seems that men are more likely to figure out some of these things themselves. It’s true that addressing these will attract more newcomers in general.

b0b:

There are proportionally fewer women involved in open source vs. proprietary software (1.5% vs. 28%) as quoted here: http://gnomejournal.org/article/48/the-womens-summer-outreach-program

zenwalker:

I think people are much better about this nowadays. Of course, women need to have some resilience in the matter too and not get discouraged at the slightest remark that might seem out-of-line. The more challenging part is actually to dissuade women from believing the stereotypes that open source is intentionally male-dominated and to get them involved.

A1. If they proactively seek it.

A2. By wanting to contribute the other 50% perspective.

A3. By being encouraged to join in

False. The proportion of women in open source is much less than in closed source (and closed source’s numbers aren’t stellar).

“Generally speaking, women are just not interested by Computer Science.”

Nonsense.

Please don’t assert that there’s no problem. We’re trying to fix the problem, not debate its existence; such debate is a hindrance.

Why are women staying out?

Lack of knowledge about how to get involved
Lack of spare time and different cultural hobbies and responsibilities
Lack of knowledge about how important and valuable the free software movement is
Lack of open source recruitment events

How exactly are these women-specific?
You are right of course that they are problems that should be addressed, but men have the exact same problems.

While the goal of attracting more women to OSS might be noble, in my opinion the ends do not justify the means. An outreach program for women would exclude men, which makes it benign discrimination. In my opinion there’s no such thing as benign discrimination, discrimination is malign in any case.

The money for those outreach programs could better be spend on extra students for the Google Summer of Code.