Women & Free Software: obstacles to women’s participation

Author: Kathambi Kinoti (via AWID)

According to the Association for Progressive Communications, the Free Open Source movement is based on “Open” pillars: Open Source, Open Standards and Open Content.

FOSS (or FLOSS, as it is sometimes called) gives a licence to users to access software source codes, modify them and redistribute the original or modified programs. Its advantage is not only in its affordability, but also in its appropriateness to individual and localized needs. In this way, the software has the potential to keep evolving to suit users’ needs, and facilitating the flow of information and knowledge. Women, both in the North and South, stand to gain tremendously from the FOSS movement and it is hailed as having the potential to deliver appropriate information and communication technology on a grand scale to disadvantaged groups.

Linux, Debian and Gnome are some of the several FOSS initiatives which are attracting more and more computer programmers into their communities. However, only about 1.1% of FOSS developers are women. This dearth of women reflects the situation in many other areas of scientific and technological development. Not only are there far fewer women programmers than men, but the female end user’s software needs are not adequately catered for, a factor that is directly related to the low numbers of women software designers.

The rest of this article is freely available on the Network of East-West Women website.