Being a mom is a completely different matter entirely. I think it was Jezebel that had some interesting articles recently about being a mom and having a career. It’s unfortunate but true that once you have a kid, you probably aren’t moving up the food chain any further at your job, regardless of open source. You’ve got a new top priority in your life, and they don’t make any exceptions for mothers, not really.

I have an 8 year old son, but because of my schedule, it is mostly his dad taking care of him. Sometimes I feel horribly guilty about it, because it’s still hard to overcome the social notion that the females have to be the primary caretakers of children. I only knew a few other women in open source that have had children, but those kids have long since grown up and moved out.

Regardless, I don’t really think that asking for open source experience is something that is sexist. I’m not some freetard that is all “open source awesome, closed source bad!” – but I do see the advantages in hiring someone that’s worked in open source.

Recently I took a few college courses on programming. I’d never done the whole CS education thing, and I figured there was probably something that I was missing. When I was taking a data structures class, my instructor said two things that stuck with me: one, that one of the things she’d heard from employers over and over and over again was that job candidates often weren’t all that great at working with other people’s code. Two, that getting involved in open source was a great way to obtain those skills and to work in an environment where one isn’t penalized (except perhaps socially) for not knowing something. Working in that kind of environment promotes growth of knowledge and growth of self, because you aren’t having to deal with 18 different levels of management. Many projects don’t have a centralized management structure, and much of it is collaborative. When someone’s active in open source, it’s easy for a potential employer to do a bit of research and see just how well that person plays with others. Hiring an employee is often a crapshoot, and this makes it a little more of a sure thing.

It may not seem terribly fair for mothers. But when I was a sysadmin, they didn’t let me beg off pager duty just because I had a baby that was keeping me up all night already. Words like ’sexist’ are painful. They are thrown around so easily, and not necessarily because women are going for equal rights – but because they want exceptions to be made.

That said, I don’t think a company that says it wants someone that has worked in open source would have that as a hard requirement. You do have a valid point that a mother could still be a fantastic developer. However, at the end of the day when a project hasn’t quite gone as well as planned and they need someone to pull an all-nighter to get something out on time, how easily are you going to be able to do that? People in open source are crazy. Many of us do give all of our spare time to working on code, so we don’t have the kinds of responsibilities that family types have.

Reading over the comments and the posts, I realize that one point wasn’t entirely clear. While I do think that the open source community is sometimes hostile to women, that wasn’t the only, or even primary, reason why requiring open source is a sexist thing to do.

Out of all of the women I’ve ever heard of in open source, which is only a handful as it is, I’ve never heard of any with children. I’m SURE there are some, so no need to counter-argue with Susy in Open X with triplets or something.

The issue is that by requiring a job candidate to not only have demonstrated good work at work, but they must also have used their “spare” time in additional FREE work. So, if they spent their time on paid work, doesn’t count. If they spent their time climbing mountains, doesn’t count. Most importantly, if they spend time taking care of their children, DOESN’T COUNT.

I’m sure fathers can talk about how little free time they have after having kids, although the key here is that they have SOME. For mothers, there is none. Whatever “spare” moment I have where I am not working or actively taking care of my kid (this adds up to about 30 minutes a day, on a good day), I have to cook dinner, pack lunch, do the laundry, sweep the floors, etc. Since I have a generous husband, I also get to work out a couple times a week and get a haircut/nails done once a month or so. So maybe a mother could be a fantastic developer for 37signals, but on a whole, the entire mom population doesn’t have a shot.

I was enjoying reading this blog until I got to this post. Next time you might actually try researching and talking to women in open source instead of just talking out of your ass and assuming you speak for all of us.

A key point about this case is that they require all of their hires to come through open source, not just prefer it. They say that hiring ANYONE else would be irresponsible. They say that on a whole people in open source are more passionate than people in it. Are men more passionate than women?

So in your example, where you were looking for a web designer, you might have a selection of men and women. Then you tell them “Oh, and when we meet to discuss this project, we will meet at a strip club”. Sure, some women might be ok with that (and some men might not be) but overall you are excluding women when you do that – and it has no bearing on their ability to do the job. You don’t intend for that exclude women, but it is and it’s sexist.

You might say “Well, women could come if they want to” but that’s ridiculous because for most women that would be very uncomfortable. You might say “It’s the strip club that’s making a hostile environment for them, not me” but of course that’s not true either – by requiring that as part of the job, you’re contributing to the hostile environment.

Now, I’m not saying that they CAN’T do it, of course they can. It’s their money and people certainly have worse hiring practices than that out there … but they’re not just hiring that way, they’re also publishing that hiring practices online and in books. If I can’t stop them from requiring it, then at least I can raise awareness for other businesses looking to improve their hiring practice.

@Stormy You bring up a good point that if open source work is part of the job, then it makes sense to look for that – although that’s not the case for 37 signals. For them, they are just using it because it’s an easy way to see someone’s code contributions and because people in open source clearly have more passion for coding than people who don’t (not!)

In my opinion, we should encourage more women to participate in open source rather than tell companies not to look for that experience!

For me sexism is intentional or it is not sexism. Artificially changing the percentages is for the politicians. If I want a web designer to help in some project (to detach the case from 37signals), I go and look for a good professional. I don’t care about the gender.

You could perhaps point to the community as a whole as the thing that introduces sexism and thus the ultimate cause for the odds. It is hard to refute that and I don’t like to discuss non-refutable affirmations, but anyway what I don’t think you can say is that I am sexist because a mere probabilistic thing as far as I am concerned is what makes the chances higher for a male nowadays.

Sexism lies in the motivation in my view, is what biased people apply when they do prefer some gender. If you are not biased, in my definition you are not sexist.

All you need to do is USE the software you are creating or mantaining in your paid projects. They don’t need to be frameworks, just interesting libraries that solve a problem you are having.

So whenever you are doing open source you are also being paid (and more benefits like low coupling and easy reuse, world auditing and contributions, etc.)

Stating the statistical distribution of women in computing as a matter-of-fact defense is flawed, too. Those numbers exist in the first place because sexism is a problem in the industry / community, and there’s plenty of research to back that up – geekfeminism.org is a great starting place, as they tend to report on a lot of these studies.

Statistically women are a minority, and statistically it could be the case that most of open source devs wear casual clothes. Are 37signals biased against suits? Do not think so, those are just a posteriori consequences from a statistical viewpoint.

I think this is just about evidence. A person with a strong open source record has proven some stuff to the eyes of the recruiter, and has public work that can be evaluated. You can see how he writes code, how he relates to people in mailing list… there’s a good deal of public stuff to gauge.

Of course there are world-class people that have no open source out there. But it is an option not to look there, if the obvious path also gives you world-class people, but with more information about them, that may be enough.

That being said, I do think the “irresponsible” bit is perhaps going too far. I don’t think this approach is the only valid approach (though it is the one I personally prefer).