I’ve been thinking about the topic of women in open source for quite some time. For context, the percentage of women in IT is about 20%, and the percentage of women in open source is about 1.5%. For larger context, read Skud’s OSCon keynote, because she is *way* better at articulating it than I am.

Which brings me to my point.

The women I know in open source are way above average. By which I mean, quite simply, that almost all of them make me feel stupid by comparison.

Now, I don’t consider myself a genius, but I also know that I’m no dunce. I’ve written 13 books. I can read several languages, and make myself understood in one or two of them. I have a masters degree in mathematics. I’m no slouch.

But then I look at people like Skud, Allison Randall, Noirin Shirley, and Elizabeth Naramore, among others, and feel like maybe I should have paid more attention in school.

But, see, if I look around all of the Open Source projects that I’m involved with, *all* of the women are this caliber. There are no average or below-average women in Open Source, it seems. Which makes me look at some of Skud’s statistics, and wonder.

Sure, men are unaware of the problem, because they look around and see these amazingly talented women working with them, and figure, how can there be a problem.

But that seems to only highlight the problem. Why’s that? Well, apparently, when you’re a woman, you have to be amazing just to get past all of the old-boys-club and macho chauvinism that pervades the entire Open Source culture. Granted, this is less true in some corners of the kingdom than others, but it’s pretty prevalent where I live.

I remember riding up to my hotel room (at a conference) in an elevator with my wife, and a PHP developer who, fortunately, I don’t know the name of, wearing a shirt that was so profoundly offensive and degrading to women that it was all I could do to not make him apologize right there. Perhaps I should have. And that’s certainly not a one-off anecdote.

Now, I don’t pretend to know what the solution is. But I think that a good way to start is reading Skud’s presentation, and not wearing shirts like that – not only at conferences, but ever. Until we men adjust our attitudes about women, we’re going to perpetuate this problem – even if we refuse to acknowledge that it’s a problem.