The problem

If you have worked in IT teams before, then you have probably already realized how very few women are directly implicated in developing and coding processes. Above all, women’s presence is even more scarce amongst FLOSS 1) projects. In fact, a European Commission survey led out a few years ago points out that only 2% of women work in FLOSS communities – against more than 25% in proprietary software.

In the development field, numbers are even lower: the percentage of women developers in Open Source falls down to almost 1% (European Commission FLOSSPOL 2002-2005).

Why? What are the reasons for this? And what can Mozilla do about this?

Contribution in open source projects is not limited to development. It also involves a large variety of fields and subjects: community work, localization (translation), community marketing, organizing events,… and of course coding.

There is therefore no reason that women should not find their place in open source contribution.

And Mozilla in all that

Many women have already gathered and created official groups in various open source projects: Ubuntu Women, PHP Women, GNOME Women, DrupalChix, and many others.

Up until today, there existed no “Mozilla group” dedicated to improving women’s visibility.
Instead of creating yet another women’s group and dividing things up even more, we have decided to create a meeting point where women / men / existing women’s group / anyone interested by the project can join and suggest ideas.

And here you are 🙂

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