First, we need to define the problem that we want to solve. Do we want more female programmers? Do we want more female OSS contributors? Do we want more female speakers? These are all quite different problems requiring different actions.

For example, throwing scholarships at women doesn't make them conference speakers, just like offering free travel to female speakers doesn't make little girls pick computer science.

As a conference organizer, I found that a good way to have female speakers is to rework the selection guidelines. The idea is not to always pick the best speaker for the job, but one that is good. Otherwise we'd always be picking Sebastian for unit tests or Fabien for Symfony.

By changing that, and especially by making these guidelines public, we greatly increased the number of proposals made by women. We announced the fact very loudly too, to encourage even more women to submit next year. Montreal Girl Geeks also helped us by promoting the call for papers in their vast network. We also put the following mention on our call for papers page:
"We do not discriminate candidates based on age, gender, ethnicity, handicap or appearance. Please feel welcome to submit."

And so now we have speakers who are female, hispanic, black, asian, in wheelchair, etc. There's still much work to be done, but it's a start and we see progress.

References:
http://confoo.ca/en/call-for-papers/guidelines
http://confoo.ca/en/news/2013-ratio

Try this and let me know if that helps.

But how is that goal related to gender disproportion?
Why is attracting one gender more important than another if your end-goal is a feature that doesn't depend on gender at all?

I think the point is: there are plenty of women developers out there who use PHP, but hardly any that contribute within the Symfony ecosystem (unlike, from the looks of it, Drupal, say). It may be the case that no-one is standing at a gate barring women from contributing (I wouldn't attribute sexist behaviour to anyone in this discussion), but it's also not the case, necessarily, that everything is fine just now, unless you can hear the voices of women saying it's fine. It's not a matter of attracting one gender over another - it's just recognising that it might well be the case, not because of anyone's bad intentions or actions, that there is something about the way the community operates that chimes more with men and less with women, and about being open about what that might be.

Diversity should be irrelevant in any case. Just because there is a lack of a certain group does not mean that group is discriminated against. What people should focus on is the character and talent, not other characteristics. Diversity is not inherently good or bad, it simply is what it is.

Hello,

I think this is not a problem at all. We have much more male Developers than female. Like we have more male Construction Workers.

What is the point? If there would be more female devs, nobody would run against it. Everybody would like it.

But you cannot FORCE women into Tech-Jobs. It is their personal desicion they make.

It think the situation is somehow changing the last two years. More females are going into tech.

But as Symfony2 universe is very High-Level community, only the top of the male devs are into this , too.

Symfony2 has a very high learning curve and affords passion and time.

I think the biggist problem at all are personal staff that hire women as devs BECAUSE they are female.

RailsGirls and so on are things that discriminate all male teenagers intrested in a developer career. They are out BECAUSE they are male.

Do we NEED women in Symfony2 Committers-List? For what? We need devs that do the work. This is not gender specific.

Cheers
@mablae

I don't think a lack of diversity within the programming community is an issue (I am not part of the Symfony community, just a programmer) - yet people love to make it an issue. There is sexism within the technological industry that's for sure, but when it came to being a part of things, I don't think I have been discriminated against due to my gender (maybe I am lucky). In fact, quite the opposite.

I am always wondering; was I hired primarily because I was female rather than because of my skills? I am constantly told my work is amazing by male colleagues yet they never compliment each other despite, IMHO, doing their job just as well; is that because they feel like they need to praise and encourage their only female cohort?

I have read various job descriptions that stated they wanted to support women in computer science, and were willing to provide additional support and opportunities. I can understand trying to get as many people introduced to programming as possible as many people, not just women, have never considered it as a career choice. Ultimately, though, maybe most women just have a different idea about what they want to do with their lives. Maybe most women just don't want to be programmers.

You don't have to have a 50:50 split in everything to be considered an 'equal opportunities' community. Just let who wants to contribute, contribute. If the contributors just so happen to be female; great, but don't choose a mediocre contributor just because they lack a Y chromosome.

I must admit with this blog post I also wanted to give my own thought process some basis, so I very much appreciate the feedback.

@Alfina: in terms of goals I see 2 "levels"

1) ensuring we as a community are inclusive, which likely requires now and then gathering feedback from members and non members of the community. but in general ensuring we stay sensitive to the topic (ie. associating a sexy technology in a slide deck with a half naked women is not inclusive). this level should not take much resources and there should also not be any concerns about giving any one preference.

2) is the bigger topic of actively trying to encourage less represented groups in the community. obviously this isn't about percentages since if the goal would be to have 50% women in the community we could just get rid of enough men and we would be there. however such efforts could indeed be seen as diverting resources away from the general population to just a subset. ie. if conferences prefer less established speakers because they come from a group that is targeted for such efforts then it means there are less slots left for people from other groups. in the same way if we have a SymfonyGirls initiative where women can get training, but men cannot, then it can be seen as unfair towards the men that could also benefit from what is being taught there. so in conclusion this "level 2" both requires more resources and also has a higher risk of alienating people that already are in the community.

Lukas, I considered you an intelligent person but reading this post I realize that I was wrong.

No woman has been prevented from collaborating with Symfony. If they don't want to collaborate is their problem, not ours.

Please, stop this stupid debate.

those are some harsh words there, but I assume there was something lost in translation .

but I want to stress that I wasn't trying to say that women or any other group is being discriminated in the Symfony2 community. but I just wanted to ensure that we remind us to stay sensitive to the topic since its easy to just overlook this. non inclusive statements can come out without any ill intentions.

further more I wanted to make it clear if there is someone motivated to work on supporting a specific group and are in need of support that I am there to help.