Those of you who have followed issues of diversity (and gender diversity in particular) in the open-source world have almost certainly run across the FLOSS-POLS survey from 2006, based on survey data collected in 2004. That’s the source of the “women are 2% of open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL.” statistic that’s frequently quoted.
Given how much the open-source world has changed in the last 10 years, it was high time for an updated survey, and the results are now out: You can find them at http://floss2013.libresoft.es/results.en.html
In the new survey, women are up to 11% of respondents, with another 2% reporting “other” to the gender question (which wasn’t an option in the previous survey). The survey included all contributors to open-source projects — so design, support, translation, et al are also included. I was also happy to see lots of overlap between code and non-code contributions. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s great to see this much movement!
The full dataset is available for download for anyone who enjoys the stat-geeking.