There are a lot of myths out there about the hiring practices of proprietary software companies vs open source companies or communities. People are sharing anecdotal evidence claiming proprietary software developers are somehow better because they employed more women. While this is extremely far from the truth. I don’t hate women, in fact I love them and I love my girlfriend. Shes the greatest.
However companies like Apple actually have set policies which cause them to hire more women. According to Apple’s Job website:
We are committed to diversity. Apple is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer.
Source: Apple Jobs
This actually means that instead of just hiring who comes first, they are filtering their applicants in order to promote an equal workplace. This is not a bad thing but it is something you need to consider when comparing the two entirely different ways of working.
Here is an excercise to get the concept into your head. Say you normally receive 1000 resume’s a week and you need to pick the best. You are likely to pick based on first come first serve, and then check their qualifications and then hire them if they are qualified to do the job.
However if you are a Equal Employment Opportunity employer you cannot do this. You can’t pick based on first come first serve. Your company policy requires an equal workforce so you’ll simply have to put most of the resumes on file. The practice discriminates against hiring men because there are already ‘too many’ if there are more than 50% of them in the company despite the fact that computer science graduates aren’t 50/50 men and women.
Again, I don’t hate women I love them, I’m just pointing out that there is bias in Apple that causes it to have higher numbers of women employed than in companies or communities which don’t enforce an Equal Employment Opportunity. This isn’t bad at all and I hope more women get jobs in IT. This same policy exists in most large corporations, especially ones big enough to get the attention of government agencies.
Meanwhile in open source communities everyone is invited and there are no filters which prevent people from participating based on sex, race or religion. Women are encouraged to join via projects like Debian Women and Ubuntu Women but none of these projects deny or filter men from joining in favour of equality. No open community is going filter out men to increase the numbers of women. There is also nothing preventing women from joining companies or communities like Redhat/Fedora, OpenSuSE/Novell, Canonical/Ubuntu and Mandriva either.
