Aren't you arguing against OSS here, essentially? Is OSS not the perfect example of communication across cultural and demographic differences? Should Torvalds just shut out everyone under 40 in the name of efficiency?
It reminds me of my manager going on about how our unit test coverage is only 60%.
Splitting your time between coding and test coverage is an extremely poor analogy to inclusivity in software. For one, your time is a resource, software is output. If you split 8 (wo)man hours into 8 hours testing and 0 hours coding, your output goes down; if you add 8 (wo)man hours to a software project, your output goes up. Even more importantly, coding and testing are not people, they don't have feelings, children to feed, etc. The comparison simply doesn't apply.
As far as your point about "bursaries" (had to look it up, it means scholarships), please consider that the original article talks about having more women's user groups and better conference policies and makes no references to financial aid of any kind. It's really not germane to pit every discussion about gender in software against apocalyptic scenarios. Yes, it would be bad if all of a sudden men were totally excluded and women were totally included, but we are far from that now, aren't we? Shall we worry about "loads of bursaries" when said loads become an actual problem?
Of course not, that would be putting the cart before the horse. He should recruit those who work together most efficiently - but if it turns out the most efficient team is demographicly homogeneous (and I suspect that the core linux team is) - then why not? Are you going to argue that he should form a less efficient team in the name of diversity?
>Splitting your time between coding and test coverage is an extremely poor analogy to inclusivity in software. For one, your time is a resource, software is output. If you split 8 (wo)man hours into 8 hours testing and 0 hours coding, your output goes down; if you add 8 (wo)man hours to a software project, your output goes up. Even more importantly, coding and testing are not people, they don't have feelings, children to feed, etc. The comparison simply doesn't apply.
You've misunderstood; my point is not that by focussing on testing you take away from coding. My point is that, while a low test coverage number indicates a problem, if you just focus on the coverage number you can end up doing more harm to the problem you were trying to fix.
The post I replied to was saying "look, if only 4% of OSS developers are female then clearly that indicates some problem." My point is that if we focus too much on the number, then we're only going to treat the symptom. Let's fix the problems, but let's not put too much attention on one shallow number.
Edit. You say: the post I replied to was saying "look, if only 4% of OSS developers are female then clearly that indicates some problem." I've re-read the post that you replied to, and it neither said, nor implied anything of the sort.
Ok, I'll dare: per the mythical man month, the biggest factor limiting the success of programming teams is communication. A demographicly uniform team can communicate more effectively with each other (due to having a larger shared vocabulary of common experiences) and this reduced communication overhead greatly increases their productivity.
>If there were something keeping women out of the community, you'd want to fix it. Right?
This metrics vs. data thing is precisely why hearing people go on about the lack of women in programming makes me nervous. It reminds me of my manager going on about how our unit test coverage is only 60% and why isn't it 70%; if you define low test coverage as the problem rather than the symptom, we could easily write some terrible tests that would increase the coverage but make our codebase worse.
So likewise, if you start thinking about "only 4% of open source developers are women" as a problem /in itself/, it's very easy to jump from there to doing something that increases the number of women in open source, while actually making things worse (e.g. "let's offer a load of bursaries for female CS undergrads to work on open source projects"; quick, easy, increases that percentage, but could quite possibly backfire by giving women in open source a reputation for low-quality code - and more to the point, does absolutely nothing to address whatever actual problem you're referring to)