When will women be taken seriously in the FOSS community? That's a question that needs to be asked after the Debian GNU/Linux project garnered headlines earlier this month over an offensive mailing list post that had at least two women considering whether they would continue their involvement in the project.

On various women's mailing lists, a subscriber has raised the idea of a distribution developed "for and by women." So far, the idea has met with a cool reception. It might even be a troll. However, if such a distro ever gets underway, it would be very much in the spirit of the community, and might give more women the background and confidence to reduce the gender gap in free software.

At april 18th 2008, 19 new Debian Developers (DD) accounts were created.

Debian Project is a volunteer effort, and needs more skilled manpower at many human knowledge areas.

Mark Shuttleworth has apologised “unreservedly to all offended” for his “poor choice of language” during LinuxCon 2009 during which a comment made by the Ubuntu founder was deemed to be sexist by many members of the Linux community.

Exclusive: Women working on Debian have been getting death threats from a nut job who believes they're killing free software.

We can talk to women who come to user group meetings and invite them to speak. By being friendly and asking women directly to speak up, we open the door for participation. If we insist on equal participation, the structure of our organizations will change. The first time I spoke up in a user group was terrifying, but I did so because a peer politely, but repeatedly, asked me to speak.

The gender inequality among developers and supporters of free software is stunning. Less than 2% of us are women, according to studies conducted for the European Commission. Why?

Assuming that the numbers from 2006 hold true, the level of participation by women in open source could use a lot of improvement. According to the Flosspols study, women make up less than 2 percent of the open source community. Proprietary software shows a not-great but much higher participation rate of nearly 30 percent.

Earlier today Lyz Krumbach sent an email to the Ubuntu Women Project mailing list announcing that the Ubuntu Community Council had appointed me as the interim leader of the Project.